Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

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The intention of Timothy Mitchell in Carbon Democracy is quite straightforward, even though its subject matter is not: to investigate how democracy relates to fossil fuels. The book starts from a seemingly simple question: by retracing the history of the exploitation of oil and contrasting it with that of coal, what do we learn about the organisation of political and economic power? Mitchell answers with an invitation to revisit our conception of democracy, opening his book on the strong claim that “Fossil fuels helped create both the possibility of modern democracy and its limits” (p. 1). The implication is that the history of democracy and of its transformations during the 20 th C. is inseparable from the history of fossil fuels -and, in particular, of oil. This does not mean that oil explains everything about the organisation of political power -indeed, Mitchell shuns technological determinism-, but rather that oil cannot be left out of the equation. Mitchell introduces himself as a political theorist and historian, but his work takes part in Science and Technology Studies, and falls in line with actor-network theory and performativity studies. Carbon Democracy builds on the work of Bruno Latour and Michel Callon who, as leading proponents of actor-network theory, have developed methods to bring nature and technology within the realm of social sciences and humanities and, thereby, to question the divide between nature and politics. Actor-network theory is characterized by its relational take on social processes, its inclusion of the non-human as social actors, and its attention to situations of controversies in which “sociotechnical arrangements” are put to the test and negotiated. It has also contributed to the study of economics and markets, with two major interests: first, the “performativity” of economics, that is to say, the distinctive ways in which economics knowledge relates to its objects and takes part in constituting the economy; and second, descriptions of the functioning of the economy and of markets focused on “market devices”, that is the sociotechnical devices, both material and conceptual, that organise it.

A brilliant, revisionist argument that places oil companies at the heart of 20th century history - and of the political and environmental crises we now face...If we're ever to curb such behaviour, and to regain some comprehension of our planet's preciousness, we need first to understand how it came about. Not a book for the season of indulgence, this one. But one that demands to be widely shared. Susanna Rustin, Guardian the birth of “the economy” as a technocratic device aimed at controlling politics and any “excess of democracy”, and money as a veil between politics and the nuts and bolts of our societies Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist who studies the political economy of the Middle East, the political role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge, the politics of large-scale technical systems, and the place of colonialism in the making of modernity. As end-of-the-world catastrophism replaces end-of-history triumphalism, the last four decades of “political” thinking about climate seem to have been hardly political at all. Or, rather, the climate thinking of those decades was a symptom of an anti-politics that then dominated, a politics of ideas (rational-actor theory, behavioral economics) and institutions (the fossil-fuel industries, investment banks, the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin) that claimed to be not politics but expertise or science, and worked to quash any politics that went beyond generalized pessimism about human beings and optimism about institutional and technological tinkering.A brilliant, revisionist argument that places oil companies at the heart of 20th century history—and of the political and environmental crises we now face.”— Guardian The book focuses on two important milestones in modern economic life. First, the Industrial Revolution allowed coal to replace muscle power as the main energy source of civilization. With that change came working-class power. The large crews who mined fuel and transported it to factories had the power to shut down European society, which allowed them to force elites to accept democratic change. Carbon Democracy is a sweeping overview of the relationship between fossil fuels and political institutions from the industrial revolution to the Arab Spring, which adds layers of depth and complexity to the accounts of how resource wealth and economic development are linked. Financial Times Mitchell's subsequent work covered a variety of topics in political theory and the contemporary political economy of the Middle East. His essay on the modern state, originally published in the American Political Science Review, has been republished on several occasions. Further writings on the nature of European modernity include an edited volume, Questions of Modernity, bringing together the work of leading scholars of South Asia and the Middle East. In political economy he has published a number of essays on agrarian transformation, economic reform, and the politics of development, mostly drawing on his continuing research in Egypt. The research includes long-term fieldwork in a village in southern Egypt, which he has studied and written about for more than a decade. Let’s start with the oft-made suggestion that vanquishing climate change may mean overriding democracy. The specter of the enlightened despot who governs for the sake of the earth and its creatures—the Plato-Hobbes-Muir hybrid—recurs semi-regularly. The fact that no such regime has ever existed or seems likely to come into being has not stopped academics and journalists from citing over and over the odd scientist who volunteers that democracy may not be up to the task of stopping climate change. Where authoritarian forces do rule, it is not in the name of ecology. China, paradoxically, occupies a double position in this imaginary: on the one hand, it’s said to render U.S. climate action irrelevant on account of its growing and unstoppable emissions; on the other, to exemplify the environmental perks of authoritarianism, with its capacity to build high-speed rail or shut down coal production overnight.

Democratization arises not because manufacturing allows workers to gather and share ideas… but because it can render the technical processes of producing concentrations of wealth dependent on the well-being of large numbers of people.” This book is well worth reading, though I still question the amount of emphasis placed on energy as *the* basis of democracy/capitalism. Mitchell nevertheless makes a strong argument for the influence of oil companies and associated representational-disciplinary entities on destruction of labor and creation of a "limitless resource" economic representation while at the same time limiting production of oil so as to retain profits. Mitchell is a Foucauldian complement to David Harvey's Marxism, in that both offer coherent sets of specifics (Aramco, Eisenhower and others for Mitchell; Lewis Powell and others for Harvey; and the right-wing think tanks for both) in support of their arguments. As a result, though their basic epistemological perspectives are quite divergent, both Mitchell in this book and Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism provide important narratives about the individuals and groups that support, represent and seek to underpin corporate exploitation. The switch from coal to oil in the industrialized countries, a process spanning almost the first half of the 20 th century, constituted the main mechanism that capitalists and their governments employed to undermine the power of industrial workers, curtailing far-reaching democratic gains and eroding the ones already won by the struggles of workers in the age of coal. Oil produced a different kind of democratic politics for two reasons: the first reason, a historical-geographical reason that has more to do with coal; the second derives from the geophysical properties of oil itself. Whereas coal was crucial for the development of modern industry, oil was incidental because its production developed after modern industry was already running on coal. By geological accident, moreover, oil reserves were far from the industrial regions that developed around locations of coal deposits. Thus, since its earliest development, oil had to be transported over long distances; but with the advent of tankers, this also meant flexible routes. Because of its liquid form, however, Mitchell reasons that oil production and transportation (by pipeline and tanker) did not require the large concentration of workers at critical junctions of the energy system as in the coal regime. The remoteness of oil deposits from industrial regions, together with the particular physiochemical form of oil, made the oil network less vulnerable to sabotage by workers—though, strangely, not by governments or oil companies—depriving them of the kind of political agency afforded by coal: “the flow of oil could not readily be assembled into a machine that enabled large numbers of people to exercise novel forms of political power” (p. 39). 1A brilliant, revisionist argument that places oil companies at the heart of 20th century history—and of the political and environmental crises we now face.” — Guardian We tend to treat climate change as an entirely different kind of problem, requiring entirely different solutions, when in fact it sheds light on many of the most persistent paradoxes, challenges, and tensions of our already existing politics. At a high level of abstraction, the questions may be existential, but in practice their resolution will involve something between trench warfare and a collective nervous breakdown, passing through the capillaries of every existing institution, at once trapped by them and straining their capacities. We make our own politics, but not as we please. To appreciate oil’s negative impact on democracy, one must first consider the nature of its predecessor, which fueled both the industrialization and political activism of an earlier era. Mitchell details the emergence of “carbon democracies” in the nineteenth century through a study of the coal industry, where concentrated energy supply traveled in networks that offered workers a new kind of autonomy. Each step—mining, loading, transporting, and ultimately consuming—was susceptible to sabotage. In demanding better pay and work conditions, labor activists achieved egalitarian breakthroughs by way of their intransigent actions, notably mining and refinery strikes. In response, captains of industry persuaded governments to reorient markets toward petroleum in a way that weakened domestic labor movements.

The UK has successfully reduced its carbon emissions to a level not seen since the late 1800s. But the most salient part of this chart are the two dramatic dips in the 1920s. They were the result of strikes at coal mines, which threatened to cripple the British economy. (Source: Carbon Brief)

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Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy examines the simultaneous rise of fossil-fueled capitalism and mass democracy and asks very intelligent questions about the fate of democracy when oil production declines.”

Mitchell's research on the making of the economy led to a four-year project that he directed at the International Center for Advanced Study at NYU on The Authority Of Knowledge in a Global Age. Articles on The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science, The Properties of Markets, Rethinking Economy, and The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes Its World, explored these concerns, and developed Mitchell's interest in the broader field of science and technology studies (STS). His current research brings together the fields of STS and postcolonial theory in a project on "Carbon Democracy," which examines the history of fossil fuels and the possibilities for democractic politics that were expanded or closed down in the construction of modern energy networks. If only I could have read this book 40 years ago! This is certainly one of the best books I've read on history, economics, ecology or politics. Mitchell asked why democracy and fossil fuels have always been seen as mutually exclusive entities. He asserted that carbon energy and modern democratic politics are intrinsically tied together. Consequently, as strains on the availability of carbon energy continue to rise, so will pressures on democracy. According to his research, new discoveries of oil cannot keep up with demand. Three million barrels per day are needed just to keep production levels at bay. In a historical context, more than half of the oil consumed in the last 150 years has been burned in the three decades since 1980. As oil deposits become more costly and more difficult to access, the amount of energy and money needed to extract oil will inevitably continue to reduce the supply.Coal provided the essential link between industrialization and democratization because it gave power to the workers, especially miners, to sabotage industrial production. The “new political instrument” in the hands of the workers was the general strike, made possible by the material linkages of the energy system that connected the dispersed power of workers and increased the vulnerability of the owners of industrial capital. The concentration of large numbers of workers at the endpoints and main junctions of the conduits that transported large volumes of coal gave workers a new kind of political agency. This agency, for Mitchell, derived not from the workers’ organization and political alliances, or from the development of “new forms of political consciousness” or “repertoire of demands”, but from their ability to slow down or interrupt the flows of coal, providing workers with “an effective way of forcing the powerful to listen to those demands”. The network of material linkages that connected subterranean chambers to the factories that depended on steam or electric power gave the miners the “technical force” that connected their demands to the demands of other workers: “Workers were gradually connected together not so much by the weak ties of a class culture, collective ideology or political organisation, but by the increasing and highly concentrated quantities of carbon energy they mined, loaded, carried, stoked and put to work.” (p. 27). The workers could achieve democratic gains (the eight-hour day, public pensions, the right to vote, the right to form labor unions and political organizations, and the right to strike among other rights) as long as they could sabotage the flows of coal. This is what Tim Mitchell pursues in Carbon Democracy : a “socio-technical understanding” of democracy as a form of political life grounded in forms of carbon energy and, on this basis, to outline ways to overcome “obstacles to our shaping of collective futures” deriving from carbon democracy. Democratic politics and fossil fuels, Mitchell argues, are not simply related: democracy is “a form of politics whose mechanisms on multiple levels involve the processes of producing and using carbon energy” (p. 5). Mitchell recounts how the transition to an energy regime dependent on fossil fuels with the coal-fired industrialization of Europe laid the path towards “ways of living based on very high levels of energy consumption” in the industrialized countries. The transition, however, was never confined to the industrialized west: “the switch in one part of the world to modes of life that consumed energy at a geometric rate of growth required changes in ways of living in many other places” (p. 16), ranging from the dispossession of agricultural workers in places like India and Egypt and their subjugation to slavery and slave-like colonial systems, to the institution of forms of government intended to facilitate the control of oil reserves and flows of financial capital across the world. Carbon democracy is a planetary form of life whose development presupposes and depends on the production of different forms of political and economic life over time and space. At a deeper level, however, carbon democracy could also be read as a segment of the natural history of the human species. Like any form of life, democracy is “carbon-based” (p. 5). Carbon Democracy is about “democracy as oil”. Quite surprisingly, after establishing oil as the weapon with which the ruling classes curbed the advance of democracy in the West—because of the inherent immunity of the oil infrastructure to assembling political agency—Mitchell goes on to argue that delaying the development of an oil industry in the Middle East “impeded the ability, using the infrastructure of oil, to build effective methods for advancing egalitarian political claims” (p. 86). Indeed, referring to the two pipelines built between 1932 and 1934 connecting Kirkuk to the Mediterranean, one ending in Haifa the other in Tripoli, Mitchell declares that: