V
Carbon Democracy, 2009
Timothy Mitchell
Why did a new and increasing reliance on coal in the eighteenth and nineteenth century
generate continued or new colonial expansions?
Using historical examples, describe in detail the methods employed by coal workers
(miners, transporters, etc.) to forge a new kind of collective democratic power.
Using historical examples, describe in detail the methods employed by oil industry
workers to forge a new kind of collective democratic power.
Using historical examples, explain why oil workers were ultimately not as successful as
coal workers in securing greater democratic participation in the conditions of their labor.
What is the economy" according to John Maynard Keynes? How did it work? How did
oil factor into this new concept of "the economy"?
How did the increased output of oil from the Middle East impact the prospects for
democracy there?
Fossil fuels helped create both the possibility of twentieth-century democracy and it limits. To
understand the limits, I propose to explore what made the emergence of a certain kind of demo-
cratic politics possible, the kind I will call carbon democracy. Before turning to the past, however,
let me mention some of the contemporary limits I have in mind.
In the wake of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, one of those limits was widely discussed. A dis-
tinctive feature of the Middle East, many said, is the region's lack of democracy. In several of the
scholarly accounts, the lack has something to do with oil. Countries that depend upon petroleum
resources for a large part of their earnings from exports tend to be less democratic. However,
most of those who write about the question of the ‘rentier state' or the oil curse'as the problem is
known have little to say about the nature of oil and how it is produced, distributed and used. They
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merely discuss the oil rents, the income that accrues after the petroleum is converted into gov
ernment revenue. So the reasons proposed for the anti-democratic properties of oil--that it gives
government the resources to relieve social pressures, buy political support or repress dissent-
have little to do with the ways oil is extracted, processed, shipped and consumed, the forms of
agency and control these processes involve or the powers of oil as a concentrated source of energy.
Ignoring the properties of oil itself reflects an underlying conception of democracy. This is the
conception shared by the American democracy expert who addressed a local council in south-
ern Iraq: 'Welcome to your new democracy," he said. 'I have met you before. I have met you in
Cambodia. I have met you in Russia. I have met you in Nigeria.' At which point, we are told, two
members of the council walked out (Stewart, 2006, p. 280). It is to see democracy as fundamen-
tally the same everywhere, defined by universal principles that are to be reproduced in every suc
cessful instance of democratization, as though democracy occurs only as a carbon copy of itself.
If it fails, as it seems to in oil states, the reason must be that some universal element is missing or
malfunctioning
Failing to follow the oil itself, accounts of the oil curse diagnose it as a malady located within only
one set of nodes of the networks through which oil flows and is converted into energy, profits
and political power in the decision-making organs of individual producer states. Its aetiology
involves isolating the symptoms found in producer states that are not found in non-oil states. But
what if democracies have not been carbon copies, but carbon-based? Are they tied in specific
ways to the history of carbon fuels? Can we follow the carbon itself, the oil, so as to connect the
problem afflicting oil-producing states to other limits of carbon democracy?
The leading industrialized countries are also oil states. Without the energy they derive from
oil their current forms of political and economic life would not exist. Their citizens have devel-
oped ways of eating, travelling, housing themselves and consuming other goods and services that
require very large amounts of energy from oil and other fossil fuels. These ways of life are not
sustainable, and they now face the twin crises that will end them: although calculating reserves of
fossil fuels is a political process involving rival calculative techniques, there is substantial evidence
that those reserves are running out; and in the process of using them up we have taken carbon that
was previously stored underground and placed it in the atmosphere, where it is causing increases
in global temperatures that may lead to catastrophic climate change (IPCC, 2007). A large limit
that oil represents for democracy is that the political machinery that emerged to govern the age
of fossil fuels may be incapable of addressing the events that will end it.
To follow the carbon does not mean substituting a materialist account for the idealist schemes of
the democracy experts, or tracing political outcomes back to the forms of energy that determine
them-as though the powers of carbon were transmitted unchanged from the oil well or coal-
face to the hands of those who control the state. The carbon itself must be transformed, begin-
ning with the work done by those who bring it out of the ground. The transformations involve
establishing connections and building alliances-connections and alliances that do not respect
any divide between material and ideal, economic and political, natural and social, human and
non-human or violence and representation. The connections make it possible to translate one
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set of resources and powers into another. Understanding the relations between fossil fuels and
democracy requires tracing how these connections are built, the vulnerabilities and opportuni-
ties they create and the narrow points of passage where control is particularly effective. Political
possibilities were opened up or narrowed down by different ways of organizing the flow and con-
centration of energy, and these possibilities were enhanced or limited by arrangements of people,
finance, expertise and violence that were assembled in relationship to the distribution and control
of energy
Buried sunshine
Like mass democracy, fossil fuels are a relatively recent phenomenon. The histories of the two
kinds of forces have been connected in several ways. This article traces four sets of connections,
the first two concerned with coal and the rise of mass politics in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, the second two with oil and organizing limits to democratic politics in the
mid-twentieth century.
The first connection is that fossil fuel allowed the reorganization of energy systems that made
possible, in conjunction with other changes, the novel forms of collective life out of which late-
nineteenth-century mass politics developed.
Until 200 years ago, the energy needed to sustain human existence came almost entirely from
renewable sources, which obtain their force from the sun. Solar energy was converted into grain
and other crops to provide fuel for humans, into grasslands to raise animals for labour and further
human fuel, into woodlands to provide firewood and into wind and water power to drive trans-
portation and machinery (Sieferle, 2001).
For most of the world, the capture of solar radiation in replenishable forms continued to be the
main source of energy until perhaps the mid-twentieth century. From around 1800, however,
these renewable sources were steadily replaced with highly concentrated stores of buried solar
energy, the deposits of carbon laid down 150 to 350 million years ago when the decay of peat-bog
forests and of marine organisms in particular oxygen-deficient environments converted biomass
into the relatively rare but extraordinarily potent deposits of coal and oil.
The earth's stock of this 'capital bequeathed to mankind by other living beings', as Sartre (1977,
p. 154) once described it, will be exhausted in a remarkably short period-most of it, by some cal-
culations, in the 100 years between 1950 and 2050 (Aleklett & Campbell, 2003; Deffeyes, 2005).
To give an idea of the concentration of energy we will be exhausting, compared to the plant-based
and other forms of captured solar energy that preceded the hydrocarbon age: a single litre of pet-
rol used today needed about twenty-five metric tons of ancient marine life as precursor material,
and organic matter the equivalent of the earth's entire production of plant and animal life for 400
years was required to produce the fossil fuels we burn in a single year (1997 figures from Dukes,
2003; Harberl, 2006).
Compared to these concentrated hydrocarbon stores, solar radiation is a weak form of energy.
However, it is very widely distributed. Historically its use encouraged relatively dispersed
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forms of human settlement along rivers, close to pastureland and within reach of large
reserves of land set aside as woods to provide fuel. The switch to coal over the last two cen-
turies enabled the concentration of populations in cities, in part because it freed urban pop-
ulations from the need for adjacent pastures and woods. In Great Britain, the substitution of
wood by coal created a quantity of energy that would have required forests many times the size
of existing wooded areas if energy had still depended on solar radiation. By the 1820s, coal 'freed',
as it were, an area of land equivalent to the total surface area of the country. By the 1840s, coal
was providing energy that to obtain from timber would have required forests covering twice the
country's area, double that amount by the 1860s and double again by the 1890s (Sieferle, 2001;
Pomeranz, 2000). Thanks to coal, Great Britain, the United States, Germany and other coal-
producing regions could be catapulted into a new 'energetic metabolism', based on cities and large-
scale manufacturing.
We associate industrialization with the growth of cities, but it was equally an agrarian phenom-
enon-and a colonial one. Production on a mass scale required access to large new territories
for growing crops, both to supply the food on which the growth of cities and manufacturing
depended and to produce industrial raw materials, especially cotton. By freeing land previously
reserved as woodland for supply of fuel, fossil energy contributed to this agrarian transformation.
As Pomeranz (2000) argues, the switch to coal in north-west Europe interacted with another
land-releasing factor, the acquisition of colonial territories. Colonies in the New World provided
the land to grow industrial crops. They also generated a direct and indirect demand for European
manufacturing, by creating populations of enslaved Africans who were prevented from producing
for their own needs. Europe now controlled surplus land that could be used to produce agricul-
tural goods in quantities that, together with arrangements of the slave plantation, allowed the
development of coal-based mass production, centred in cities.
This relationship between coal, colonization and industrialization points to the first set of con-
nections between fossil fuels and democracy. Limited forms of representative governments had
developed in parts of Europe and its settler colonies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
From the 1870s, however, the emergence of mass political movements and organized political par-
ties shaped the period that Eric Hobsbawm calls both the age of democratization' and 'the age of
empire! The mobilization of new political forces depended upon the concentration of population
in cities and in manufacturing, enabled in part by the control of colonized territories and enslaved
labour forces, but equally associated with the forms of mass collective life made possible by orga-
nizing the flow of unprecedented concentrations of non-renewable stores of carbon.
Controlling carbon channels
Fossil fuels are connected with the mass democracy of the late teenth and early twentieth
centuries in a second way. Large stores of high-quality coal were discovered and developed in
relatively few sites: central and northern England, South Wales, and Ruhr Valley, Upper Silesia
and Appalachia. Most of the world's industrial regions grew above or adjacent to supplies of coal
(Pollard, 1981; Rodgers, 1998, p. 45). However, coal was so concentrated in carbon content that it
became cost-effective to transport energy overland or on waterways in much greater quantities
than timber or other renewable fuel supplies. In Britain, the first Canal Acts were passed to dig
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waterways for the movement of coal (Jevons, 1865, pp.87-8). The development of steam transport,
whose original function was to serve coal-mining and which in turn was fueled by coal, facili-
tated this movement. Large urban and industrial populations could now accumulate at sites that
were no longer adjacent to sources of energy. By the end of the nineteenth century, industrialized
regions had built networks that moved concentrated carbon stores from the underground coal
face to the surface, to railways, to ports, to cities and to sites of manufacturing and electrical
power generation.
Great quantities of energy now flowed along very narrow channels. Large numbers of workers had
to be concentrated at the main junctions of these channels. Their position and concentration gave
them, at certain moments, a new kind of political power. The power derived not just from the
organizations they formed, the ideas they began to share or the political alliances they built, but
from the extraordinary concentrations of carbon energy whose flow they could now slow, disrupt
or cut off.
Coal-miners played a leading role in contesting labour regimes and the powers of employers in
the labour activism and political mobilization of the 1880s onwards. Between 1881 and 1905, coal-
miners in the United States went on strike at a rate about three times the average for workers in
all major industries, and double the rate of the next highest industry, tobacco manufacturing.
Coal-mining strikes also lasted much longer than strikes in other industries. The same pattern
existed in Europe. Podobnik (2006) has documented the wave of industrial action that swept
across the world's coal mining regions in the later nineteenth century and early twentieth century,
and again after the First World War.
The militancy of the miners can be attributed in part to the fact that moving carbon stores from
the coal seam to the surface created unusually autonomous places and methods of work. The
old argument that mining communities enjoyed a special isolation compared to other industrial
workers, making their militancy 'a kind of colonial revolt against far-removed authority', mis-
represents this autonomy (Kerr & Siegel, 1934, p. 192). More recent accounts stress engagements
with other groups, with mine-owners and with state authorities (Church, Outram & Smith, 1991;
Fagge, 1996; Harrison, 1978). As Goodrich had argued, the miner's freedom' was a product not
of the geographical isolation of coal mining regions from political authority but of the very geog-
raphy of the working places inside a mine' (1925, p.19). In the traditional room-and-pillar method
of mining, a pair of miners worked a section of the coal seam, leaving pillars or walls of coal in
place between their own chamber and adjacent chambers to support the roof. They usually made
their own decisions (Podobnik, 2006, pp. 82-5). Before the widespread mechanization of mining,
Goodrich wrote, “the miner's freedom from supervision is at the opposite extreme from the care-
fully ordered and regimented work of the modern machine-feeder' (1925, p. 4).
The militancy that formed in these workplaces was typically an effort to defend this autonomy
against the threats of mechanization or against the pressure to accept more dangerous work prac-
tices, longer working hours or lower rates to pay. Strikers were effective, not because of mining's
colonial isolation, but on the contrary because of the flows of carbon that connected chambers
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beneath the ground to every factory, office, home or means of transportation that depended on
steam or electrical power.
The power of the miner-led strikes appeared unprecedented. In Germany, a wave of coal-mining
strikes in early 1889 and again in December of that year shocked the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II,
into abandoning Bismark's
hard-line social policy and supporting a programme of labour reforms
(Canning, 1996, pp. 130-3). The Kaiser convened an international conference in March 1890 that
called for international standards to govern labour in coal-mining, together with limits on the
employment of women and children. By a 'curious and significant coincidence', as the New York
Times reported, on the same day the conference opened in Berlin, 'by far the biggest strike in the
history of organized labour' was launched by the coal-miners of England and Wales. The number
of men, women and children on strike reached the bewildering figure of 260,000'. With the great
manufacturing enterprises of the north about to run out of coal, the press reported, 'the possibili-
ties of a gigantic and ruinous labor conflict open before us'.
Large coal strikes could trigger wider mobilizations, as with the violent strike that followed the
Courriéres colliery disaster of 1906 in northern France, which helped provoke a general strike
that paralysed Paris. The commonest pattern, however, was for strikes to spread through the
interconnected industries of coal mining, railways, dock workers and shipping. By the turn of the
twentieth century, the vulnerability of these connections made the general strike a new kind of
weapon.
A generation earlier, in 1873, Engels had rejected the idea of a general strike as a political instru-
ment, likening it to ineffectual plans for the 'holy month', a nationwide suspension of work, that the
Chartist movement had preached in the 1840s (Engels, 1939 [1873]). Workers lacked the resources
and organization to carry out a general strike, he argued. Were they to acquire such resources and
powers of organization, he said, they would already be powerful enough to overthrow the state, so
the general strike would be an unnecessary detour.
Thirty years later, Rosa Luxemburg developed an alternative view. After witnessing the wave
of strikes that paralysed Russia in the 1905 Revolution, she argued in The mass strike (1906) that
workers could now organize a revolution without a unified political movement, because isolated
economic struggles were connected into a single force. This force, she wrote, 'flows now like a
broad billow over the whole kingdom, and now divides into a gigantic network of narrow streams
(1925 (1906), ch. 4). Luxemburg's language tried to capture the dispersed yet interconnected power
that workers had now acquired. However, her use of a fluvial metaphor missed the fact that it was
railways and canals, more than streams and tides, and the coal and coal-based products they car-
ried that assembled workers together into a new kind of political force.
During the First World War, US and British coalfields and railways were placed under the direction
of government administrators, and coal and rail workers were in some cases excused conscription
and integrated into the war effort. Strikes were reduced, but the critical role of these energy net-
works became more visible (Corbin, 1981; Reifer, 2004). After the war, from the West Virginia coal
strikes of 1919 to the British General Strike of 1926, one can trace the development of the 'triple
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alliance', or mine workers, dockers and railwaymen, with the power to shut down energy nodes. The
dispersed energy systems of solar radiation had never allowed groups of workers this kind of power.
The strikes were not always successful, but the new vulnerability experienced by the owners of
mines, railways and docks, together with the steel mills and other large manufacturing enterprises
dependent on coal, had its effects. In 1914, the massacre of striking coal-miners in Ludlow, Colo-
rado, caused a political crisis that threatened the power of the Rockefeller family, which owned
the mines (Chernow, 1998, pp. 571-90). Rockefeller hired Mackenzie King, a Harvard-trained
political economist who had helped resolve more than forty coal, railway, shipping and other
strikes as Canadian minister of labour, to devise a new method of managing workers (King, 1918,
p. 13). King's report on the crisis, Industry and humanity: A study in the principles underlying industrial
reconstruction (1918), explained the new vulnerability:
If the recent past has revealed the frightful consequences of industrial strife, do not pres-
ent developments all over the world afford indications of possibilities infinitely worse?
Syndicalism aims at the destruction by force of existing organization, and the transfer of
industrial capital from present possessors to syndicates or revolutionary trades unions.
This it seeks to accomplish by the general strike. What might not happen, in America
or England, if upon a few days' or a few weeks' notice, the coal mines were suddenly to
shut down, and the railways to stop running....Here is power which, once exercised, would
paralyze the...nation more effectively than any blockade in time of war.
(King, 1918, pp. 494-5)
King's report provided a blueprint for the corporate management of labour. After working as an indus-
trial relations consultant to Rockefeller and other firms, he returned to politics in Canada, where he
served as prime minister for twenty-two years and became the architect of the country's welfare state.
The difficult fight against the resources of a labour movement that, for the period of a few decades,
could threaten a country's carbon energy networks helped impel the owners of large industrial
firms and their political allies into accepting the forms of welfare democracy and universal suf-
frage that would weaken working-class mobilization.
From coal to oil
After the Second World War, the coal-miners of Europe again appeared as the core of a mili-
tant threat to corporatist democratic politics. As US planners worked to engineer the post-war
political order in Europe, they came up with a new mechanism to defeat the coal-miners: to con-
vert Europe's energy system from one based on coal to one based predominantly on oil. Western
Europe had no oilfields, so the additional oil would come from the Middle East. Scarce supplies
of steel and construction equipment were shipped from the United States to the Persian Gulf,
to build a pipeline from eastern Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean, to enable a rapid increase
in oil supplies to Europe. The diversion of steel and of Marshall Plan funds for this purpose was
justified in part by the need to undermine the political power of Europe's coal-miners (Forrestal,
1941-9, p. 2005, 1951, Vol. 9-10, 6 January 1948; Painter, 1984, p. 361).
Like coal, oil gave workers new kinds of power. Decisive industrial action was organized at Baku in
1905 in the Russian-controlled Caucasus, in the Maracaibo strikes of 1922 and 1936 in Venezuela,
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