Book review: Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital, by Matthew T. Huber

Abstract

Matthew T. Huber Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and Forces of Capital, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2013; 253 pp: 9780816677856, 25 [pounds sterling] (pbk) The historian David Nye (1998) explains, 'as Americans incorporated new machines and processes into their lives, they became ensnared in power systems that were not easily changed ... Processes of capitalism and industrialization alone do not explain this rapid development or [the massive] national difference. Culture does.' Matthew T. Hubers Lifeblood builds critically on this idea, explaining that capital is central to a particular construction of a cultural politics of life--'the lived practices and meanings that naturalize capitalist forms of power and hegemony'--an 'entrepreneurial life' made possible by socioecological relations that extract, refine, consume and enliven 'dead ecologies' of fossil-fuel energy. Huber's focus, importantly, is on 'life' and particular construction of an 'American way of life' under oil-fired capitalism, as opposed to fossil-fuel machine-dominated 'work' (for more on work, see Noble 1977, 1984). He explains that oil is 'a central energy resource shaping forces of social reproduction ... real subsumption of under capital ... [wherein] appears as capital, or what Foucault calls the enterprise form so central to neoliberal subjectivities.' With this focus, Huber adds a unique analysis to growing literature on energy and capitalism, providing a critique and supplement to work of, amongst others, Timothy Mitchell (2011) and Mazen Labban (2008). In theoretical introduction to work, Chapter 1, Huber focuses on 'fetishism of oil', which embeds it with an undialectical 'thingness', an alien character and attribution of causality outside of social relations. As Huber argues, oil needs to be understood as a specifically material aspect of alienated and seemingly autonomous power of capital over living labour. The cultural politics of capital shifts from formal to real subsumption of as wage-labour relation and social reproduction based on commodity relations is supplemented with a material transformation made possible by oil (a home, car and family), and when 'life' is expressed materially as an 'individualized product of hard work, investment, competitive tenacity and entrepreneurial life choices'. Huber argues this is central to creating and reinforcing 'lived process' of neoliberal hegemony. The power of oil, then, is not in its socio-natural properties alone, but in particular historical geographies and social relations that harness its versatility, abundance, energy density and liquidity. Huber's larger historical account focuses on how materiality of oil shapes its 'system of provision'--from extraction, distribution and refining to consumption. The rest of book focuses on particular moments of crisis and stability in development of petro-capitalism in USAs--specifically, 1930s, 1945-1973, 1970s, and 2000s--which align with specific points of 'system of provision' so heavily influenced by materiality of oil. In Chapter 2, Huber roots struggle over production and reproduction of under capitalist relations in what Marx termed 'value of labor power'. Under historical and geographical context of Great Depression and New Deal response in 1930s, a massive reconfiguration of value of labour power was emergent from struggles between labour, capital and state over issues such as wages, housing, living conditions and public provision of services and infrastructure--or largely, determinants of standard of living. Achieving 'American way of life' was complicated by oil overproduction resultant from US legal regime of private property and subterranean oil deposits, which in turn resulted in glut, collapsing prices and a political regime that intended to curtail production through pro-rationing that would set 'recommended' production limits. …