“Everything Must Change So That Everything Can Remain the Same”: Reflections on Obama’s Energy Plan
Is President Obama’s oil/energy policy going to be different from the Bush Administration’s? My immediate answer to this prophetic question will be philosophical: a firm “No” and a more hesitant “Yes.” The reason for this ambivalence is simple: the failure of the Bush Administration to radically change the oil industry in its neoliberal image has made a transition from an oil based energy regime inevitable and the Obama Administration is responding to this inevitability. Consequently, we are in the midst of an epochal shift so that an assessment of the political forces and debates of the past have to be revised and held with some circumspection.
Before I examine both sides of this answer, we should be clear as to the two oil/energy policies being discussed.
The Bush policy paradigm’s premise is all too familiar: the “real” energy crisis has nothing to do with the natural limits on energy resources, but is due to the constraints on energy production imposed by government regulation and the OPEC cartel. Once energy production is liberalized and the corrupt, dictatorial and terrorist-friendly OPEC cartel is dissolved by US-backed coups (Venezuela) and invasions (Iraq and Iran), according to the Bush folk, the free market can finally impose realistic prices on the energy commodities (which ought to be about half of the present ones), and stimulate the production of adequate supplies and a new round of spectacular growth of profits and wages.
Obama’s oil/energy policy during the campaign and after his election has the following equally familiar premise, he presented on Jan. 27, 2009: “I will reverse our dependence on foreign oil while building a new energy economy that will create millions of jobs…America’s dependence on oil is one of the most serious threats that our nation has faced. It bankrolls dictators, pays for nuclear proliferation and funds both sides of our struggle against terrorism.” In the long-term this policy includes: a “clean tech” Venture Capital Plan; Cap and Trade; Clean Coal Technology development; Stricter automobile gas-mileage standards; cautious support for nuclear power electricity generation.
The energy policy he outlined in his budget proposal is supportive of a peculiar “national security” autarky (especially when it comes from an almost mythical pro-globalization figure like Obama). Its logic is implicitly something like this: if the US were not so dependent on foreign oil, there would be less need for US troops to be sent to foreign territories to defend the US’s access to energy resources. Obama treats oil in a mercantile way, the vital stuff of any contemporary economy (a little like the way gold was conceptualized in 16th and 17th centuries), long after mercantilism has been definitely abandoned as a viable political economy. In effect, he is calling for an autarkic import-substitution policy for oil while he is leading the main force for anti-autarkic globalization throughout the planet.
A Firm “No”
Obama’s paradigm is problematic since it poses the key question of oil policy as a matter of “dependency” and not as the consequence of the present system of commodity production. It does not recognize that: oil is a basic commodity; the oil industry is devoted to making money profits; the US government is essentially involved in guaranteeing the functioning of the world market and the profitability of the oil industry (not access to the hydrocarbon stuff itself); and energy politics involves classes in conflict (and not only competing corporations and conflicting nation states). In brief, it leaves out the central player of contemporary life: workers, their demands and struggles. Somehow, when it comes to writing the history of petroleum, capitalism, working class, and class conflict are frequently forgotten in a way that never happens with oil’s earthy hydrocarbon cousin, coal. Once we put profitability and working class conflict into the oil story, the plausibility of the National Security paradigm lessens, since the US military will be called upon to defend the profitability of international oil companies against the demands of workers around the world, even if the US did not import one drop of oil.
There will be wars fought by US troops aplenty in the years to come, if the US government tries to continue to play for the oil industry in particular and for capitalism in general the 21st century equivalent of the 19th century British Empire. For what started out in the 19th century as a tragedy, will be repeated in the 21st, not as farce, but as catastrophe. At the same time, it is not possible for the US government to “retreat” from its role, without jeopardizing the capitalist project itself. Obama and his Administration show no interest in leading an effort to abandon this imperialist, market-policing role as his efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan as well as his carte blanche to Israel in its bombing of Gaza initially indicate.
Thus the supporters of the National Security paradigm for oil policy like Obama are offering up a questionable connection between energy import-substitution and the path of imperialism. As logicians would say, energy dependence might be a sufficient condition of imperialist oil politics, but it is not a necessary one. This is Obama’s dilemma then: he cannot reject the central role of the US in the control of the world market’s basic commodity, at the same, the inter- and intra-class conflict in the oil producing countries is making the US’s hegemonic role impossible to sustain. Therefore, Obama’s oil policy will be quite similar to Bush’s.
A Hesitant “Yes”
Up until now my argument has been purely negative, i.e., though Obama’s oil policy and Bush’s are radically different rhetorically, they will have much in common in practice. Obama’s goal of “energy independence” will not affect the military interventions generated by the efforts to control oil production and accumulate oil profits throughout the world. These interventions will intensify as the capitalist crisis matures and as the short-term, spot market price fluctuates wildly from the long-term price, and geological, political and economic factors create an almost apocalyptic social tension.
I do see, however, that there is a major difference between Bush and Obama. The former was a status quo petroleum president while the latter is an energy-transition president, i.e., Obama (like Roosevelt in the 1930s and Carter in the 1970s) is in charge of a capitalist energy transition similar to the successful one that substituted oil/natural gas for coal in many places throughout the productive system in the 1930s and 1940s and the unsuccessful one that failed to substitute coal, solar power and nuclear power for oil/gas in the US of the 1970s. We are at the moment similar to the time when capital began to recognize that coal miners were so well organized that they could threaten the whole machine of accumulation (an experience felt in the British General Strike of 1926 and the coal mining struggle in the US of the 1930s that led to the triumph of the CIO) and had to be put on the defensive by the launching of a new energy foundation to capitalist production, and when Carter despaired of putting the struggle of the oil producing proletariat (especially in Iran) back in the bottle.
In the face of the failure of the Bush Administration’s attempt to impose a neoliberal regime on the oil producing countries, the Obama Administration must now lead a partial exit from the oil industry. It will not be total, of course. After all, the transition from coal to oil was far from total and, if anything, there is now more coal mined than ever before while the transition from renewable energy (wind, water, forests) in the late 18th century to coal was also far from total. Indeed, this is not the first time that capitalist crisis coincides with energy transition, as a glance at the previous transitions in the 1930s and 1970s indicate. It will be useful to reflect on these former transitions to assess the differences between Bush’s and Obama’s oil policies. The different phases of the transition from oil to alternative sources include: (1) repressing the expectations of the oil producing working class for reparations of a century of expropriation, (2) supporting financially/legally/militarily the alternative energy “winners”; (3) verifying the compatibility of the energy provided with the productive system; (4) blocking any revolutionary, anti-capitalist turn in the transition.
In reflecting on these phases, I note that they offer the kind of challenges that were largely irrelevant to the Bush Administration, since it was resolutely fighting the very premise of a transition: the power of the inter- and intra-class forces that were undermining the neoliberal regime. Consequently, they will provide a rich soil for discussion, debate and planning in this period. But the interests of the world market and the oil/energy companies will be paramount in the deployment of US military power-it also applies to my “Hesitant ‘Yes’” side as well, though less directly, since the ultimate purpose of the Obama administration is (pace Rush Limbaugh) to preserve the capitalist system in very perilous times. It just so happens, however, that the “everything” that must change is more extensive than had ever been thought before.
The first element in the transition is to recognize that there will be interclass resistance to the transition from those who stand to lose. Of course, most the oil capitalists will be able to transfer their capital easily to the new areas of profitability, although they will be concerned about the value of the remaining oil “banked” in the ground. This transition has been theorized, feared and prepared for by Third World (especially Saudi Arabian) capitalists ever since the first oil crisis of the 1970s. But what is to be done with respect to the oil producing proletariat? After all, the “down side” of Hubbert’s Curve, in a sense, could be seen as a potential payback for a century of exploitation, forced displacements and enclosures in the oil regions.
The capitalist class as a whole is unwilling to pay reparations to the peoples in the oil-producing areas whose land and life has been so ill-used. Oil capital’s resistance to reparations is suggested by its horror, for example, of paying the Venezuelan state oil taxes and rents that will go into buying back land that had been expropriated from campesinos decades ago and giving it to their campesino children or grandchildren. Capital wants to be able to control the vast transfer of surplus value that is being envisioned in these discussions of transition, and without a neoliberal solution it is not clear that it can. Moreover, will the working class be a docile echo to capital’s concerns? After all, shouldn’t reparations be paid to the people of the Middle East, Indonesia, Mexico, Venezuela, Nigeria and countless other sites of petroleum extraction-based pollution? Will they simply stand still and watch their only hope for the return of stolen wealth snuffed out?
We should recognize as far as phase (2) is concerned that alternative energies have been given an irenic cast by decades of “alternativist” rhetoric contrasting blood-soaked hydrocarbons and apocalypse-threatening nuclear power. But if we remember back to the period when capitalism was operating under a renewable energy regime in the 16th through most of the 18th century, we should recognize that this was hardly an era of international peace and love. The genocide of the indigenous Americans, the African slave trade and the enclosures of the European peasantry occurred with the use of alternative renewable energy! The view that a non-hydrocarbon future operated under a capitalist form of production will be dramatically less polemic is questionable. (We saw an example of this kind of conflict of interest in the protests of Mexican city dwellers over the price of corn grown by Iowa farmers that was being sold for biofuel instead of for “homofuel”!)
As for phase (3), we should remember that an energy source is not equally capable of generating surplus value (the ultimate end of the use of energy in capitalism). Oil is a highly flexible form of fuel that has a wide variety of chemical by-products and mixes with a certain type of proletariat. Solar, wind, water and tide energy will not immediately fit into the present productive apparatus to generate the same level of surplus. The transition will ignite a tremendous struggle in the production and reproduction process; for inevitably workers are going to be expected to “fit into” the productive apparatus whatever it is.
Finally, (4) presents the nub of the issue before us: will this transition be organized on a capitalist basis or will the double crisis opened up on the levels of energy production and general social reproduction mark the beginning of another mode of production? Obama’s energy policy is premised on the first alternative. There are, however, many reasons calling for the negation of this premise that leads to “everything remaining the same.” Consequently, we should be investigating with all our energy and ardor the other alternative. Join us.
Previously Presented at the Geopolitics of Oil Colloquium, Rutgers University, March 4, 2009.
From The Geopolitics of Petroleum ACAS Blog Series
Keywords: energy policy • Obama administration • oil
