Fossil fuels: manna from heaven or magma from hell?

AuthorRaza, Syed
PositionBook review

A Review of Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

By Timothy Mitchell

(London: Verso, 2013), 292 pages.

Timothy Mitchells Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil provokes a rethinking of the relations between the human and non-human world, democracy and fuel, reality and representation, and the great divergence between East and West. Mitchell, a political theorist and scholar of contemporary political economy, discusses all of these themes within his well-researched analysis of the roles of political actors and fossil fuels in both creating opportunities and setting limits for democratic rule.

Mitchell begins his analysis by contrasting the political machinery erected by coal, and by oil. In focusing on the material composition of the fossil fuel in question, the nuanced examination is well-grounded in reality. (1) The mode of governance required to use coal as a fuel involved large number of workers who mined underneath the ground, without any direct managerial supervision. Due to the solid nature and heavy weight of coal, industrialized centers were located near mines while other cities depended on railways to have coal delivered from point of production to consumption. This concentration of energy created the possibility of a general strike, an opportunity for workers to organize and mobilize against exploitation. (2) Oil, on the other hand, mandated a much different assembly of the sociotechnical world. It needed workers above the ground who relied on machinery to pump out the oil. Being fluid, it could easily be transported to established industrial centers through pipelines and sea routes. Geographically, coal as a fuel moved on a dendritic network, which workers could use to create choke points. Oil, on the other hand, moved along a grid pattern--"like an electricity network, where there is more than one possible path and the flow of energy can switch to avoid blockages or overcome breakdowns." This gave oil companies enormous power to circumvent labor laws, won through decades of struggles, by registering their vessels under "flags of convenience." (3) Ultimately, Mitchell concludes, coal created the mechanism through which the workers' voices came to be heard, while oil dismantled that very "political machine."

Another major problem explored in the book is how objects of calculation, like the economy and the environment, are formulated, by whom, for what purposes, and how they can develop a life of their...

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