How Coal Brought Us Democracy, and Oil Ended It: Lessons from the New Book “Carbon Democracy” « naked capitalism

Yves Smith posts an article about How Coal Brought Us Democracy, and Oil Ended It: Lessons from the New Book “Carbon Democracy”. This is a review of Carbon Democracy Political Power in the Age of Oil by Matt Stoller.

Stoller writes that:

Everything in our politics flows through dense carbon-based energy sources, and has for three to four hundred years.…[Winston] Churchill supported this occupation not just because he wanted Iraq’s oil, but because he wanted to defeat democratic forces – particularly militant coal miner unions – at home. Churchill and conservative elites running through British history (most recently Margaret Thatcher) understood that as long as the British power grid, and more importantly the military, was dependent on radical coal miners, his left-leaning labor opponents would be able to demand higher wages, social insurance, voting rights, and a share of the economic gains of the British economy. He preferred to have the British economy running on oil, so he sought imperial strategies to ensure access to resources without being reliant on his political opponents. Globally, in fact, the switch from coal to oil was a fight about labor.

Emphasis Mine

This puts Imperialism into a different light to the normal Marxist story as I understand it. Here Imperialism is used to acquire super-profits which enable the Capitalists to placate the Proletariat in the Imperial countries through higher wages and benefits. This buying off of the workers helps to align the working class with the Imperial project and breaks the international solidarity of workers.

Stoller goes on:

…England began using coal to fuel its economy, leading to substantial economic growth and imperial strength. Coal, though, presented a challenge to the governing elites, since the characteristics of coal, with its labor intensive extraction methods, were quite vulnerable to strikes. Coal was hard to transport, and miners operated underground in a collaborative manner. Once on the surface, coal had to be moved by fixed networks of trains. There were multiple bottlenecks here, and in the late 19th century, for the first time, the energy system of the industrialized world was reliant on workers who could withhold their labor and block a key resource. This translated directly into political power.

This political power manifested itself in greater democratic rights for workers. It was the production of oil that was used to drive the neo-liberalism project of rolling back the gains of the working class. Now, the advent of Peak Oil threatens this project by removing the energy source.

The post comes close to a class analysis but veers towards the idea that energy is the driving force behind world history instead of class warfare. I think it relies too much on the miners for an explanation of democratic growth.