Abstract
Matthew Huber has written an important book, a book that offers a novel way to think about the cultural economy of capitalism in the United States. In that sense, it is a specifically ‘American’ book, in its subject matter, but arguably also in the realm of political work to which Huber clearly hopes the book might contribute. As such it might seem a little unfair to engage Lifeblood by putting it in a much larger geographical context. Nevertheless, that is what I try to do in the paragraphs that follow. My principal tool of engagement is the work of the Jordanian–Saudi–Iraqi (and ultimately exiled) oil economist-become-novelist Abdelrahman Munif (1933–2004). Among many novels, Munif’s most celebrated include his quintet Cities of Salt. (The novels originally appeared in Arabic between 1984 and 1989. Only the first three books have been translated into English, between 1987 and 1993.)
In English, the first novel is also called Cities of Salt. 3 In the eyes of many – me included – it is a thinly fictionalized, and sharply critical, retelling of the founding of the modern state of Saudi Arabia in the 1930s and 1940s. In it, brash American cowboy-men – known by locals as ‘foreigners’, ifranj; as the novel’s translator has said, ‘“Franks,” just a gentle hint of the Crusades’ – descend on the desert of the eastern peninsula. 4 They back a corrupt emir in a long-running political conflict and proceed to tear the desert apart in search of oil, destroying the oasis of Wadi al-Uyun (the community at the center of the tale), gunning down striking Bedouin workers, all in the face of the resistance of Mut’ab, a selfless and fierce local hero. (If I make it sound predictable, it is not.)
While I am in no way a scholar of the Middle East, or of oil or novels, I nevertheless want to bring Munif into the conversation because, like Huber, he offers an oil-driven narrative, set in exactly the same period as Lifeblood, one with, perhaps, an even more striking message about the relation between culture, capitalism, and oil. But Munif’s story is quite radically different, and not only in the obvious ways (Saudi Arabia vs United States, novel vs scholarship, semi-nomadic communities vs North American suburbs, the romance of the Bedouin versus the Beverly Hillbillies).
Its differences strike us not only in this mirror-image manner but also insofar as it is actually, in many ways, another telling of the same story. If we imagine ourselves as witnesses to the unfolding petro-history of the 20th century – one that clearly took place not as a series of isolated ‘national’ developments but was instead entangled at a fully planetary scale – then Cities of Salt and Lifeblood are in fact like different scenes in the same film. To understand what was (and is) going on at the planetary scale, we would need to flash back and forth between the two works (among others) to keep track of what was going on in both places, because they are crucially related. If we could do that, I think we would find a whole host of questions emerge about historical and geographical sinews that establish and maintain those relations. But we would also perhaps discover some fascinating and instructive material concerning the vagaries of the political in the age of oil.
There is a thread of anti-capitalism in Huber’s story, which is in some ways a kind of shadow-story that runs throughout Huber’s work, both in Lifeblood and in the scholarly papers that have preceded it. The book is clearly an ongoing accounting of the ‘forces of capital’, as the subtitle says. But it is also about the work of counteracting those forces, less in the historical ‘resistance’ sense than in their critical analysis – the ‘labor of negation’, one might say. Certainly, if you take the book as a whole, and in particular the open-Marxian theoretical armature through which Huber makes his argument, it is fair to assume that a sophisticated anti-capitalism underwrites the analysis. Although these politics only appear on his sleeve in the last couple of pages, he already has a long history of work on the oil industry’s contribution to what elsewhere he calls (after Marx) ‘the despotism of capital’. 5
Munif was himself also an anti-capitalist. An Arab nationalist, and an influential figure in the Ba’ath party in the 1950s and 1960s (for which he was stripped of his Saudi citizenship), he earned a PhD in oil economics in Tito’s Belgrade in the early 1960s. Upon his return to the Middle East, he settled in Baghdad, but his critique of increasing Ba’ath brutality led to his exit from the party in 1965. He moved to Damascus, and eventually to Paris, but remained committed to his ex-party’s political origins in an essentially socialist vision of pan-Arab development. 6
And this is where things get quite interesting. For in many of those specifically American political dimensions Huber takes on so compellingly in Lifeblood, there were of course very different oil politics happening elsewhere at the very same time. These political developments were always linked more or less tightly to dynamics in the United States (and elsewhere). These links operated not only in what Huber calls the ‘big world’ of geopolitical strategy and ‘carbon democracy’, the realm of scholars like Timothy Mitchell, 7 but in the cultural politics of freedom, nation, and development.
This is the political terrain Huber is talking about when he asks, ‘can energy do political work?’ His answer, quite reasonably, is that ‘energy’ in this sense does not actually do anything: except insofar as we understand it as a socio-ecological relation, one that in the United States has become bound up in an ideology of the suburbanized ‘freedom’ of ‘entrepreneurial life’. For Munif, too, oil functioned, or at least had the potential to function, as key to freedom of a somewhat different kind: a collective freedom for Arabs and the Arab nations. But for him it was also, as is so clear in Cities of Salt, the key to Saudi ‘petro-despotism’ and bloody community rivalries – a truly ‘geosocial force’, as Huber put it in an earlier article. 8 These are radically different but no less ‘everyday’ political economies and cultural politics than those that are the focus of Lifeblood. They are, on Huber’s terms, just a different set of ‘relations and processes that produce the idea of oil as a powerful thing’. Indeed, in Munif’s account of the destruction of an admittedly romanticized Bedouin way of life, one might read a more vicious, but no less effective, account of the real subsumption of life under capitalism. In all Munif’s novels, there is very real blood pumping under very real oil, and he would agree with Huber that on its own, the ‘political work’ we might be tempted to attribute to oil is in fact social artifact.
Huber’s compelling discussion of the ‘No Blood for Oil’ rhetoric comes into view here, but again in a different historical–geographical (i.e. political) light. As he shows very clearly, in the protests against the Iraq wars, ‘No Blood for Oil’ made little sense. On the contrary, it was a fallacy on two political registers: first, it really meant ‘No American Blood for Oil’, and second, oil is not some extravagant accouterment to everyday life in the United States. It is indeed a matter of survival, thoroughly enmeshed in the political economic organization of modern American life. Oil is not ‘optional’ in the modern American context. For Munif, the equation is just as straightforward, and just as central. The fact is the answer is ‘Yes, blood for oil’. But again, with Munif, we find ourselves witness to a struggle over and for what is arguably a very different kind of freedom: ‘Oil is our one and only chance to build a future, and the regimes are ruining it’:
Oil, present by mere chance, provides the sole and final opportunity for the region to develop itself rather than depend upon others as was the case in the past and as may happen in the future if the present misuse of oil wealth continues.
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All of which is to say that in the juxtaposition of these works, so very different on the surface, what becomes visible is the centrality of oil not only to the historical and geographical specificities of North American or Middle Eastern political life. Rather, we can see that oil has perhaps become central to the political as a category of modern social life (or, as Poulantzas put it, a ‘region’ of modern social formations). 10 This is to suggest a relation qualitatively different than Mitchell’s carbon democracy, that is, one in which political ‘form’ is overdetermined by energetic ‘content’. 11
If we understand the political, with Poulantzas, as constituted neither solely in the realm of the clash of interests nor in agonistic confrontation and collective or individual self-actualization, but in the field in which the relationship between the dominant and the dominated is worked out, then the Huber–Munif pairing reminds us that oil fuels not just particular forms or sites of modern politics – modern American ‘democracy’ or modern Arabian ‘dictatorship’ or monarchy – but the category of the political as such in modernity. The very ‘region’ of social life we call the political has in fact been constructed, contradictions and complexities included, in an age from which oil is inextricable. On this, Mitchell is absolutely correct. But it is not just its nominally ‘democratic’ form in which oil has played a role; there is no modern ‘form’ of the political which has not been shaped and continually reshaped by oil. What would it mean to imagine a modern political life that is not soaked in petroleum? It is almost unthinkable – precisely the reason that when we are asked to imagine a world beyond oil, it often seems to be one in which we need to go ‘back’ in time: ‘de-growth’, ‘re-localization’.
Of course, Huber has throughout his previous work also emphasized the ‘global’ nature of petro-capital, 12 and I would contend this conception of the political is very much in line with Huber’s argument (and that of the excellent work of others like Labban 13 ). Indeed, it is a proposition that would be impossible without their excellent work to build on. It also brings us back to the role of anti-capitalism in Lifeblood, to which Huber turns explicitly only in the very last paragraphs. There he points us toward a rethinking of the very space of the political today, via a renewed urban anti-capitalist future, in contrast to the ‘anti-urban’ one with which we now live. There, he draws inspiration from the ecosocialist David Schwartzman’s elaboration of a ‘solar communism’. 14 One of the merits of that work – and it is there in Lifeblood’s conclusion too – is the way it looks beyond the subjective moralism that animates most left environmentalism today and emphasizes the necessity of thinking about the structures of feeling and the structures of social reproduction that are at play and at stake.
Which brings me, finally, to a wonderful little book by the Spanish poet and essayist Jorge Riechmann, Socialism Can Only Come by Bicycle. 15 Like Schwartzman, Riechmann recognizes the limits of ecological moralizing, but he also knows that comunismo solar describes political and techno-institutional structures that seem completely removed from the relations of social reproduction that shape everyday life in the global capitalist North. He wants to ground possibility in something closer to hand, which he calls ‘socialism by bicycle’ (socialismo en bicicleta). The bicycle, he says, is the anti-capitalist machine ‘par excellence’, one on which we can ride away from petro-capitalism, without going very far (‘más allá del capitalismo fosilista’, ‘sin ir más lejos’). Surely, any realizable socialismo en bicicleta requires an urban future like that Lifeblood’s final pages urge upon us. I would take the liberty of presuming that Huber would press us to take a ride on Reichmann’s handlebars. Listen up, and hop on.