Fuel Is...
[{Intro}, {A}, {B}, {C}, {D)i.}, {D)ii.}, {E)i.}, {E)ii. Conclusion}]
My key question has been, How does fuel fit into the Marxist framework? Strictly speaking, Marx treats it as an ancillary substance, ancillary, that is, to the means of production, and therefore a part of the means of production. But that only became clear and consistently applied in the third volume; throughout the first, substances like coal and oil seem to shift between categories. And so the answer to my question emerged in stages as I read along, and I believe that evolution in understanding has led to a revision of Marx that makes it most relevant in an age to be defined by fueled and catastrophic heat. Petrocommunism.
That question rests on a more basic question: What is fuel? Whether or not it is sentient, that is surely not its defining characteristic. Rather, I will argue, fuel should be understood as a commodity sold with a particular use value: to do work by combustion. Compare this to the definition of labour: a commodity sold to do work by metabolism.
Some words are confusing because they have multiple meanings, but work is confusing because it only has one meaning: the force applied to an object in order to move it through space. “The use of labour-power is labour itself. The purchaser of labour-power consumes it by setting the seller of it to work” (vol. 1, 283 – the first lines of Chapter 7). The specific definition of work as the force necessary to move an object had already been well established by the physical sciences by Marx’s time. He cites a figure from 1861 (Chapter 15, footnote 11), who measures labour across modes (somatic, steam, hydro) in the force required to lift 33,000 lbs in one minute.
Perhaps today there would be workers (readers) who feel that their work is not reducible to the simple moving of objects—there is something more cognitive, creative in your vocation. If that is you, I challenge you to produce any value without moving something, even the inputs on a machine. The truth is, we ‘creative workers’ do work, just very little of it, applied in highly particularized ways. Work is always pushing something, pulling something, manipulating something.
Nonetheless, Marx exclusively attributes labour to humans in a passage I find challenging and philosophically problematic: “We presuppose labour in a form in which it is an exclusively human characteristic. A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally.” (Vol. 1, 284). That seems wrong, and it’s not at all clear that the beehive as a collective consciousness has no awareness of its own creation as an ideal form.
Marxism is not a religion and Marx is not a prophet; here, as in other places, I will argue that Marx is wrong. Within a cooperative production process, a single worker does not need to have any conception of the end product in order to do his labour; imagine a worker on an assembly line who screws in a single screw. He is a part of a larger cooperative hive-mind that is very similar to that of the beehive, which is actually a good model for human labour. No substantial part of his theory rests on the intention behind the work; except for in this passage, he is concerned with work itself. Therefore, my argument is that human workers sell labour harvested from metabolism, and fuel sells labour harvested from combustion, does not compromise his larger theory. His assertion that only humans do labour is not a weight-bearing part of his argument, and it can be discarded without consequence. Which is important, because:
Marxism is right, and all other modes of analysis are wrong. This is proven by history, and by the repeated failures of bourgeoise economics to reflect reality or guide policy in an effective direction. Marxism is the only science of capitalism that doesn’t twist itself into knots trying to justify or hide the inequities and injustices of the capitalist system.
Therefore, if my revisions to his thought result in different answers, at the end of the day, different bottom lines, I’d be wrong. My revisions enhance rather than reverse Marxism’s ultimate conclusions. Think of “show your work” in math class: I’m revising the work, but we both get the same answers, except in the ways in which petromarxism shows how the dynamics at play in classical Marxism have accelerated greatly.
In the end, I hope we arrive at a political philosophy that can oppose oil and its influences—thereby staging a meaningful fight to claw back every tenth of degree of warming we can—without falling into the ideological traps of liberal environmentalism.
How does fuel fit into the Marxist framework?
Not exactly (or exclusively) where Marx thought it did. That fuel was not a major point of emphasis for him makes complete sense given the historical moment at which he wrote, and given the enormity of his main and only topic, Capitalism. It cannot be a surprise to you that fuel is fluid. And so it appears in the following (overlapping) forms.
(This will also be the table of contents for this essay, which will come out every few days until it’s done. I’ll link the unpublished drafts below, in case you want to binge-read the whole thing right now.)
D. A Part of the Means of Production
Thanks for doing this essential work. I still think Lefebvre was onto something with Rhythmanalysis (in terms of trying to navigate the differences between different modalities of time, such as under capitalism and under other political structures) but I think the most important aspect of time in what you are wrestling with in encapsulated in the "corpse juice".