Book review: Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital, by Matthew T. Huber:

Matthew T. Huber Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2013; 253 pp: 9780816677856, 25 [pounds sterling] (pbk) The historian David Nye (1998) explains, 'as Americans incorporated new machines and processes into their lives, they became ensnared in power systems that were not easily changed ... Processes of capitalism and industrialization alone do not explain this rapid development or [the massive] national difference. Culture does.' Matthew T. Hubers Lifeblood builds critically on this idea, explaining that capital is central to a particular construction of a cultural politics of life--'the lived practices and meanings that naturalize capitalist forms of power and hegemony'--an 'entrepreneurial life' made possible by the socioecological relations that extract, refine, consume and enliven the 'dead ecologies' of fossil-fuel energy. Huber's focus, importantly, is on 'life' and the particular construction of an 'American way of life' under oil-fired capitalism, as opposed to the fossil-fuel machine-dominated 'work' (for more on work, see Noble 1977, 1984). He explains that oil is 'a central energy resource shaping the forces of social reproduction ... the real subsumption of life under capital ... [wherein] life appears as capital, or what Foucault calls "the enterprise form" so central to neoliberal subjectivities.' With this focus, Huber adds a unique analysis to the growing literature on energy and capitalism, providing a critique and supplement to the work of, amongst others, Timothy Mitchell (2011) and Mazen Labban (2008). In the theoretical introduction to the work, Chapter 1, Huber focuses on the 'fetishism of oil', which embeds it with an undialectical 'thingness', an alien character and attribution of causality outside of social relations. As Huber argues, oil needs to be understood as a specifically material aspect of the alienated and seemingly autonomous power of capital over living labour. The cultural politics of capital shifts from the formal to the real subsumption of life as the wage-labour relation and social reproduction based on commodity relations is supplemented with a material transformation made possible by oil (a home, car and family), and when 'life' is expressed materially as an 'individualized product of hard work, investment, competitive tenacity and entrepreneurial "life choices'". Huber argues this is central to creating and reinforcing the 'lived process' of neoliberal hegemony. The power of oil, then, is not in its socio-natural properties alone, but in particular historical geographies and social relations that harness its versatility, abundance, energy density and liquidity. Huber's larger historical account focuses on how the materiality of oil shapes its 'system of provision'--from extraction, distribution and refining to consumption. The rest of the book focuses on particular moments of crisis and stability in the development of petro-capitalism in the USAs--specifically, the 1930s, 1945-1973, 1970s, and 2000s--which align with specific points of the 'system of provision' so heavily influenced by the materiality of oil. In Chapter 2, Huber roots the struggle over the production and reproduction of life under capitalist relations in what Marx termed the 'value of labor power'. Under the historical and geographical context of the Great Depression and the New Deal response in the 1930s, a massive reconfiguration of the value of labour power was emergent from the struggles between labour, capital and the state over issues such as wages, housing, living conditions and the public provision of services and infrastructure--or largely, the determinants of the standard of living. Achieving the 'American way of life' was complicated by oil overproduction resultant from the US legal regime of private property and the subterranean oil deposits, which in turn resulted in glut, collapsing prices and a political regime that intended to curtail production through pro-rationing that would set 'recommended' production limits. …