File spoon-archives/marxism-general.archive/marxism-general_1998/marxism-general.9803, message 1


Date: Sun, 1 Mar 1998 06:07:06 +0100 (MET)
From: rolf.martens-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se (Rolf Martens)
Subject: M-G: UNITE! Info #62en: 2/6 US etc: Blood instead of oil


UNITE! Info #62en: 2/6 US etc: Blood instead of oil
[Posted: 01.03.98]

[Continued from part 1/6]


3. "TRADITIONAL" IMPERIALISM AND RAW
   MATERIALS

On oil and the recent war threat and on raw materials in gene-
ral, you wrote, Juan:

>Of course it's not *just* "about oil," not anymore than US 
>government support for the apartheid regime in South Africa was
>just "about diamonds" or just "about titanium," or the inter-
>vention in Guatemala in 1954 was just "about bananas."  But oil
>played its part.  In the early weeks of the crisis back in 1990
>this was explicit: in the USA gasoline companies raised their 
>prices dramatically and drastically, bourgeois analysts 
>repeatedly pointed out the percentage of the world's oil supply
>that Hussein would control if allowed to keep Kuwait; how much 
>more he would have if allowed to take Saudi Arabia; how much he 
>could prevent from getting out by disrupting traffic through 
>the Gulf; etc.  Oil was on everyone's minds and on George 
>Bush's lips.  Once the domestic cries started coming about "No 
>Blood for Oil" he changed his tune to one of defense of a 
>little country who never hurt anyone.

In fact, oil's "being on everyone's minds" and the dramatic 
raising of prices, that above all had to do with the bourgeois
propaganda and actions, for economic but also political reasons.

You continued:

>Oil is the constant in politics in the Middle East.  It plays 
>its part in the US's cozying up to the Saudi monarchy, it was 
>the weapon used by the Arab League against Israel's supporters 
>abroad, its the stick with which Iraq is daily being beaten, 
>it's involved in US and Russian overtures to Turkey and Georgia,
>it's behind the scramble toward Baku. 

and:

>One can argue that it's not really the US but the oil companies
>that are involved in that degree.  However let us remember the 
>saying that "the business of the United States IS business." 
[Well, as I said, let's also remember that this leaves something
quite vital out: The "business" of keeping the bourgeoisie in
power, in the US itself as well as elsewhere. - RM] 
>What finally moved the USA to act against the Arbenz government
>in Guatemala? Expropriation of United Fruit lands.  What con-
>tributed to the increased pressure on the Allende government in 
>Chile? Expropriation of Anaconda Copper.  What soured the US on
>the Velazco regime in Peru? Expropriation of Cerro de Pasco 
>Copper.  All vested interests of the US bourgeoisie.

These things about the past (at least) are quite true too. And
Lenin, as we know, for instance wrote: 

	"The more capitalism is developed, the more strongly
	the shortage of raw materials is felt, the more
	immense the competition and the hunt for sources of
	raw materials throughout the whole world, the more
	desperate is the struggle for the acquisition of colo-
	nies."

"Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism" (1916), Foreign 
Languages Press, Peking, 1973, p. 98. 

By "raw materials" and a "shortage" of them, Lenin here no doubt
meant *cheap* raw materials of various kinds. All the stuff that
mankind needs exists in enormous amounts on the earth's surface
or not so far beneath it, but if the concentrations of the va-
rious things are too low (the ores too poor, in the case of me-
tals, etc), then not even socialist society will consider using
such deposits. In the case of capitalist/imperialist society, it
always has wanted only the very cheapest.

Of course the price of the raw materials depends on two things:
The stand of extraction or cultivation technology, and the price
of that labour power that carries out the mining, drilling or
growing of the stuff in question. Since 3rd-world labour power
long has been the cheapest by far, 3rd world sources of raw ma-
terials have been of particular interest to the capitalists. 

Many 3rd world countries, as we know, being poorly developed
industrially and in part having been kept that way on purpose by
the imperialists, for a long time have been economically depen-
dent on their exports of just one or a few raw materials, whose
prices have been kept low. In particular from the 1970s on, many
of them joined together in producer associations in order to get
a more fair rate of exchange of their products for industrial
goods; the most famous of them of course was the OPEC which with
an oil boycott in 1973-74 managed to improve this importantly.

But it should be noted in this context that the oil (petrol)
price rises for the consumers in 1973-74 by no means were due
only to the Arab etc countries - quite just - actions. The oil
companies utilized the imperialist propaganda at the time to
add some raises of their own, in their cases extortionist ones,
and, even more importantly, there at that time also were price
raises caused for *political* reasons, anti-industry and anti-
worker such, by a number of imperialist states. Large parts of
the bourgeoisie had then already started to embark on those 
arch-reactionary anti-industry, anti-growth etc propaganda cam-
paigns under the cloak of "protection of the environment" which 
are so massive in the world today, and these served to "justify"
some parts of the extortionist raises.

At the same time, the old hoax that oil "is scarce" was warmed
up again and bandied about in a massive way, together with an
increasing media vilification of that even much more modern
energy source, nuclear fission, and even today, this hoax is
still present as some kind of "undisputed truth" in the way
bourgeois forces present things.


4. THE HOAX THAT OIL IS "SCARCE" -
   COVERING UP AN ARCH-REACTIONARY
   POLICY

It's often stated by the burgeois media that a very large part 
of the world's recoverable oil - "some 60%", even - is in the
Middle East. Such figures are vastly exaggerated and are part
of the "oil is scarce" propaganda, which denies the fact that
there are enormous reserves of recoverable oil and natural gas
in many other countries around the world, some of them proven
and others still which one may infer are there. 

Oil and natural gas are in the main not "fossil", i.e. of bio-
logic origin, stemming from  residues of plants of earlier
epochs of the world's geological history, as is practically al-
ways maintained by the media, but above all stem from methane
and other "lower" hydrocarbons which have been present on earth
since its formation and which are seeping up from great depths,
in some (rather many) places being polymerized into those larger
molecules that make up oil by the activities of deep-earth bac-
teria. (I wrote on this - to many still unknown - fact in Info
#28en of 23.02.97.) This the true story of their origins also
entails the possibility that these energy raw materials are 
quite plentiful, in relation to the needs of human civilization 
at its present level, which they in fact are.

This is confirmed too by the fact that, despite all "scarce"
stories, the proven amounts of remaining recoverable oil and na-
tural gas in the world have grown bigger for each year and never
smaller. To this the big improvements in extraction technique
in recent years, sometimes as much as doubling the amount of oil
that can be extracted from a certain type of well compared to
20 years ago, of course also contributes. 

Many of the oil fields in the Middle East have the technical ad-
vantage that their oil is rather close to the surface. In other
places, deeper wells are needed (or off-shore drilling such as
in the North Sea), sometimes as deep as 6-7.000 metres, but then
at such depths, there really *is* plenty of oil in many coun-
tries. In Russia, for instance, this knowledge has long been 
made large-scale use of, and in China too, which quickly deve-
loped an important oil industry when that country was still so-
cialist. 

But *for reactionary political reasons*, many such deposits
have been left unexplored or unexploited, on purpose. There in
all probablity is a quite big one here in Sweden, for instance
(as I wrote about in Info #28en). In an article in the French
paper le Monde some 15 years ago, the oil companies were criti-
cized for "not doing their business" (that of procuring oil)
"properly", "since", as was pointed out, in the entire rest of
the world, as compared to the US state of Texas, only as many
exploratory oil wells had been drilled so far than in that
single state alone.

In fact, it's the imperialist governments that are responsible
for this, much more than directly the oil companies. And today
their stance has sharpened even more into what may be called a
kind of "warfare *against* oil", which since long hits the 
peoples of the world quite hard, in particular those of many 
countries in the third world.



5. AN IMPERIALIST POLICY OUT OF FEAR OF 
   CONDITIONS RIPENING FOR PROLETARIAN 
   REVOLUTION IN THE WORLD 

Why do some main forces of imperialism today *not* want oil and
other modern energy sources any more but are engaging in a poli-
cy of *curtailing* their use? The basic explanation can actually
be found in a speech by Marx as far back as in 1856 (in London
on 14.04 of that year, see <www.marx.com>). He said that

	"Steam, electricity, and the self acting mule were revo-
	lutionists of a rather more dangerous character than 
	even citizens Barbes, Raspail and Blanqui",

and:

	"This antagonism between modern industry and science on 
	the one hand, modern misery and dissolution on the other
	hand; this antagonism between the productive powers and 
	the social relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, 
	overwhelming, and not to be controverted. Some parties 
	may wail over it; others may wish to get rid of modern 
	arts, in order to get rid of modern conflicts...."

[Continued in part 3/6]  



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