fuel

Sketching a Theory of Fossil Imperialism

By Bernardo Jurema and Elias Koenig

This is a summary of the paper ‘State Power and Capital in the Climate Crisis: A Theory of Fossil Imperialism,’ presented by the authors during the “Confronting Climate Coloniality” - Paper Session at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) annual meeting on March 26th, 2023. It is also an overview of some of the main ideas that we hope to further develop this year. While the research behind the conference paper was carried out at Research Institute for Sustainability - Helmholtz Centre Potsdam (RIFS), the opinions and viewpoints expressed herein are our own and do not represent the standpoints of RIFS as a whole. This piece was originally published on the RIFS Potsdam website.


In recent years, both activists and researchers have started to invoke the term fossil imperialism to highlight the ways in which imperialist politics are tied up with the logic of fossil capitalism. Under fossil capitalism, ceaseless accumulation of capital necessitates continued expansion of an energy base of coal, oil, and natural gas. Imperial states play a key role in the process, which has in turn enabled a remarkable concentration of imperial power and continues to do so in today’s world order. Understanding fossil imperialism, therefore, is necessary for devising effective strategies of resistance to a planet-wrecking capitalist status quo.

Our model of fossil imperialism attempts to sketch the general workings of this relationship between imperial states and fossil capital in its historical development over the past two centuries and in its different varieties. It is principally based on the two general modes of expansion and obstruction. On the one hand, the expansion and protection of new fossil fuel resources and infrastructure are crucial to keeping the engine rooms of fossil capital well-supplied. On the other hand, the obstruction or destruction of the infrastructure of rivaling capital factions and states in order to maintain control over pricing and distribution has been equally integral to the history of fossil imperialism. In this way, the workings of fossil imperialism reflect the more general nature of capitalism as a mode of production and destruction.

It is important to take into account the specific characteristics of the three dominant sources of fossil energy (coal, oil, gas) when analyzing concrete cases. While all three energy sources still hold a significant share of the global fossil economy, each also corresponds to a distinct historical phase in the development of fossil imperialism. Coal powered the rise of the British Empire, the switch to oil marked the ascent of American hegemony in the 20th century, and fossil gas is increasingly at the core of the United States’ attempt to continue projecting its supremacy well into the 21st century. While there is growing concern over new forms of "green imperialism", especially in relation to the extraction and distribution of the raw materials supposedly required to decarbonize the economies of the North, current fossil-fueled conflicts such as the Russian war in Ukraine or the Saudi war in Yemen show that the age of fossil imperialism is - unfortunately - far from over.

There are at least five ways in which imperial states facilitate the interests of fossil capital: through colonization, the projection of military power, the suppression of anti-extractivist movements, economic warfare, and the domination of global institutions. This scheme makes plain the crucial role of fossil fuels, functioning variously as a driver, as an enhancer or as an outcome of imperial states' actions. It disentangles the ways in which contemporary politics are significantly influenced by fossil fuels, which have played a defining role in shaping the structure of capitalist corporations, settler-imperial states, and earth-transforming technoscience. These arrangements have had profound consequences for ecological destruction and the implementation of ecological management strategies.

Colonization is a form of direct political domination and subjugation of one people by another. It was perhaps most evident during the “golden” age of coal, the fossil fuel that powered the rise of the British Empire — from Australia to India, from South Africa to Borneo. Because coal extraction requires a large amount of disciplined labor, arguably, it also necessitates more comprehensive forms of social and political control than oil and gas extraction. At the same time, the British — in many cases — obstructed the rapid expansion of foreign coal industries to protect their own domestic industry.  Even in the case of oil and gas, many of the major private companies like BP and Shell still operate in markets shaped by colonial legacies.

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“Projection of military power” refers to different kinds of military interventions short of full-on colonization. Historically, states often deployed their own forces to protect fossil infrastructure abroad — a practice that continues today in various ways. Projection of military power also takes place through proxy armies, funded through a closed circuit of oil money and weapons contracts, as in the case of the Gulf monarchies. The 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq reminds us how current the role of military power remains. Twenty years after the regime-change military intervention, the United States still has 2500 troops stationed in the country. And, as has recently been revealed, BP and Shell, which had been barred from the country for decades, have extracted tens of billions of dollars in Iraqi oil post-invasion.

The pursuit of regional economic dominance on the part of fossil imperial states requires the suppression of anti-extractivist movements and other grassroots movements opposed to the social order. Interventionary military assistance was justified from the 1990s onwards on the basis of immigration enforcement, anti-narcotics control, and fighting against general criminality. For example, the role of the War on Drugs in continuing counterinsurgent practices against civilian population that were carried out until the late 1980s within a Cold War framework. However, according to Russell Crandall, professor at Davidson College in North Carolina and former Pentagon and National Security Council official under George W. Bush, the significant role in shaping outcomes is not primarily played by the U.S. military advisors, but rather by the "imperial diplomats" – the civilian officials within the U.S. foreign policy structure.

In his study of economic sanctions, Cornell historian Nicholas Mulder has demonstrated that modern-day sanctions developed out of mechanisms for energy control, blacklisting, import and export rationing, property seizures and asset freezes, trade prohibitions, and preclusive purchasing, as well as financial blockade — simply put, economic warfare. He shows that effectively isolating a whole nation from the intricate networks that support global trade requires the ability to gather information and generate knowledge. This involves mapping the intricate web of physical goods and resources that connect the specific country to the rest of the globe. Key factors in this process include having legal authority and access to more precise data and statistics. What makes it possible to impose this unilateral sanctions regime on the rest of the world is the domination of the global (financial and political) institutions that regulate the trade and distribution of fossil fuels. Both 19th-century British and 20th-century US-American dominance stemmed from their respective global leadership in corporate, regulatory, technological, and financial frameworks, which in turn was tightly linked to the pound sterling and later the US dollar being the chief reserve and trade currencies of their time.

In the age of American hegemony, the United Nations and other multilateral organizations — in particular, the Bretton Woods system (the International Monetary Fund and World Bank) — have become key means to maintain its armed primacy and fossil-based economic dominance. Significantly, the US-led bloc thwarted attempts by the newly decolonized countries in the postwar period to build a fairer world order by torpedoing the Third World agenda, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the Non-Aligned Movement and the New International Economic Order.


Conclusion

It is impossible to understand imperialism without understanding the role of fossil fuels in its historical emergence and development. A climate movement that does not actively take into account the mechanisms of fossil imperialism risks being co-opted into imperialist false solutions to the climate crisis. Likewise, anti-imperial movements that fail to break definitively with the logic of fossil capitalism historically fall victim to various social and ecological contradictions. A case in point are the Pink Tide governments of the first decade of the 21st century. As University of Toronto political scientist Donald Kingsbury put it, when "faced with a choice between extraction and the local movements that made their governments possible,” these regimes “sided with extraction." A better understanding of the topic can therefore contribute to more effective climate justice activism, more strategic clarity and tactical innovation, and serve as a basis for more international solidarity.

Refinancing the Climate Crisis: The Disaster Politics of Climate Change and Datafication of Capital

By Julius Alexander McGee

As the climate crisis escalates, the contradictions of the nation-state as both a facilitator and regulator of capital become increasingly apparent. The increase of natural disasters sparked by global warming have produced civil unrest and calls for change to our current social structures. These calls for change include a Green New Deal; divestment from fossil fuel industries; and a redistribution of wealth, all of which threaten the existing mechanism of capital accumulation. In response, the state has turned to the disaster capitalist playbook, turning the risk of civil unrest into new modalities of capital accumulation that maintain the status quo. This includes the creation of new low carbon markets that recapitulate pre-existing modalities of capital accumulation[1]. Recent attempts by nation-states to mitigate global warming through the creation of low carbon markets reveal how the climate crisis is being used to facilitate the expansion of capital into markets of data accumulation. This expansion is characterized by a process where data is created, collected, and circulated to generate wealth. Specifically, data extracted from low carbon technology to improve operational efficiencies ultimately functions to increase overall energy demand, as vast quantities of electricity are necessary to store data on computer servers. Such processes, unfortunately, of course, serve to undermine climate mitigation efforts. Further, the datafication of capital enhances surveillance technology that is used to disenfranchise Black and Brown communities through enhanced policing. Police departments around the United States as well as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (also known as ICE) are using data to target communities that are left most vulnerable by the unrest of the climate crisis[2]. Meanwhile, lithium, an alkali metal essential to many low-carbon technologies is mined at the expense of indigenous communities in South America in response to increased demand for electric vehicles (henceforth EVs) and large-scale batteries required to store deployable renewable energy. Simply put, these outcomes reveal the racial character of economic development and the tendency for capital to maintain the settler colonial project that established capitalism as a system of social organization. 

The automobile industry and widespread electrification were each established in the United States by dispossessing Black, Brown, and indigenous communities. The automobile industry thrived in the United States after the states demolished Black owned businesses and homes to build highways, and electrification was used to dispossess Black farmers of their wealth[3]. Moreover, the fossil fuels used to power automobiles and electricity are extracted on land dispossessed from indigenous people[4]. Indeed, it is increasingly clear that the continual dispossession and disenfranchisement of Black, Brown, and indigenous communities the world over is the true engine of capital accumulation. Specifically, by maintaining the historical expropriation of populations outside the terrain of capitalist production such that processes of uneven development favoring privileged Westerners might continue even in the face of socio-ecological instability. This paper intends to demonstrate how state policies aimed at creating low carbon markets are positioned as a reactionary force under disaster capitalism, which create new modalities of capital accumulation. I illustrate some of the key functions of this emergent phenomenon by examining the relationship between state sponsored low carbon markets and big data — a dynamic interplay that, despite appearances, fosters further dependence on fossil fuels through the dispossession of Black, Brown and indigenous communities around the world. 

First, I explore the crisis that facilitated the datafication of capital -- the dot-com bubble burst of the early 2000s. Second, I explore the implications of the crisis that facilitated the creation of low carbon markets -- the crisis of the fossil economy. Third, I examine how low carbon markets perpetuate the datafication of capital such that data supplants fossil fuels as an organizing structure of the system of capitalism. I conclude by exploring how the internal dynamics of capitalism as a system are maintained through the combination of these two wings of the high technology sector.      

 

The dot-com bubble burst and the rise of data as capital 

In the neoliberal era, modalities of capital accumulation that emerge in the wake of social, economic, and ecological crises (be they actual or perceived), facilitate the redistribution of wealth from poor to rich through combined and uneven development[5]. Abstractly, this usually means new capital is created for the wealthy to own, new revenue streams are created to preserve the status of the middle class (that simultaneously undermine their stability), and new mechanisms of extraction are created that target/create the dispossessed -- this is what Naomi Klein refers to as “disaster capitalism”. In essence, disaster capitalism recapitulates the dynamics of capital accumulation in response to crises by passing down the risk from the wealthy to the poor. 

In response to the dot-com bubble burst of 2000 as well as the events of September 11th, the Federal Reserve (the central banking system of the United States) continuously lowered interest rates for banks to help the United States’ economy emerge from a recession[6]. This created new capital in the form of AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities, because banks were incentivized to lend in order to generate new revenue from interest on loans[7]. Specifically, banks relied on individual home mortgages as a revenue stream by passing the Federal Reserve’s lower interest rates down to middle class homeowners who could take out cash from their homes through mortgage refinancing or cash-out refinancing to counteract stagnating wages. The federal reserve lowered interest to 1% in 2003, where it stayed for a year. In that time, inflation jumped from 1.9% to 3.3%. However, this proved to be extremely volatile due to lending practices that targeted Black and Brown communities in the United States with predatory loans. The subsequent Great Recession of 2008, disproportionately decimated wealth within Black and Brown communities through housing foreclosures, which redistributed wealth upwards, widening the racial wealth gap[8]. As Wang says, “these loans were not designed to offer a path to homeownership for Black and Brown borrowers; they were a way of converting risk into a source of revenue, with loans designed such that borrowers would ultimately be dispossessed of their homes”[9]. The transfer of capital from the productive sphere into the financial sector of the economy resulted in the financialization of capital via dispossession, breathing new life into the system through the construction of a new frontier for capital.  

The dot-com bubble burst of the early 2000s was a crisis created by failed attempts to transform the technology of the internet into capital. Internet companies during this time absorbed surplus from other markets through investments but failed to turn a profit, creating a crisis that was solved through finance capital and the transfer of risk from wealthy to poor. In the 1990s and early 2000s, internet companies merged with media corporations to create a new frontier for capital based on the increasing popularity of the internet. For example, the America Online (AOL) Time Warner merger, seen as the largest failed merger in history[10], represented a merger of the largest internet subscription company and one of the largest media corporations in the United States. However, this merger failed after dial-up internet was supplanted by broadband -- a much faster and more efficient way to use the internet. Broadband connections, which allowed for continuous use of the internet, helped usher in the Web 2.0 era. Unlike its predecessor, Web 2.0 is defined by internet companies, such as Google, whose value derives in part from its ability to manage large databases that are continuously produced by internet users[11]. Investments in internet technology in the form of data, as opposed to software tools such as internet browsers (e.g., Netscape), transforms data into a modality of capital accumulation akin to fossil fuels. Data, like fossil fuels, supplants pre-existing modalities of capital accumulation by refining their ability to produce a surplus. Thus, whereas the dot-com bubble burst was produced because the internet could not turn a profit after absorbing the surplus of other markets, Web 2.0 is defined by its ability to enhance the surplus produced by other markets by refining their mechanisms of capital accumulation. In the proceeding section I explore how fossil fuels as capital are based on the continued oppression of Black, Brown, and indigenous communities in order to demonstrate how data is supplanting fossil fuels as capital.

 

Fossil fuels and the cycle of dispossession

Fossil fuels have been an emergent feature of capital accumulation since they were first tied to human and land expropriation at the start of the industrial revolution in Great Britain. Factory owners in British towns used coal to power the steam engines that manufacture textiles from cotton, which was picked by enslaved Africans on land stolen from indigenous peoples. This tethered the consumption and production of coal to the expropriation of enslaved Africans and indigenous ecologies. As a result, coal, alongside enslaved Africans and indigenous ecosystems, became capital -- a resource that could be converted into surplus. Eventually, the steam engine gave the industrial bourgeoisie primacy over the plantation system that preceded it. Coal became the central driver of capital accumulation, which has borne an unsustainable system rife with contradictions. The natural economy, once based on human and land expropriation, gave way to the fossil economy, which uses fossil fuels to extract profit from human and ecological systems. 

Prior to the “industrial revolution” the contradictions of human and land expropriation were apparent in the multitude of slave revolts across the West Indies; in San Domingo, Jamaica, Barbados, etc. These rebellions were not simply slave revolts, they were outgrowths of the contradictions of the plantation system, which were apparent from the time they were established. As Ozuna writes, “centuries of sustained subversive activity prompted colonial authorities to rethink their relationship to the enslaved, and oftentimes, make concessions to preserve the body politic of coloniality”[12]. That is, the fossil economy emerged as a way to avert the crisis of the plantation system.   

The ability to manufacture cotton into textiles at an accelerating rate through the consistent use of coal, which was abundant on the island of Great Britain, became the precedent for colonial expansion in the United States, as well as the slave trade. Thus, human and land expropriation were fused to fossil fuel production and consumption. To put it succinctly, the fossil economy is an outgrowth of the plantation system, which automizes labor to efficiently accumulate capital. In supplanting the “natural economy” coal, and eventually petroleum, became emergent forms of capital accumulation that shifted the apparent contradictions of human and land expropriation.  

 The fossil economy has never transcended the contradictions embedded in human and land expropriation. The climate crisis consolidates the dialectical tension of fossil fuel production and the expropriation of humans, land, and human relationships with land. Likewise, the inability of nation-states to address the climate crisis is embedded in an unwillingness by ruling classes to address the core contradictions of capital accumulation. To address the climate crisis in a socially and ecologically sustainable way these contradictions must also be addressed. The climate crisis can be averted without addressing the contradictions of human and land expropriation, but such attempts will cost more in human life and ecological longevity by recapitulating human and land expropriation through the construction of new modalities of capital accumulation. In the same way that coal enabled the industrial bourgeoisie to expand capital accumulation while deepening its contradictions in centuries prior, data will recapitulate capitalism today. 

 

Low carbon markets as disaster capitalism

Low carbon markets, such as cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, and consumer tax rebates are market-based, regulatory, environmental policies that seek to disincentivize environmental degradation by establishing a competitive market for low carbon technology to compete with fossil fuel-based markets. The logic of these policies is to encourage fossil fuel companies to pay for the future ecological cost of their markets and to use the funds obtained from these policies to establish new markets that can replace fossil fuels. 

In the case of cap and trade (perhaps the most widely used strategy), a central authority allocates and sells permits to companies that emit CO2, which allows them to emit a predetermined amount of CO2 within a given period. Companies can buy and sell credits to emit CO2 on an open market, allowing companies that reduce emissions to profit from companies’ that do not. This approach was first established over thirty years ago in the United States to phase out lead in gasoline, and sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants that resulted in acid rain[13]. In 2003, the European Union adopted a cap-and-trade approach to CO2 emissions to reach emission reduction goals established during the Kyoto Protocol. Since then, more than 40 governments have adopted cap-and-trade policies aimed at reducing CO2 emissions while introducing minimal disruption to dominant economic processes[14]

If we accept the reality that fossil fuels were used to stave off the crisis of the plantation system and maintain capital accumulation via expropriation of human and ecological processes, then it points to the possibility that any new energy source created to maintain capitalism as a system will recapitulate the human and ecological expropriation that is foundational to the system. Thus, economic policies that facilitate the construction of low carbon markets, and that do not question the emergent character of fossil fuels under capitalism, invariably create new frontiers for capital accumulation. Opening such frontiers has been a primary role of the state under capitalism. 

The abolition of enslavement by nation-states across the capitalist system aided in efforts to stave off the crisis of the plantation economy by alleviating the political and ecological tension the slave trade created. Nonetheless, many nation-states continued to expropriate formerly enslaved Africans by forcing them into labor conditions that were conducive to the overarching dynamics of capitalism[15]. Further, other forms of expropriation (e.g., the coolie trade) in newly established colonies within Southeast Asia were made possible by and undergirded the technology produced via the fossil economy. Thus, similar to how capitalism recapitulated its internal dynamics following abolition, it recapitulates its internal dynamics in its efforts to transition off of fossil fuels.   

 This plays into what Naomi Klein termed the politics of disaster capitalism[16]. Under the impetus of averting a climate catastrophe, climate mitigation policies allow industries to profit from the perceived disasters that will be caused by the climate crisis. While the climate crisis is no doubt a real threat to life on this planet, the new orchestrators of disaster capitalism have successfully commodified climate change in perception and solution. The perception is commodified through the implicit narrative that the market is the only solution to a crisis of its own making. Sustainable energy companies, like Tesla Motors, suggest that they have proved “doubters” wrong by producing electric vehicles that perform better than their gasoline counterparts, implying that the only obstacle in the way of addressing the vehicle market’s contribution to the climate crisis is the vehicles themselves. This feeds into the tautological logic used to commodify the solution, which assumes that the market simply needs to reduce CO2 emissions and, because electric vehicles are less CO2 intensive than their gasoline counterparts, they result in less CO2 emissions overall. Nonetheless, because the market operates under the logic of capital accumulation, companies that profit from the disaster playbook are incentivized to create more capital with their surplus, and companies create this surplus capital through datafication.           

 

The datafication of capital

Data operating as capital has three fundamental components that allow it to operate as a distinct form of capital that is dialectically bound to broader systems of exchange. (1) As capital, data is valuable and value-creating; (2) data collection has a pervasive, powerful influence over how businesses and governments behave; (3) data systems are rife with relations of inequity, extraction, and exploitation[17]. Like other forms of capital, data’s value derives from its ability to create a market irrespective of its utility. The creation of data hinges on its potential to generate future profits, and not on its immediate usefulness. As such, the goal of this section is to establish how data is transformed into capital, not how it is used by any particular firm or institution.  

The disaster politics of the climate crisis are similar in character to the tactics used by Wall Street financiers in the wake of financial crises. However, in addition to using crises as a launching pad for capitalist plunder, the orchestrators of the disaster politics of the climate crisis take advantage of the groundwork laid by finance capital. This is best exemplified in the ascendency of Elon Musk, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who rose to prominence through an unregulated data-driven financial tool, and subsequently became one of the world’s richest people, in part through his companies’ ability to transform the shock of the climate crisis into an endless opportunity for data capital accumulation.

In 1999 Musk co-founded X.com, one of the first online payment systems. It later merged with Confinity Inc. to become PayPal, which is one of the largest online payment platforms in the world today. Similar to other tech companies from Silicon Valley, such as Uber, PayPal functions as a deregulated variant of a pre-existing market. Musk and others recognized the “inefficiency” of checks and money orders used to process online transactions. Online payment platforms bypassed regulations applied to banks when processing payments and led to these inefficiencies; PayPal created a new payment system that regulated itself based on data instead of bureaucracy. 

In many respects PayPal is a digital bank whose main activity is in data instead of finance. PayPal claims that the data it collects is used to increase the security of its transaction, allowing money transfers to occur faster and with more convenience[18]. PayPal obtains its revenue through processing customer transactions and value-added services, such as capital loans. Online payment platforms such as PayPal are increasingly blurring the lines between retail and investment banking, again. For example, the loans that PayPal distributes to businesses are based on PayPal transactions, which are enhanced by PayPal’s data collection techniques. Thus, instead of accumulating wealth from financial instruments, PayPal accumulates wealth from the data it obtains from transactions, which it uses to finance more businesses and expand the number of consumer transactions it processes. This reality on its own has numerous implications for the climate crisis, as data centers, which store data at an exponential rate, rely on fossil fuel energy to operate[19] -- a fact that we will return to later. 

Online payment platforms have also become the shadow benefactors of financial deregulations. For example, the repeal of Obama-era financial regulations in 2016 (installed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis) that required financial institutions to disclose fees and protections against fraudulent charges benefited online payment platforms who were also subject to these regulations until 2016[20]. Here one can see the interest of data and finance aligning around market deregulation. As Sadowski writes, “Like finance, data is now governed as an engine of growth. If financial firms are free to shuttle capital from country to country, then similarly technology corporations must also be free to store and sell data wherever they want.” This is an expansion of the neoliberal project that began decades ago. 

Data, like finance, is being used as a transnational modality of capital accumulation that transforms the role of the nation-state in relation to capital. Similar to how the state became a “lender of last resort, responsible for providing liquidity at short notice”[21] to encourage finance capital, the nation-state is facilitating the rise of data capital through tax-credits, rebates, and cap and trade. To be clear, at the end of the day the state is merely supporting long standing markets of capital accumulation, such as transportation and electricity, by aiding their efforts to create capital from data. Moreover, the state’s encouragement of data capital’s accumulation is increasingly occurring under the veneer of efforts to mitigate global warming.    

 

Bitcoin’s legacy of expropriation and the climate crisis

After his departure from PayPal Elon Musk founded Tesla, an electric vehicle and clean energy company, in 2003. As a company, Tesla manufactures and sells electric cars, battery energy storage systems, solar panels, and solar roof tiles. However, Tesla’s profits derive from more than just the sale of its products. For example, in the first quarter of 2021 the bulk of Tesla’s profits came from the sales of emissions credits to other automakers, and sale of its bitcoin holdings[22]. This represents the new reality created through the disaster politics of the climate crisis, which merges financial speculation and data capital. 

Carbon credits sold by Tesla to other auto manufacturers, who would otherwise incur fines, allow Tesla to profit from environmental degradation. This is the goal of policies such as cap and trade, as Tesla is profiting from the production and consumption of its low-carbon commodities, which in theory should facilitate the rise of low-carbon markets at the expense of fossil fuel-intensive companies. In addition to cap and trade policies, Tesla benefits from a number of tax credits and rebates that exist across the United States and European Union to encourage growth in low carbon energy markets[23]. Similar to the way cap and trade is meant to incentivize low-carbon technology, the logic of tax credits and rebates is to encourage both producers and consumers to adopt cleaner energy practices as an alternative to fossil fuels by reducing the cost of implementation, and increasing overall capital accumulated from low carbon technology. In theory, this should progress the consumption of less CO2 intensive commodities at the expense of CO2 intensive commodities. However, by using a portion of these profits to buy bitcoin, Tesla is expanding its holdings through the speculative value of Bitcoin, which derives from the ongoing exchange of Bitcoins and the vast stores of energy used to validate these transactions, produce and distribute the currency, and store its data. 

Bitcoin is a popular cryptocurrency, the value of which is determined by a decentralized database known as a blockchain. This is distinct from the valuation of fiat currency, which is typically an outcome of inflation rates and the internal working of a central bank. The data that determines Bitcoin’s value encapsulates the supply and demand of Bitcoin on the market (the same as fiat currencies), competing cryptocurrencies, and the rewards issued to bitcoin miners for verifying transactions to the blockchain. Instead of storing its data in a central location, the data used to verify Bitcoin transactions is stored on multiple interconnected computers around the world. Each time a transaction using Bitcoin occurs, an equation is generated to be solved by a computer in order to confirm the validity of the transaction. The transaction is then stored permanently on data storage devices in 1MB chunks of transactional information. The completed block is then appended to previously existing ones, creating a chain of data that stores the history of all Bitcoin transactions. In effect the Bitcoin blockchain contains the entire history of all transactions that have ever occurred through Bitcoin, and this blockchain is repeated across every data storage device, or node, that composes the Bitcoin blockchain network. Thus, every time a block is completed and chained to the previous blocks, the solution is distributed to every node in the network where the block’s authenticity (the solution to the equation) is verified, and subsequently stored.

As blocks are added to the chain, which verify new transactions through the solution of a complex mathematical equation, new Bitcoin are produced. The equations are structured to identify a 64-digit hexadecimal number called a “hash.” The difficulty of the equations is determined by the confirmed block data in the Bitcoin network. The difficulty of the equation is adjusted every 2 weeks to keep the average time between each block at 10 minutes[24]. “Miners,” those who solve the equations and thereby verify the transactions that make up each block are rewarded for this work with Bitcoin, making it a lucrative market activity in and of itself. Thus, miners are in competition with one another to create new blocks; the more computing power the higher likelihood of successfully earning more coins. Because computers need electricity to function, and more computationally intensive tasks require more electricity, the process of creating new Bitcoin is very energy intensive. A study published in the journal Nature Climate Change in 2018[25] warned that due to its high electricity demands and increasing usage, Bitcoin mining could put the world over the two-degree Celsius tipping point, which would lead to an irreversible climate catastrophe. 

The decentralized structure of blockchains grants Bitcoin users a level of anonymity that is not accessible through traditional currency. Further, as data-based currency is not regulated as traditional currencies are, Bitcoin transfers can be cheaper than a traditional bank’s transactions.  As a result, many Bitcoin transactions are money transfers that benefit from anonymity and “cheapness.” Because Bitcoin’s value is determined in part by the number of transactions, companies, such as Tesla, that trade Bitcoin for profit derive surplus from how Bitcoin is used. This has numerous implications as to how datafication is deriving surplus from the disenfranchisement of Black and Brown communities. 

The climate crisis has created an impetus for the data-based currency, Bitcoin. For example, migrants from the nation-states of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua are increasingly using Bitcoin for remittances[26]. Remittances are funds sent as gifts to friends and relatives across national borders. They comprise more than 20% of El Salvador and Honduras’ GDP, and nearly 15% of Nicaragua and Guatemala’s GDP, as of 2020[27]. Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua have been ravaged by a five-year long climate change-induced drought, which reduced crop yields from corn and beans -- food staples in the region[28]. The recent drought coupled with oppressive government regimes that were supported by the United States’ neoliberal policies are themselves indirect drivers of these currency transfers–– resulting in large-scale migration out of these regions and into relatively stable and wealthy nation-states, such as the United States (where they will be exploited either in ICE detention centers, prisons, jails, or other low-paid wage labor most frequently available to migrants).[29].  

Bitcoin has become an increasingly popular form of currency to send remittances through because (like PayPal) it is cheaper, more efficient, and subject to less regulation than most banks[30]. In early 2021, El Salvador made headlines by announcing that Bitcoin would become a legal currency[31]. The logic behind this move is that Bitcoin will make it easier for people who do not have access to a bank to transfer money back to El Salvador.  Here we see an explicit example of how the politics of disaster capitalism facilitate the construction of new frontiers that recapitulate the environmental harm (e.g. climate change through increased use of fossil fuels) and generate surplus from the climate crisis. Specifically, patterns of migration onset by climate change and U.S. policy create space for new financial tools, such as Bitcoin to fill. The carbon intensity of Bitcoin recapitulates the environmental harm that is partially responsible for mass migration.

 

Data, renewable energy, and the expropriation of Black and indigenous peoples

Tesla’s investment in Bitcoin demonstrates how low carbon markets recapitulate the internal dynamics of the fossil economy, deriving surplus from the legacy of human expropriation and exasperating the climate crisis. In addition to creating capital from data in the form of Bitcoin, electric vehicle companies like Tesla also create their own data. For decades, automobile producers and rideshare companies have been increasing the data they collect from drivers in an effort to profit from an emerging data market. Everything from speed, breaking habits, vehicle position, and music preferences are collected from individual vehicles and sold to various interests[32]

Electric vehicles like Teslas collect and store far more data than their predecessors, and the amount of data collected grows with every new product line. This is due to the ever more complicated hardware and software that comes stock on new vehicles. Specifically, new vehicles are equipped with internal cameras that are capable of capturing video of drivers who use autopilot[33], the reaction of drivers just before a crash, as well as infrared technology to identify a driver’s eye movements or head position[34]. New vehicles also connect directly to smartphones, allowing third parties to collect data on a driver’s travel and driving habits. Further, states are beginning to put forth laws that require automakers to include driver monitoring systems, increasing the pace at which data is extracted from vehicles. For example, driver monitoring systems will be a part of the requirements for Europe’s Euro NCAP automotive safety program as of 2023[35]. All of this increases the demand for data centers to store new data collected from vehicles as well as the propensity for data to operate as capital. 

While a large portion of the data is sold to third parties such as insurance companies who can use data to determine rates, repair shops that can use data to assist mechanics, and automakers who use data to improve their products, vehicle data is also being used to expand the police state. Companies like Berla Corporation are working with police departments to extract data collected from vehicles, which can be used to surveil the population[36]. Through third parties, police departments are able to access data from smartphones that have been linked with vehicles, giving them access to anything from text messages to GPS location[37]. Considering the broader structure of the police state, this data can be used to expand the scope, scale, and authority of an institutionally racist organization, furthering the dispossession of Black and Brown communities. 

New policies implemented by the state, such as the United States’ proposed 1 trillion dollar infrastructure plan[38], include incentives to increase the consumption of electric vehicles, accelerating the number of vehicles that can extract data from drivers. While the goal of these incentives is to increase adoption of electric vehicles to mitigate climate change, the vehicle market will also benefit from the new data collecting techniques embedded in electric vehicles, which will exponentiate the data stored in centers. Moreover, most electric vehicles are still far more expensive than gasoline vehicles, making them only accessible to the middle or upper classes. Thus, efforts to encourage consumption, such as tax rebates to consumers, results in combined and uneven development as middle-class consumers increase their long-term savings while poor people are left out. Moreover, in the past cap and trade has resulted in higher gasoline prices, which means those left out may also absorb the cost of these policies on the petroleum industry[39].  

The apparent silver lining in all of this is the rise of renewable electricity, which could theoretically reduce the amount of fossil fuels used to capture and store data. Crypto currencies and the data collected from an evolving vehicle fleet could theoretically, then, grow without deepening the climate crisis as long as they rely on renewable sources of electricity. Nonetheless, when it comes to capital, there is nothing new under the sun. The climate crisis itself is an outgrowth of the continuous dispossession of the natural economy. Fossil fuels are merely an energy source that aids in this process. The ability to transcend ecological boundaries has facilitated the slow death of populations around the world since before the widespread use of fossil fuels. The first sugar plantations were erected in Madeira and the Canary Islands, to help the Genoese outcompete their Venetian rivals in the European sugar market at the expense of the indigenous life dependent on these islands. Capital’s maturation has been on an ongoing journey of death and destruction. While tracing this legacy is beyond the scope of this paper, suffice it to say that we are currently at a crossroads in the narrative of capital. The disaster politics of the climate crisis and data capital have created a new frontier in the lithium mines of Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. These mines exist on indigenous land, which belongs to the Atacama people.      

Renewable electricity, such as that drawn from wind and solar power, as well as EVs require large lithium batteries to store the energy they use[40]. Lithium, a major component in all of these batteries, is currently being mined at the expense of indigenous people. The Lickanantay who live in the Atacama salt flat of northern Chile, consider the water and brine of this land as sacred[41]. As a result of lithium mining, the Atacama water table is losing an estimated 1,750-1,950 liters per second[42], depleting the sacred resource of Lickanantay people. Moreover, it has been argued that the increased demand for lithium mining has led to a recapitulation of the old neoliberal playbook - military coups. Specifically, the 2019 ousting of then president Evo Morales in Bolivia has been called a coup d'etat against indigenous people in Bolivia[43] in favor of lithium mining interests. 

 

Conclusion

These recent developments bring us full circle as we can now see the outcome of the disaster capitalist playbook. The state responds to a crisis that it has aided and abetted by creating a new frontier - the low carbon market. The crisis is not global warming per se, rather, the civil unrest that the climate crisis creates. This unrest is addressed through the commodification of both the perception and solution to climate change - e.g. sustainable products such as EVs. The widespread consumption of low carbon technology results in combined and uneven development, allowing the middle class to reduce the long-term cost of travel and electricity at the expense of the underclass who absorb the cost of “environmentally sustainable” technology by becoming more surveilled and incurring the added costs borne by the fossil fuel industry due to its shrinking market share. The widespread consumption of low carbon technology facilitates and accelerates the datafication of capital, expanding the demand for energy within capitalist markets. As of now this demand has been met by fossil fuel interests who have become the benefactors of data capital's need for cheap energy. Nonetheless, as the renewable energy market expands, the need for lithium, located on indigenous land will encourage the further dispossession of indigenous ecologies. In the end, the natural resources needed to produce EVs and the data they gather are a new lease for capital; a new loan for endless dispossession; a refinancing of the climate crisis.                



Notes

[1] Sadowski, Jathan. “When data is capital: Datafication, accumulation, and extraction.” Big Data & Society 6, no. 1 (2019):

[2] Rani Molla “Law enforcement is now buying cellphone location data from marketers” February 7, 2020.

[3] Eric. The folklore of the freeway: Race and revolt in the modernist city. U of Minnesota Press, 2014.

[4] Simpson, Michael. “Fossil urbanism: fossil fuel flows, settler colonial circulations, and the production of carbon cities.” Urban Geography (2020): 1-22.

[5] Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Verso Trade, 2018.

[6] Kimberly Amadeo “Fed Funds Rate History: Its Highs, Lows, and Charts” September 24 2021

[7] Celi, Chris, “Redefining Capitalism: The Changing Role of the Federal Reserve throughout the Financial Crisis (2006–2010)”. Inquiry Journal. No. 3 (2011)

[8] Rakesh Kochhar and Richard Fry “Wealth inequality has widened along racial, ethnic lines since end of Great Recession” December 12th, 2014

[9] Wang, Jackie. Carceral Capitalism. Vol. 21. MIT Press, 2018.

[10] Rita Gunther McGrath “15 years later, lessons from the failed AOL-Time Warner merger” January 10, 2015.

[11] Tim O’Reilly “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software” No. 4578 2007.

[12] Ana Ozuna. “Rebellion and Anti-colonial Struggle in Hispaniola: From Indigenous Agitators to African Rebels.” Journal of Pan African Studies 11, no. 7 2018: 77-96.

[13] Richard Conniff “The Political History of Cap and Trade” Smithsonian Magazine August, 2009;

[14] Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich “These Countries Have Prices on Carbon. Are They Working?” The New York Times April 2, 2019.

[15] Sherwood, Marika, and Christian Hogsbjerg. "After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade since 1807." African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter 11, no. 1 (2008).

[16] Klein, Naomi. The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. Macmillan, 2007.

[17] Sadowski, Jathan. “When data is capital: Datafication, accumulation, and extraction.” Big Data & Society 6, no. 1 (2019):

[18] Adam Dillon. “How Paypal Turns Customer Data into Smoother Safer Commerce” Forbes May 6th 2019.

[19] Tom Bawden. “Global warming: Data centres to consume three times as much energy in next decade, experts warn” The Independent. January 23rd 216.

[20] Matthew Zeitlin “Venmo Could Be A Big Winner As Obama-Era Financial Rules Are Scrapped” Buzzfeed February 28th 2017.

[21] Foster, John Bellamy. "The financialization of capitalism." Monthly review 58, no. 11 (2007): 1-12.

[22] Jay Ramey “Tesla Made More Money Selling Credits and Bitcoin Than Cars” Auto Week April 27th 2021

[23] https://www.tesla.com/support/incentives accessed 8/9/2021

[24] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/difficulty accessed 8/11/2021

[25] Mora, Camilo, Randi L. Rollins, Katie Taladay, Michael B. Kantar, Mason K. Chock, Mio Shimada, and Erik C. Franklin. “Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2 C.” Nature Climate Change 8, no. 11 (2018): 931-933.

[26] Enrique Dans. “Bitcoin And Latin American Economies: Danger Or Opportunity?” Forbes July 14, 2021

[27] World Bank Developmentl Indicators https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.TRF.PWKR.DT.GD.ZS?locations=SV accessed 8/13/2021

[28] Jeff Masters “Fifth Straight Year of Central American Drought Helping Drive Migration” Scientific American December 23, 2019

[29] Michael D McDonald. “Climate Change Has Central Americans Fleeing to the U.S.” Bloomberg Businessweek June 8, 2021

[30] Roya Wolverson. “Bitcoin is wooing the millions of workers who send their earnings abroad” Quartz Africa March 26, 2021

[31] Mitchell Clark “Bitcoin will soon be an official currency in El Salvador” The Verge June 9, 2021

[32] Matt Bubbers. “What kind of data is my new car collecting about me? Nearly everything it can, apparently” The Globe and Mail January 15, 2020

[33]  Fred Lambert. “Tesla has opened the floodgates of Autopilot data gathering”. Electrek June 14, 2017

[34] Keith Barry. “Tesla's In-Car Cameras Raise Privacy Concerns” Consumer Reports March 2021.

[35] Euro NCAP. “In Pursuit of Vision Zero”  https://cdn.euroncap.com/media/30700/euroncap-roadmap-2025-v4.pdf accessed 08/3/2021

[36] Mitchell Clark. “Your car may be recording more data than you know” The Verge December 28, 2020.

[37] Sam Biddle. “Your Car is Spying on you, and a CBP Contract shows the Risks” The Intercept, May 3, 2021.

[38] Niraj Chokshi. “Biden’s Push for Electric Cars: $174 Billion, 10 Years and a Bit of Luck” The New York Times March 31, 2021.

[39] Mac Taylor. “Letter to Honorable Tom Lackey” https://lao.ca.gov/reports/2016/3438/LAO-letter-Tom-Lackey-040716.pdf accessed 8/22/2021

[40] Xu, Chengjian, Qiang Dai, Linda Gaines, Mingming Hu, Arnold Tukker, and Bernhard Steubing. “Future material demand for automotive lithium-based batteries.” Communications Materials 1, no. 1 (2020): 1-10.

[41] Amrouche, S. Ould, Djamila Rekioua, Toufik Rekioua, and Seddik Bacha. "Overview of energy storage in renewable energy systems." International journal of hydrogen energy 41, no. 45 2016.

[42] By Ben Heubl. “Lithium firms depleting vital water supplies in Chile, analysis suggests” Engineering and Technology August 21, 2019.

[43] Kinga Harasim. “Bolivia’s lithium coup” Latin America Bureau October 7, 2021.

Privatizing the Common Good: The 21st-Century Enclosures Are Here

[Pictured: Oscar Olivera, executive secretary of the Cochabamba Federation of Factory Workers and spokesperson for the Coalition in Defense of Water and Life, known as La Coordinadora, organizing with fellow Bolivians.]

By Ashley Dawson

Republished from Literary Hub.

Fossil capital has been granted immense power, producing life-giving heat and light but also plunging communities into darkness when they fail to return outsize profits. In 2011, DTE Energy, the investor-owned utility (IOU) that controls southeast Michigan’s energy infrastructure, repossessed one thousand streetlights from Highland Park, a city in the larger metropolis of Detroit. The city was left in the dark. Like many other Black-majority cities across Michigan, Highland Park was struggling at the time with capital flight and spiraling levels of austerity. Once home to Ford and Chrysler auto assembly plants and the well-paying jobs that they generated, Highland Park had seen its fortunes crash in the 1990s and the 2000s as the automakers shipped jobs abroad.

Now, half of the residents of Highland Park had trouble paying their monthly electric bills, and a quarter had experienced a shutoff of gas or electricity—often during Michigan’s cold winter months. When DTE took the lights, Highland Park owed $4 million in electricity bills, a situation likely to be aggravated by the rate hikes the utility wanted to impose to support its existing coal-fired power plants, to build new fossil fuel plants, and to pay the utility’s chief executive his $5.4-million annual salary. The repossession of Highland Park’s streetlights was part of a broader crisis of public assets: across Michigan, communities struggled as control of key public infrastructure like the water department and the school system was stripped from them by undemocratic emergency-management czars.

The taking of the light in Highland Park is part of a new, global round of enclosures in which common assets are stripped from the public. For radical critics of capitalism such as the historians Silvia Federici and Peter Linebaugh and the geographer David Harvey, enclosures are one of the dominant forms of contemporary capital accumulation. According to these activist scholars, critics of capitalism have mistakenly followed Marx’s analysis of what he famously termed “primitive accumulation,” which sees enclosure as a kind of original violence that kick-started the capitalist system. Enclosure, Marx argued, was foundational to capitalism since it allowed powerful landlords to accumulate wealth by dispossessing the peasantry of the land they farmed collectively, replacing such feudal social relations with more lucrative forms of enterprise such as the production of wool.

As the 16th-century English philosopher and statesman Sir Thomas Moore put it, “sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns.” The accumulated capital produced by enclosure of common lands was used to support expansion of industrial production domestically and of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism abroad. Enclosure thus refers to a global process of violent extraction. But the key thing is that enclosure did not cease once common lands in Britain had all been opened up and capitalism had been established as an economic and political system.

Contrary to what Marx argued, the predatory stripping of common assets around the world never stopped. In fact, it has intensified. The neoliberal era that began in the 1980s has seen a massive expansion of attacks on the commons, both in the form of the shifting of formerly public assets such as school systems into the private sphere in rich countries, and through extensive land grabs in areas hitherto relatively autonomous from the capitalist world system such as parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

Resistance to the new enclosures has become a central feature of social struggles over the last few decades. For instance, in 2000, the people of the city of Cochabamba in Bolivia rose up after the World Bank insisted that the government hand over control of municipal water supplies to Aguas del Tunari, a conglomerate controlled by the US-based multinational Bechtel Corporation. The new owner of Cochabamba’s water demanded steep and sudden rate increases of double or more for poor consumers in order to finance the double-digit profits demanded by the companies. The conglomerate even proposed to tax water that people caught in barrels as the rain flowed off their roofs.

A just transition to renewable energy will require a shift away from today’s energy-as-commodity regime.

The people of Cochabamba rose up in protest, occupying the center of the city and forming a grassroots participatory organization called the Coordinator for the Defense of Water and Life that shut the city down and demanded a rollback of the water privatization measures. Under pressure from the water conglomerate and international authorities, the Bolivian government declared martial law and tried to suppress the protests with riot troops, measures leading to mass arrests, hundreds of injuries, and the death of a teenage boy as conflicts erupted on the barricades the citizens had set up around the city. Protesters held fast in the face of state repression, however, and on April 10, 2000, the Bolivian government reached an agreement with the Coordinadora that ultimately not only reversed the privatization of the city’s water but also catapulted Evo Morales and his Movement for Socialism (MAS) into power in the country.

This victory for popular mobilization in Bolivia was a key moment in resistance to the new round of capitalist enclosures carried out during the age of neoliberal hyper-capitalism. The defense of the commons through new forms of participatory organizing resonated around the globe in the following years. In 2013, for instance, Turkish activists protesting government plans to pave over Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park described the park itself and various other urban spaces that the government’s neoliberal policies tried to confiscate for private profit as a “commons.” The Turkish activists called the form of self-government developed during their occupation of Gezi a “commune,” one that involved not just a sit-in but also food distribution, a medical center, and an autonomous media collective.

Grounded in a determination to defend common space from enclosure, the Gezi protest shared a commoning ethos not just with the Cochabamba Water Wars but also with similar movements around the world, from the resistance of the Zapatistas to the neoliberal tenets of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in Mexico beginning in 1994, to the Occupy movement that began in New York and spread across the United States, and to the Indignados movement in Madrid in 2011. In addition to resisting enclosure, these movements also experimented with new forms of popular sovereignty, animated by a fierce critique of the blindness to inequality that characterizes liberal democracy and the regime of private property rights on which it is founded. New structures of governance were developed in global movements founded on the idea of the people as an egalitarian collective with a mandate to rule in order to bring about social transformation.

These experiments reached their highest point with the emergence of what might be termed the social movement party in countries such as Bolivia and Brazil, but the effort to develop egalitarian, non-bureaucratic ways of organizing societies has been a key feature of the Left in recent decades. And, as feminist scholars such as Silvia Federici have documented, contemporary commoning movements crucially include the fight for communal, egalitarian control over material needs linked to social reproduction such as housing, food preparation, child rearing, sex and procreation, and even the reproduction of collective memories.

These radical experiments have exciting implications for the struggle for energy democracy. For example, when the power company came to strip them of their light, the residents of Highland Park took power into their own hands in ways that built on the logic of popular sovereignty developed in global commoning movements. DTE Energy had consistently used political donations (based on those elevated rates) and lobbying to stymie efforts to establish local ownership of clean energy in Michigan. Now it was taking away the power supplied by dirty coal plants.

Faced with this threat, citizens of Highland Park established Soulardarity, a community-based organization that fights for collectively owned streetlights, energy production, and equitable development. Soulardarity not only brings light back to Highland Park, it generates the power to run streetlights from the sun. Soulardarity produces what one observer calls “visionary infrastructure.” And it provides local folks with jobs building and maintaining this new solar infrastructure. Through the organization’s PowerUP program, the community is able to purchase solar power in bulk and at reasonable rates, and to deploy tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of solar infrastructure in the community. But this is not just about transformation of the community’s physical infrastructure: it is also about broader social transformation in Highland Park.

Soulardarity is a democratic, community-governed membership organization that aims to educate Highland Park residents about what autonomous control of power or energy democracy should look like, and to advocate for community ownership, transparency, and environmental sustainability across the region. Soulardarity advocates for a Community Ownership Power Administration (COPA) as a vital element of a Green New Deal in the United States. Like the Rural Electrification Administration that brought electricity to farms across the country during the New Deal in the 1930s, COPA would provide finance and technical capacity to help local communities across the country make the transition to renewable energy. As Jackson Koeppel of Soulardarity explains, COPA would give municipalities, counties, states, and tribal authorities the legal authority and the funding mechanisms that would allow them to “terminate their contacts with investor-owned utilities, buy back the energy grid to form a public or cooperative utility, and invest in a resilient, renewable system.”

In the introduction to their collection of essays on the US movement for energy democracy, Denise Fairchild and Al Weinrub contrast corporate models of decarbonization with the forms of renewable energy being fought for by organizations like Soulardarity. For Fairchild and Weinrub, the former are oriented around the growth imperative of capitalism and are characterized by “a transition to industrial-scale, carbon-free resources without challenging the growth of energy consumption, material consumption, rates of capital accumulation, and concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few.”

The centralized nature of power generation and distribution in the era of fossil capitalism has not only led to significant waste, with average losses of 8 to 15 percent of power generated as a result of far-flung transmission lines. It has also helped to make energy invisible and unconscious for many ratepayers, while subjecting others to heightened environmental and health damages, harms that track closely along lines of residential segregation and racialized inequality in the United States. Corporate-owned renewable energy is not likely to challenge this history.

By contrast, Fairchild and Weinrub argue, the decentralized renewable energy model fosters community-based renewable energy development that “allows for the new economic and ecologically sound relationships needed to address the current economic and climate crisis.” Such decentralization of power, they suggest, is facilitated by the distributed nature of renewable resources: “solar energy, wind, geothermal energy, energy conservation, energy efficiency, energy storage, and demand response systems are resources that can be found in all communities,” and consequently provide a foundation for “community-based development of energy resources at the local level through popular initiatives.”

Fairchild and Weinrub’s advocacy of decentralized renewable energy is thus predicated on both the material characteristics of renewable energies and the forms of radical democracy that they hope will facilitate and result from a just transition. For them, transition is about community empowerment rather than simply decarbonization of the grid, as important as the latter may be in the struggle to avoid climate meltdown.

The question of the energy commons is fundamental to the fight for a collective future.

Writing in Fairchild and Weinrub’s collection of essays, Cecilia Martinez, director of the Center for Earth, Energy, and Democracy, argues that a just transition to renewable energy will require a shift away from today’s energy-as-commodity regime. Martinez suggests that energy democracy requires the construction of an energy commons. What models exist to support the institution and collective governance of such an energy commons, one that diverges radically from today’s private property–based regimes of energy control and ownership? For Martinez, the first step is to recognize that energy is not so much a physical object, but rather a “vast array of natural interactions and phenomena for societal use.”

While energy might derive from natural phenomena all ultimately grounded in the harnessing of solar power, it is inescapably rooted in the social forms and infrastructures developed by humans to exploit solar energy. It is about forms of collective power that are active: in other words, about commoning rather than about some pre-given and static commons. How might energy be regulated in a more egalitarian manner? Martinez alludes briefly in her essay to the legal structures created over the last few decades to establish a global commons outside the control of any particular nation: founded on centuries-old legal paradigms governing the high seas, today’s global commons also includes the atmosphere, Antarctica, and outer space.

Martinez also draws on the pioneering economist Elinor Ostrom to argue that diverse cultures around the world and across history have established institutions resembling neither the bourgeois nation-state nor capitalist markets to govern resource systems. Martinez points to indigenous governance models of commoning founded on reciprocity, cooperation, and respect not only between humans but also among humans and the more-than-human world.

What are the conditions for the creation of a new world based on the energy commons? The egalitarian governance systems and legal paradigms discussed by Cecilia Martinez are helpful here. The particular material characteristics of modern renewables such as solar and wind power distinguish them from fossil fuels like coal and oil, but to what extent do these specific material forms, which derive directly from solar power and its effect on atmospheric systems, make for a new, commons-based energy regime that might be termed “Solarity”? What forms of collective, egalitarian governance can the movement for energy democracy draw on as it seeks to challenge the centralized paradigms of energy generation and ownership of the fossil capitalist regime? Do legal paradigms already exist to help community-based organizations like Soulardarity escape from the clutches of fossil capital and adopt solar power on a mass basis? What are the limits of these legal paradigms and what juridical innovations might address these limits?

These questions all relate to much broader struggles to establish new, revolutionary forms of popular sovereignty to defend and extend the commons, but they have a particular import for the fight for energy democracy. The struggle for a rapid and just energy transition is at the core of broader struggles for an exit from today’s trajectory toward social degradation and planetary ecocide. The question of the energy commons is therefore fundamental to the fight for a collective future.

Ashley Dawson is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His previous books include Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change and Extinction: A Radical History. A member of the Social Text Collective and the founder of the CUNY Climate Action Lab, he is a long-time climate justice activist. His new book, People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons is available at OR Books.

Racial Justice is Climate Justice: Racial Capitalism and the Fossil Economy

By Julius Alexander McGee and Patrick Trent Greiner

“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be...This is the inter-related structure of reality.”

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter From Birmingham Jail

The narrative of oppression moves through dialectical pressures. Capitalism evolved from the feudal order that preceded it, creating new forms of racial oppression that benefited an emerging ruling class[1]. Racial tensions evolve alongside economic oppression that subjugates labor to capital. The preceding racial order molds to emerging mechanisms of expropriation and exploitation by way of force and resistance. Beneath the surface of these tensions lies the interconnected threads of ecological and human expropriation. At the heart of all oppression, lies the manipulation of reproduction. The social processes necessary to reproduce black and brown communities, the ecological processes necessary to reproduce various species, and the dialectical processes that exist between humans and nature that are necessary to reproduce societies; the history of oppression is a tapestry of exploitation and expropriation interwoven so as to reproduce the means of maintaining the ruling class lifestyle. From afar this tapestry looks like a single garment; enslavement, capitalism, colonialism, etc. all coming together to produce the image of modernity, but on close examination one can see the interlocking threads of history weaving together a tapestry of oppression.

Fossil fuel consumption is a ubiquitous form of oppression that intersects with other oppressive structures, empowering those who call upon them to more efficiently extract surplus from various processes of social and ecological reproduction. As Malm writes, “The fossil economy has the character of totality... in which a certain economic process and a certain form of energy are welded together[2]” (12). We must not ignore, however, the ways in which oppressive structures and processes of social reproduction are welded into this totality as well. The expropriation of Black bodies cannot be reduced to mere economic relations, nonetheless racial oppression has always served economic interests. Thus, it is our goal to identify how the ongoing process by which fossil fuels and racial oppression are fused to one another and how that fusion changes the economic character of racial capitalism. This will not be a detailed narrative. Our goal is to develop a heuristic to better understand the connection between racial justice and climate change. To this end, we start with the claim that racial justice is climate justice.

Fossil fuels are the loom that weaves the tapestry of oppression into a functioning whole, systematically influencing the lives of the enslaved, imperialized, colonized, and exploited. Fossil fuels have become the bedrock of economic growth and the basis of most social reproduction. By social reproduction we mean human institutions that maintain the genealogical infrastructure of society. The family, schools, food, language, all of these are essential to reproducing a community's way of life. The dialectical bounding of economic growth and social reproduction is mediated through the consumption of fossil fuels. The family uses energy derived from fossil fuels to survive; schools use electricity to reproduce knowledge; food is produced and transported via networks of fossil fuel consumption; language is increasingly tailored to the needs of economic production.  Economic growth is itself a process of reproduction. Growth within the tapestry of oppression reproduces the conditions of much of contemporary social life, but its primary function is the protection and improvement of ruling class livelihoods. The legitimacy of the capitalist class derives from their ability to sustain economic growth. Economic growth is maintained by fossil fuel consumption. The residual impact of this pairing is the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, as well as the transformation of any earth systems that don’t readily lend themselves to the perpetuation of such emission.

All oppression is unsustainable. Oppression produces contradictions that undermine the mechanisms of both social and ecological reproduction. In the case of fossil fuels, humans burn the buried remains of plant and animal species that lived millions of years ago to change the landscape of the living. Fossil fuels embody the death that was essential to our life; they have already contributed to the reproduction of lifecycle processes. When humans use fossil fuels as the basis of social reproduction, they are choosing to live based on death instead of life. The reproduction of economic growth, which is essential to the capitalist classes' rule, is undermined by climate change. Carbon dioxide emissions are the largest contributor to climate change, which threatens the reproductive capacity of the tapestry of oppression. Changes in weather patterns contradict the ecological and social processes that the capitalist class expropriates and oppresses to reproduce their way of life. However, because fossil fuels weave together all forms of reproduction, it is not just the reproduction of the capitalist class that is threatened by climate change, but that of all subjects composing the weft and warp bound together by fossil fuels to create the great tapestry of oppression.

Economic growth is mediated by fossil fuels through the exploitation and expropriation of labor. Exploitation is labor that reproduces the conditions of the capitalist class. The surplus derived from labor exploitation reproduces class dynamics within the tapestry of oppression. Expropriation is the process of confiscation that yields the labor and natural resources that reproduce the existence of those living within the tapestry of oppression- particularly those most deeply exploited. Ecological processes, subsistence living, culture, etc., these forms of reproduction are often tailored to the needs of the ruling class. In order to reproduce their means, the oppressed must pay tribute to the capitalist class. However, the tapestry of oppression is not totalizing. The oppressed resist subjugation through the development of new forms of social reproduction.

There have always been alternative modes of social reproduction. However, reproduction outside the tapestry of oppression threatens the existence of the capitalist class. Therefore, the capitalist class views these forms of reproduction as disposable. Those who are expropriated are disposable insofar as the mode of social reproduction they rely upon, and in many instances their very existence is determined by the whims of the capitalist class. When the mechanisms of reproduction fall outside the realm of what can feasibly be expropriated, the capitalist class corralls processes of social reproduction from geographically and culturally distant populations into the service of capital accumulation. This process is known as primitive accumulation.

Primitive accumulation operates on the color-line as piezas de indias. Piezas de indias was a term used during African enslavement to quantify the productive capacity of enslaved peoples[3]. Specifically, piezas de indias measures qualities and characteristics of enslaved Africans that were developed prior to their enslavement. The term denotes a measurement of the value of a theft. “Marx had meant by primitive accumulation that the piezas de indias had been produced, materially and intellectually, by the societies from which they were taken and not by those by which they were exploited[4]” (121). Primitive accumulation, like all forms of oppression, is a process that is productive of contradictions. These contradictions contain legacies of opposition to the tapestry of oppression. It is here that one finds the germ and trajectory of the Black radical tradition. Primitive accumulation occurs on a spectrum. Material and intellectual theft is not homogenous, though it does often take shape around the color-line[5]. Piezas de indias is primitive accumulation specific to Black folks. In this essay, we identify the ongoing transformation of piezas de indias through three major shifts in the distribution and production of fossil fuels: 1) the first industrial revolution, 2) the second industrial revolution, 3) the neoliberal revolution.  

Although it is still common for historians to refer to a single industrial revolution (much like it is common to refer to a single agricultural revolution[6]), many U.S. historians refer to a second industrial revolution as well[7] [8]. The second industrial revolution occurred during the early and mid 20th century with the electrification of rural and urban towns, increases in railroad use, and the emergence of the automobile industry. This is distinct from the first industrial revolution, which started in Britain in the late 18th century, gradually spread across Europe and the U.S., and is defined by the increased use of steam engines and the rise of textile manufacturing in cities. For our purposes, both of these industrial revolutions are understood as forms of primitive accumulation perpetuated by piezas de indias. By this, we mean that primitive accumulation during the first and second industrial revolutions functioned through uneven and combined development, creating unique dynamics of interdependence within the tapestry of oppression.

The First Industrial Revolution: King Cotton and Racial Capitalism

If fossil fuels are “a train put at a point in the past on the current perilous track2”, African enslavement is the track by which the train moves. The bulk of the fossil economy, which emerged in Britain during the 18th and 19th centuries, was initially centered on textile production. The raw materials that made industrial production of textiles economically preeminent were extracted by enslaved bodies on cotton plantations in the United States. As competitive capitalism grew in British towns, largely a result of innovations related to the steam engine, enslavement grew to meet the productive demands of the emerging industries. By the mid-19th century, the United States accounted for three quarters of global cotton production[9]. The majority of the southern states’ cotton was sent to Britain and the northern U.S.to be manufactured into clothing in industrial factories. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin drastically increased the productive capacity of cotton plantations, and thereby accelerated enslavement[10]. From 1790 until the United States’ congress banned the importation of slaves from Africa in 1808, southern plantations imported around 80,000 enslaved Africans. In fact, so powerful was the economic imperative of expropriation, that despite the ban on the import of enslaved peoples to the U.S. slave ships continued to find their way to American shores until 1860- when the slave ship, Clotilda, brought 110 west Africans to the coast of Alabama[11].

Racial capitalism as a concept is synonymous with the Black radical tradition. Enslaved Black folks played a pivotal role in resisting the fossil economy from its inception, as their labor was essential to the rise of industrial capitalism. Slave rebellions, such as the German Coast Rebellion and Nat Turner’s Rebellion, threatened the hegemony of the southern bourgeoisie[12], which in turn threatened the flow of cotton to industrial centers. The Southern bourgeoisie were aware of their influence on industrial capitalism. King Cotton Diplomacy was implemented during the Civil War to coerce European nations into supporting the South’s secession efforts. These efforts failed for many reasons; the British and French had stockpiles of cotton due to previous surpluses, and the British were able to expand cotton extraction via their colonies. However, an often ignored factor that contributed to the failure of King Cotton Diplomacy was the general slave strikes throughout the South, where hundreds of thousands of enslaved Black folk fled plantations to support the war effort. The general slave strikes also provided the Union army with much needed reinforcements, which helped end the war swiftly[13] [14].   

Although the British refrained from taking an explicit “side” during the war, which was in part fueled by their reliance on grain produced in northern states[15], they partook in many efforts to support the southern states’ secession. This included efforts by the British bourgeoisie, who built the majority of ships used by the confederate navy[16]. It is clear that the British had a vested interest in maintaining enslavement in the United States. Although the British had previously outlawed slavery across its empire, the Black radical scholar Eric Williams made it clear that this was not due to a moral shift in British sentiment toward enslavement. The abolition of slavery in the empire served the interest of the emerging industrial bourgeoisie, who used reparations paid to indebted plantation owners to finance industrialization[17] [18].

Following the abolition of slavery, millions of Black folk were denied just compensation for the socially and environmentally destructive contradictions of enslavement, which had manifested in the early fossil economy. Instead of choosing a path toward healing, the United States government ceded power back to plantation owners, who in turn developed systems of debt peonage, sharecropping, and convict leasing, which restructured the tapestry of oppression and further tangled the oppressive threads of the fossil economy and the expropriation of Black bodies. All three of these systems of expropriation (debt peonage, sharecropping, and convict leasing) helped the United States regain its place as a global leader in cotton exports. In fact, the South’s new systems of expropriation increased the efficiency of cotton exportation to industrial centers[19]. Black folk who resisted these changes and attempted to integrate into white society became the target of new Jim Crow laws, which, among many other things, prevented Black and poor White folk from constructing their own communities. In the tapestry of oppression, the threads that bind the oppressed are mediated by the policy and ideology of the ruling class. If fossil fuels are the loom, then these forces of hegemony are the shuttle- weaving the weft of ecological devastation into the warp of social domination- the product is the legitimated mode of social reproduction and control; the tapestry of oppression. Jim Crow laws- one such shuttle- were a form of continuous primitive accumulation that disrupted communal efforts by Black folk to resist expropriation via debt peonage, sharecropping, and convict leasing. Without these efforts, it would have been difficult to corral Black bodies back into servitude in support of the fossil economy. A loom is rendered useless without a shuttle.

After surviving and resisting decades of expropriation in the southern United States, ecological and economic pressures changed the interdependent dynamics within the tapestry of oppression. The Boll Weevil epidemic of the late 19th and early 20th century decimated the South’s cotton economy creating a push factor for Black migration out of the South. Further, the reduced flow of European immigrants to the United States due to World War I, created distinct pull factors for Black migration to industrial cities[20]. From the late 19th to mid-20th century hundreds of thousands of Black folks migrated out of the South to industrial cities across the United States in what is known as the Great Migration[21]. Black migration out of the south coincided with a dramatic change in the structure of the fossil economy. While in 1860 cotton still reigned supreme as the U.S’s leading industry, by 1890 cotton was surpassed by machinery manufacturing as well as steel and iron production[22]. The new jobs in these expanding sectors were filled by Black migrants. To be clear, the cotton economy still played a prominent role in industrial manufacturing throughout the late 19th early 20th centuries, however the influx of Black workers to industrial cities provided the industrial bourgeoisie with leverage over workers by way of racial segregation.

During the early years of the Great Migration, White industrial workers in the United States formed the first national labor unions in response to the economic imbalances produced by the second industrial revolution and World War I. These unions organized mass resistance to the changing dynamics of the fossil economy, however their efforts were undermined by bourgeois racial hegemony. For example, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, which resisted a central component of the fossil economy, freight train transit fueled by fossil fuels, was a response to wage cuts onset by the end of the Great War[23]. Black railroad workers were actively denied membership to railroad unions, stoking hostility and resentment between Black and White workers. Specifically, White workers saw the lower wages paid to Black workers as a threat to union efforts and demanded that Black workers be replaced with White workers who would be paid higher wages[24], rather than demanding equal pay for White and Black workers. The active discrimination against Black workers by unions resulted in what could be viewed as Black workers crossing the picket line, however the only accurate assessment of these events would lead to the conclusion that it was the color-line that crossed unions and the picket line that crossed Black workers. Similarly, the Homestead Strike of 1892 pitted oppressed workers against the fossil economy’s emerging juggernauts, steel and iron manufacturing. The strike was undermined by the color line and Black workers were, once again, denied union membership. In November 1892, 2,000 White workers on strike violently attacked Black workers who crossed picket lines as well as their families[25]. Ultimately, at the end of the month, the White worker's strike was brought to a close and they were left reapplying for their jobs. Resistance to the fossil economy was undermined by racial tensions. Again, instead of walking down the path of healing by building a cohesive resistance, industrial workers chose to further entrench the expropriation of Black folks and fossil fuels.     

The second industrial revolution: fossil fuels as a basis for social reproduction

If piezas de indias during the first industrial revolution is defined by enslavement, Jim Crow, and industrial labor disenfranchisement, in the second industrial revolution it is defined by political coercion and the uneven distribution of fossil fuel-based amenities.

In the early 20th century, as the U.S. emerged as a global economic hegemon, electrification became a means to expand the fossil economy through coerced consumption. Mass electrification of towns started with the construction of Pearl Street Station in New York City in 1882[26]. The first residential house to receive electricity in the U.S. was occupied by J.P. Morgan (the famous financial capitalist), who was a large financial backer of residential electrification24. Morgan was responsible for the eventual merger of Edison Electric Company and rival company Thomson-Houston, into the economic giant General Electric, which persists today as one of the largest multinational corporations. Electrification did not become ubiquitous until it braided together the ability to increase the efficiency of reproductive labor with the production of culture. Specifically, inventions such as the electric iron, washing machine, and refrigerator all increased leisure time in the home for many workers and families. This newly afforded leisure time was replaced by the culture industry[27], which used electricity to create commodities, such as the radio and eventually the television to mass produce culture.

Mass distribution of electrification was slow due to its infrastructural needs. Little is known about the first working class households to receive electricity. What is known is that early distribution was contingent on whether or not households could afford electricity24. This leads us to suspect that early on, electrification in U.S. cities was implemented along the color-line, however more research is needed to understand the totality of these effects.

Following the Great Depression, rural electrification was implemented by the Roosevelt administration as part of the New Deal in the 1930s. In his research on rural electrification in the U.S. south, geographer Conor Harrison identified the ways in which Jim Crow laws influenced rural electrification and disadvantaged Black households in the rural spaces of the region. It must be remembered that, in the 1930s, more than half of the previously enslaved Black population in the U.S. lived in the rural South[28]. Harrison argues that analyses carried out to determine where the efforts of electrification should be directed relied on a “correction factor”, which was used by federal agents in the rural electrification program to underestimate potential electricity use in Black households. Ultimately, this served to prioritize electrification of White households throughout the region. In this sense, the correction factor, similar to other New Deal policies such as redlining[29], was used to systematically disadvantage Black folk. Harrison concludes, “New energy systems do not emerge into places devoid of social order. Rather..., energy systems deployed in already uneven and racialized landscapes tend to perpetuate marginalization” (pp. 928). Again, fossil fuels were used to further wrap Black folk into the tapestry oppression. In general, one can see how many New Deal policies, such as the National Housing Act of 1934  and the Rural Electrification Act of 1935, encouraged expropriation by more tightly bounding social reproduction (in this case the need for shelter and reproductive labor necessary to maintain that shelter) with economic life. The New Deal relief efforts were implemented on the color-line. This meant that processes of expropriation, which New Deal policies facilitated, were inherently uneven. As such, the continued use of these amenities, at best, functioned to maintain the color-line.

The rise of the automobile industry is a more explicit example of uneven development during the second industrial revolution. The automobile was developed through a series of  inventions using internal combustion engines to propel horseless carts[30]. The mass production and consumption of automobiles is most commonly associated with Henry Ford, the Model T car, and “Fordism.” Fordist production combined the fragmented tasks of “Taylorism” with industrial processes to produce assembly lines of so-called “low skilled workers.” This process increased labor productivity such that working class incomes rose alongside the profits of the capitalist class. The subsequent increase in working class disposable income encouraged mass consumption, which was structured around the automobile[31] [32]. Automobiles expanded the scope of the fossil economy by making oil paramount in industrial development. This expansion was supported by the discovery of large oil reserves in the southern United States in the Spindletop oil fields during the late 19th century[33].

Automobile expansion is inexorably linked to racial segregation in the United States. The phenomenon of White flight, which led to mass suburbanization in the U.S., was encouraged by New Deal housing policies that facilitated the expansion of the automobile market. In order to pass New Deal legislation during the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration pandered to Southern Democrats by excluding Black folks from many of the amenities granted by the New Deal policies[34] [35]. Prior to the Great Depression, many industrial cities were already heavily segregated due to racial hostilities during the first Great Migration of Black folks out of the South. Federal agencies constructed during the New Deal, such as the Federal Housing Administration and Home Owners Loan Corporation, furthered racial segregation through racial covenants and new underwriting standards that discouraged home loans in racially mixed and predominantly Black neighborhoods. New Deal legislation also disproportionately affected Black farmers through rural restructuring efforts that pushed Black farmers in the South off their land (a legacy that continues today in HUD financing to Black farmers, see NYT 1619 Project[36]). This in combination with new labor opportunities in industrial cities due to World War II, prompted the second Great Migration of Black folks out of the rural south and into urban centers.    

During World War II, the automobile industry grew exponentially due to government purchases related to the war effort30. Following the war, the United States Congress continued to support the automobile industry through legislation, such as the Federal Aid Highway Acts of 1944 and 1956. Further, after the war many Black workers who migrated into industrial cities were put out of work and replaced by White workers who had recently returned from the war. Newly constructed highways and new mortgage schemes, both of which were backed by the U.S. government, combined with the booming automobile industry to encourage White families after war to move out of the city and into suburban sprawls.

The phenomenon, known as White Flight[37], was facilitated by preexisting racial oppression, newly institutionalized racist policies, and government support for the automobile industry. In the end, White flight further tangled the reproductive needs of the capitalist class with the reproductive needs of the oppressed. In post-World War United States, the automobile became the opiate of the White working class; it liberated White folks from the drudgery of city life that had befallen Black folks and simultaneously bound them to the whims of the capitalist class. Through automobile proliferation, the fossil economy effectively weaved together the social reproductive needs of the oppressed with the reproductive needs of the capitalist class such that oppression is perpetuated through myriad dimensions of social reproduction. Where one chooses to live, and how one chooses to live, is tethered to the automobile and the mechanisms that led to its widespread use. Thus, one’s life chances- largely determined by where one is born[38]- are, in effect, patterned by the historical structures and relations that compose the fossil economy. These impacts can even be seen today, as research has shown a clear link between race in the United States and carbon emissions from transportation[39], race and access to solar energy technologies[40], and ties between life expectancy and zip code of birth[41]. Such historically produced associations have created a reality wherein Black liberation is often negotiated under the looming shadow of the fossil economy. The long Civil Rights Movement saw Black communities advocating for better schools, better housing, better access to transit, and better working conditions. Due to the second industrial revolution, most of these amenities became inexorably linked to the fossil economy. While it would be inappropriate to define the Civil Rights Movement as Black folk simply seeking better access to the fossil economy, many of the ‘rights' granted to Black folks during the Civil Rights Movement benefited the fossil economy due to the structural changes that occurred during the second industrial revolution. For example, access to public transit increasingly became a necessity for life within the city, particularly after transit funding was shifted away from cities and towards the suburbs[42]. Actions taken by Civil Rights activists, such as the Montgomery bus boycotts, were negotiated under the framework of the fossil economy. Further, legislation, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, included policies that undermined unions’ ability to discriminate against Black folks. However, by this time many industrial unions were seeking to share in the benefits of the fossil economy, rather than deconstructing the mechanisms of capital accumulation[43] [44]. A key point here is that many of the social, political, and economic gains made during the Civil Rights Movement were premised on the unjust allocation of fossil fuel-based amenities.   

In the aftermath of primitive accumulation during the second industrial revolution, a new Black radical tradition emerged that sought to control social reproduction outside the framework of the tapestry of oppression; this movement came to be known as the Black Power Movement. Influenced by the radical teachings of Malcom X, the Black Power Movement in the United States sought liberation through controlling the means of social reproduction. The crowning achievements of the Black Panther Party, which was one of the most successful organizations in the Black Power Movement, were the free breakfast programs, free health clinics, and resistance to police brutality. These efforts actively resisted the expropriation of Black folk in the tapestry of oppression. The Black Panthers sought liberation through re-appropriating various mechanisms of social reproduction. For example, the free breakfast program was supported by local grocery stores, who donated food to the Black Panther Party[45]. The cost of this food captured the embedded cost of the fossil economy (i.e. the fossil fuels used to produce and transport the food to local communities). The cost and relative inaccessibility of this food for Black folk was a product of the uneven distribution of fossil fuel amenities, which at this point had become the basis of social reproduction in the tapestry of oppression. Thus, the re-appropriation of this food into free breakfast for hungry Black children resisted the inequality embedded in the tapestry of oppression. However, as we mentioned earlier, social reproduction outside the tapestry of oppression is a threat to the ruling class. The Black Power movement was actively targeted and opposed by the state, not because they were a violent threat, but because they undermined the internal mechanisms of social reproduction inside the tapestry of oppression; they were actively pulling at the threads, unweaving the tapestry as it wrapped around them. The ruling class was successful at corralling the oppositional social reproduction within the Black Power Movement. To resist this new threat, the ruling class implemented a new form of piezas de indias that combined the tactics used during the first and second industrial revolution -- this new form of primitive accumulation would come to be known as neoliberalism.

The neoliberal revolution: mass incarceration, gentrification, and the rise of color-blind environmentalism

Under neoliberalism, piezas de indias functions through political coercion and economic restructuring. Neoliberalism is a political and economic project that reframes the crisis of stagflation, which plagued monopoly capitalism, as a worker-induced problem[46]. Economically, neoliberalism functions through the state, which facilitates the redistribution of wealth from workers to the ruling class. Politically, neoliberalism works as a narrative to justify legislation that seeks to recapture wealth distributed by the state to workers through programs such as welfare. The mechanisms through which these processes occur are often violent. However, this violence is typically mystified through political coercion[47]. For instance, the carceral state in the U.S., which has emerged as an extension of the neoliberal state, is often viewed apolitically and ahistorically. This allows the carceral state to operate with impunity, as its violent actions are viewed as a necessary and normal response to political dissent. For our purposes, we will explore neoliberalism in the U.S. as it relates to 1) economic restructuring in the wake of deindustrialization and 2) political restructuring in the wake of the declining welfare state.

One of the first neoliberal efforts to restructure a society’s processes of social reproduction occurred in Chile in 1973, when the United States backed a coup d'état against the democratically elected socialist leader– Salvador Allende. This event is significant in that it sparked a restructuring of the fossil economy (first in Chile but eventually across most of the world), as well as the restructuring of the state’s role in managing political dissent. After being elected, Allende nationalized Chile’s copper industry, which at the time was the nation’s largest export, and Chile’s private utilities. The coup that ousted Allende was led by Augusto Pinochet, who installed a brutal military dictatorship to replace Chile’s democratic government. In addition to re-privatizing Chile’s newly nationalized copper market and public utilities, Pinochet also employed a violent military regime that was hostile to political dissent[48]. With respect to the fossil economy, one of the more significant changes that followed the re-privatization of Chile's utilities was the creation and installation of a wholesale energy market system. The wholesale energy market was a trading scheme developed by economists trained at the University of Chicago, which was an early breeding ground of neoliberal economic policies and ideology. The economic restructuring of Chile was an experiment of racial capitalism– akin to the experiments others have examined in Puerto Rico[49] and Flint Michigan[50] more recently.  

In general, wholesale energy trading is best understood as a neoliberal project that was developed to further efforts to extract surplus from the oppressed. Rather than using the traditional monopoly structure of energy production and consumption that was developed during the second industrial revolution– an approach which saw electricity monopolies profit by reducing the cost of production relative to that of consumption– wholesale energy markets break down monopolies into smaller, more competitive producers and distributors. Electricity producers compete with one another by selling energy to distributors at variable rates. Under this scheme, households often pay a fixed rate for electricity, which further normalizes the ubiquity of fossil fuel consumption while also rendering the cost of production invisible to consumers within the tapestry of oppression. The habits of electricity consumers under this new scheme create the conditions for a more rapid, efficacious mode of accumulation by dispossession. The term accumulation by dispossession was developed by Harvey to describe how capitalist policies under neoliberalism result in a centralization of wealth and power by dispossessing public and private entities of their wealth or land43. We employ it here to highlight that, if producers believe consumption will be higher during certain hours of the day they can alter the price of electricity sold to distributors to turn a greater profit. As a result, wealth is increasingly concentrated into the hands of energy producers- being transferred from the energy distributors and, when left unprotected by policy makers, consumers that are woven into these market mechanisms. Put differently, implementation of the wholesale market system allows for the more rapid accumulation of wealth by energy producers via a process of dispossession, or expropriation, of both the natural world and the populations who must rely on their products in order to reproduce their life cycles in the system of neoliberal capital– that most recent pattern of oppressive structures and relations being woven across the tapestry that tangles our fates.

The wholesale energy market exacerbates the tendency towards uneven development within the tapestry of oppression by making energy saving techniques carried out within the home mutually beneficial to electricity distributors and consumers. The ability to reduce electricity consumption– at least during certain hours of the day– becomes a market in and of itself that is supported by electricity distributors[51]. For example, energy distributors such as Pacific Gas and Electric[52], and Portland General Electric[53] have created incentive programs to increase energy savings within households in their distribution network. While on the surface these incentives appear to be potential points of disruption to the fossil economy, in actuality they represent an alliance between energy distributors and wealthy home owners who work in tandem to shift the burden of the accumulation by dispossession carried out by energy producers onto poorer and disproportionately Black households. The accessibility of energy efficient appliances and energy saving techniques operate on the color-line. Black folk in the U.S. are more likely to rent their homes, to be rent stressed[54], and live in fuel poverty[55]. The material conditions of Black life prevent Black folk from accessing the energy saving techniques that are available to consumers, such as energy efficient refrigerators, modern insulation, and energy efficient heating and air conditioning. For example, renters in the U.S., which is disproportionately made of Black folks, are unable to implement many energy saving techniques– such as insulation, and energy efficient heating and air conditioning– because the choice to make such improvements is typically only accessible to homeowners, investment property owners and landlords. Beyond accessibility, the incentive structure of these types of home ‘upgrades,’ are generally expected in the long-term savings over years and decades; a cost-savings timeline which is not applicable to renters whose housing security is far more precarious (even if renters did purchase an energy efficient refrigerator, their rent may increase prohibitively in the coming months, making the investment in an energy efficient appliance more of a nuisance than a benefit.). Further, using these amenities works to alleviate the cost of electricity, which disproportionately benefits White households. Similar to the White Fight of the second industrial revolution, energy saving techniques are an opiate of the White middle class, one that works to alleviate the cost of energy consumption by further tangling the threads within the tapestry of oppression.

An important condition of these relationships, one that is unique to the neoliberal epoch of the fossil economy, is the apparent color-blindness of environmental sustainability. Household energy saving techniques that are supported by energy distributors, and many other markets as well, are touted as environmentally sustainable and are a central part of strategic climate mitigation planning. Nonetheless, these narratives are also part of a hegemonic discourse of color-blindness that masks the reality of racial oppression in the United States. Here, again, instead of walking a path that heals the planet and unravels the threads of Black expropriation, the White middle class is being coerced into an alliance with an industry that perpetuates uneven development throughout the fossil economy.

The development of neoliberalism in the United States coincided with the rise of the carceral state. In his book, Incarcerating the crisis: Freedom struggles and the rise of the neoliberal state, Jordan T. Camp argues that the carceral state emerged by creating racial enemies out of those resisting neoliberal efforts to restructure the economy. Specifically, Camp contends that the “transformation of the [carceral] state was legitimated in response to the organic crisis of U.S. Jim Crow capitalism, a transition that represented a rupture in a ‘total way of life’ characterized by Fordism’s purportedly high wages, mass production, industrial factories, assembly lines, bureaucratized unions, and mass-based popular culture44.” Black folks were disproportionately affected by what Camp calls the ‘crisis of Jim Crow capitalism[56]’. The various rebellions that spawned from this crisis, including the Harlem Revolt of 1964, the Watts Rebellion of 1965, and the Detroit Rebellion of 1967 germinated grassroots resistance to the tapestry of oppression, inducing class-consciousness. This created a crisis of capitalist hegemony, as the ideological threads that protected the policies underlying racial capitalism began to strain. These rebellions– as rebellions so often do– breached the color-line, as White and Black workers united in resistance to the economic restructuring of neoliberalism. Carceral policies emerged in response to these rebellions. It was through these new policies and discourses that the capitalist class attempted to recapture its hegemonic influence. Our metaphorical loom–fossil fuels– was fit with a new shuttle– the ideological tenets of colorblind racism and the policies of mass incarceration– to intricately interweave Black folk, Black life, and U.S. understandings of criminality in a way that maintained the tapestry’s coherence[57]. Taken together these changes culminated in the current wave of mass incarceration, a phenomena which represents the neoliberal state’s political and economic response to the rebellions of Black folk.

The political upshot of all this is that mass incarceration has effectively restructured the color-line in the United States. People of color are confronted by the police, charged with crimes, and incarcerated at disproportionately higher rates than Whites within the U.S. carceral state49. This has occurred against the backdrop of color-blind racism, and it is through the use of color-blind rhetoric that the racialized outcomes of carceral policy have come to be viewed as essential to maintenance of ‘law and order’ in the U.S.– which further disguises the raced palette of mass incarceration. Simply put, the color-line has been established around a coded language of race, which helps to legitimate piezas de indias through incarceration. Further, this process has also helped efforts to reorganize the fossil economy, making its machinery more suitable for weaving together the social and cultural structures of modernity into the totality that is the tapestry of oppression.

In a forthcoming study, we have found that mass incarceration significantly increases carbon emissions from industrial production. While on the surface the relationship between mass incarceration and climate change appears disparate, the interconnected threads of the tapestry of oppression reveal a direct relationship between mass incarceration and the fossil economy. This relationship is an artefact of the prison industrial complex, which represents a collection of political, bureaucratic, and economic interests that benefit from mass imprisonment. Economically, the prison industrial complex profits from industrial development that is interconnected with mass incarceration. Specifically, since 1980 more than 1,000 prisons have been constructed in the U.S[58]. The construction and maintenance of prisons have become a source of revenue for over 3,000 private U.S. corporations. These companies are funded through government contracts, which provide an avenue for industrial expansion. Sociologist Natalie Deckard, argues that mass incarceration works as a “locus for the coercion of demand and consumption”, compelling those who would otherwise marginally participate in markets to become active consumers[59]. Moreover, the prison industrial complex has effectively enacted policies that allow the state and private entities to profit from incarcerated labor. Prison work programs, such as the U.S. government owned corporation Unicor, pay prisoners as little as a dollar an hour for industrial labor, which helps to expand industrial development by reducing the cost of labor. Further, Unicor has a monopoly on government contracts for textile production. Fascinating here, is the reality that black enslavement is yet again being used to support the textile industry, bringing us full circle.

While the fossil economy did not encourage mass incarceration, it has benefited from mass imprisonment through the prison industrial complex. In its current state, mass incarceration, which is nothing more than a modern form of enslavement, is woven into the tapestry of oppression through the use of hegemonic ideology and policy– though, yet again, it is only the use of fossil fuels that has made such complex weaving possible. The economic crisis of the 1970s, which disrupted the structure of the fossil economy that was developed during the second industrial revolution, produced mass unrest. Neoliberal policies are a response to this unrest, which seek to further entrench Black folk into the tapestry of oppression through coerced demand and consumption. The seemingly ever-expanding carceral state creates a cycle of coerced production and consumption. Incarcerated people simultaneously consume and produce industrial goods, which benefits a small number of entities within the prison industrial complex.     

                                     

Conclusion

Black folk have been at the center of the fossil economy since its inception. At each moment of change within the tapestry of oppression, when the threads hang loose and are in need of mending, the opportunity for organized resistance has been squandered by the shuttles of white hegemony; reconstruction following the civil war, mass migration fueled by emerging industries, civil unrest after the economic crisis of the 1970s. All of these moments are defined by primitive accumulation-- by piezas de indias. The emerging renewable energy economy once again presents us with an opportunity to resist the tapestry of oppression. However, the interlocking threads of the tapestry must be opposed if renewables are going to be effective at alleviating oppression. Such resistance requires that we craft new shuttles– by introducing policies that serve as a redress to past forms of expropriation– while simultaneously constructing a new loom– one energized not by the death embodied in the carbonaceous form of fossil fuels, but by the productive, immediate, and life giving (if also fleeting) power of our Sun. Such dramatic changes require purposeful, community-based action, as the inertia of the historical forces described here is formidable. Consider a recent study published in the journal Nature Energy[60], which finds that the expansion of renewable energy consumption disproportionately burdens Black households in the southwestern United States with higher energy bills, demonstrating the long-term effects of Black expropriation within the tapestry of oppression. The expropriation of Black folk is so deeply woven into the tapestry of oppression that pulling on a loose thread without considering the structure of the whole risks disproportionately unraveling the tapestry, which has been carefully woven by way of racialized policy implementation and fossil fuel-based technologies. Combating climate change requires more than simply opposing the fossil economy; we must resist the oppression that fossil fuels have facilitated for over 100 years. The question is: will we seize this moment and unite to carefully unravel this tapestry, weaving it anew into something more just and sustainable, or will we yet again squander an opportunity for healing in favor of further entangling the threads that constitute the tapestry of oppression?   

John Kay’s 1733 Patent for the “New Engine or machine for Opening and Dressing Wool”. This patent introduced the “flying shuttle” to the loom. The introduction of the shuttle allowed looms to be operated by a single laborer, and made loom production…

John Kay’s 1733 Patent for the “New Engine or machine for Opening and Dressing Wool”. This patent introduced the “flying shuttle” to the loom. The introduction of the shuttle allowed looms to be operated by a single laborer, and made loom production fast and efficient enough to facilitate its role in the industrial revolution. https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Kay

Notes

[1] Kelley, Robin DG. "What did Cedric Robinson mean by racial capitalism." Boston review 12 (2017).

[2] Malm, Andreas. Fossil capital: The rise of steam power and the roots of global warming. Verso Books, 2016.

[3] Rodriguez, Junius P. The historical encyclopedia of world slavery. Vol. 1. ABC-CLIO, 1997.

[4] Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. Univ of North Carolina Press, 2000.

[5] Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. The souls of black folk. Oxford University Press, 2008.

[6] Foster, John Bellamy. "Marx's theory of metabolic rift: Classical foundations for environmental sociology." American journal of sociology 105, no. 2 (1999): 366-405.

[7] Pirani, Simon. "Burning Up." University of Chicago Press Economics Books (2018).

[8] Mokyr, Joel. "The second industrial revolution, 1870-1914." Storia dell’economia Mondiale 21945 (1998).

[9] Beckert, Sven. "Emancipation and empire: Reconstructing the worldwide web of cotton production in the age of the American Civil War." The American Historical Review 109, no. 5 (2004): 1405-1438..

[10] Green, Constance M. Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology. (1965)

[11] Zanolli, Lauren. “'Still fighting': Africatown, site of last US slave shipment, sues over pollution.” The Guardian (2018).

[12] The southern bourgeoisie should be contrasted with their industrial counterparts in the northern U.S., specifically due to their use of enslavement wage labor to derive surplus.

[13] Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt, ed. Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a history of the part which black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860-1880. Routledge, 2017.

[14] Roediger, David R. Seizing freedom: Slave emancipation and liberty for all. Verso Books, 2014.

[15] Ginzberg, Eli. "The Economics of British Neutrality during the American Civil War." Agricultural History 10, no. 4 (1936): 147-156.

[16] Blackett, Richard JM. Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War. LSU Press, 2000.

[17] One should also not forget that it was the rift in soil metabolism between plantation and town that made the sugar trade a volatile market in need of economic restructuring.

[18] Williams, Eric. Capitalism and slavery. UNC Press Books, 2014.

[19] Woodman, Harold D. King cotton and his retainers: Financing and marketing the cotton crop of the south, 1800-1925. Beard Books, 1999.

[20] Higgs, Robert. "The boll weevil, the cotton economy, and black migration 1910-1930." Agricultural History 50, no. 2 (1976): 335-350.

[21] United States Census, “The Great Migration, 1910 to 1970”. 2012. https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/020/ (accessed 3/20/20)

[22] Economics 323-2: Economic History of the United States Since 1865 http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jmokyr/Graphs-and-Tables.PD

[23] Foner, Philip Sheldon. History of the Labor Movement in the United States: The TUEL to the end of the Gompers Era. 9. Vol. 9. International Pub, 1991.

[24] Davis, Colin J. "Bitter conflict: The 1922 railroad shopmen's strike." Labor History 33, no. 4 (1992): 433-455.

[25] Adamczyk, Joseph. “Homestead Strike: United States History.” Encyclopedia  Britannica 2020. https://www.britannica.com/event/Homestead-Strike (accessed 3/22/20)

[26] Jonnes, Jill. Empires of light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the race to electrify the world. Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2004.

[27] Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, and Theodor W. Adorno. The culture industry: Selected essays on mass culture. Psychology Press, 2001.

[28] Motion, In. "The African-American Migration Experience." URL: http://www. inmotionaame. org/about. cfm (data obrashcheniya: 13.07. 2014) (2009).

[29] Coates, Ta-Nehisi. "The case for reparations." The Atlantic 313, no. 5 (2014): 54-71.

[30] Gartman, David. Auto opium: A social history of American automobile design. Psychology Press, 1994.

[31] Vroey, Michel De. "A regulation approach interpretation of contemporary crisis." Capital & Class 8, no. 2 (1984): 45-66.

[32] Florida, Richard L., and Marshall MA Feldman. "Housing in US fordism." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 12, no. 2 (1988): 187-210.

[33] Walker, Judith, Ellen Walker Rienstra, Jo Ann Stiles, Ward Morar, and Kara Medhurst. "Giant Under the Hill: A History of the Spindletop Oil Discovery at Beaumont, Texas in 1901." (2002).

[34] Lowndes, Joseph E. From the new deal to the new right: Race and the southern origins of modern conservatism. Yale University Press, 2008.

[35] Cowie, Jefferson. The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics. Vol. 120. Princeton University Press, 2017.

[36] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html

[37] Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. American apartheid: Segregation and the making of the underclass. Harvard University Press, 1993.

[38] Wasserman, Miriam. “The Geography of Life's Chances” Federal Reserve Bank Boston. 2001. https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/regional-review/2001/quarter-4/the-geography-of-lifes-chances.aspx (accessed 3/24/20)

[39] McGee, Julius Alexander, Christina Ergas, and Matthew Thomas Clement. "Racing to Reduce Emissions: Assessing the Relation between Race and Carbon Dioxide Emissions from On-Road Travel." Sociology of Development 4, no. 2 (2018): 217-236.

[40] Sunter, D.A., Castellanos, S. & Kammen, D.M. Disparities in rooftop photovoltaics deployment in the United States by race and ethnicity. Nat Sustain 2, 71–76 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0204-z

[41] Macintyre, S., Ellaway, A., & Cummins, S. Place effects on health: How can we conceptualise, operationalise and measure them? Social Science & Medicine, 55(1), 125-139.).

[42] Taylor, Brian D., and Mark Garrett. 1999. “Reconsidering Social Equity in Public Transit.” Berkeley:

University of California Transportation Center

[43] Obach, Brian K. "New labor: slowing the treadmill of production?." Organization & Environment 17, no. 3 (2004): 337-354.

[44] Schnaiberg, Allan, David N. Pellow, and Adam Weinberg. "The treadmill of production and the environmental state." The environmental state under pressure 10 (2002): 15-32.

[45] Austin, Curtis J. Up against the wall: Violence in the making and unmaking of the Black Panther Party. University of Arkansas Press, 2006.

[46] Harvey, David. A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, USA, 2007.

[47] Camp, Jordan T. Incarcerating the crisis: Freedom struggles and the rise of the neoliberal state. Vol. 43. Univ of California Press, 2016.

[48] Fourcade-Gourinchas, M. and Babb, S. 2002. The rebirth of the liberal creed: Paths to neoliberalism in four countries. American Journal of Sociology, 103: 33–579.

[49] Klein, Naomi. The battle for paradise: Puerto Rico takes on the disaster capitalists. Haymarket Books, 2018.

[50] Pulido, Laura. "Flint, environmental racism, and racial capitalism." (2016): 1-16.

[51] Wang, Ucilia. “Utility companies start hawking appliances” The Guardian. 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/may/13/utility-rebate-sdge-xcel-energy-simple-energy (accessed 3/24/20)

[52] See http://www.pgecorp.com/corp_responsibility/reports/2017/cu02_cee.html

[53] See https://www.portlandgeneral.com/residential/energy-savings/special-offers-incentives 

[54] According to a 1981 modification of the Urban Development Act of 1969, rent stressed, or burdened, households are those paying more than 30% of their income on housing. As of 2015, 24% of Black households in the U.S were bearing such a burden, while 20% of White households were. The numbers highlight the disparity more clearly when looking at households that experience a severe rent burden- defined as spending more than 50% of income on housing. In 2015 23% of Black U.S. households were severely burdened, compared to 13% of White U.S. households. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2018/04/american-families-face-a-growing-rent-burden

[55] “Fuel poverty, is often defined as a situation where low-income households are not able to adequately provide basic energy services in their homes and for their transport at affordable cost” https://www.enerdata.net/publications/executive-briefing/fuel-poverty.html

[56] What Camp cites as ‘Jim Crow Capitalism’ encompassess the economic restructuring of the second industrial revolution.

[57] Alexander, Michelle. The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press, 2020

[58]Lawrence, Sarah, and Jeremy Travis. 2004. “The new landscape of imprisonment: Mapping America's prison expansion”. Urban Institute, Justice Policy Center.

[59] Deckard Delia, Natalie. 2017. “Prison, coerced demand, and the importance of incarcerated bodies in late capitalism.” Social Currents 4(1): 3-12.

[60] White, Lee V., and Nicole D. Sintov. "Health and financial impacts of demand-side response measures differ across sociodemographic groups." Nature Energy 5, no. 1 (2020): 50-60.