Lifeblood: Geographies of petro-capitalism in the United States.
详细信息
- 作者：Huber ; Matthew T.
- 学历：Doctor
- 年：2009
- 导师：Emel, Jody,eadvisorMartin, Deborah,eadvisor
- 毕业院校：Clark University
- ISBN：9781109125764
- CBH：3356638
- Country：USA
- 语种：English
- FileSize：12459662
- Pages：260
文摘
Although many explanations for US oil addiction exist, this project offers a macrostructural analytical approach that treats oil resources as a constitutive element of capital accumulation, crisis and socio-institutional change. Drawing from the regulation approachs notion of the wage-relation, I highlight the central role of petroleum products to the social reproduction of the basic commodity of capitalism -- labor power. From this foundation, I position the governance of oil provision as essential problem of and precondition to capitalist development. Methodologically, this research required a guided search through archival, newspaper, policy and oral history documents, secondary historical literature and the compilation and organization of historical statistical data. First, I argue that cheap oil was a vital ecological precondition to the remaking of the "wage-relation" in the middle of the twentieth century around a particular "Fordist" regime of mass consumption. I utilize statistical data to demonstrate how oil was necessary to both a mode of sociospatial development based upon car and home ownership and the industrialization of the food system. Second, I argue that the provision of "cheap oil" is not automatic, but the result of political struggles over the distribution of wealth and power from oil resources. In conjunction with the regulationist emphasis on the 1930s as the crucial historical era of economic restructuring, I focus on the crisis of oil overproduction that forced state governments in Texas and Oklahoma to call in the National Guard to halt production in 1931. I find that the institutional reforms enacted in response to this crisis created stability in the oil market throughout the postwar growth regime. Rather than being engineered by "Big oil", I found that this system was more beneficial to high-cost "independent" oil producers. This analysis emphasizes the complex balancing of competing power blocs needed to achieve political consensus or hegemony on oil issues. In the conclusion, I suggest that petro-Fordism reveals a profoundly capitalist -- but equally irrational and wasteful -- logic on both ends of the oil commodity chain from production to consumption. I end the concluding chapter by considering this studys value for understanding the crisis of petro-capitalism in the 21st century.