A Speculative American Petrohistory of the 20th Century
Hydrocarbon Corpse Juice Part II
You don’t need to have read what I called Part I, but you can. You can also skip ahead and read about plastics.
All energy on the planet is solar energy. This solar energy exists here on earth as movement, heat, and biochemical energy. It matters what machines we use to convert that solar/photosynthetic energy into survival, and, ultimately, wealth. Before the Industrial Revolution, most of those machines were animals, including most importantly, human animals, who could convert biochemical energy into muscle power and so labor power. Under this preindustrial regime, the most efficient way to gain power was to accumulate and control human bodies: slaves. Ultimately, slavery was the engine of colonialism — the energy that drove the domineering Europeans to invade, occupy, dominate and control so very many communities around the world. Slavery came to demand a total logic of white supremacy that infected everything. And then, our story begins:
In 1880, Pattillo Higgins, a White Supremacist in Beaumont, Texas, with a fourth grade education, threw a bomb into a Black baptist church and then started shooting into the windows. He was seventeen. I don’t know whether he killed any of the churchgoers, or whether everyone inside survived, and it wasn’t recorded because Black lives didn’t matter. However, Patillo got in a shootout with the cops who responded to the scene, and he killed one. Pattillo was acquitted of the murder, since after all, he was simply performing his duty as a young racist to terrorize Black people in their own church, and the cop was a race traitor for defending them, and this is Eastern Texas in 1880 (“self-defense”).
Ten years later, the still-young Racist bought himself a patch of land way outside of Beaumont, where he still lived without fear of reprisal, called Spindletop, and spent the next nine years trying to drill for oil there, and failing to do anything, wasting intolerable amounts of capital, and yet always getting bailed out (just like that jury did back in Beaumont). Then in January, 1901, oil erupted out of the hole, destroying the machinery and shooting 100 feet above the derrick. It flowed for 9 days at a rate of 100,000 barrels a day, as if it was eager to be free of its subterranean lair: not quite as a caged animal would escape into freedom, more like an ejaculation that doesn’t end. That 900,000 barrels of oil was the vanguard of oil’s entropic conquest of America, as Texans and other White southerners made themselves rich and Capital was mobilized to tap the flow of distilled photosynthesis spurting out of the ground, turning money into oil’s key instrument to get itself into combustion chambers to release its pent-up joules.
Suddenly we could tap hundreds of thousands of years of photosynthetic energy at once, millions of metric tons of oil just bursting out of the ground, flinging itself at us like a horny teenager. After Spindletop, new oil fountains kept leaping up around Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, each one creating a new capital stream, each one making rich first a few White men, then groups of them as the streams began to run together into rivers: Texaco, Chevron, Standard Oil. This was the birth of a new global power with a center of gravity in the former Slave states, where, at the time, the Civil War was referred to as “The Lost Cause.”
(It is worth mentioning that coal, which was the tellurian entity that spawned the first phase of the industrial revolution, and which continues to be a major necrotic agent today, has its own personal history, different from but related to that of oil.)
So, modern American petrohistory is about 120 years old. Not a long time, just longer than the life of a real person, and indeed, many people still alive have lived through the great majority of it. On a timeline, the fossil fuel age looks like the flame on a long cigarette. And it’s creating an epochal extinction event that will be quite unpleasant to live through.
But apparently 120 years was long enough to seem like it’s always been here, and always will be. Apparently, it was long enough for capitalism to complete its domination around the globe, long enough for it to grow into maturity as colonialism’s replacement. Long enough to spread the false dogma of progress, of a natural human right to air conditioning, internet, and power tools (none of which I’m prepared to live without). Long enough to make it seem like anyone without a national regime of mass consumption has been left behind, and need to be doing everything they can to “develop.” Long enough to create a third world and intentionally, cruelly impoverish it, long enough to destroy the idea of a second world, the only alternative that gained enough power to pose a dialectic challenge to capitalism: Communism. Long enough to irrevocably change the climate of the world and trigger a mass extinction event that will be the defining feature of the 21st century. Long enough, in other words, to remake the world.
I believe that oil is a sentient entity, with its own intelligence and motivations. That it has manipulated humanity into its own self-demise. To make myself seem moderate and mainstream, I’ll start by citing Amitav Ghosh, who, building on the fact that today scientists accept that trees in a forest are able to communicate with one another, develops a very common sense vision of arboreal consciousness:
“In that humans lack the ability to communicate as trees do, could it not be said that for a tree it is the human who is mute? If trees possessed modes of reasoning, their thoughts would be calibrated to a completely different timescale, perhaps one in which they anticipate that most humans will perish because of a planetary catastrophe. The world after such an event would be one in which trees would flourish as never before, on soil enriched by billions of decomposing human bodies. It may appear self-evident to humans that they are the gardeners who decide what happens to trees. Yet, on a different timescale, it might appear equally evident that trees are gardening humans.”
Good point, Amitav; but why are you talking about trees in such necrophiliac terms? Trees may well be our best allies and friends, one of our best defenses against the real enemies: Fossil Fuels. Oil, Gas, and Coal are directly changing the climate. They are the direct and proximate cause of warming the planet. Why should we not believe they are doing so on purpose? If humans are in control, why do we have so little control here?
If oil were intelligent, it would be a deeply inhuman intelligence —alien in a terrestrial sense — and so, as Stanislaw Lem proves in His Master’s Voice, utterly unrecognizable and incomprehensible to us. Oil doesn’t speak human languages, and so we may never know what it wants. But we can guess. The humans who are indentured to the cause of Oil’s conquest — for instance, “oil companies” — do not speak or act for oil, even though they work in oil’s interest. Nonetheless, by looking at the actions of those people and corporate persons, we may discern the outlines of oil’s plan: “moving the Earth’s body toward the Tellurian Omega — the utter degradation of the Earth as a Whole” (Cyclonopedia, 17).
Oil is the most influential nonhuman consciousness in the history of humanity. Oil was on every side of every war of the 20th century. And so, it can be said that in the 20th century, history stopped being human history.
Oil is inhabited by war machines, a tendency toward violence and domination; a unification of power by the fascist forces of combustion. Any one agent of this power is completely disposable and replaceable, any individual easily sacrificed. It’s in the action of sacrifice where the profit is made. The fissuring of carbon structures, the release of Joules into Watts. Reza Negarestani, whose idea this is, explains in Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008) that
History can now only be told of the ascent from the ground of this primordial power, the ongoing apotheosis/combustion of fossil fuels into atmospheric carbon. And once it was burned, of course, that carbon could heat the earth. Perhaps their goal is to recreate the conditions of the biosphere from 358 million years ago, when most of that stuff was alive.*** Reptiles ruled the world when the solar energy was captured by the plants that went on to become oil; it is their world that we burn. What should we call this? I suggest we stick with the obvious: Petrolocism (petrolocized, petrolocization) is the process of being reconstituted by oil, and thereby accelerated greatly. Look, for example, at the agriculture sector: Food production was petrolocized after Fritz Haber invented nitrogen fertilizer in 1918. And so on, for every area of the economy.
During that period of Fritz Haber’s early work, American Oil was growing up into a political agent, an interest in the international stage. All over the world, Europeans were in a frenzy of exploiting their colonial holdings, in sadistic, genocidal ways. American Oil ended up on all sides of World War I — forming partnerships with the English, the Germans, whoever offered access to new streams of oil or capital. World War One was the brutality of colonialism brought home to the imperial core, the brain-poison mix of colonialism and the acceleration of industrialization making everyone go insane in an aimless orgy of violence, and which accelerated the increased oil consumption. That same Fritz Haber, a Jewish Prussian, became the “Father of Chemical Warfare.” He formed a special troop within the Prussian army for gas warfare that formed the core group (minus Haber, who left to live in Japan) that became I.G. Farben after the war, and started making deals with John Rockefeller. Of course, as that entity pivoted from being a unit of the army to a private corporation to an arm of the Nazi government, it turned hard into antisemitism — it would have been interesting to ask Eichmann about Fritz Haber.
Meanwhile, during the Weimer days, IG Farben started making deals with John Rockefeller. In 1927 Standard Oil and IG Farben founded the company Standard IG Farben in Germany. The deal involved Standard Oil sharing patents about coal hydrogenation — a process that liquefies coal — with the Germans in exchange for patents on how to manufacture synthetic rubber; fictionalized and made horny as Imipolex G in Gravity’s Rainbow. Through a different subsidiary, the Vacuum Oil Company, which also had ties to the colonists in South Africa, employed Adolf Eichmann until 1933, when he quit to join the SS. Standard oil continued their dealings with the Nazi party throughout the war, of course. Oil spreading the gospel of its technologies of fire; oil lubricating the processes, accelerating events, massaging interests.
Of course, American Oil wouldn’t just pull out of a market because of a War; It is not in the nature of Capital to shrink. From its very beginning, the oil industry was the beloved child of the Markets: a wonderful, endless stream of collateralized bonds and overvalued stocks for anyone to multiply their returns.
This is where Gravity’s Rainbow picks up the story. Gravity is what the rocket must push against: a force and a counterforce, a We system and a They system. It is also the force that created oil by repressing and condensing organic matter over time. Pynchon describes the process of petrolocization that was World War Two, when Enzian, an African, arrives at the oil refinery at Nordhausen.
The War was a self-reproducing iterative program, a driving essence that we call Capitalism, but was never about competitive markets. It was about creating & maintaining absolute monopolies that unify state and corporate demands into one great Power. The Real War was about the Markets. It was in Perfect Working Order as soon as the war ended.
Lyle Bland, the billionaire Masonic spiritualist, who “has had his meathooks well into the American day-to-day since 1919,” and ends up funding “psychological experiments” on people, has a vision as he is dying:
Worth noting that Bland is maybe the only character who’s entirely in control of himself because he’s in control of everything around him, unlike Slothrop, who has no idea what’s really going on, and knows it.
Ostensibly, in that time after the war ended, when the wreckage was becoming thus remobilized, and the Zone was a going concern, there was a pivot in political enmity. The great bad Other had to become the Soviet Union. This conveniently opened the door to any relationships Nazis might want to have with Americans, as long as their cover was passable.
Back in nonfictional life, Oil began its takeover of American government in the very pivot from fighting the Axis to fighting the USSR. Particularly notable in the immediate Postwar period is this James Forrestal, whose suspicious “suicide” is much speculated about. But it is not just his death that concerns the petrological. Before the war, he was an investment lawyer who oversaw and got rich off the 1936 merger of Standard Oil and Texaco. During the war he was a DoD advisor to Roosevelt overseeing the Navy and buildup in the Pacific War. He was probably one of the only people who knew what really happened at Pearl Harbor. Then he became Secretary of Defense and became the “godfather of Containment” — he took more of a mentorship position to Brennan who claims the idea. Henry Wallace, FDR’s VP, said that Forrestal’s hands were “stained with oil” since by then he was invested in Arab oil in the middle east. (He made perhaps the fatal mistake of being anti-Zionist for oil reasons.)
Why would Oil organize itself around fighting the USSR? (The Soviet Union was as petrolocized as America, maybe more so — it exported more, and was certainly a death-cult. Stalin bought into the petrological dogma that industrialization meant progress, although his countrymen have, in my experience, generally always realized that everything remains generally shitty throughout history and nothing ever gets better. He sacrificed millions of bodies at the pyre of burning oil. But it didn’t work.)
Because it was never really about the Russians, it was about the takeover of America. It was about making a world in which there is no alternative to whatever degraded state of monopoly-captured Capitalism we now find ourselves in. Communism was the last dialectical challenge to Petrocapitalism. They did destroy the real Communist and Socialist movement in America, and destroyed labor organizations. Forrestal could destroy the movement, but he could never defeat the Russians in his mind. His own paranoia that he passed on to Joe McCarthy (he was the one who provided the “list of communists in government” that Joe had in his pocket). He was a vocal member of the John Birch society. Obviously, I could have chosen many other Cold Warriors, and people more intimately connected to Dallas, November 22, 1963.
Oil rode the Cold War to utter domination in the form of American Capitalism, in part by creating better consumers. It is, of course, mainly an economic force, and only a political one only insofar as that’s where we can look to hear it speak. Whether or not it was because of the cold war, during the postwar economic boom, oil put itself in a position to wage an extermination campaign — an ecocide — against humanity and many thousands of other species in an the fastest and most intense mass extinction event in the history of the world, which is now only beginning to gain its momentum. It did so partly by creating a permanent state of war, a fight against an Other to drive policy and accumulate wealth, sometimes also called “funding,” rather than a positive ideology like Socialism, which could have distributed funding to the people’s needs.
It has built a world where constant consumption of petroenergy is an inevitability, almost all day, every day. I don’t want to live without it, certainly not unilaterally. If we all could commit to an energy use strike, I’d consider the practicality of joining myself. But since we can’t even approach collective action, I’m enjoying my comfort. Ravi, six years old sitting beside me, is going to live through exactly whatever history he is going to live through, and me turning off the light in the next room (which I will nonetheless do) isn’t going to change that.
I’m going to write about the latter half of the twentieth century in a Part III, so watch this space.
In the end, this is not about humans. We’re not going to survive (or maybe some version of “we” will), but the earth will. So we’re not really the protagonist of our own history now. Now we are an instrument of Oil, and our tenure is but one battle in a much longer struggle between void and combustion, gravity and matter, an entropic dialectic played out presumably around every star in the galaxy. Energy gets radiated, absorbed, subsumed, and then released again. Life is just a sometimes-artifact of this flow.
That gets me to the second half of the twentieth century, and it’s time for the Plastinomicon
