Upstream - [TEASER] Oil, Monopoly Capitalism, and Imperialism w/ Adam Hanieh

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

This is a free preview of the episode "Oil, Monopoly Capitalism, and Imperialism w/ Adam Hanieh." You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast As a Patreon subscriber you will get access to at least one bonus episode a month (usually two or three), our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers—depending on which tier you subscribe to. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at Patreon.com/upstreampodcast or at upstreampodcast.org/support. Thank you. Oil is much more than just a source of energy—it’s a commodity that has shaped—and has been shaped—by the forces of capitalism perhaps more so than any other commodity. The story of oil is one of monopoly capitalism, one of imperialism, one of cheap labor, resource extraction, ecosystem devastation, climate change, assassinations, environmental disasters, genocides—the list goes on. Oil is the commodity which not just lubricates the actual, literal machinery driving the system—but which also lubricates the entire process of U.S. imperialism—the blood flowing through the empire’s many tentacles wrapped around the globe. As today’s guest has written, “Oil's centrality stems from what it does for the imperatives of accumulation: its ability to accelerate and expand capital's turnover, cheapen the costs of production (including labor), and knit together an international market. No other commodity plays this role.” Adam Hanieh is a Palestinian professor at the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East, published by Haymarket Books, and most recently, Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market, published by Verso. Adam was on the show last year to talk about the political economy of Palestine, part of our ongoing series on Palestine.In this episode we explore the early history of oil, its emergence as a fuel source and how it eventually overtook other fuels like coal as the primary energy source of capitalism. We explore the role that oil has played in shaping geopolitics—from colonialism to coups, assassinations, and more, focusing on the way that oil has shaped the Middle East to this day. We talk about the major oil companies and how the world market for oil works, and finally, we bring into stark relief the environmental implications of this hydrocarbon and the way that oil companies continue to dominate and shape our response to climate change. Further resources: Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market Related episodes: Upstream's ongoing series on Palestine Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

A quick note before we jump into this Patreon episode. Thank you to all of our Patreon subscribers for making Upstream possible. We genuinely couldn't do this without you. Your support allows us to create bonus content like this and provide most of our content for free so we can continue to offer political education media to the public and help to build our movement. Thank you comrades. We hope you enjoy this conversation. Oil is often described, you know, it's described as a prize or as a curse, or in the words of a former Venezuelan oil minister, as the devil's excrement, and so forth. Now, I think the problem with this kind of approach is it gives a causal power to oil, which in the end of the day is really just a sticky black goo.

Instead, I think what we need to do is place oil in capitalism and to ask ourselves, what is it about capitalism that gives oil its power and its meaning? How do the priorities, logics, and behaviors that are today systemic to capitalism determine oil's place in our world today? And that's the basic question I really tried to dig into, include capitalism. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream.

Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Oil is much more than a source of energy. It's a commodity that has shaped and has been shaped by the forces of capitalism, perhaps more so than any other commodity. The story of oil is one of monopoly capitalism, one of imperialism, one of cheap labor, resource

extraction, ecosystem devastation, climate change, assassinations, environmental disasters, genocides, the list goes on. Oil is the commodity which not only lubricates the actual literal machinery driving the system, but which also lubricates the entire process of US imperialism. It is the blood flowing through the empire's many tentacles wrapped around the globe. As today's guest has written, oil oil centrality stems from what it does to the imperatives of accumulation, its ability to accelerate and expand capital's turnover, cheapen the costs of production, including labor, and knit

together an international market. No other commodity plays this role. Adam Hania is a Palestinian professor at the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Lineages of Revolt, Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East, published by Haymarket Books, and most recently, Crude Capitalism,

Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the world market, published by Verso. Adam was on the show last year to talk about the political economy of Palestine, part of our ongoing series on Palestine. In this episode, we explore the early history of oil, emerging as a fuel source and eventually overtaking other fuels like coal as the primary energy source of capitalism. We explore the role the oil has played in

shaping geopolitics from colonialism to coups, assassinations and more, focusing on the way that oil has shaped the Middle East to this day. We talk about the major oil companies and how the world market for oil works and finally we bring into stark relief the environmental implications of this hydrocarbon and the way that oil companies continue to dominate and shape our response to climate change. And now here's Robert in conversation with Adam Henia. Adam, it is great to have you back on the show.

Thanks, Robert. It's a real pleasure to join you today. Adam, it is great to have you back on the show. Thanks, Robert. It's a real pleasure to join you today. So, for folks who missed it, we had you on last year to actually talk about your book, Lineages of Revolt, Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East. And we focused particularly on your chapters on Palestinian political economy in that conversation. So, anybody who wants to go check that out, if you haven't already, I would definitely recommend that. If you missed that episode though, or if you just need a refresher on who Adam is,

I would love it, Adam, if you could introduce yourself for our listeners. Sure. I'm currently a professor of political economy and global development at the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK. I'm of Palestinian origin and lived and worked in Palestine for about seven years in the early 2000s through the Second Interfather. And so I've written extensively on Palestine, but also the wider Middle East region. Much of my previous academic work is focused on the Gulf Arab states. I'm particularly being interested in how the Middle East is connected to the wider global

capitalist system and to try to move away analysis of the region from the kind of standard approaches we see replicated in the media, which focuses on supposedly intractable conflicts, religion as kinds of the main explanatory factors to really try to understand how the Middle East, as with all places in the world today, is deeply embedded in global capitalism and is part of how global capitalism functions. Absolutely. Yeah. And the book that we're going to be talking about today, your latest book, really helps to do to do just that focusing in on one specific commodity could call it the commodity oil. So crude capitalism, that's that's the book that we're going to be talking about today going to be published this month, actually, September 17. And yeah, can you talk about what drove you to want to write this book

and what you were hoping to accomplish with it? Yes, well, I've worked for about 20 years now on, as I mentioned, the Gulf states like Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar. And in all these states, obviously, the question of oil is supremely important. They are the world's leading oil exporters, major sources of gas, natural gas as well. And a lot of academic work on the Gulf tries to use these hydrocarbon resources as the key explanatory factors to try to explain society and politics and economics

in the Gulf as a result of these stupendous oil supplies that they possess. There's a theory, for example, called the Rontier State Theory or Rentier State Theory, which basically says that countries like Saudi Arabia are undemocratic because they have a lot of oil, and this allows the state to earn wealth without having to tax its citizens. So because of this, oil-rich states tend to be undemocratic and they have a lopsided development that's mostly focused on the oil sectors. Now, I think this kind of approach is very misleading. It's a kind of commodity fetishism, to use Marx's framework, where a commodity appears to be invested with a magical power that kind of creates and determines its society, its politics, its social forms. And we can see this reflected in the way that oil is often described. It's described as a prize or as a curse, or in the words of a

former Venezuelan oil minister, as the devil's excrement, and so forth. Now, I think the problem with this kind of approach is it gives a causal power to oil, which, in the end of the day, is really just a sticky black goo. Instead, I think what we need to do is place oil in capitalism and to ask ourselves, what is it about capitalism that gives oil its power and its meaning? How do the priorities, logics and behaviours that are today systemic to capitalism

determine oil's place in our world today? And that's the basic question I really tried to dig into, include capitalism. I really think this is a key question. We obviously can't deal with the climate crisis and let's face it, the climate crisis is the biggest question facing humanity today without having an answer to this question. But to me, it's remarkable, you know,

if you look at climate discussions, both the kind of discussions you see at places like COP28, but even more broadly through the media and different climate movements, how much these discussions ignore capitalism. They treat energy, they treat energy consumption and energy production as simply technical problems. And I think what this does is it naturalizes capitalism.

Capitalism is just there. It's a natural thing that we don't even have to acknowledge, rather than it being a social system that emerged historically and has only been around a few hundred years. So what I'm saying here is that we need to kind of foreground capitalism, bring it out of its invisibility, if we are really going to tackle the climate crisis To move away from fossil fuels to move away from oil and to really understand the place of oil in our life today

Hmm. Yeah, thank you so much. You you really made so many important points there and I really appreciate the point about evoking of capitalist realism and this idea that There is no other alternative and we just think about capitalism if we don't even really think about capitalism as a system often when we make our decisions in life, it just feels like the water that we swim in. So I think that's also a very very important point that I think about quite a bit as well. So you start the book with a really interesting story about the way that oil sort of emerged. And you sort of break a lot of assumptions that we have about that running out of energy sources and the need to move to oil and all of that kind of stuff.

So I'd love it if you could maybe talk about how oil became a primary energy source under capitalism and maybe unpacking the history and telling the story about how it also came to surpass all other fuel sources eventually to become the world's dominant fuel source. Yes, well I think that the place we need to start here if we're going to be speaking about oil and capitalism is actually the idea of energy. All human societies need energy sources. We interact as human beings with nature through labor to produce the means of our existence. All human societies have done this for millennia.

And energy is what enables this labor to take place and determines its relative strength. So for most of human history, energy was delivered through muscles, human muscle, muscle power, generated through the food we eat, plants and animals, which ultimately derive from solar energy.

Later on, human muscle was supplemented by the burning of wood and charcoal and rudimentary machines that could harness wind and water. So this was basically the situation for millennia. But when capitalism emerged in the 1400s, and quickly came to envelop the whole world, it transformed our relationship with nature in really profound ways. If we think about capitalism,

the production of goods, production of commodities, is aimed at the market. It's aimed at exchange and human needs are incidental to that. The goal of capitalist production is to accumulate, to accumulate more and more, to accumulate money. And there is an underlying logic therefore of endless accumulation, ever accelerating accumulation, which overrides all other kinds of considerations. So what this does, and I talk in a bit more detail of this in the first chapter, is that there's a tendency

for ever increasing energy demand under capitalism. And I think this is a really, really important point that is really often forgotten today, particularly in the discussions around renewables and the possibility of a green transition or an energy transition, that energy use actually tends to grow exponentially under capitalism, more and more, there's a voracious demand for energy. So that's one thing, this logic of endless accumulation. Secondly, one thing, this logic of endless accumulation. Secondly, because of the drive to make profit, capitalism also tends to displace human labor with machines and other kinds of capital-intensive

technologies. And if we ask ourselves, what are machines, they are basically energy converters. They transform energy into useful work, into useful mechanical work. And this means that the types and quantities of energy that drive machines and drive factories become extremely important to how capitalism both emerges and functions. There are other kinds of systemic logics if you like to capitalism. One which Marx spoke famously about is of course the speeding up of the circulation of commodities and expansion of markets because more profit can be made the more goods that can be produced and consumed in any given cycle. There's a tendency to really accelerate the production and consumption of all goods and again, energy can be seen as crucial to how this happens.

The portability of energy and the energy density of various fuels thus really play into the profitability of capital. So these and other kinds of systemic features of capitalism, the drive to ever accelerate and produce ever more, the speeding up of circulation, the replacing of human labor with machines. All of these things are deeply connected to the kinds of energy that we use under capitalism. And here, I think, is where we can really understand how fossil fuels, which here we're talking about coal and oil and gas in particular, which, you know, here we're talking about coal and oil and gas in particular, really became the ideal energy substratum for this kind of social system.

They have a higher energy density than other energy sources. They are discrete physical resources, so they can be moved around. They have a chemical flexibility that allows them to be turned into other products like plastics and petrochemicals, which is another really key part of the story of oil that I think often gets left out. So that's kind of the bigger, more, if you like, abstract picture of placing fossil fuels within capitalism, within these systemic features of capitalism. But if we turn more historically to how fossil fuels emerged as the key energy source under capitalism, this began in the 1700s and 1800s with the advent of coal, firstly,

under basically British supremacy. Britain in 1800 produced about 80% of the world's coal, the production of coal, the use of coal in powering locomotives, in producing steel was very important to the rise of British global dominance through this period and all the way through to the late 19th century, Britain was responsible for the majority of the world's coal output. But beginning in the early 1900s, oil began to emerge as an important fossil fuel. Firstly, with production centered in the United States and Baku in modern day Azerbaijan,

as the two kinds of major oil production centers in the early 1900s. Oil was more energy dense than coal. It could be turned into liquid fuels like gasoline that could be moved around easier and eventually became utilized in things like automobiles and ships and planes and so forth. And then around 1950, oil supplanted coal as the principal fossil fuel. This was first in the US, then in Western Europe, and then the rest of the world. So that mid-20th century point is really key to understanding how oil became so central to our lives

and is the point where we can talk about this oil transition, if you like, in the 1950s after the Second World War. I just want to make one point, though, again, around this point of oil transition or energy transitions. We nearly need to think of energy transitions as something that are additive. Because of this feature of capitalism, that it's this voracious demand for energy. Energy tends to grow and grow and energy sources tend to become additions not replacements. So if

we look at coal for example, despite the fact that oil is by far the principal fossil fuel today, overall consumption of coal has actually quadrupled since the beginning of the oil age. We see oil added to coal as a key energy source and the same thing with gas and the same thing I would argue with renewable energy today. So really it's important to kind of see how it's not a substitution of one energy source by another, but actually an additional growth in energy that we tend to see under capitalism. month, usually 2 or 3, our entire back catalogue of Patreon episodes, early access to select episodes, and benefits like stickers and bumper stickers depending on which tier you subscribe to.

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