by Stan Goff
[Copyright 2002, From The Wilderness Publications, www.copvcia.com. All Rights Reserved. May be copied, distributed, or posted on the Internet for non-profit purposes only.]
Aug. 27, 2002, 12:00 PDT (FTW) -- Most of the polemical resistance to the so-called "War on Terrorism" has thus far been based on ethics and morality. And the moral dimension of the war is important. But we must take a more critical look at this war, at what is motivating the war, and what are the likely outcomes. While we can mount moral resistance to the war, if we fail to critically engage the real causes of it, we cannot mount an effective political resistance, which has to be an effective response to the motive forces behind the war.
Here we will emphasize the dynamic between an American ruling class and its governing junta -- which has seized power and is in many ways out of control -- in an adverse historical circumstance that is not likely correctable, and cannot, therefore, guarantee the survival of U.S. imperialism. We have to study this dynamic concretely to understand it.
It is important at the outset not to think of big business (sometimes referred to as "capital") as broken into discrete sectors, each sector with its own static base and ideology. The concept of capital as broken into static sectors, while it may be useful for a short time to conduct a transient analysis, is fundamentally mechanical. Capital is a dynamic and cyclical process of accumulation via valorization1 and systemic reproduction. It has to stabilize and reproduce itself as a system, yet it also has to "grow." This simultaneous need for equilibrium and disequilibrium is one of the central paradoxes of imperialism. Total capital at any moment is a set sum of money, for the sake of argument, but it is in flux, changing forms throughout the production/reproduction process, first productive capital, then goods and services, then redistributed through interests and rents, then finance capital, etc.
Capital has a temporal nature. In this process, the system bosses, CEOs, etc., are like an acting troupe, the members of which keep changing roles. The notion that they are divided into sectors, then, is illusory, because no fraction of capital exists independently in any sector. A crisis of accumulation2 is not a discrete crisis limited to one "sector" of capital. It is general. And the higher the degree of international integration and rationalization of the capitalist class, especially in a technically complex interdependency, the more generalized are the accumulation crises. Anything affecting one "sector" necessarily affects all "sectors."
We cannot know every aspect of this dialectic, but we can focus on some key aspects of it, bearing in mind the limitations of this focus, that I think will shed some light on our situation. So I will focus on oil, on currency, and on the evolving role and dilemma of the U.S. military. While we can certainly acknowledge that currency and the military are constants in the abstract and not a sector of capital, oil at first blush appears to be a definite sector. But this, too, is illusory. Oil is not a separate sector, first for the reasons cited above, but also because oil is no mere commodity.
Oil is the form of a deeper cycle of material reality than that on which radical theorists concentrated in the abstract with relation to the commodity and the vast social architecture they unfold from that enigma. It is the embodiment of inescapable physical laws related to energy and matter, and those are the laws, in conjunction with the laws of social motion, that we are bumping up against, not just as a society but as a species. Oil is a form of super-concentrated energy, originating as solar energy that formed over hundreds of millions of years in unique biological and geological conditions that cannot be replicated. Our species has used over half of the recoverable oil in approximately 100 years.
World oil production is probably peaking right now3, even as population continues to increase and the demands of a crumbling world economic infrastructure continue apace. Two factors might provide a transient reprieve from this event. First, technological advances like 3-D seismic enhanced recovery, nuclear-magnetic resonance techniques, horizontal drilling, and so forth, and second, a worldwide depression, which would radically decrease demand.4 It is not difficult to imagine some of the long-term consequences of the end of cheap oil, even using the input-output models of the neo-Malthusians.5 (Thomas Malthus [1766-1834] was an English economist who became famous through his book, "Essay on Population." He claimed that population increased faster than the means of human subsistence. Facts contradict this, and show that a niche must be opened in order to be filled. The neo-Malthusians have altered Malthus' concept somewhat, by claiming that population will "overshoot" as means of subsistence, like arable land, water, and fossil fuels, are depleted. There appears to be some validity to this. But their model is based on simple input-output calculations that assume a human population trajectory based on a static list of variables, with no account for the characteristics of social systems. It implies, therefore, a kind of genetic determinism that can easily devolve into racism.)
But we must take into account the social relations of energy, and value-theory.6 It is not the finite physical limit of oil that matters right now. It matters what is finite in the context of what is economically essential. Does oil have any perfect substitutes? At this conjuncture, the answer is an unequivocal "no." What is the value of oil in terms of embodied socially-necessary labor-time? In other words, can the value of oil rise fast enough for the whole economy to be contained? The answer to that is an unequivocal "yes."
Oil has no perfect substitute. Neither solar cell, nor coal, nor plutonium can run trucks or airplanes. There are theoretical substitutes, but not one shows any promise in the near term of even being developed. It is the lifeblood of the entire global capitalist system, and has been for 100 years. If oil prices go beyond a very operational price of no return, so to speak, the economy will most certainly be contained, very likely to the point of collapse.7 Imagine the consequences today, for example, if oil prices jumped a mere 50 percent. But if best predictions are correct, and we are entering the era of post-peak production, a steady and accelerating increase in the price of oil is inevitable, and soon.
Cont ...