Energizing historical materialism: Fossil fuels, space and the capitalist mode of production |
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Authors: | Matthew T. Huber |
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Affiliation: | Clark University, Graduate School of Geography, 950 Main Street, Worcester, MA 01610, United States |
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Abstract: | In this paper, I present a theoretical argument that fossil fuel represents a historically specific and internally necessary aspect of the capitalist mode of production. Despite sustained attention to distributional conflicts between international capital and energy rich nation-states, few historical-materialists have paid attention to the relations between fossil fuel and capital accumulation in industrial capitalist societies. In opposition to ecological economic notions of fixed thermodynamic “laws”, I first propose a dialectical conception of energy as embedded in dynamic social processes and power relations. Second, I review the historical importance of the energy shift from solar or biological sources of energy (muscles, wind, and water) to fossilized sources of energy (coal, oil, and gas). I then demonstrate how attention to fossil fuel energy forces a reexamination of the core insights of ecological Marxism and the political economy of nature. In the core argument of the paper, I reconsider the shift from biological to fossil energy as internal to the generalization and extension of capitalist social relations from two basic vantage points - (1) capitalist production based on wage labor; (2) the spatial conditions of capitalist circulation. I conclude by asking whether it is accurate to conceptualize capitalism as a “fossil fuel mode of production” and highlight the political urgency of a historical materialist perspective that takes seriously the importance of energy to the reproduction of capitalist social relations. |
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Keywords: | Marxist political economy Ecological economics Capitalism Energy Fossil fuel Coal Wage labor Space |
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