Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

“An idea is something that is somehow the same in different places – that can be repeated from one context to another, freeing itself from local histories, circumstances, and material arrangements, becoming abstract, a concept. An expert in democracy has to make democracy into an abstraction, something that moves easily from place to place, so he can carry it in his suitcase, or his PowerPoint presentation, from Russia to Cambodia, from Nigeria to Iraq, showing people how it works.”

In the opening chapter of the book, Mitchell explains why he disagrees with the conventional interpretation of the term “democracy.” Experts in democracy often view it as an idea or model that can be reproduced in one place to the next. When democracy fails, it is because something is wrong in the model. For example, experts in democracy would blame oil money for the corruption in Middle Eastern countries. In this example, oil money prevents democracy from taking root in the Middle East. Mitchell disagrees with the conventional idea of democracy. Instead, he believes carbon energy produced democracy by influencing political relations. To understand why democracy does not seem to succeed in the Middle East, Mitchell argues that we need to understand how these relationships were built.

“The exploitation of coal provided a thermodynamic force whose supply in the nineteenth century began to increase exponentially. Democracy is sometimes described as a consequence of this change, emerging as the rapid growth of industrial life destroyed older forms of authority and power. The ability to make democratic political claims, however, was not just a by-product of the rise of coal. People forged successful political demands by acquiring a power of action from within the new energy system. They assembled themselves into a political machine using its processes of operation. This assembling of political power was later weakened by the transition from a collective life powered with coal to a social and technical world increasingly built upon oil.”

This excerpt clearly expresses Mitchell’s belief that carbon energy created democracy. Because of coal, workers for the first time ever were able to come together to fight for collective rights, which led these rights to expand to the masses. According to Mitchell, industrialized countries and large fossil fuel companies pushed back against this democratization from the beginning. He suggests that these countries, including the US, and companies intentionally switched to oil to reduce the rights of workers and thus the masses. Oil has limited the democratic capabilities of both people in oil-producing countries and those in countries who depend on oil.

“By the turn of the twentieth century, the vulnerability of these mechanisms and the concentrated flows of energy on which they depended had given workers a greatly increased political power.”

This passage summarizes how coal gave workers political power in lay terms. Because of the vulnerabilities of coal, workers were able to easily disrupt or stop coal-energy throughout the distribution and production processes through strikes and sabotage. Through strikes and sabotage, workers forced their employers to yield to their demands. Workers became even more powerful when various industries banded together. They could disrupt or shut down the flow of coal-energy at nearly every node in its process.

“In the coal age, workers had discovered the power that could be built from the ability to interrupt, restrict or slow down the supply of energy. The challenge facing large oil companies was to do something similar: to introduce small delays, interruptions and controls that, by limiting the flow of energy, would enhance their control.”

Mitchell demonstrates how large oil companies used sabotage against its workers to curtail democratic rights. Oil companies had no desire to maximize production. Instead, they wanted to control the flow of oil so that they could maximize their profits. Sabotage was one way in which they were able to do this. By controlling the flow of oil, oil companies created a scarcity of oil. This allowed them to set higher prices and thus increase their own profits.

“In the months that followed the discovery of oil at Masjid-i-Suleiman in 1908, for example, the fledgling British company – the future BP – was unloading steel pipe to build a pipeline from the oil field to the coast, planning a telephone line to follow the path of the pipeline, contracting with local tribesmen to guard the route, designating a firm of agents to handle the local storage and shipping of oil, drafting a prospectus in Britain to attract investment in the venture, and arguing unsuccessfully with the Admiralty that the prospectus be allowed to claim government support for an oil industry in Persia as a future source of fuel for the Royal Navy.”

Here, Mitchell shows how oil companies amassed their power. Oil companies were smaller than the workforce whose labor they tried to control. However, this did not mean that they were weaker. Oil companies grew their power by controlling all aspects of producing and marketing oil, including pipelines, refineries, oil tankers, and government and financial officials who made decisions around the oil industry. Because this process was much more dispersed (i.e., it was not located in a single region) than that of coal, it was harder for workers to disrupt or stop it, putting more and more power in the hands of oil companies at the expense of workers and democracy more broadly.

“We have now assembled the alternative account of the beginnings of the modern oil industry in the Middle East. The story begins not with the heroic prospectors in the barren hills of Persia, but with rival firms and their allies attempting to win ‘the great economic and political struggle’ for the oil of Mesopotamia.”

Mitchell’s primary goal in Chapter 2 is to tell an “alternative account” of the origin of the modern oil industry in the Middle East. In contrast to traditional accounts, Mitchell’s story does not begin with heroic pioneers finding oil in barren places in the Middle East. Rather, oil companies knew that oil was plentiful in the region. Firms and their financial and government allies tried to outcompete one another to gain concessions and rights to oil in the region from local governments. In doing so, they were able to slow the development of the oil industry. This action led to oil being a scarce resource, which enabled oil companies to make large profits. Some British government officials also used these concessions and rights to block the export of oil from Russia, further maximizing the profits of British oil companies and Britain’s own political power. Oil companies and their allies learned to portray their needs to control Middle Eastern oil as furthering the imperial interests of their country, despite this not being the case.

“In August 1911, when the strikes moved from the coal mines to the railways, Churchill deployed troops to maintain control of the rail lines (and to police electric power stations), violating a rule that military force could be deployed only at the request of local authorities – a rule confirmed by parliament following the Featherstone massacre of 1893, when soldiers shot and killed striking coal miners. Labor leaders in parliament pointed out that the government could have ended the rail strike immediately by ordering the railway companies to concede the strikers’ main demand – that they recognize the right of national unions to represent railway workers – and attacked Churchill for his ‘diabolical part’ in provoking unrest by substituting ‘military rule’ for civil government.”

To Mitchell, Churchill did not protect democratic rights in Great Britain. Instead, he played a leading role in eroding the power of the masses. Churchill tried to suppress the coal miners’ strike in south Wales through military force rather than simply telling the railway companies to negotiate with them. These strikes stood in the way of Churchill’s ambition to ensure that Britain’s navy was ready for war. The vulnerability that coal strikes put on his ambitions is one of the reasons why Churchill pushed for and eventually succeeded in the navy switching its reliance from coal to oil.

“The principle of self-rule was not, therefore, in contradiction with the idea of empire. On the contrary, the need for self-government could provide, paradoxically, a new justification for overseas settlement and control, because only European presence in colonised territories made a form of self-rule possible: ‘the more backward race,’ such as the people of Egypt or India, were to be included in the imperial Commonwealth ‘for the very reason that they are as yet unable to govern themselves.’”

Mitchell addresses how Europeans used the concept of self-rule (self-government or self-determination) as mechanism for imperialism. The idea behind self-rule is that a country should be able to choose its own destiny. In practice, however, Europeans ensured that other Europeans sat in positions of power in a non-European colony or territory. European government officials claimed this was done to help the non-Europeans learn how to govern themselves, but this is simply not true. Europeans used the principle of self-rule to maintain control over territories and colonies. This idea was eventually adopted by the League of Nations, which further institutionalized self-rule as a form of European subjugation of non-Europeans.

“Populations were designated as undeveloped in relation to the European races, were to acquire the know-how of development from Europeans and Americans, and were to be denied the democratic rights enjoyed by ‘developed’ peoples, a denial explained by their need for development.”

This passage explains the concept of the doctrine of separate development. Similar to the principle of self-determination, western countries used this doctrine to maintain control over non-Europeans and prevent these colonies and territories from democratizing. Mitchell firmly believes that reliance on carbon energy not only brought into being an industrialized world, but a colonizing world too.

“Democracy was becoming an ideal, a lightweight claim, translated into doctrines of self-determination.”

Many scholars of democracy argue that the idea of democracy is a carbon copy of itself, which allows it to be taken and implemented anywhere in the world. Mitchell disagrees with this notion. Western countries have only allowed democratic tendencies in their own countries although as Mitchell illustrates, many Western government officials tried to undermine democracy in their own countries. While they claimed that the doctrine of self-determination is democratic in nature, this is far from the truth. As a result, democracy is becoming more of an ideal rather than an actual tangible principle that people, especially those in non-Western countries, can adopt. Western countries gate-keep this ideal so that they can maintain control over oil and other material items of interest.

“Arthur Hirtzel, a senior official at the India Office in London, said that the problem in Iraq was how to create ‘some administration with Arab institutions which we can safely leave while pulling the strings ourselves; something that won’t cost very much, that Labour can swallow consistent with its principles, but under which our political and economic interests will be secure.’”

This passage summarizes the two main challenges that pro-imperialist British government officials faced in maintaining control over Iraq and other countries in the Middle East. The first challenge was to ensure that Britain remained in control but not through military occupation. British government officials knew that Iraqis and other locals would oppose military occupation. The second challenge was to mitigate protests from Labor members in parliament and other critics of imperialism in Britain who opposed the cost of the empire and the prolonged use of military forces after WWI. The British constructed the “machinery of consent” (92) as a solution.

“Under the principle of self-determination, mechanisms were devised to produce the ‘agreement’ of occupied Arab countries to European control. In the case of Egypt, for example, after finally agreeing to negotiations in London with the nationalist elite in order to bring an end to the 1919 Revolution, the British party to the talks, led by Lord Milner, insisted that the nationalist leadership return to Egypt with the draft of a proposed treaty ‘to explain to the public of the country the nature of the settlement […] and the great advantages which Egypt would derive from it’. If it were favorably received, Milner explained, ‘this would constitute a “mandate” from the people.’”

Mitchell provides an example of how self-determination or the machinery of consent worked in practice. British government officials gained consent for treaties by taking the treaties to a few groups of locals. Once they had consent from these locals, the British government officials claimed they had consent from the people of that country. They used a small group of representatives to support their indirect rule. These pro-imperialist officials could then say to anti-imperialists in their own country that the imperial rule was consented by the locals. This eroded some of the power that anti-imperialists had in trying to democratize foreign policy.

“In building the infrastructure of oil, the petroleum companies were also laying out the infrastructure of political protest. The points of vulnerability, where movements could organise and apply pressure, now included a series of oil wells, pipelines, refineries, railways, docks and shipping lanes across the Middle East. These were the interconnected sites at which a series of claims for political freedoms and more egalitarian forms of life would be fought.”

In Chapter 4, Mitchell demonstrates how key points along the oil production and distribution processes became sites of intense political struggle in the Middle East. Like European and American coal workers, many locals tried to use the vulnerabilities in the oil-energy system to fight for more freedom and rights. Unfortunately, the dispersed nature of the oil-energy system meant that foreign oil companies and governments could more easily suppress political protests. They did this mostly through violence. As a result, it is much more difficult to produce a democratic order with reliance on oil than it was for coal.

“The critics lost, the Cold War was constructed, and ordinary corporate ambition to control resources overseas, in the increasingly difficult context of postwar decolonisation and the assertion of national independence, could now be explained by invoking and elaborating this global ‘context.’”

US government officials and oil executives had a hard time explaining American control over the oil industry in the Middle East after WWII. They used the Cold War, which was in some ways manufactured by the US, to create a reasoning for their continued use of imperial power. Because the Cold War represented a permanent war, US government officials and oil executives could now explain interest in oil in the Middle East as of strategic concern in mitigating the Soviet Union’s influence in the region and protecting democratic (or really Western) principles.

“The conceptualisation of the economy as a process of monetary circulation defined the main feature of the new object: it could expand without getting physically bigger.”

Previous ways of thinking about wealth and natural resources focused on the limits of growth. By the 1930s, these limits were approaching with the European empires ending, coal mines being exhausted, population in the West leveling off, and agriculture and manufacturing facing overproduction. The economy, however, did not appear to have a limit. National income (later renamed gross domestic product) was its primary source of measurement. It was a measure of how frequently and quickly money changed hands, rather than a measure of wealth accumulation. It was based on the conception that oil was limitless. As a result, the economy too must also be able to grow without limits.

“In the oil-producing states the powers of sabotage over which oil workers and oil firms had struggled were being increasingly taken over by governments – which were equipping themselves with the palace guards and intelligence services that by the late 1960s made them immune to further foreign- or domestic-organized military coups. In industrialised countries, the ‘power of inhibition’ underwent a different change. The rise of oil had weakened the old alliance of coal, which brought together miners, railwaymen and dockworkers, allowing them unprecedented power. By 1948, spurred by the role of the Marshall Plan in subsidising the switch from coal to oil, the era of the mass strike was over. In its place emerged a new method of making political claims, based on new ways of interrupting industrial processes.”

In this passage, Mitchell contrasts how sabotage was used between oil-producing countries in the Middle East vs Europe. In the former, sabotage became a power controlled by the state. Because this power was concentrated in the hands of a few, it reduced the power of the people (who had initially used it to help their state gain more power over foreign oil companies and governments). This reality curtailed the formation of democracy in many countries in the Middle East. Sabotage took on a different form in French oil refineries during the same period. Oil workers used their increased technical knowledge to seriously disrupt the oil-energy flow. Unfortunately, the invention of the metal shipping container once again reorganized relations of control, ultimately eroding the power of the oil workers.

“We do not know for certain how far these changes were planned by oil companies, and how far the transformations came about through the rivalries between them and their conflict with the producer countries, and the changing agendas of the US government. But there is no doubt that the creation of a crisis made it easier to blame outside forces for the radical alterations that occurred.”

This statement represents one of the more controversial claims made by Mitchell. Here, he is suggesting that oil companies intentionally planned crises to distract from the fact that they helped create transformations in the methods of controlling flows of oil and finances between the 1950s-1970s. Many of these crises (e.g., the US going off of the gold standard) negatively impacted oil companies, so it is difficult to see how and why they created these crises. Mitchell presents stronger evidence around the idea that the actions of international oil companies (and the governments of their home countries) led to significant changes to control over oil flows and global finances.

“As the OPEC states began to take control of the production of oil, in the ways examined in Chapter 6, the international oil companies wanted to raise the price by as much as 50 per cent or more. The increased income of the producing countries could then be paid by consumers, rather than by any reduction in the income of the large oil firms A main obstacle to such an increase was that users of oil might switch to alternative fuels, including natural gas, coal and nuclear power. It was not enough to collaborate in restricting the supply of oil: the oil companies, with the help of the Nixon White House, had to extend the system of ‘sabotage’ to other forms of fuel. They were to be linked together through corporate ownership, government administration, news reporting and scholarship, as a single issue facing a collective predicament: the energy crisis.”

In Chapter 7, Mitchell demonstrates how US oil companies and government officials colluded to keep oil prices high by increasing the prices of other energy forms. Both entities knew that if the price of non-oil energy forms did not rise simultaneously with oil prices, consumers would move away from oil. One of the most egregious examples is with nuclear power. By framing the environment as a new object of politics, oil companies and the government forced producers of nuclear power to include into the price of the energy the cost of long-term environmental effects (e.g., the cost of decontaminating reactors when they went out of use and of storing nuclear waste). This calculation ensured that nuclear energy remained not only more expensive than oil, but also less palatable to the American public because of these environmental costs.

“Western commentators linked the decision taken by the Arab states on 17 October to reduce the supply of oil, and the subsequent embargo on the supplies to the US, with the decision taken by OPEC the previous day to raise their tax on oil production by 70 per cent. In fact, they tended to collapse the two decisions and portray them as a single event, much as they are linked by the model of supply and demand. Even today, the two events are misleadingly referred to as ‘the OPEC embargo.’”

Throughout the book, Mitchell repeatedly explodes traditional accounts of history and economics. This passage represents one such example. Here, Mitchell demonstrates that these two events are actually separate, even though they are traditionally linked together. The countries in the Middle East that decided to restrict oil supplies to the US did so, not because of increased tax rates, but to force the US to accept a peace settlement between Israel and Palestine.

“The international politics of oil is usually explained in terms of the desire of the United States to protect the global supply. But that was not the problem. The real issue, where the muwahhidun [mujahidin] came in, was to protect the system of scarcity.”

In Chapter 8, Mitchell returns to the idea that the weaknesses of the oil industry shaped the politics of the Middle East. As readers have seen throughout the book, huge profits could be made by controlling oil production and distribution. International oil companies sought to secure and enlarge these profits. To do so, they engaged in a collaboration, often one grounded in rivalry, with the governments and their respective allies that controlled the oil fields. The muwahhidun and Saud ruling family represent one example.

“The history of McJihad, in contrast, is a history of certain incoherence and weakness, of a politics ‘ridden with inner tensions.’ It is a concept that directs attention to the impossibility of securing the enormous profits of oil except through arrangements that relied on quite dynamic but seemingly uncapitalist social forces. But in what sense were these forces ‘uncapitalist’? They were not some pre-capitalist, ‘cultural’ elements resisting capitalism from the outside. Whatever their historical roots, they were dynamic forces of the twentieth century, whose role developed with the development of oil.”

Initially, it might seem like alliances between foreign oil companies and their home countries and the elite of oil-producing countries (primarily the ruling family and the conservative religious leaders) would be impossible and even antithetical to capitalism. Mitchell argues that this idea is simply untrue. The weaknesses inherent in the oil industry, which is the drive for greater profits by creating scarcity, makes these alliances possible and flourish. These alliances played a significant role in the development and control of the oil industry.

“The perpetuation of conflict was a symptom of the relative weakness of the United States, given its imperial ambitions.”

While other Western countries meddled in the politics of the region, Mitchell suggests that the breadth of involvement and subsequent violence inflicted by the US on the region remains unparalleled. Mitchell points to three examples in this chapter to support his belief: Iran-Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Mitchell does not view the involvement of the US as a sign of strength. In general, it was rarely able to take full control over any of the countries. Instead, it needed to rely on protracted warfare to weaken local opposition; something Mitchell views as a sign of weakness.

“Just 110 giant oilfields, out of around 70,000 oilfields worldwide, produce half the world’s petroleum. A majority of these giant fields were discovered more than half a century ago, between the 1930s and early 19602. Many of them, including at least sixteen of the twenty largest, are in decline, producing less oil each year.”

This passage illustrates Mitchell’s first predicament that our dependence on fossil fuels, especially oil, have made our world particularly vulnerable. For several decades, economists, oil companies, and politicians claimed oil was inexhaustible. The concept of the economy was built on this notion. However, oil is in fact exhaustible and rapidly declining. Mitchell argues that we need to take advantage of this fact and engage in the battle for a new energy system in the hopes of crafting a more democratic collective future for all.