Abstract
The historian David Nye (1998) explains, ‘as Americans incorporated new machines and processes into their lives, they became ensnared in power systems that were not easily changed … Processes of capitalism and industrialization alone do not explain this rapid development or [the massive] national difference. Culture does.’ Matthew T. Huber’s Lifeblood builds critically on this idea, explaining that capital is central to a particular construction of a cultural politics of life – ’the lived practices and meanings that naturalize capitalist forms of power and hegemony’ – an ‘entrepreneurial life’ made possible by the socioecological relations that extract, refine, consume and enliven the ‘dead ecologies’ of fossil-fuel energy.
Huber’s focus, importantly, is on ‘life’ and the particular construction of an ‘American way of life’ under oil-fired capitalism, as opposed to the fossil-fuel machine-dominated ‘work’ (for more on work, see Noble 1977, 1984). He explains that oil is ‘a central energy resource shaping the forces of social reproduction … the real subsumption of life under capital … [wherein] life appears as capital, or what Foucault calls “the enterprise form” so central to neoliberal subjectivities.’ With this focus, Huber adds a unique analysis to the growing literature on energy and capitalism, providing a critique and supplement to the work of, amongst others, Timothy Mitchell (2011) and Mazen Labban (2008).
In the theoretical introduction to the work, Chapter 1, Huber focuses on the ‘fetishism of oil’, which embeds it with an undialectical ‘thingness’, an alien character and attribution of causality outside of social relations. As Huber argues, oil needs to be understood as a specifically material aspect of the alienated and seemingly autonomous power of capital over living labour. The cultural politics of capital shifts from the formal to the real subsumption of life as the wage-labour relation and social reproduction based on commodity relations is supplemented with a material transformation made possible by oil (a home, car and family), and when ‘life’ is expressed materially as an ‘individualized product of hard work, investment, competitive tenacity and entrepreneurial “life choices”’. Huber argues this is central to creating and reinforcing the ‘lived process’ of neoliberal hegemony.
The power of oil, then, is not in its socio-natural properties alone, but in particular historical geographies and social relations that harness its versatility, abundance, energy density and liquidity. Huber’s larger historical account focuses on how the materiality of oil shapes its ‘system of provision’ – from extraction, distribution and refining to consumption. The rest of the book focuses on particular moments of crisis and stability in the development of petro-capitalism in the USAs – specifically, the 1930s, 1945-1973, 1970s, and 2000s – which align with specific points of the ‘system of provision’ so heavily influenced by the materiality of oil.
In Chapter 2, Huber roots the struggle over the production and reproduction of life under capitalist relations in what Marx termed the ‘value of labor power’. Under the historical and geographical context of the Great Depression and the New Deal response in the 1930s, a massive reconfiguration of the value of labour power was emergent from the struggles between labour, capital and the state over issues such as wages, housing, living conditions and the public provision of services and infrastructure – or largely, the determinants of the standard of living. Achieving the ‘American way of life’ was complicated by oil overproduction resultant from the US legal regime of private property and the subterranean oil deposits, which in turn resulted in glut, collapsing prices and a political regime that intended to curtail production through pro-rationing that would set ‘recommended’ production limits.
Huber investigates refineries, in Chapter 3, and explains that the process of distillation of crude into various petroleum products provides the material basis for the appearance of ‘fractionated lives’, ‘each tidily contained and controlled within the private spaces of the car, the home, and the body’. Refineries provide an ecological basis, and consequently the supplementary materiality, for reproducing the imaginary of an individuated condition, or ‘life,’ that is improvable solely by one’s own individuated effort and entrepreneurial capacities. The lived practices of energy consumption actively made possible specific spatial configurations of ‘residential settlement, transportation networks, and global flows of commodities’, and more generally an at-once mobile and home-centreed way of living – ‘mobile privatization’ – that was central to defining ‘freedom’ within the confines of the realm of social reproduction.
In Chapter 4, Huber discusses the decade of the 1970s plagued by oil ‘shocks’ and ‘crises’, the onset of neoliberal hegemony, increased privatisation, and political support garnered by suburbanites in a landscape of suburban social reproduction that reinforced an entrepreneurial way of life. Huber argues that the popular understandings of the ‘energy crisis’ tended to reinforce the shift to neoliberalism by chalking the shortage up to a conspiracy of vested interests, like ‘Big Oil’ and ‘Big Government’, which unfairly manipulated supply and demand to the cost of the hard-working individual. Foreign oil made all of this unduly precarious. Popular adversarial geopolitics reflected this anti-foreign oil sentiment with ‘racialized politics of anti-Arab xenophobia’ and support for the promise of ‘energy independence’.
Increasing job insecurity, mounting debt, and eroding conditions of ‘life’ for the working-class, portrayed popularly as ‘pain at the pump’, are discussed in Chapter 5 in relation to the neoliberal tendencies to produce economic insecurity and anxiety. Huber argues that capitalist organisation of life itself around access to commodities contributed to this anxiety, because, as he explains, the ‘American way of life’ is only ‘comprehensible through the wage relation wherein access to the means of life is necessarily mediated by the commodity form’. Thus, the ‘pain at the pump’ was felt as gas prices increased and threatened ‘self-made’ livelihoods. And as such, any energy policy, associated automatically with taxation, incited strong populist fervour under a politics of ‘hostile privatism’ that placed the blame of economic insecurity on forms of public solidarity such as taxes, government programs, and wealth redistribution.
In the concluding chapter, Huber deliberates on the role of energy in Marx’s ‘Realm of freedom’ in a society beyond capital, compared to that with the explicit spatial and historical experience of freedom constructed within the hegemony of neoliberalism in the USA. A society beyond capital implies freedom beyond the limited, exclusionary, individualistic and neoliberal freedom for US suburbanites made possible through oil, through its violent geographies and injustices. Oil is deeply entrenched in our lives, in the sphere of social reproduction and in the means of production, and moving to a society beyond oil will require a reconfiguring of ‘life’ and ‘work’. In all, Huber’s work is necessary reading for anyone interested in the relations between energy and capital.