Book review forum: Lifeblood by Matthew T. Huber,with commentaries from Julie Guthman,Geoff Mann,Anna Zalik,Mazen Labban,and Matthew T. Huber

First of all, I want to thank Julie, Anna, Mazen, and Geoff for such thoughtful and critical engagements with the book both at the AAG meeting in Tampa and in print here. The overworked academic has only so much time to read books in full, and I am deeply grateful for all of the insights – if only they could be woven into the book itself at this point!

Perhaps the place to start is Julie Guthman’s provocative claim that ‘Lifeblood isn’t primarily about oil’. In many ways I agree. As Guthman deftly summarizes, the main story of the book is tracing the emergence of neoliberal politics from the ‘compromises’ of the New Deal and through the rightward/neoliberal shifts of the 1970s and beyond. The book is also not another of the (too many) books already in circulation about oil as a discrete, contained empirical object. In this approach, there is an equally discrete ‘politics of oil’ wherein this object is struggled over or claimed to cause wars, poverty, wealth, or whatever other agency is bestowed upon it. What I tried to do was to use oil to tell a wider story about what Geoff Mann calls ‘the category of the political as such . . .’ (emphasis in original). For Mann, this is less about struggles between interests; rather, it is ‘the field in which the relationship between the dominant and the dominated is worked out’. Insofar as in the current context of the United States, domination is ‘worked out’ (or perhaps legitimated and made ‘common sense’) through a neoliberal ideology of freedom and ‘entrepreneurial life’, I wanted to explore oil’s relation to this broader politics. Not the politics of oil, but how the cultural and everyday relationship with oil shapes our politics. This also serves to flip much attention lately focused on the politics of ‘nature’ or ‘environment’, and look at how we can see ‘the category of the political as such’ as already ecological.

Along the way, however, I realized the book is ‘about’ oil in one important sense. It turns out this broader neoliberal politics can help us explain the persistence of ‘oil addiction’ in the United States. Since the 1970s, every policymaker and politician has laid out the laundry list of perils associated with our continued dependence on oil and fossil fuels. The current crisis around climate change only intensifies these longstanding views. While many are comfortable blaming a cabal of ‘Big Oil’ corporations for smashing alternatives and paying off politicians (which is certainly part of the story), I argue it is a broader neoliberal populism which vilifies collective politics, the public sector and any form of energy policy as a ‘tax’ that needs much more attention. ¹ Confronting this politics of privatism means grappling with how even left movements are saturated with language that emphasizes neoliberal ideas of fair competition, freedom, and entrepreneurialism, but, on the other (more optimistic) hand, it means the barriers to the kind of energy transition we need are mostly political – that is, changeable.

As Anna Zalik points out, this neoliberal populism can also be materially linked to oil in another specific way – the private rights to the subsoil create a populist bloc of royalty owners and small-scale independent oil producers trumpeting the discourse of ‘free enterprise’ and ‘private property’ in their support of the oil industry. This brings us back to important points brought up by Zalik and Mann – oil is so often not associated with this kind of politics of privatism in other global contexts. From Mexico to Saudi Arabia, oil stands in for public riches, national development, and state power over the economy (more on these kinds of geographical differences below).

The book is also more broadly about the relationship between energy in general and the realm of the political. This is at the heart of (at least) some of Mazen Labban’s critical interventions. He sees, ‘a relation of causality that construes those [sociospatial] arrangements and [cultural] attitudes (industrial capitalism, suburbanism, “entrepreneurial life”) as effects of the power of fossil fuels’. One way in which he reads this ‘effect of causality’ is my (likely annoying) habit of ‘injecting the term fossil fuel [or oil] when it is not analytically necessary’. As examples he cites ‘oil-powered escape’ from work and the city (p. 110), ‘oil-powered privatism’ (p. 120), and ‘oil-powered life’ (p. 123). This is my (overly earnest) attempt to emphasize (and make painfully clear) the energy-politics analytic at the heart of the book. As others have pointed out, this kind of energy-politics analytic has little precedence in social (or critical geographical) theory. ² Yet, my goal was never to ascribe a ‘relation of causality’ between fossil fuel/oil and any social or cultural arrangement. Mine is a dialectical approach that does not seek to impute ‘causality’ to any one independent thing or variable, but rather seeks to establish and trace relationships and processes. ³ Insofar as it is also a dialectical materialist (and historical) approach, my interest is not in how oil or fossil fuels ‘caused’ anything, but rather set particular material conditions of possibility (where the realm of ‘possibility’ is very wide and contingent).

Labban also contends that I employ a ‘transhistorical’ concept of energy. He rightly points to the historical specificity of the concept of energy itself, which happens to coincide with the era of capitalist large-scale machinery. ⁴ As evidence, he quotes some passages in which I make some admittedly grandiose claims about energy being the basis for ‘life itself’ (no matter what the historical circumstances). But this was a tactic to make some rather general statements about energy before engaging in a study on the historically specific relation between fossil fuels and capitalism and, more specifically, oil and 20th-century American political economy. This is akin to Marx’s own methodological tactic of moving from the abstract to the concrete – the moment in the ‘Introduction’ to the Grundrisse where he speaks of ‘production in general’ or in Capital Vol. 1 where he speaks of the ‘labor process’ (and in particular the social metabolism with nature) in transhistorical terms before examining the historically specific nature of the capitalist labor process. ⁵ Now, if pushed, Marx would certainly agree that the concepts of ‘production’ and ‘labor’ are themselves a product of historical circumstances, but nevertheless he claims the abstraction of production in general is ‘a rational abstraction in so far as it brings out and fixes a common element and thus saves us repetition’. ⁶ Although our concept of energy is a product of 19th-century thinking, it is useful for understanding a ‘common element’ of all forms of nature–society interaction. But my study is certainly not based on the abstraction of energy, ⁷ but rather the concrete political and social relations between one form of energy (oil) and capitalist society in the United States.

Labban is also right to point out that the relations between fossil fuels and industrial capitalism are geographically specific – automatic machinery in one place ‘gorged on the muscles and brains’ of workers subjugated to slavery and other forms of colonial rule (in history and today). This connects to Mann’s insightful discussion of quite different, yet concomitant, struggles over oil and ‘freedom’ in Saudi Arabia vis-à-vis the work of Abdul Rahman Munif. Indeed, while Saudi Arabia is often simply constructed as a brutal monarchial piece on the ‘chessboard’ of American empire, it too could be analyzed along the same lines as Lifeblood – seeking to untangle the relations between oil, lived practice, and ideas of freedom. Zalik also brings up questions of global difference and the ways in which the politics of the subsoil – and, in particular, the ways in which the American private property system – makes it quite unlike their North American neighbors of national (Mexico) or provincial (Canada) landlord states. One constant anxiety in writing Lifeblood was the way in which I put analytical borders around the object of study – political culture within the United States – ‘an American book’ as Mann points out. In the end, I stuck to an ‘American book’ simply because I think there is something very geographically particular, culturally peculiar, and structurally important, about both US politics and the country’s extraordinary levels of oil consumption. Yet, Lifeblood could have been more explicit that its examination of oil and culture is not just about reproducing power ‘in’ the United States but also reproducing consent to the wider global entanglements of American empire (related to oil or not). Moreover, geographers have long insisted that any analysis of a national state or culture must be situated in global relations of capital and other flows, and Lifeblood certainly could have provided more global context for its analysis of US oil culture and politics.

Guthman also raises important questions about the book’s ability to grapple with ‘new articulations of work and life’. With the rise of home-work technologies and longer work hours, the distinction between production (work) and reproduction (life) is more difficult to maintain in contemporary capitalism. Indeed, it could be argued the revival of literature (in geography and beyond) around ‘social reproduction’ is about troubling this traditional Marxist distinction. ⁸ Upon some reflection, I think I failed to articulate how the New Deal compromise premised upon this clear distinction between work and life – where capitalist control over work was exchanged for the ‘good life’ of suburbs and automobility – was bound for failure. The compromise was based upon quarantining freedom in the realm of ‘life’ and social reproduction. As Guthman puts it, ‘The sphere of social reproduction became where freedom was experienced and where meaning was to be made’. Yet, by maintaining the basic relations of capitalism, ceding control to capital over the conditions and means of production and ceding ‘life’ to the abstract realm of commodity relations for basic reproduction (materialized through wages, machines, mortgages, shopping lists, etc.), this compromise was doomed from the start. As production became subject to more coercive global competition, it was inevitable that capital would begin subjecting labor not only to lower wages but tighter work-disciplines, more precarity, and an increasing colonization of the so-called free time of life. The erosion of the boundaries between work and home life was implicit in the ceding of control over production itself – and, thus, a central contradiction of the New Deal ‘victory’ for labor. Capital’s false promise of ‘freedom’ quarantined in the realm of life and social reproduction was as fabricated as bourgeois delusions of freedom inherent in capitalist markets.

Resisting the tendency to quarantine ‘politics’ only in the realm of life and social reproduction takes us to what Mann calls the ‘shadow-story’ of the book: its anti-capitalist politics. Admittedly, this politics is only explicitly discussed in the final pages. What I tried to do in those few pages is to argue for the resuscitation of Marx’s belief that capitalism – and more specifically the capitalist development of the productive forces – should be seen as a material basis for a society beyond capital (call it ‘socialism by bicycle’, if you like!). This notion has been the target of postmodernist critique of Marx’s ‘teleological’ and ‘stage-oriented’ historical outlook, and ‘eco-Marxist’ critiques of his industrial productivism. However, as Mann points out, abandoning the idea of capitalism as the basis for something better has led to a nostalgic politics (particularly on the environmental left) where ‘it often seems . . . we need to go “back” in time: “de-growth,” ‘“re-localization”’. Guthman says the return to muscle-powered drudgery is ‘not a vision that is likely to win many hearts and minds’. Abandoning this backward-looking politics means seeing fossil-fuel-powered machines as not the original sin of the Anthropocene, but as the basis for emancipation from what Marx called ‘the realm of necessity’ – that is, the basic hard manual work of social reproduction.

As Labban strongly argues, one must be careful in a politics that places, ‘faith in the emancipatory capacities of capitalist forces of production’. It is wrought with ‘productivist’ and ‘technocratic’ dangers of putting trust in machines and not actual social struggle and the creative capacities of living labor. For Labban, it also ‘rests on the reduction of labor to the generation of mechanical power – labor as “human muscles”’. This is surely a dull and soulless imaginary of labor if there ever was one. Yet, while certainly not wanting to reduce labor to muscles, I would argue ignoring the very material and objective role of human and animal muscles in environmental history (and the potential of ‘labor saving’ automatic machinery to relive some of this toil) is at best naive and at worst a product of our own socio-institutional location in the ‘immaterial’ worlds of knowledge work (it turns out us academics don’t use our muscles very much). While Labban seems keen on the rhetorically attractive sense that we must ‘render inoperable the capitalist machines that reign over the production and reproduction of material life . . . [and] turn capitalism into a fossil’, this seems to imply that overcoming capitalism must accompany changing technologies. There is nothing inherently capitalist about fossil-fuel-powered machinery, and, in fact, theorists of an ecosocialist transition argue it would be naive to think we would not need to deploy some fossil-fuel technology in a transition to a post-capitalist economy powered by solar and other renewable energies. ⁹ Moving beyond capitalism cannot primarily be about creating new technologies, but new social relations over how technologies are deployed and put to use. It was Marx’s belief (at least, I think) that large-scale automatic machinery – with social relations of the ‘associated producers’ – could be deployed to the benefit of all of humanity and not just the privileged wealthy few (while, as Labban rightly points out, millions more continue to toil in brutal conditions).

Of course, just because Marx thought this does not make it dogma. History has revealed that the energy system powering those machines is completely unsustainable. There is no ‘realm of freedom’ on a planet threatened by climate change among other ecological calamities. If our productive system were actually oriented toward human (and ecological) needs, fossil-fuel-powered machines would necessarily be transitioned out in favor of clean and renewable sources. It turns out that when we imagine a society of ‘freedom’, it cannot be restricted to just the human world of labor, but also the wider ecologies of life as a whole.

Matthew T. Huber Syracuse University, USA