After
Saturday's gigantic world-wide show of popular will [1], the anti-war movement
can claim to have put a new player in the field beside the miserable
protagonists of the Iraq/US war: Bush and Hussein. This figure is the refusnick
of a war with a banner on which a slogan is written: "No Blood for
Oil." Who is this person? What does the banner mean? What will we do on
the basis of it?
In
this discussion I want to make some elementary reflections on this slogan and
see what future the protester is pointing to. I will do this by reading the
slogan on four different levels, each more general than the previous one.
Level
1. No Blood for Oil, literally
We
should not be reductive nor jump to conclusions, but there is plenty of
evidence to show that the Bush Administration is planning war as a way to
plunder the oil fields of Iraq.
It
is widely known that Iraq's presently known oil reserve of more than a 100
billion barrels is the second largest on the planet and that "the
undiscovered oil in the Middle East [including Iraq] is very likely the largest
untapped supply in the world." As a retired petroleum geologist
unequivocally answered when asked about whether Iraq or Iran had more untapped
oil: "[I]t's Iraq. We plugged and abandoned any well that wouldn't make
5.000 barrels a day. Throw'em back in the water." Iraq's oil reserve is
worth potentially more than three trillion dollars at current prices. Moreover,
Iraqi oil is very inexpensive to produce and is one of the world's
"sweetest," i.e., it produces fewer pollutants on combustion.
At
the moment however, even though the US government and corporations import 2.3%
of their total oil from Iraq , US based oil companies cannot directly profit
from oil production there. In fact, the Saddam Hussein regime has made a number
of important agreements with French, Russian and Chinese oil firms assuring
them of very attractive deals in oil production once the sanctions are ended.
The British and US firms, however, have been given clear notice that they will
not be welcome in a post-sanctions era, if Saddam Hussein and/or the Ba'ath
Party remains in power.
Therefore,
the only way for the US (and British) oil companies to gain profitable direct
access to Iraqi oil is through a war that would violently and irrevocably end
the Hussein/Ba'ath Party rule and bring in a new government that could cancel
the deals with the French, Russian and Chinese companies. That is why the first
objective of the US military is to secure the oil fields in an invasion of
Iraq. Further, the US government assumes that its troops will occupy the
country for many years and will have a general as a military governor, in the
style of Douglas MacArthur in post-WWII Japan. This governor will be paying for
the occupation with the sales of Iraqi oil.
Anyone
familiar with the oil industry-connected backgrounds of key figures in the Bush
Administration, starting with George Bush himself, should not be surprised by
this plan of plunder that the "No War for Oil" slogan reveals and
protests. The US oil corporations (including Haliburton, VP Chaney's former
company) would definitely find the opportunities of "rebuilding" the
Iraqi oil industry destroyed by US bombs and/or Hussein's "scorched
oil" tactics a bonanza.
Such
a blatant plan of theft and plunder can only be accomplished by military means.
The consequences for the Iraqi people will be devastating, even if the invasion
is relatively swift. For the subsequent struggles among Iraqis and against the
US occupiers will be bloody indeed.
The
slogan "No Blood for Oil" on this level rejects the obvious gangster
behavior the Bush Administration (and the Blair echo) with brevity and justice.
S/he who affirms it wants to stop this act of brigandage pure and simple and
treats Bush's and Blair's "high-minded" (and poorly crafted)
rationalizations for invasion as crude, shameful parodies of justice. Surely,
s/he will brand
any oil company that profits from such an adventure a criminal and boycott its
tainted products.
Level
2: No Blood for Privatization of Oil Resources
Though
plunder is definitely part of the Bush Administration's plan there are other
more global issues suggested by the slogan. For the US has been the leader in
imposing neo-liberal/globalization policies around the planet. Thousands of
nationalized companies and agencies have been privatized due to structural
adjustment programs imposed by the World Bank and IMF while many forms of
"restraints to trade" (including "price fixing" cartels)
have been abolished by the international trade agreements now coordinated by
the WTO. The US government, not surprisingly, is the dominant partner in the
World Bank, the IMF and the WTO.
One
commodity after another has been "neo-liberalised," but oil has
escaped this fate. Most of the nationalizations of oil companies took place
between 1969 and 1973, but it has been almost impossible for these companies to
be privatized, even though the national telecoms and airlines were put on the
auction block in many of these same countries (e.g., Nigeria).
Similarly,
though there has been an attempt to destroy international price fixing cartels
in most commodities via treaties like the one that created the WTO, oil and
OPEC has been exempted from the rules of the neo-liberal global regime. This is
unusual since oil is the commodity that is both most basic (i.e., being
involved in the production of most other commodities) and the most traded
(i.e., the highest value of international sales) while OPEC is the most blatant
price fixing cartel in the world.
This
exemption of oil and OPEC from neo-liberal standards has been at the heart of
the Republican Party critique of the Clinton's energy policies. Thus in the
waning days of the Clinton era, there was a Congressional Hearing on
"OPEC's Policies: A Threat to the U.S. Economy" chaired by Benjamin Gilman
(R-NY) who charged that Clinton remained "remarkably passive in the face
of OPEC's continued assault on our free market system and our antitrust
norms."
With
the Bush Administration's rise to power, OPEC is increasingly seen as a hostile
entity--especially after 9/11 - which must be subverted and either replaced or
abolished.
This
hostility is intensified by realizing who are the main political figures in
OPEC now (aside from Iraq's Ba'ath regime): in Iran there are the desperate
Islamic clerics, in Saudi Arabia there is a ruling class that is divided
between globalization and Islamic fundamentalism, in Venezuela there is the
populist government of Chavez, in Ecuador there is a government that was nearly
seized in a rebellion by the indigenous, in Libya there is Ghaddafi (need more
be said?), in Algeria there is a government that just narrowly repressed (and
collaborated with) an Islamist revolutionary movement, in Nigeria and Indonesia
there are "democratic" governments with questionable legitimacy that
could collapse at any moment. There is simply too much class struggle in an
area of high tech production (oil production) that these leaders and
governments were not able to control.
This
list of OPEC leaders constitutes a "rouges" gallery from the point of
view of the thousands of capitalists who send a tremendous portion of
"their" surplus to OPEC governments via their purchases of oil and
gas. With such a composition, OPEC is hardly an institution to energize a
neo-liberal world.
Of
course, OPEC was not always a political or economic problem. In the 1960s and
in the early 1970s OPEC was a relatively pliable organization while
nationalization and monopolistic pricing were still acceptable elements of the
Keynesian political economy of the day. Iran was under the Shah, the Ba'athists
had just lost their Nasserite zeal, Ghaddafi's fate was still undeveloped,
Venezuela was a tame neo-colony, Indonesia was under the communist-killer
Suharto, Nigeria was under the control of General Gowan, and the Saudi Arabian
monarchy's Islamic fundamentalism was considered a quaint facade under which
the movement of billions of "petro-dollars" could be recycled back
into the U.S.-European economies.
But
that was then and this is now. From the Bush Administration's viewpoint OPEC
needs to be either destroyed or transformed in order to lay the foundation of a
neo-liberal world that would be able to truly control of energy resources of
the planet. The Bush administration is putting as much pressure as possible on
OPEC's members. In April of 2002 there was a U.S.-supported coup d'etat in
Venezuela against the Chavez government, the leading price hawk in OPEC. It
failed. In August 2002 it was Saudi Arabia's turn. The RAND corporation issued
a report claiming that the Saudi Arabian monarchy was the "real
enemy" in the Middle East and should be threatened with invasion if it did
not stop supporting anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli groups. But that verbal threat
was nullified by the Bush Administration in the controversy that followed.
All
in all, the Iraqi government is clearly the weak link in OPEC. It lost two wars
it instigated. It is legally in thrall to a harsh reparations regime, it cannot
control its own air space, and it cannot even import freely but must have UN
accountants approve of every item it wants to buy on the open market.
Ideologically and economically it is prostrate.
But
a US-sponsored Iraqi government committed to neo-liberal policies would
definitely be in a position to undermine OPEC from within or, if it departs,
from without.
Such
a transformation would make it possible to begin a massive investment in the
energy industry that might be an alternative to the spectacular failure of the
high-tech sector that has
Theoretical
Interlude:
We
should realize that oil is not just like any other commodity for a number of
reasons. It is a basic commodity. Its price changes affect the prices of almost
all other commodities and hence average wages and profits. Also, its production
process has a high organic composition, i.e., it involves large amount of
machines and equipment and relatively little direct labor. Finally, it has a
rent component in its cost. All of these elements together make of oil a
special commodity from the point of view of political economy and for our
movement. Let us review them.
Basic commodity: Surely, any group which can make decisions to change the
price of oil can influence the rest of the capitalist system in a way similar
to the way that those who decide on interest rates can. They ultimately have a
power much more general and diffused that it immediately appears. The many
economic models since 1973 that have shown how whole economies have been
"put into recession" because of oil price hikes (whatever one makes
of their scientific value) express this connection. The fact that NY,
Washington and London looks at the composition of the OPEC leaders and sees
Islamic terrorists and nationalist revolutionaries clearly shows how the
economic character of the commodity implies political consequences.
Transferred value: Most commodities do not sell at their values, otherwise
highly demanded commodities like oil would not be produced, since their almost
labor-less production would not generate enough surplus value directly.
Consequently, some value from branches of production with lower organic
composition (e.g., textiles) must be transferred through the market and
competition into the higher organically composed branches like the oil
industry. This means that oil is a commodity that is the object of the
collective interest of the capitalists around the planet. Any attempt to run
such an industry that would be detrimental to the general capitalist interest
will face opposition from a vast assembly of individual capitalists around the
world. (As Kissinger said in the early 1970s: "Oil is too important to
leave it to the Arabs.") Thus there is a tendency for these enterprises to
be closely monitored (and regulated) within nation states and, more
irregularly, internationally. All this to simply say that it is not only the US
oil companies that are vitally interested in the fate of the oil reserves of
Iraq, there are behind them many other corporations whose profits will depend
upon that fate as well.
Indeed,
there is such a collective (almost communal) capitalist concern for such
industries that they can easily be the object of political action. Sometimes
this action can be peaceful. The oil industry in the US is a good example (it
was the initial target of the "anti-trust" movement) as is the
software industry (see the Microsoft case). But sometimes this action can be
violent and prompt war (from the British attack on the Ottoman Empire in WWI to
the Gulf War in 1991.)
Rent: Rent is one of the categories of political economy that is clearly
relevant to the oil industry. There is a differential rent that goes to the
owners of the oil fields due to the fact that not all underground oil is the
same. Some is "sweet" some is not, some is deep, some is not, some is
on land, some is not, some requires a lot of technology to find, some does not.
Clearly, if the price of oil is the roughly the same, then the owner of the territory
where the oil has positive characteristics can charge rent (and expect to be
paid it). Indeed, there is probably some "Absolute Rent" in the
rental costs of oil that is paid simply as tribute to the regime of private
property even when a company is producing in the worst oil areas. All this
rental value comes from the transferred value discussed above. Again, there is
a collective capitalist interest in its part of the cost of oil.
Indeed,
there has been a capitalist critique of "rent-seeking" throughout the
history of political economy. Rent is the epitome of unproductive income,
presumably. This critique still goes on today in the text-books and among the
ideologues of Keynesianism and neo-liberalism. However, for all the critique of
the rentier, rent still is a decisive form of income in capitalist society, as
any New Yorker will attest to! But the productivist ideology that has its roots
in Locke's defense of English colonialism in the late seventeenth century is
always waiting on the horizon to be brought in to justify attacks on the rights
of the rentier. If the rentier, though his/her right of exclusion, disrupts the
productive development of a profitable industry, then there is a right of the
"more productive" to lay claim to the right of exclusion. Therefore,
war is always on the wings of all rental claims.
Given
the exceptional political economic character of the oil commodity, it is not
surprising that this gift of hundreds of millions of years of the meeting of
organic life and the heat of the earth's core should generate so much violence
in a capitalist world. The protester's sign now is saying: no blood should be
spilt to preserve the energy system envisioned by Bush and Co. It must be
scrapped before we are all bloodied for oil. Some new way of distributing the
earthly commons must be devised, the present and future pricing/profit system
that will lead to one war after another cannot be allowed to continue.
Level
3: No Blood for Neo-liberalism
One of the main diplomatic failures of the Bush Administration has been to give
the impression that this new "world domination" strategy is a product
of a spontaneous Nietzschean will to power. Their claim that the urgency of the
Iraq invasion and take-over is due to some imminent threat to national security
posed by Hussein's weapons of mass destruction has been rejected even by many
of their most loyal defenders. There is an emergency the Bush Administration is
responding to, but it is not a military one...it is political-economic one.
The
neo-liberal system of capitalist accumulation (what we in the US call
"globalization") that replaced the Keynesian one in the late 1970s
has been in deep crisis since 1997 and the Bush Administration must respond to
this crisis or it too will be thrown out by its masters, (if not by its
subjects!) I need not inform you of the story that now conventionally begins in
Thailand in July 1997 with the collapse of the "bhat." This was not
the first financial crisis of the neo-liberal model (there was the Mexican
crisis of 1995 we should remember), but the Thai crisis began a series of
events that have led to today's situation. Nor need I trace this series for you
through the dramatic collapse of the stock market bubbles throughout the planet
leading to destruction of trillions of dollars of values (paper though they
were), the stagnation in Europe and Japan, and even the decline of
profitability in US capitalism. This constitutes the first major crisis of
neo-liberalism.
The
Bush Administration's answer to this crisis is war. How can this be? What does
war have to do with this political-economic crisis? Of course, there are many
past reasons for such a correlation and they are not to be slighted. For
example, war is a classic devise of ideological and juridical control of a population
dissatisfied with an unrelenting economic crisis (after all, Chief Justice
Rehnquist has recently reminded us that "In War the Laws are
Silent"). As another example there is "war Keynesianism," i.e.,
the use of war expenditures to stimulate demand for capital and consumer goods
in order to jolt the system out of a far from full employment equilibrium.
These could be reasons for the Bush Administration's answer to the crisis, but
they do not deal with the fact that the crisis of neo-liberalism is global and
that the US government is now "responsible" for the survival of
neo-liberalism/globalization as a whole.
The
main problem with neo-liberal/globalization is that for it to "work"
the system must be global and the participant nations and corporations must
follow the rules of trade even when they are going against their immediate
self-interest. In a time of crisis, however, there is a great temptation for
many participants to drop out of or bend the rules of the game, especially if
they perceive themselves to be chronic losers. What country is going to keep
the recalcitrants (both old - those who refused to be part of the game - and
new-those who dropped out) from proliferating? Up until the post 1997 crisis
most of the heavy work of control was done by the IMF and World Bank through
the power of money, but since then it is becoming clear that there are
countries that will not be controlled by structural adjustment programs.
The
most obvious case is Argentina, but there are other, quieter dropouts in Africa
and South America. The most illustrious recalcitrants are the Bush-baptized
"axis of evil" nations, Iraq (one of the last of the national
socialist states), Iran (one of the last fundamentalist states after the demise
of the Taliban) and North Korea (one of the last of the communist states), but
there are many other Islamic, national socialist and communist governments that
have not transformed their economies into neo-liberal form. This list will
undoubtedly grow unless there is a check, in the form of a world police officer
that will increase the costs of an exit.
There
needs to be for the neo-liberalism of today the equivalent of the role Britain
played for the liberal capitalist system of the 19th century in order for it to
function properly. Clinton and his colleagues believed that the UN could
eventually be used by the US government as such a force. The Bush
Administration disagrees. According to Bush, the US will have to act in its own
name to enforce the rules of the neo-liberal order (even though many of its
adherents are unwilling to do so) and that action must at times be military. In
the end, it is only with the construction of a terrifying Leviathan that the
crisis of neo-liberalism will be overcome and regime of free trade and total
commodification will finally be established for its Millennium. The invasion of
Iraq (the "oil" of the slogan) is a step in this construction process
which is seen by Bush and Co. as a sacrifice of US human and capital resources
for the greater capitalist good. The internal debate in the UN is part of a
complex negotiation process that ultimately is meant to determine the
conditions of US interventions, not their elimination. That is why the
protester's sign does not say, "No Blood for Oil...unless the UN says so!"
The
Bush project might be possible, if there promised to be but a few recalcitrants
to and migrants from the neo-liberal order. However, if the antiglobalization
movement is right, this is not likely. For neo-liberalism does not seem to be
able to deliver on the "sustained growth" that rises all ships even
in its halcyon days. On the contrary, it does not even raise the 20% of the
"ships" it had claimed to do in its inception. This means that many
ruling classes and even more working classes around the planet are going
shopping at Porto Alegre to look for another system.
There
will be neo-liberal wars aplenty in the years to come if the US wishes to play
the British Empire of the 21st century. For what started out in the 19th
century as a tragedy, will be repeated, not as farce, but as catastrophe in the
21st. Thus the slogan, "No Blood for Oil," is a rejection of the
series of wars that are being planned by the Bush Administration for the years
ahead, aimed at terrorizing the recalcitrants of the neo-liberal order into
cooperation.
Level
4: No Blood for Profit, Period
The
protester's sign's slogan has been interpreted on three different levels so
far: first, as a refusal to spill blood for the plunder of Iraq's oil
resources; second, as a refusal to spill blood in order to impose privatization
and "free market" practices on the oil industry internationally;
third, as a refusal to spill blood to preserve the rules of the neo-liberal
global regime. On the final level, I want to think about "No Blood for Oil"
as a revolutionary slogan similar perhaps to the "Land, Peace and
Bread" of the Russian Revolution, i.e., a concrete demand that at first
sight seems quite moderate and practical, but due to the context it becomes
revolutionary. After all, having "revolution" on one's banners does
not make them revolutionary!
The
slogan is neither anticapitalist nor against war per se. It commits one to be
against a war for oil, but not necessarily against war for other things. Nor is
it absolutely anticapitalist, for the sign is conditional. It seems to be
saying, I reject the spilling of blood in order to continue with the
commodification of and profit making off "oil" (or indeed any other
vital stuff). Human blood is beyond the worth of any commodity and a system
that can only run on this higher exchange is a corrupt and obnoxious Molloch.
The slogan seems to be offering an alternative, if "oil" can be
commodified and sold at a profit without the expenditure of blood, then let it
continue. A tame, non-aggressive capitalism is an acceptable one. The slogan
seems to be challenging the "world leaders" at the UN to come up with
such a capitalism. Some indeed are trying, as some non-Bolsheviks tried to
implement the demands of "Land, Peace and Bread," but failed.
Capitalism
in any of its forms - neo-liberal, Keynesian, liberal or mercantile - cannot
meet the challenge of the slogan. It must produce war and blood, since it
cannot satisfy the minimal demands of the human race as a whole, much less its
terrestrial environment. We have five hundred years of experience to support
that claim. Consequently, since the condition can not be satisfied, the
slogan's advocates will not part with their own or others' blood to preserve
it, period.
Indeed,
if we combine the slogans of the anti-globalisation movement--"Another
World is Possible"--with that of the antiwar movement--"No Blood for
Oil"--the political arithmetic gives us, "Another World is
Necessary." We must reason with this arithmetic and commit to in the
coming days, weeks, months and years to be sure that the invasion of Iraq, if
it comes, does not demoralize us, but merely confirms the logic of our path.
1.
A talk given by George Caffentzis at ABC No Rio (NYC) on February 18, 2003 on
the eve of the war.