Space, Oil and Capital by Mazen Labban

Mazen Labban , Space, Oil and Capital . New York : Routledge , 2008 . ISBN 978-0-415-77391-1 (cloth) Mazen Labban's timely book aims to puncture the widely circulated proposition that it is oil's geological scarcity that explains both its global supply and pricing dynamics as well as geopolitical conflicts by instead arguing quite the converse, that it is oil's abundance that perforce requires the socio-spatial manufacture of its scarcity in order to propel capitalist accumulation forward. As such, de-mystifying the historical-geographical materiality of oil requires an examination of inter-capitalist competition and its attendant process of monopolization. Therefore the key issue, in the context of continued growth in global proven oil reserves over the last quarter century, is protecting profitability rather than, as is often thought, locating new oil supplies to meet growing demand. This approach is vital for tempering the neo-Malthusian power of peak oil theories that take root with every price increase wave. By developing a theoretical core that focuses on how inter-capitalist competition, particularly between extractive and landed capital, seeks control over the material basis of production, Labban's work stands in contrast to most other political economic analyses of global petropolitics centered on the strategic role of oil in the assertion of American hegemony. Within the political economic rethinking of petropolitics currently afoot, Labban implicitly expands the preliminary ideas of the Bay-area collective Retort (Boal et al 2005) who aim to redirect the now well-worn argument that the strategic US interest in Iraqi oil lay in its growing import dependencies by asserting instead that we need to examine its pivotal role in reinvigorating capitalist profitability. Moreover, the book also effectively responds to the call to bring “old-fashioned resource geography” back into the center of economic geography (Hayter, Barnes and Bradshaw 2003). The book's first three chapters provide the most scrupulous exposition to date of the theoretical basis for understanding inter-capitalist competition within the global oilscape, while the remaining three chapters analyze the trajectory of Russian and Iranian oil development. The theoretical framework is distilled from within an established Marxist tradition that draws on Marx's writings as well as the Third International's work on imperialism and monopoly capital by Lenin, Bukharin and Luxemburg supplemented by the second phase of imperialism studies by Baran, Swezzy, Magdoff and Mandel. Labban sets out how the contradiction between capital as a whole and the individual factions of capital is expressed through securing the objective means of production, which for oil is manifested as the contradiction between productive capital and landed capital. The latter itself exhibits the contradictory tension between expansion and integration on the one hand where land is opened to production, and fragmentation and isolation where resources are held back in order to garner surplus profit. In particular, Labban underscores how centralization relies on ever-increasing amounts of non-renewable resources to uphold profitability, thereby deepening territorial fixity. Labban's framing is to be particularly welcomed given the peculiar absence of monopoly processes in the most recent third phase of imperialism studies despite some attempts to raise its profile (see Foster 2006). While a very bold and necessary step forward, this first half is developed with minimal reference to the long-established literature on the oil trade as well as the more recent work on the political economy of extractive sectors. By actively interweaving the ways in which the very abstracted theory of imperialist and monopoly dynamics is borne out by the global history of oil production and pricing, a stronger sense of its interpretive power would have been forthcoming whilst redressing some of the ongoing criticisms of earlier imperialism studies that it insufficiently contends with empirical depth. In addition, acknowledging and critically assessing the earlier interventions on oil and rent theory (from the 1980s and 1990s) by leftist oil economists such as Bernard Mommer (a German Marxist now Venezuela's Governor to OPEC) and Cyrus Bina had the potential to strengthen the analysis of what politically differentiates extractive and landed capital as social relations. Lastly, an engagement with the work of sociologist Stephen Bunker and colleagues (eg Bunker and Ciccantell 2005) would have opened up Labban's understanding of monopolization to a range of multiple factors because their examination of the global race for resources such as aluminum and steel involves locating the complex interconnections between the environmental characteristics of the raw materials themselves, the firm's particular strategies, as well as the bargaining politics between firms and states (both core and peripheral). Essentially, this was considered necessary for grasping the dissimilar histories of resource-exporting countries in ways that theories of imperialism and monopoly capital were not able to encompass. In the second half of the book, the focus on Russian and Iranian oil dynamics are largely centered on the contradictory battles by the owners of the black gold, the nation-state, to retain control over its rich oil resources for national development even as this has necessitated opening up to global financial capital as well as transnational oil companies from the 1990s onwards. By tracking the twists and turns of their oil development policies, what becomes clear is the commonality of their strategies whereby the previously nationalized oil industry becomes transformed into a series of state-controlled hybrid corporations (partly state-owned, partly foreign-owned). This move towards liberalization is partially the outcome of depressed oil prices in the late 1980s caused by the arrival of North Sea oil to the market. What Labban does not highlight here, however, is how displacement of the earlier monopoly power over posted prices (under the “seven sisters”) by a much less controllable politics of pricing driven by spot and futures markets from the early 1980s onwards has significantly affected inter-capitalist competition. Most importantly, because the chosen case studies reveal that both Russia and Iran's oil policies were very much molded by Cold War imperatives as much as economic factors, a chapter that sets out the broader interlinkages between geopolitics and geoeconomics over oil, in the way Khalidi (2009) has recently provided in his analysis of US power in the Middle East, would have better contextualized the individual country-level developments. After all, it is precisely the conventional narrative on the sequential relationship between geopolitics and geoeconomics that is being revisited (see Cowen and Smith 2009). The book certainly provides an important new entry into the political economy of oil that will be valuable to economic geography as well as resource geography graduate students. There is a desperate need to theorize oil's role in capitalism because its production process, as Marx identified in The Fragment on Machines in the Grundrisse, gradually culminates in the automatic system of machinery, fed by coal and oil as matières instrumentales, within which the “value-creating power of the individual labour capacity is an infinitesimal, vanishing magnitude” (Marx 1973:694) even as it warps the environmental conditions of global life

Context (archaeology) · Economics · Economy · Hegemony · Market economy · Peak oil · Political science · Politics · Scarcity · Global Energy and Sustainability Research · Law · Market Dynamics and Volatility · Natural Resources and Economic Development

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