Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

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As a result of the Nixon Doctrine, there was a new justification for arms sales as a means of arming groups and states that sought to contain the spread of communism. The United States also restricted available energy by cultivating a culture of high carbon energy consumption. Oil created a denatured political life whose central object – the economy – appeared capable of infinite growth. In this way, Mitchell challenges critical approaches to capitalism which have granted it a lamentable but single logic, and instead shows that there is little logic in a system built on tenuous ‘science’ and even more tenuous alliances.

The book has some valuable and interesting observations about the history of fossil fuel economy and the middle east. This significant book should be read in conjunction with Robert Corfe's important book, "The Crisis of Democracy in the advanced industrial economies," which reaches the conclusion that the left/right divide that has served as the medium in resolving democracy's problems over so long a period is now reaching the end of its useful life. Our modern conception of “the economy” is built upon what once appeared to be an infinite quantity of oil.

S.-Iraq war, Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy set out to analyze the relationship between oil and democracy. To the contrary, the book explains very well that the logic of separate development - both across and within societies, in the form of inequality - is its guiding force and strength, along with a fundamental hatred of democracy that other forces in society attempt to counter.

Democratic processes, to me, now seem to be mostly about the plebian ability to gain a small share of vote and benefits, only from their ability to withold their essential roles in the production process. Mitchells conception of how oil itself maintained the post war currency system is something I had never heard of before. Around 1915 the British Navy was trying to acquire oil from Mexico, then the third largest oil producing company and a part of the world claimed by the Rockefeller interests, which protected itself by funding the overthrow of the government. Reading this book—having access to a sweeping yet bracingly simple long-view of modern civilization in its entirety, as seen through the fundamental dynamics of how carbon fuels have shaped the process of both politics and economics, leaving you with both a deep abiding sense of superhuman clarity but god-like deep pessimism —must be what it feels like to be Dr.Mitchell outlines how he doesn’t think that’s so in the afterword, in a way that is consistent with his initial argument and believable. Oil companies alone could not act with the required force to maintain control over production in the Middle East, so they banded neoimperialist aims, persuading agencies such as the C. Such great profits have enabled great political, industrial and military power, which has always wanted to, and vastly increased global oil dependence. There is no doubt that coal and steam engines fundamentally changed the British world, creating conditions for the first Industrial Revolution, but to suggest that it is this development that accounts for the rise of the working class ignores all the foundation laid by earlier generations. Notably, he looks at the move from the coal-based system which allowed for organised labour (particularly miners, train workers and dock workers) to block the entire economic system through the power of the general strike, to an oil system which was dispersed and held together by a fragile set of geopolitical faustian bargains championed by the United States.