[AI Statement: My older articles use imagery generated by the first-generation stable diffusion model. I am now committed to using only public domain images. No AI or LLM has been consulted on the research or writing of the below text, except sometimes for translations, and those have all been checked by a human with knowledge of the source language and English.]
“More recently, what has come to seem more immediately urgent, particularly in the era of climate change now upon us, is the wholesale seizure of all energy sources, the appropriation of the oil wells and the coal mines and the destitution of the immense transnational companies that control them.” — Fredric Jameson
My petromarxism essay is an excessively long read ([{Intro}, {A}, {B}, {C}, {D)i.}, {D)ii.}, {E)i.}, {E)ii.}]). In order to make the content accessible, I want to provide an overview. However, in real ways this summary is actually larger than the essay, because the essay was a focused deep dive on Marx’s Capital, while here I feel compelled to give some context, as well as point to the solution that petrocommunism represents. There was an older post that introduced petrocommunism, but now that I’ve done the work of developing the theory of petromarxism in full, it is time to return to it. Petrocommunism is a socialist alternative to both liberal environmentalism and to degrowth.
Context/Problem:
The accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere causes a large increase in global enthalpy, which in its many catastrophic incarnations represents one of the most serious material crises of our time. The sole cause of this is the extraction, marketing, and combustion of hydrocarbon fuel. This is one major aspect of a larger polycrisis.1 Anyone who calls this a hoax are deluding themselves about actual material conditions.
If we wish the situation to improve rather than continue to get worse, the absolute mass of hydrocarbons burned around the world needs to rapidly decrease. There have been many schemes and policy proposals put forward to achieve this, but none of them appear adequate or practical because “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” a challenge I hope we’ll overcome together.
Radical ecological destabilization is not an inherent product of the existence of human life upon the planet. Our civilization relatively sustainable until development of petrocapitalism, about 150 years ago (a very short timeframe). Ecological catastrophe is a result of the contradictions of petrocapitalism. Global warming is not “anthropogenic” or “caused by humans”—it is caused by the combustion of fuels, which is an aspect of a very new and hitherto untested global economic system: capitalism.
Liberal environmentalism has failed to stop, or even meaningfully resist, this historical progression towards climate catastrophe. In fact, its historical roots lie in the same institutions that brought you the greatest lie in history: the Cold War. It is the controlled opposition and is functionally useless as a political force.
Petrocommunism/Solution:
The only way to restrict the flow of fossil fuels is to restrict the flow of fossil fuels. This means taking them entirely off the private market. We do that by declaring that all natural fuels are owned by the people. Oil, coal, and gas should become the first post-commodities: materials that no longer can be sold or resold by any private entity. It is not enough to provide energy “alternatives,” we must actively limit the use of hydrocarbons. It is not enough only to build a new energy infrastructure; we must destroy the old one. This begins with something that looks like nationalizing the energy sector, but goes beyond the nationalized oil companies we see in the world today, which still operate on the capitalist market, selling oil to whomever can buy it.
Under the demanded petrocommunist regime, if you need a steady supply of gasoline or coal or methane gas (&tc.) you will buy it at subsidized prices from the public monopoly. Before they sell it to you, they will ask you to show that you are unable to substitute any alternative energy sources. This monopoly will be only one organ of a larger apparatus designed to decarbonize everything as quickly as possible, funded by the surplus value captured by the financial and energy sectors, which will be the first to be fully nationalized.
Despite the harm they cause, fossil fuels have undeniable social value. Given current technologies, some combustion of fossil fuels is socially necessary. The unjust inequalities of a world built by imperialist capitalism mean that it would create only more injustice if we were to make fossil fuels prohibitively expensive, or forbid their use in the third world. Part of fuel’s unique social value is its affordability; simply inflating the price of fuel will not help the world and it will guarantee that the richest people continue to burn disproportionately vast amounts of the stuff.
That said, there are massive, wasteful, socially unnecessary emissions of carbon, mostly by the capitalist class, that we must end.
Liberal environmentalism primarily focuses on the effects of petrocapitalism: its focus is on proving to us that global warming is “real” and we need to “do something about it.” Petrocommunism focuses on the cause: fuel.
North American economies both consume and produce fuel. This is in contrast to (for example) China, which only consumes (imports) fuel. This has enabled the Chinese Communist Party to take serious steps towards building a decarbonized energy system, and as they replace their sources of energy with alternatives, they can simply stop buying oil and natural gas. Western societies, however, are dominated by the material interests of fuel producers, and they will not willingly let go of their economic activities. These entities need to be either expropriated, bought out, or both. If they are allowed to continue to operate as private entities, they will continue to sabotage any and all efforts to decarbonize.
Since we don’t currently have the infrastructure to replace hydrocarbon energy, at the moment of transition to petrocommunism, most workers in the oil, coal, and gas industries could keep their jobs, which would become public-sector unionized jobs. Their bosses would lose their jobs. As the regime shrinks the hydrocarbon sector, it can seamlessly transfer these workers into other energy projects without even an interruption in their employment.
Degrowth is a political dead-end that is circumvented by petrocommunism. Petrocommunism is compatible with a national industrial policy that improves quality of life for all workers, based mainly on the rapid buildout of nuclear power, hopefully using thorium reactors. The sacrifices it requires are to be made by the capitalists who own the energy sector. There may be temporary interruptions in the power supply as we transition, and periods of energy rationing, but we are not asking people to go back to pre-industrial ways of living (although somatic technologies like the typewriter and the bicycle have tremendous value).
Petromarxism
Marxism arose, like any idea, out of the historical context in which it was formulated. Although it is logical and scientific, it is also responsive to its historical moment. Some historical moments, like that of Stalin, require massive, carbon-intensive industrialization. Our historical moment requires decarbonized industrialization.
I have not seen other Marxists making the points above, and so I needed to return to Marx and develop my argument using his logical and scientific method.
In the first instance, it seemed obvious to me, and should to you, that fuel is a part of the means of production. The animating desire of all socialists is that the means of production should be held in common. Therefore, fuels must be held in common.
However, I wanted to go deeper. And so I returned to the founding text, Capital, to look at the role of fuel in capitalist production. Marx’s description of capitalism is one of a dynamic system in which many things play multiple roles: a worker is a seller of labor and a consumer of the means of subsistence, etc. Nothing is just one thing.
Fuel is eight things in Capital, and it is one more thing on top of that, which extends petromarxism beyond existing Marxist ecological analyses. Each one of these nine forms of fuel got their own post. Fuel is:
D. A Part of the Means of Production
I was trying to take the same systematic, rational approach that Marx takes himself, and that is why each one of these needed its own couple-thousand words.
It is the last one, (E) labour, that is a logical extension of the text, and therefore the only one that needs summarizing here. The use value of fuel is that it does “work” by the physical definition of the word: the force necessary to move an object in space. Marx uses the useful term “motive power” to describe this force, and it is indeed differentiated from human labor. However, it is key to note that it is often possible, and, under capitalism, necessary to replace human labor with mindless motive power, and the means to do so is the machine.
The example of the pedal-driven spinning wheel is the most useful and revealing:
“The foot is merely the prime mover of the spinning-wheel, while the hand, working with the spindle, and drawing and twisting, performs the real operation of spinning. It is the second part of the handicraftman’s implement, in this case the spindle, which is first seized on by the industrial revolution, leaving to the worker, in addition to his new labour of watching the machine with his eyes and correcting its mistakes with its hands, the merely mechanical role of acting as the motive power. On the other hand, in cases where man has always acted as a simple motive power, as for instance by turning the crank of a mill, by pumping, by moving the arm of a bellows up and down, by pounding with a mortar, etc., there is soon a call for the application of animals, water and wind as motive powers. Here and there, long before the period of manufacture, and also to some extent during that period, these implements attain the stature of machines, but without creating any revolution in the mode of production.” vol. 1, 496
Only the addition of fuel—coal—created the revolution in the mode of production that is Marx’s object of study.
It was obvious that fuel could immediately replace the work of the foot. But we must recognize the historical reality that machines can, to varying degrees, also replace the work of the hand. This is much more obvious today than it would have been in Marx’s day. As machines get more self-regulating, more production is driven by exosomatic energy, creating both an absolute increase in the amount of production in society, and a relative decrease in the influence and standing of human labor. Therefore, in very real ways, fuel competes with labor.
This gives us a strong motivation to demand petrocommunism: a party that truly represents the interests of the human working class would carefully control the flow of fuel for at least two reasons: 1) because otherwise fuel unfairly competes with the working class and thereby radically empowers the capitalist class, and 2) because it’s destabilizing the whole climate system.
Most human labor is socially necessary labor — we try not to waste working hours on relatively inefficient production processes, since human labor is expensive and limited. Only some of the use of fuel is socially necessary; we are much more profligate in the waste of exosomatic calories because fuel is cheap. But petromarxism recognizes that fuel is not actually socially cheap: every gallon we burn releases more greenhouse gas that has massive social cost. Therefore a key goal of petrocommunism is to allow the socially necessary uses of fossil fuels while protecting everyone from excess, unnecessary carbon emissions.
Note on Context Within Contemporary Marxism
Most of the existing Marxist work on ecological issues serves primarily to reveal that despite historical necessity of rapid industrialization in the 20th century, Marxism is an inherently ecological framework. This work has been led by John Bellamy Foster and it is extremely useful. The logical extension of the acknowledgement by Marx that enclosure is a precondition for the development of capitalism means that the term “ecosocialism” is redundant.
However, this does not give Marxists a framework to differentiate our ecological program from liberal environmentalism. This is especially important in the age of the climate catastrophe. Whatever forms of socialism arise in the 21st century will do so within the context of a regime of climate disasters, and in order to present a vigorous alternative to capitalism, we have to show how we will approach the problem differently. Lenin’s approach was to gain popular support by the clear articulation of the Party’s goals. Today we need to be able to tell people why Marxism will uniquely be able to address the climate crisis, and why it will succeed where liberal environmentalism failed.
Final Note on Strategy
As of this writing, we don’t have a clear path to meaningfully challenge petrocapitalist power. However, as Lenin said, sometimes there are weeks when decades happen. The contradictions are getting higher and higher, and there could be an opportunity coming.
Petrocommunism—or petrosocialism if it’s more palatable—needs to be a primary demand at the forefront of the movement, because of the urgency of the problem and because petrocommunism is a necessary precondition for actual communism.
I hope that existing communist and socialist formations—from the PSL to the DSA to the ACP—consider petrocommunism, and, even if they reject this specific formulation, clarify their position about what they actually want to do about global warming in order to differentiate their positions from liberal environmentalism. I don’t have good contacts in all of those places, so if you are involved in an organization, I hope you’ll share this with them. I’m not writing this because I want to be the guy who came up with petrocommunism, but because I see an urgent necessity for socialists to take a position here.
To celebrate the milestone of 1,000 free subscribers, my plan is to begin sharing my typewriters with you via the “CHAT” function on Substack (available to all subscribers). You may or may not be interested to see my writing machines.
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I can present reams of evidence for these claims, if you wish me to do so. I recommend my fellow neurodivergent SubStacker Richard Crim for climate science analysis. If you have doubt about how bad the crisis is, or how quickly it is happening, do me this favor: read the headlines of the Collapse Chronicle every day for one week (it’s a daily round-up of climate-related news stories).
“You have any idea how much diesel we had to burn to mix that much concrete? Or make that steel? Or haul this s–t out here and put it together with a 450-foot crane? You want to guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that f–king [windmill]? Or winterize it? In its 20-year lifespan, it won’t offset the carbon footprint of making it. And don’t even get me started on solar panels and the lithium in your Tesla batteries.”
Landman
Seems like a good idea, I will just point out that it will involve completely changing the power structure of human civilization globally. Do we have time for that and as ever the question is who will take over the system?