A political journey through two decades of social struggles, ranging from the Middle East and Africa to Appalachia, tracing the unifying themes of work, energy, oil, and war. It suggests new boundaries, hidden political commonalities, and possible strategies for confronting the “New World Order.”
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Among the best theorists of capitalism and class struggle of the last 30 years,
By Phil Myers (Brooklyn) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War 1973-1992 (Paperback)
This collection of essays spans nearly 30 years, and represents a sustained, nuanced, and often brilliant effort to illuminate the terrain of the global class struggle, with particular attention to key resources of labor, energy, and food, in the years of neoliberal ascendancy from the late 60s to the first Gulf War.
"Energy frees capital from labor." The collective's perspective foregrounds the role of working class struggle in determining global political and economic developments. The basic thrust of the analysis is that worker's struggles in the late 60s and early 70s disrupted the decades-long Keynesian compromise between capital and labor that guaranteed ever-increasing wages in exchange for ever-increasing productivity. These struggles through the system into crisis, and Capital's way out was to increase global energy prices, which offered the dual advantage of lowering worker's real wages, and providing a massive pool of profit to be invested to replace labor intensive factories with high-energy, high tech production. The oil shocks were not due to scarcity, they note, but about disciplining labor and creating conditions for renewed profit-making. Their analysis of the First Gulf War sees it as primarily an endeavor to discipline a volatile and strategically positioned "oil proletariat", and their study of the demographics of oil-workers in the mid-east is penetrating. Their looks in the closing chapters at the "New Enclosures", the attempts by multinational capital to uproot and expropriate the resources of self-sufficient peasant communities worldwide are fascinating and prescient. Overall an excellent body of work from some of the most brilliant, diligent minds working to understand this system in recent decades. Harry Cleaver's "Reading Capital Politically" is an excellent companion to this book. "Capital has come to achieve laborless production in precicely those sectors which are essential for controlling the working class: energy and food...no autonomy of labor can be allowe din those sectors." p.136
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