Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

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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. A challenging, sophisticated, and important book that undermines expectations in the best kind of intellectual provocation. Foreign Policy Carbon Democracy offers a detailed explanation of this and many other riddles. For the first time in my historical studies, I read about the origin of the concept of "the economy", in the years shortly before my birth. "The economy", Timothy Mitchell explains, was based on the sudden abundance of fossil-fuel energy, a resource that was seen as so nearly infinite that there was no need to even account for its gradual depletion. Instead, "the economy" became a system of money flows which could grow infinitely, unhindered by the sort of physical limits encountered in what humans used to consider reality. In the halycon days of the fossil-fuel fiesta, the workings of "the economy" could be calculated as purely mathematical flows of numbers, aka dollars, which became completely detached from any physical foundation.

Mitchell is the author of Colonising Egypt, a study of the emergence of the modern state in the colonial period and an exploration of the forms of reason, power and knowledge that define the experience of modernity. The book has been influential in fields as diverse as anthropology, history, law, philosophy, cultural studies, and art history. Translations have appeared or are in preparation in seven languages, including Arabic, German, Polish, Spanish and Japanese. the Bretton Woods monetary system as the companion to the newly engineered oil dependence of Western economies After 9/11, there was a whole genre of literature trying to explain why the Middle East is so messed up. Less racist authors tended to gravitate to the “resource curse,” the idea that oil wealth slows down development and invites foreign intervention.

What does it mean, then, to speak of “forms of collective life” and “forms of democratic politics” created or made possible by abundant fossil fuels? How can forms of political life be created from the production and consumption of large amounts of hydrocarbons? Can such formulation provide the basis for a materialist theory of politics, or democracy more specifically, that gives the material processes and objects with which our everyday life is entwined a constitutive part in our social and political practices? What happens to the materialist conception of politics—and to political practice —when the physiochemical properties of matter become constitutive of political agency? He discussed his new book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, describing how oil dependency shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy.

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). 1 An ecologically sustainable future would have to be, Ophuls argued, “more authoritarian” and “less democratic.” Ecological mandarins would take charge to manage common resources appropriately; the ideal ecological ruler was a combination of Plato and Hobbes, with some John Muir welded on—the expertise of the philosopher-king combined with absolute sovereignty, with a grace note of green consciousness.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