Andreas Malm’s book Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (Verso 2016) is a history of the steam engine’s role during the origins of industrial capitalism. The book is not a history of “technological innovation” in Silicon Valley’s utopic sense of the phrase. Malm’s description of the Plug Plot Riots, for example, goes far to show that capitalists adopted the steam engine to quell the political power of organized labor in the cotton industry (see Chapter 10).
In Chapter 13, Fossil Capital: The Energy Basis of Bourgeois Property Relations, Malm explains his “General Formula of Fossil Capital.” This short summary will walk through the formula. Throughout I will use a simplified example of capitalist production of cotton commodities.
C-M-C’
This formula is read out loud as: “Commodity — Money — Commodity Prime.” A commodity (C) is sold for money (M) which is used to buy a new commodity (C’). In a capitalist market, I enter bourgeois property relations by selling my labor (C) for a wage (M). I use my wages to purchase the commodities I need to sustain myself, such as food to eat (C’), so that I may work another day — AKA the “social reproduction” of labor.
M-C-M’
This formula is read out loud as: “Money — Commodity — Money Prime.” Money (M) is used to buy a commodity (C) which is then sold on the market for profit (M’). A capitalist buys raw cotton. They transform the raw cotton into a finished cotton textile and then they sell it for a profit. But in order to make a profit, a capitalist must drive down their costs of production. Some costs remain fixed while others are more fungible. While the wages paid to a laborer for, say, 6 hours of work are enough for the laborer to “socially reproduce” themselves — pay rent, buy food, buy clothes— a capitalist will try to keep that laborer working more than 6 hours a day. Marx argues that the ultimate source of capitalist profit is in the production of this “surplus-value,” meaning that capitalists have an incentive to increase working hours and decrease wages.
M-C(L+MP)…P…C’-M’
This extended formula better represents the reality of commodity production. The first commodity (C) is bracketed by (L+MP), where the L stands for Labor Power and the MP stands for Means of Production. In our example, a capitalist purchases raw cotton. They can’t just magically transform the material into a new commodity (C’). Labor must work (LP) the raw cotton through weaving and spinning machines (MP) to complete the process. The P in this formula stands for Production, which, Malm argues, is closely related to the Marxist concept Stoffwechsel (“metabolism” or “material substratum”).
Here, Production (P) is the combination of all the “ancillary” raw materials that go into the production process: “‘coal by a steam-engine, oil by a wheel, hay by draft-horse,’ fulfilling their function and instantly expiring” (Malm 283). Cotton, labor power, and the means of production get combined in a process with “ancillary” materials to produce a new commodity, like cotton clothe, which is then sold for profit. The repetition of this process is called the accumulation of capital, where profits are reinvested in the production process to buy more cotton, more coal, more machines, more labor, more profit.
M-C(L+MP(F))…P^CO2…C’-M’
This is Malm’s General Formula of Fossil Capital. He argues that:
“at a certain stage in the historical development of capital, fossil fuels become a necessary material substratum for the production of surplus-value…they are utilised across the spectrum of commodity production as the material that sets it in motion” (288).
Fossil fuels (F) are combusted to set the means of production (MP) into motion. Carbon dioxide is, of course, expelled during the fossil fuel combustion process. Given that it is not possible to burn fossil fuels without emitting carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide becomes another necessary “ancillary” material of the production process (P^CO2). Fossil capital describes the process where “self-sustaining growth [is] in general welded to the combustion of fossil fuels” (292).
Malm uses the General Formula of Fossil Capital to interpret the “hockey-stick” graph of GDP growth for Japan, Western Europe, Latina America, and Asia between 1000–1998. GDP growth starts to sky rocket in the late 18th century. Malm argues that the new growth represents “different rules of reproduction” for capital. Namely, the new growth marks the beginnings of fossil capital. In short, no industrial capitalism without fossil fuel, no planetary combustion of fossil fuel without industrial capitalism.
Hope you read Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital!
