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.

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Tyranny of Merit

Samuel Goldman, at the The American Conservative, reviews the book Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, by Christopher Hayes, in Tyranny of Merit.

His conclusion is that:

Hayes mounts a powerful critique of the meritocratic elite that has overseen one of the most disastrous periods of recent history. He lapses into utopianism, however, when he suggests that we can do without elites altogether. Like the poor, elites will always be with us. As the word’s original meaning suggests, the question is how they ought to be chosen.

Goldman's perspective is that the unruly masses have always needed a master to keep them in line. He cannot conceive of fully formed human beings being able to select their own rulers and sit in judgement of them regularly. For Goldman, true participatory democracy is an utopian ideal.

What Goldman is worried about is the radicalisation of the so-called upper middle class where this utopian ideal may take root:

Yet Hayes is optimistic about the prospects for egalitarian reform. He places his hopes on a radicalized upper-middle class. As recently as a decade ago, people with graduate degrees and six-figure incomes could think of themselves as prospective members of the elite. While the income and influence of the very rich has zoomed ahead, however, the stagnation of the economy has left the moderately well-off at risk of proletarianization.

Emphasis Mine

This radicalisation is reflected in both the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement.

But, this proletarisation was predicted by Marx as a natural consequence of the development of Capitalism. The accumulation of riches by the Capitalists, for whom the elites work, was also predicted by Marx. And yet, people are surprised that it is happening.

The Tea Party and the Occupy Movement are not the same thing. The Tea Party is a proto-fascist movement in which the petite bourgeoise seeks to defend itself against proletarisation. And the Occupy Movement is a nascent movement that could lead to participatory democracy and the overthrow of Capitalism.

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