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Socialize Oil! |
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"The idea is to keep one's own oil and spend others', to make sure strategic reserves of the energy and fuel that maintain a highly mechanized society (and, more importantly, mechanized armed forces) last long after everybody else has run out of theirs."
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The old Mohammad Reza Shah of Iran, at a frustrated point in his life blurted out that, "Iran would have been much better off, if instead of oil we had water abundantly." God may mess with his soul, but he was right in this particular observation. Oil has always been extremely expensive, in terms of its effects both environmentally and politically, for the people of the Middle East. It has never been 'easy' or 'cheap' for the people. For the oil companies and governments nourished by oil money, yes, it has been cheap. In fact there were whole periods that some western companies were getting their oil for very extremely cheap. BP, for example, which got its start as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, from 1908 extracted and sold Iranian oil at any price it wanted, and paid the Iranian government just 16% of the accrued profits. The percentage actually paid was not always exactly 16%, though, due to crafty bookkeeping practices. In 1931, the APOC, due to the worldwide economic depression, hence depressed oil revenues, paid £366,782. From the mid-1930s, the royalties were supposedly increased to more than 20%, but even then, according to Wikipedia, "In 1947, for example, Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. reported after-tax profits of £40 million ($112 million) - and gave Iran just £7 million." This highly uneven situation continued until 1951, when Iranian oil was nationalized; which led to the replacement of our democratically elected government in 1953, through a CIA-led coup. This single coup changed the path of the entire subsequent history of Iran, for the worse. That is a very expensive price to pay by the Iranians for easy or cheap oil. Some argue that profitability of oil extraction should not be the key consideration. Instead, the most important consideration should be how much energy is put into the extraction process vs. the amount of usable energy dug up (in the form of oil). Fair and well. It should immediately be added, though, that the amount of energy input required to get the oil out of ground must also include the value of human social life developed over the decades and centuries. For example, consider how long (i.e., how many human labor hours) it takes to build a school. If it takes a crew of 100 people one year to finish this school, that's 200,000 human hours (assuming work week is 40 hours, and work year 50 weeks). Now, consider how many different types of expertise go into building such a school. Now add to that the many millions of human hours spent on raising (feeding, housing, healthcare) and educating this 100-person crew. Then, enlarge the picture: people need roads, bridges, factories, office buildings, stores, farms, sewage systems, houses, universities, hospitals, theaters, concert halls, sports facilities and stadiums; they need training and professional nurturing of teachers, doctors and nurses, carpenters, plumbers, factory workers, shopkeepers, engineers, writers and journalists, trade unionists, film makers, painters, poets; people spend billions and billions of human-hours to build a city, a working government. Do the billions of hours of materialized human labor that have historically been destroyed by westerners in the Middle East enter the equations for how much energy is needed, under the current market conditions, to produce the equivalent of one BTU (British Thermal Unit) of energy? Just the amount spent on the destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan is in the trillions of dollars. How many tens of trillions of dollars worth of human creation has this war actually destroyed? Should not these destructions enter the calculations for the price of oil? American Style City Planning Apparently, "Energy demand is distributed amongst four broad sectors: transportation, residential, commercial, and industrial. The sector that generally sees the highest annual growth in petroleum demand is transportation, in the form of new demand for personal-use vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. [...] This sector also has the highest consumption rates, accounting for approximately 68.9% of the oil used in the United States in 2006." [1] Let us now praise and appraise the big, blue and purple elephant sitting in front of the TVs of all Americans still in their homes: the North American urban planning. Apart from New York City, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Portland (OR) and Seattle and a few other metropolitan centers, which together comprise a small percentage of the land mass of the country, in all the rest of the U.S. you pretty much must have a car to get around; or else it takes you about three times as long (if at all) to do anything. A large percentage of people own two cars per family. This is because of the city planning, which dictates that you shall not simply walk or take a bus to school, or to work, or the grocery store, to the drug store; to get a newspaper, a pack of cigarettes, a loaf of bread, some eggs, some cookies. No. You must drive! You must start up an internal combustion engine, and burn up thousands upon thousands of additional calorie-equivalents of energy unnecessarily for doing things that can be done far more efficiently, in the same amount of time; like they're done in about all the other countries in the world. So, something very fundamental needs to happen with this very fundamental and large part of the demand side of the 'oil crisis'. Nothing short of a social revolution can solve this specifically American problem. A key part of the long-term solution to address this aspect of the problem involves socialization of oil and gas, and the application of a rational way (as opposed to the market chaos) of using energy resources. Magical Disappearance of American Oil The actual estimates for how much oil (in different forms) is available in the U.S. are presented for the reader in two documents that were prepared for the U.S. Congress. [2] These two documents make it clear that the U.S., including its outer continental shelf, contains, just in terms of crude oil, an estimated 115 billion barrels (not 21 billion, as is reported in the mainstream media). Additionally, the U.S. also has a huge reserve of oil shale, from which a few hundred billion more barrels of oil can be had. As for the current prices, as explained by William Engdahl, 60% of the current price of oil is caused by the futures traders in this commodity, and has little to do with supply shortages. [3] In fact, there is too much supply for the actually existing capacity of refineries to refine the available oil fast enough. So, shortages have nothing to do with the oil prices, and there is plenty of American oil still available for American users. The mainstream media understate the actual figures of available oil in the U.S., because strategic considerations held by the real owners the U.S. as well as of the oil and its associated industries require this understatement; this assures their strategic supremacy. The idea is to keep one's own and spend others', to make sure strategic reserves of the energy and fuel that maintain a highly mechanized society (and, more importantly, mechanized armed forces) last long after (or at least long enough after) everybody else has run out of theirs. So, leftists in the U.S. need to take account of this in their political thinking and activities, in their strategic vision and in their organizing. The scene may be bleak now, but it doesn't have to remain so. True Reasons for the U.S. Military Attacks The real reason Saddam Hussein had to go is that he stopped being a stooge and started acting independently and challenging the politico-strategic set-up favored by the U.S. and Israel. So, the real causes for a military attack, in this case, were more political than purely economic and to do with oil. Unlike the German and Japanese imperialists, whose post-World War II interventions into Third World countries have been through economic levers, the U.S. is an imperialist power that historically has as often projected power through 'civil' means (i.e., corporations, trade agreements, financial institutions) as through state violence (coups, bilateral security agreements and military interventions). For this type of imperialism, local or regional powers willing and capable of acting independently and wielding power are not desirable, unless (as with Israel) such a local power is in a fundamental fashion (existentially?) dependent on Washington's patronage. Once Saddam Hussein practiced his right (common among thieves) to claim a larger take, the U.S. had to step in, to teach the uppity Ay-rab (and others by extension) a lesson. A tiny little, 'backwards ass', third world nation that people educated in the U.S. cannot even spot on a map, not only gives the finger to Uncle Sam but slaps him in the face, too! Uncle Sam did not have a choice; but in that very act of showing that Uncle Sam did not have a choice, he also proved his relative (and fast increasing) impotence in the new world disorder. The recent military invasions of the greater Middle East have everything to do with a now-dead hegemonic structure that was set up after World War II. In that structure -- when it came to the Middle East -- the U.S. could simply tug at some economic strings here and there, call in an ambassador or minister or two, pull off some custom made precision covert actions, and the local regimes would either dance or change (their behavior, or entirely) as desired. The fact that the U.S. now has to intervene militarily is proof that the old system has vanished, and the U.S. is in a scramble to make something, strategically, out of the chaos of its own making. But, in this scramble, there are more unknowns than there are known factors. Which is why people in the Middle East can defeat the aggressors. The Arabs, I believe, will free themselves of imperialism in the long run; as will everybody else in the third world. The Middle Eastern cultures run thousands of years deep. Nothing can destroy them. I have no doubt that the Americans too, just like the Persians, the Romans, the Mongols, and the Ottoman Turks, will eventually go back to the lands they came from. But, what will the Americans do? Will they get rid of imperialism and a corrupted-to-the-bone system, whose price of living is the deaths of millions upon millions of people worldwide? No matter if or when oil runs out (in 30, 50, a 100 or a 1000 years); socialists, progressives, revolutionary democrats and those seeking social justice must have a solution for how to approach natural resources, starting NOW. For me, a man from the lesser lands, it is actually quite amazing that in most western countries, i.e., in countries that have witnessed classic clashes between the working classes and the 'advanced' bourgeoisie, in most of these countries the ownership criteria over natural resources (set by the bourgeoisie) have never been fundamentally challenged! Third World movements for nationalization of oil and gas resources can, and should give encouragement that the idea is not such a crazy thing after all; the concept can be radicalized, cast in terms of socialization, and advocated in fact by first world leftists. This is a very key arena that the western left has handed over without a trace of a fight, there for the taking by western rulers. Especially among the intelligentsia of the west, to think of socialization of oil would be the same as denying gravity; it is simply assumed that the best form of relationship to natural resources is 'private' ownership. Yet, western leftists most likely will be able to find tons of sympathetic ears among the working people for a demand for socialization of the natural resources. Capitalists have their way of exploiting resources, their way of controlling them now, and they also have their solutions for when the oil part of it runs out. And, incidentally, from the way the owners of the industries are behaving, it is unlikely that to the best of their information, the oil resources are going to run out any time soon. Just the military ware being manufactured today, I would have to assume, is produced with the knowledge that the engines (if such applies to the equipment) will be burning fossil fuels. And the American military seems to be prepared for fighting into the next century. So, the owners have their solutions. We too must have and present solutions for the social ownership relations that must govern the use of natural resources. Capitalism will not simply disappear because oil runs out. Capitalism is 600 years old, and only in the last 130 years or so has it been boosted by access to oil. With all the resources at their command, and before all the oil is gone (assuming it will be), capitalists are in the most powerful position to develop, in privatized fashion, all sorts of alternative sources of energy, and when oil is finished, they'll be in the best position to impose an even more unequal class system on humanity. There are no short cuts out of this hell, and the capitalists will not die out automatically. In fact, they can morph into a far more barbaric species of humans and impose a far more barbaric system on us. The only thing that will end capitalism is an organized working class (i.e., any significant segment of 90% of the people in the U.S.); organized, that is, with a socialist consciousness. Reza Fiyouzat can be reached at: rfiyouzat@yahoo.com
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