Carbon Capitalism

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 Carbon Capitalism
Power, Social Reproduction
and World Order

Tim Di Muzio

London • New York

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 Published by Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB
www.rowmaninternational.com

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. is an affiliate of

Rowman & Littlefield
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA
With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK)
www.rowman.com

Copyright © 2015 Tim Di Muzio

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: HB 978-1-7834-097-5
      PB 978-1-7834-099-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

<to come>
™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

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 For Rakkaalleni, Hannalle [AQ1]

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 Contents

Preface ix

1  Carbon Capitalism and the Petro-Market Civilization 1

2  The Political Economy of a Petro-Market Civilization 21

3  The Birth of Petro-Market Civilization in Britain 47

4  The Expansion of Petro-Market Civilization in the United States 85

5  Global Carbon Capitalism 115

Conclusion: The Post-Carbon Era and the General Crisis of Social
Reproduction 153
Bibliography 173
Index 195

vii

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 Preface

It is likely that every book ever written never comes out exactly as one
intended it at the stage of conception. Every study is ‘a particular bundle of
silences’—so Trouillot tells us—and this study is no different (1995, 27). It
is a work set in a particular time period and written in particular places. There
are always gaps to fill, time constraints and more literature to consult and
critically reflect on, particularly the more we try to engage literatures outside
our own narrow fields of specialization. But in the end, the author cannot
escape making decisions of what to include and exclude, what to emphasize
and what to downplay, how to weigh agency and structure and how to bal-
ance theory and history. The author, as it were, is a bit like a curator of words,
thoughts, histories and theories. If Foucault is correct to say that knowledge is
not made for understanding but for cutting, much has been left on the cutting
room floor in the curation of this work (1984, 88). In truth, dear reader, this
book could have been twice the length and filled with even more examples,
but my partner reminds me that there will be other books to write. As you will
come to find, what I have tried to do is provide a brief genealogy of what I
call carbon capitalism and its concomitant petro-market civilization. I have
done so, and the reader will have to judge how well, by focusing on the ex-
ploitation of fossil fuels, the forms of social reproduction that were made pos-
sible and the logic of differential capitalization. Readers who are interested in
the history of capitalism will find a new theory of its emergence viewed from
the capital-as-power perspective, one that takes energy, social reproduction
and capitalization as fundamental aspects of the making of a world order. I
hope the reader finds my arguments unique, well defended and insightful, but
I will always welcome criticism. In this sense, I am well aware that this is not

ix

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 x Preface

the final word on the subject. I have many people to thank, and the usual sus-
pects know who they are. But this book would not have been possible without
Hanna’s patience and Matthew Dow’s kind assistance with research. I owe a
great deal of this work to them. To conclude this short preface, I would like to
leave you with a quote from Paul Sweezy that expresses my sentiments about
this work almost exactly: ‘The conclusions so reached are obviously tenta-
tive; they are set forth here, however, because it seems likely that the insight
gained by pursuing this method is sufficiently enlightening to warrant a great
deal of further study along the same general line’ (cited in Fine 1988, 237).

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