Timothy Mitchell

Carbon Democracy provides a unique examination of the relationship between oil and democracy. Interweaving the history of energy, political analysis, and economic theory, Mitchell targets conventional wisdom regarding energy and governance. Emphasizing how oil and democracy have intermixed, he argues that while coal provided the impetus for mass democracy, the shift to oil drastically limited democratic possibility; above all, the ability to confront contemporary ecological crises.

Political Power in the Age of Oil

Carbon Democracy

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American writings on the problem of democracy in the Middle East typically have little to say about capitalist globalisation and the work being done to turn people into the docile workers and willing consumers required to solve economic crises in the West; about the forces of empire for whom democratisation schemes are a minor, diplomatic part of wider efforts to shore up a weakening hegemony; and about the tools of violence and repression that occupying powers and military regimes deploy.

By burning within a few generations the fossil fuels that had accumulated in the earth over the previous 500 million years, humanity was injecting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that by the year 2000 was expected to increase the concentration of atmospheric CO2 by 25 per cent. ‘This may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate’, the 1965 report had warned, adding that these changes could be ‘deleterious from the point of view of human beings’. The experiment proceeded more rapidly than expected. Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have now increased by 40 per cent since the start of the industrial age, with half that increase happening since the late 1970s. The consequent changes in the earth’s climate threaten to become not just deleterious from the human point of view, but catastrophic on a planetary scale.

Unable to rely on relations of trade, Europe needed alternative ways of obtaining materials from overseas, using methods that prevented those farming the land from controlling what they grew and impeded local efforts to industrialise. In acquiring lands for sugar and cotton production in the New World, Europeans had relied on the total dispossession of the local population and the importing of slave or indentured workforces. In places where the agrarian population could not be removed en masse – India and Egypt were the main examples – Europeans and their local allies pioneered a method of localised dispossession known as private land ownership. This replaced older ways of claiming shares of agricultural revenue with a regime where one claimant, now designated the ‘landowner’, determined the crops to be grown and asserted exclusive control of the product.

Thirty years later the general strike still appeared to many on the European left as an anarchist tactic that should not take the place of organised political action. The Belgian general strike of 1902, led by the coal miners in an effort to win universal suffrage, reopened the debate about the tactics of social democracy in Europe – although even supporters like Rosa Luxemburg argued that the efficacy of the general strike in Belgium’s case rested on the geographical concentration of the country’s industry and could not be replicated in larger countries.34 Three years later, she changed her mind. After witnessing the wave of strikes that paralysed Russia in the 1905 Revolution, she argued in The Mass Strike that workers could now organise a social revolution without a unified political movement, because isolated economic struggles were somehow connected into a single political force.

Churchill’s prize was not a gift from fairyland, but an energy source to be produced by oil workers in Persia and Mesopotamia – or Iran and Iraq as they were soon to be known. The threat and subsequent outbreak of war presented Britain with an opportunity to end the Great Unrest at home. By the end of the war, taking control of the oilfields of Mesopotamia would supply a further means of weakening the new force of organised labour. While weakened at home, however, the political claims constructed through the supply of energy would come to include those of oil workers abroad. In the same process, the narrow but vital economic ‘structure’ that an imperial government claimed special powers to police – the network of energy flows – would now expand from the railway lines and coalfields of Britain to encompass the oilfields of the Middle East.

The continuous expansion of imperial rule, and the increasing military expenditure this required, were not the result of psychological or racial drives, as orthodox British opinion held. They were driven by the needs of those who, in distinction to manufacturers and merchants, were now known as ‘capitalists’: financiers and large banking houses, unable to find profitable investments at home – because, in Hobson’s analysis, the majority of the population earned too little to create a demand for additional goods. Finance capital instead flowed overseas, investing funds in mining and other capital-intensive methods of producing raw materials, and in building the railways required to carry these materials for shipment back to Europe. When their ventures caused local conflict or financial distress, the investors portrayed them as ‘imperialism’ and used their influence in the offices of state to have public funds spent on military protection for these supposedly public interests.

[…] they were to reappear in a new form after the Second World War, when Britain and the United States created, in the United Nations, not just a successor to the League, but two new institutions intended to control international finance and investment, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and attempted to create a third institution to manage the international oil industry – although with none of the democratic elements that the labour movement proposed during the First World War.

Wartime labour protests were by then a serious concern. Industrialised warfare required the organisation of coal supplies and manufacturing as much as weapons and troops on the battlefield. Trade unions had agreed to a suspension of the right to strike for the duration of the war. When the government introduced conscription (for the first time in the country’s history) in 1916, it protected key industries like munitions and shipbuilding from compulsory military service, but began ‘combing out’ male industrial workers wherever it determined that a manufacturing process could be run with a smaller or less skilled workforce.

In Palestine, Britain achieved the same position by creating a European minority – through facilitating Zionist settlement and suppressing local attempts to stop it, and then attempting to establish institutions in which the native population and the minority Zionist community were ‘equally’ represented. In fact Britain refused to create a legislative assembly in Palestine unless the Palestinian leadership accepted the terms of the mandate, which recognised Jewish ‘national’ claims in Palestine but did not recognise Palestinians as a national community.

The imperial powers, in uneasy alliance with local forces, managed to forge an alternative device, one that replaced democratic claims with the process of ‘self-determination’ and substituted for the democratic control of international capital the emergent apparatus of ‘development’.

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