The Hyperstitional Entity of Oil as Death

oil is dead, oil is death, but is oil dying?

This is a draft of a new section of the manuscript. As you can see from the ToC, there are two Parts—Oil and Gas—and each Part begins with a discussion of some of the key hyperstitional entities of each of these energy commodities. I’m posting this now in order to help myself decide whether this needs to be broken into multiple sections, as there are multiple ideas mashed together into not that many words here—maybe you can help.

---

The hypersitional entity of oil as death spreads out in multiple directions, and each branch becomes entangled. The first is oil as the substance of death itself—hydrocarbon corpse juice. Oil is not alive, but it once was. Anxiety about reanimated corpses has never been far from our culture, perhaps because we distantly intuited that corpses reanimate all the machines we worship as technology. And oil is a producer of death, in the form of heat; both the proximate and ultimate (though there are many others between) cause of cause of the tellurian omega, the mass extinction, the violent reshaping of the earth’s energy balance. Oil as death this also points the way to war machines, dissolved in oil. Mechanized war, mass death. These two vectors of destruction, climate change and war, are intimately bound and end at the same place.

If the cycle of life were reduced to its most simplistic formula, it would be Life-Death-Life; Life flourishes, it dies, and its nutrients are re-absorbed back into life. The formula of fossil fuels is the inverse, Death-Life-Death; it begins with death and ends in death. Oil brings its own teleology: it brings about the mass extinction that will eventually include on its list of victims homo sapiens.

Moreover, oil is dead biomass in the same way that value is dead labor. The value of a commodity is the emobiment of the living labor that was expended in its form; not only in its final assembly, but in all the labor along the value chain from extraction of raw materials to transportation to marketing. But that value can only be kept moving if it can be exchanged, and in this way money acts as the universal mediator, whereby we can say that a given quantity of grain is somehow the same as (equivalent to) a given quantity of cloth, or a given number of hours of in-person work. Money becomes capital when it enters into the marketplace entirely for the purpose of making more of itself; valorizing itself. That purpose allows capital to function as a controlling mechanism for the economy; it creates feedback loops that encourage profitable activities and squash less profitable ones. But capital is not a single solitary entity at the head of society, it is an infinitely dividable agglomeration of individual entities that often work at cross-purposes. It controls social activity – we are controlled by it, bound to its logic, forced to either work or forced to accumulate; for the capitalist himself has no more free will than the worker in front of the real god of capital: his only purpose is to accumulate. Ian Wright calls our attention to a passage in Marx’s 1844 private notebooks (“Comments on James Mill”):

“The essence of money is not, in the first place, that property is alienated in it, but that the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by which man’s products mutually complement one another[…] Owing to this alien mediator – instead of man himself being the mediator for man – man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself. Objects separated from this mediator have lost their value. Hence the objects only have value insofar as they represent the mediator, whereas originally it seemed that the mediator had value only insofar as it represented them. This reversal of the original relationship is inevitable. This mediator is therefore the lost, estranged essence of private property, private property which has become alienated, external to itself, just as it is the alienated species-activity of man, the externalised mediation between man’s production and man’s production. All the qualities which arise in the course of this activity are, therefore, transferred to this mediator. Hence man becomes the poorer as man, i.e., separated from this mediator, the richer this mediator becomes.”[i] [emphasis in original]

In these private moments, Marx understood capital as a “real god,” capital, logic acts as what a cyberneticist would call an autonomous control loop, consisting of a set of negative feedback loops: “…at the apex of the economy we have a competing collection of identical controllers—with an atavistic, low level of demonic intelligence—which inject and withdraw a social substance that appears to possess the magical power of animation, of bringing things alive, of creation; but also appears to possess the power of annihilation, of suffocation, of bringing things to an end, of destruction.”[ii] Capital injects and withdraws and commodity flows grow or shrink in response; as a single commodity, as important as it is, oil is only a portion of this system, the whole of which comprises the egregore known as the economy.

But on its own, considered separately from capital, oil is a different but no less real god. This god lies dormant in the earth until it is animated by capital, and in turn, it animates technology, which appears to animate the entire economy. Its value represents only a small portion of the total capital of society, and yet its flow is foundational and essential to all other productive activity. Within the value of a single commodity, the cost of energy is only an aliquot part of the whole, alongside the cost of human labor from which all new value springs; and yet its presence is as much a foundational precondition to all value as the human labor. Oil comprises a dead part of the real god, and an important one; without fossil energy, capital could only have taken an unimaginably different path to global domination.

Calling it a god emphasizes that it controls the fate of humans; we do not control it. A human is many things, but before the real god they are only a worker or a capitalist. A capitalist may be other things—a father or a poet—but when he functions as a capitalist, his only purpose is to valorize capital, and no matter how much he might wish to respect the rights of workers or the earth, he must primarily placate his one true diety. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engles write, “Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” The entity comprised of capital and oil has use for humans, but humans are neither its creator nor its sole constituent part. And as we are used, we are destroyed; our lives cut short, our circumstances immiserated.

This entity squanders life, and so there is an aliquot part of its value that is waste itself; as Ali Kadri has illuminated. Premature death counted as a waste of productive labor. The capitalist constantly seeks to maximize his surplus value by replacing variable capital (wages) with as little constant capital as possible; this has forced the rapid technological change along with the environmental degradation we have witnessed. And so the loss of productive labor, the death, the waste, is profitable to the capitalist as long as it shifts money from variable to concrete.[iii] “The working population therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing.”[iv]

Marx: “Capitalist production, when considered in isolation from the process of circulation and the excesses of competition, is very economical with the materialised labour incorporated in commodities. Yet, more than any other mode of production, it squanders human lives, or living-labour, and not only blood and flesh, but also nerve and brain. Indeed, it is only by dint of the most extravagant waste of individual development that the development of the human race is at all safeguarded and maintained in the epoch of history immediately preceding the conscious reorganisation of society. Since all of the economizing here discussed arises from the social nature of labour, it is indeed just this directly social nature of labour which causes the waste of life and health.”[v]

Kadri’s understanding of the accumulation of waste makes sense in this context. But the two meanings of the word “waste” must be held at once; not only is it a squandering, it is trash. It is a category of material that can be piled and dumped and burned, and so on. Any theory of waste must account for waste as trash itself. A life wasted by capitalism is more metaphorical than a bargeload of trash sailing from Manhattan to Fresh Kills, but these two types of waste flow into and around each other. Always looming at the horizon of waste lies depletion, the bankruptcy of the earth, the specter of the total exhaustion of oil.

Negarestani: “Oil as hydrocarbon corpse juice[…] is a deity connected to what Thomas Gold calls ‘the Myth of Fossil Fuels’ or the exhaustible oilfields.” On the surface, it is incongruous to bring Gold into the context of hydrocarbon corpse juice, because Thomas Gold believed it is hydrocarbon rock juice [see appendix]. But the Myth of Fossil Fuels is not about the origins of oil; it is about the end of oil. The myth of fossil fuels is that they will run out. Whether biotic or abiotic, oil on this earth is finite, like anything else, and so it’s a conceptually easy case to make. But just because it is finite does not mean that it is on the verge of exhaustion. These two extremes are routinely obscured by peak oilers; the common sense obscures the size of that finite quantity. There are 1.85 billion gigatons (10.85 x 10²⁷ tons) of carbon on earth, and 99% of it is below the surface, mostly in the crust.[vi] If all of that were recoverable as fuel, it would take us 48.68 million years to burn at the current rate.[vii] Not all of it is recoverable, but the recoverable proportion is historically contingent. It can fluctuate dramatically based on political and technological circumstances, most particularly the pricing mechanism. Perceived scarcity drives up prices, which makes it possible to extract more and more carbon. Ironically, there is less oil economically recoverable when the price is low than when the price rises. The oil creates its own supply. The reserves that oil companies report—booked reserves—is not at all a representation of the actual quantity of oil and gas available, even available specifically to markets in a given moment. But the myth of fossil fuels is vital to oil’s perception and power. Negarestani summarizes, with my commentary:

“Pathological symptoms effectuated by the myth of fossil fuels can be summarized as:

i. The policy of underdevelopment and deliberate impoverishment bound to the exhaustible oil fields: Since oil is dying we must use it wisely and calculatedly (the fallacy of prudent poverty).”

This is a lesser symptom, but it is audible when liberal environmentalists chastise third world nations for opening up new oilfields to concessions. We need to leave the oil in the ground, but capitalism cannot imagine a way to do so that doesn’t interfere with a nation’s sovereignty.

ii. “Inhibition of Excess and inherent suppression (connected to the moralization of the earth aka the Green Judgement).”

This is the politics of the COPs, in which developed countries are supposed to cajole the global south, which includes oil producing countries, into limiting their own economic development. This pits race against race, nation against nation, and so avoids an actual class conflict in which workers would be fighting for the future against the ownership class. The co-opted ‘moralization of the earth’ is historically specific and is not a critique of the moral qualities of the earth that are understood by indigenous traditions.

iii. “Socio-political programming of planetary systems based on the depletion of petroleum. Everything oily has been manufactured with and toward death.”

The cyclical periods of market scarcity of oil and gas are programmed into the system, in the Dave McGowan sense. All such periods of scarcity, when the energy industry enjoys a bull market, are politically manufactured. This can be made to occur intentionally, as we will see in the 2022 beginning of the war in Ukraine, or it can occur as a result of other political factors, as we see in the 2026 Hormuz crisis. Petropolitics in a narrow sense can be seen as the process of manufacturing scarcity out of a geologically ample supply. In other words, sabotage. Thorstein Veblen noted a mode of capitalist exploitation in which profits were made not by raising production, but by raising prices by restricting output; in this way, in the words of Timothy Mitchell, “profits far exceeding the earning capacity of invested assets flowed from the ‘power of inhibition’ exercised by large businesses. This ‘capitalisation of inefficiency’ was especially profitable with a commodity such as oil, which was relatively cheap to produce but becoming so vital to industrialised society that great profits could be made if the supply was restricted. The goal of oil companies was to place themselves in control of the conduits, processing points and bottlenecks through which oil had to flow, to restrict the development of rival channels, beginning with oil wells themselves, and use to use this command of obligatory passage points to convert the flow of oil into profits.”[viii]

iv. “Fueling economic systems on monotheistic platforms through melding with their belief systems and apocalyptic politics: the exhaustion of the Earth’s aqua vitae is a prerequisite for the Rise of the Kingdom. God can only appear (reveal itself) when all possibilities of the Earth are depleted. The Myth of Fossil Fuels is connected to the institutionalization of religious expectation and anticipation through the oil industry: with every thing we produce with oil, we get a little closer to God. The enigma of oil consumption or the exhaustion of the earth’s energy is consummated by a substitute energy source, the Divine’s absolute power. Oil depletion scenarios can be connected to a chronological time for which anticipation is not only a premature conclusion but also a participation in attaining what is anticipated, either through the activity of hope or the passivity of despair.”

The sects most closely associated with the oil industry have been Evangelical Christianity and Wahhabi Islam. Both are eschatological and fundamentalist formations within much more expansive monotheistic religions. Both support and mythologize the apocalyptic project, and therefore the Zionist project in west Asia, which promises the apocalypse with its “Sampson option.” That these two sects are considered to be extremist and fundamentalist by their coreligionists signifies the way that oil makes the marginal central by creating an anti-humanist elite class more powerful than humans themselves. For a sociological description of how that unfolded in America, refer to Darren Dochuk’s book, Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America.

“The Myth of Fossil Fuels” is not the only myth about fossil fuels—I tell some of the rest of the mythology in this book. But it is perhaps the myth that is most important to liberal environmentalism, which conflates and confuses the problems of resource depletion and pollution, the same two problems that Ali Kadri conflates within his concept of waste. Unfortunately the pollution will kill us long before the resources are depleted. It is the waste as a material thing—carbon dioxide—that ultimately will end the world (as long as nuclear war doesn’t get us first).

All the ways that oil is connected to death shows that petropolitics are teleological. Petrohistory begins at its endpoint: the stories in this volume are more significant in retrospect than they were at the time, in the sense that collectively they represent the means by which our species, and many others besides, were or will have been murdered. You are reading from the End, and I hope to tell you how we got here.

Image: Soul Groups by Kazuya Akimoto

---

---

[i] Karl Marx, “Comments on James Mill, Éléments D’économie Politique” 1844

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/. In Ian Wright, “Marx on Capital as a Real God” September 3, 2020 https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/marx-on-capital-as-a-real-god-2/ in Phil A. Neel, Hellworld: The Human Species and Planetary Ecology. Chicago: Haymarket, 2026.

[ii] Ian Wright in Phil A. Neel, Hellworld: The Human Species and Planetary Ecology. Chicago: Haymarket, 2026.

[iii] Ali Kadri, The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction. Leiden: Brill, 2023.

[iv] Marx, Capital vol. 1, 783. (“The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation” section 3)

[v] Marx, Capital vol. 3, Chapter 5 section 3, cited in Kadri p1-14

[vi] This number 1.85 billion gigatons, was determined by the Deep Carbon Observatory in 2019. Jonathan Amos, “Scientists estimate Earth’s total carbon store” BBC, October 1, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49899039

[vii] Approximately 38 billion tons annually. https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissions/

[viii] Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London/New York: Verso, 2011, p40. Thorstein Veblen, ‘On the Nature of Capital,’ Quarterly Journal of Economics 23:1, 1908, p104-136

AI Statement: I never use AI. Back in the olden days of Stable Diffusion & Dall-e image generation, I used to put AI-generated images with my articles, and those are still visible in my archive.