Mark Jones writes:
> In times past some people on this list somewhat sneeringly referred to
> the notion that energy politics might be an important cause of capitalist
> crisis and of war as 'oilism'. Those of us who argued that apocalyptic
> energy crises were just around the corner were derided as Malthusian
> misanthropes and hopeless Cassandras. Who was right and who was wrong?
I don't know about others, but to me, "oilism" refers to the view that (1) almost every geopolitical issue in countries that have petrol-producing potential or a pipeline projection can be reduced to the issue of oil and (2) the imminent disappearance of oil from the market at economical prices, causing economic crises.
An example of #1 would be the excessive emphasis on oil as an explanation of the US/NATO war against Serbia. That doesn't say that oil isn't important some of the time, as with Iraq. But can the Israel/Palestine situation be explained solely by reference to the battle for oil?
An example of #2 would be the forgetting of the potential for economizing on petrochemical energy, something Europe has been much better at than the U.S. But even the U.S. has been much for energy-efficient lately than it was before the 1970s (despite those damned SUVs).
I don't know about Malthusian misanthropy and Cassandran crisis theories, but #2 is one version of the Ricardo/Malthus theory that the capitalist economy "naturally" tends to grind to a halt (the stationary state) due to natural scarcities and diminishing returns.
The article doesn't prove any theory correct or incorrect. All it indicates is that the oilmen want oil, something that's pretty obvious. It also might show the words people who believe their own propaganda, as with the generations of US-based merchants who have looked to the Chinese Market as the source of Gigantic Profits (even though that Market never seems to pay off as promised).
Even if oilism -- as defined above -- is totally wrong, that doesn't mean that oil doesn't play an important role in the world. To my mind, an important part of capitalist competition is aggressive rent-seeking. The big attraction of oil to the oilmen is that it often costs much less to produce than the price it can be sold for. This implies that there's something for nothing, an extremely attractive proposition to all capitalists. And if oil company A doesn't get those rents, oil company B will get them (a zero-sum game), so that the rent-seeking competition can turn into a war, either an economic one or a hot one. This, of course, gets worse as oil prices rise (as oil becomes scarcer). Further, as the article notes, a hot war might lead to further oil shortages, encouraging oil prices to rise even more.
So we don't have to believe that international wars are always and everywhere oil-based phenomena (to paraphrase arch-monetarist Milton Frieman's phrase about inflation and money) to say that oil plays a major role.
We also don't have to believe that oil will Inevitably Run Out to say that oil prices can be a short- or medium-term problem for the world economy. But the article says that oil prices may actually fall after a U.S. victory. That hardly fits with part #2 of "oilism."
BTW, isn't Iraq a relatively high-cost producer of oil, so that the size of its estimated reserves might turn out to be irrelevant?
JD
