Crude Capitalism
Crude Capitalism

Author: Adam Hanieh

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2024-09-17

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 1839763442

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This expansive history traces the hidden connections between oil and capitalism from the late 1800s to the current climate crisis. Beyond simplistic narratives that frame oil as 'prize' or 'curse', Crude Capitalism uncovers the surprising ways that oil is woven into the fabric of our modern world: the rise of an American-centered global order; the breakdown of Empire and anti-colonial rebellion; contemporary finance and US dollar hegemony; debt and militarism; and the emergence of new forms of synthetic consumption. Much more than an energy source or transport fuel, oil has a foundational place in all aspects of contemporary life - no challenge to the fossil fuel industry can be effective without taking this fact seriously. Crude Capitalism maps the varied geographies of oil, including the rise of OPEC, the importance of revolutionary and Post-Soviet Russia, the crucial role of African upstream reserves, and the new petrochemical circuits that link the Middle East, China, and East Asia. The book provides an original and fine-grained empirical analysis of corporate ownership and control, including refining and petrochemicals. By exposing these structures of power and placing oil in capitalism, the book makes an essential contribution to debates around oil-dependency and the struggle for climate justice.

Crude Capitalism
Crude Capitalism

Author: Adam Hanieh

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2024-09-17

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1839763426

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A groundbreaking history of oil and it's importance to US politics, finance, militarism and consumerism from an award-winning author and scholar This expansive history traces the hidden connections between oil and capitalism from the late 1800s to the current climate crisis. Beyond simplistic narratives that frame oil as 'prize' or 'curse', Crude Capitalism uncovers the surprising ways that oil is woven into the fabric of our modern world: the rise of an American-centered global order; the breakdown of Empire and anti-colonial rebellion; contemporary finance and US dollar hegemony; debt and militarism; and the emergence of new forms of synthetic consumption. Much more than an energy source or transport fuel, oil has a foundational place in all aspects of contemporary life - no challenge to the fossil fuel industry can be effective without taking this fact seriously. Crude Capitalism maps the varied geographies of oil, including the rise of OPEC, the importance of revolutionary and Post-Soviet Russia, the crucial role of African upstream reserves, and the new petrochemical circuits that link the Middle East, China, and East Asia. The book provides an original and fine-grained empirical analysis of corporate ownership and control, including refining and petrochemicals. By exposing these structures of power and placing oil in capitalism, the book makes an essential contribution to debates around oil-dependency and the struggle for climate justice.

The Licit Life of Capitalism
The Licit Life of Capitalism

Author: Hannah Appel

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2019-12-13

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1478004576

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The Licit Life of Capitalism is both an account of a specific capitalist project—U.S. oil companies working off the shores of Equatorial Guinea—and a sweeping theorization of more general forms and processes that facilitate diverse capitalist projects around the world. Hannah Appel draws on extensive fieldwork with managers and rig workers, lawyers and bureaucrats, the expat wives of American oil executives and the Equatoguinean women who work in their homes, to turn conventional critiques of capitalism on their head, arguing that market practices do not merely exacerbate inequality; they are made by it. People and places differentially valued by gender, race, and colonial histories are the terrain on which the rules of capitalist economy are built. Appel shows how the corporate form and the contract, offshore rigs and economic theory are the assemblages of liberalism and race, expertise and gender, technology and domesticity that enable the licit life of capitalism—practices that are legally sanctioned, widely replicated, and ordinary, at the same time as they are messy, contested, and, arguably, indefensible.

The Oil Curse
The Oil Curse

Author: Michael L. Ross

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2013-09-08

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 0691159637

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Countries that are rich in petroleum have less democracy, less economic stability, and more frequent civil wars than countries without oil. What explains this oil curse? And can it be fixed? In this groundbreaking analysis, Michael L. Ross looks at how developing nations are shaped by their mineral wealth--and how they can turn oil from a curse into a blessing. Ross traces the oil curse to the upheaval of the 1970s, when oil prices soared and governments across the developing world seized control of their countries' oil industries. Before nationalization, the oil-rich countries looked much like the rest of the world; today, they are 50 percent more likely to be ruled by autocrats--and twice as likely to descend into civil war--than countries without oil. The Oil Curse shows why oil wealth typically creates less economic growth than it should; why it produces jobs for men but not women; and why it creates more problems in poor states than in rich ones. It also warns that the global thirst for petroleum is causing companies to drill in increasingly poor nations, which could further spread the oil curse. This landmark book explains why good geology often leads to bad governance, and how this can be changed.

Monsters of the Market
Monsters of the Market

Author: David McNally

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-07-12

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 9004201572

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"Monsters of the Market" investigates modern capitalism through the prism of the body panics it arouses. Examining "Frankenstein," Marx s "Capital" and zombie fables from sub-Saharan Africa, it offers a novel account of the cultural and corporeal economy of global capitalism.

Capitalism
Capitalism

Author: Garry Leech

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2012-04-26

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 178032202X

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In the wake of the global financial crisis, and ongoing savage government cuts across the world, Garry Leech addresses a pressing and necessary topic: the nature of contemporary capitalism, and how it inherently generates inequality and structural violence. Drawing on a number of fascinating case studies from across the world - including the forced displacement of farmers in Mexico, farmer suicides in India, and deaths from preventable and treatable diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the unsustainable exploitation of the planet's natural resources - Leech provocatively argues that global capitalism constitutes a form of genocide against the poor, particularly in the global South. Essential and eye-opening the book questions the legitimacy of a system that inevitably results in such large-scale human suffering, while going beyond mere critique to offer a more egalitarian, democratic and sustainable global alternative.

Oil & the Global Capitalist Crisis
Oil & the Global Capitalist Crisis

Author: Caleb T. Maupin

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2016-04-27

Total Pages: 62

ISBN-13: 9781532948831

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A short booklet based on Caleb Maupin's presentation to the Second Congress of the Trade Union Center of Brazil in February of 2016. The text describes oil price manipulation, US military intervention around the world, rise of Russia and China, and the problems of neoliberalism and western capitalism.

Ruminations on the Distortion of Oil Prices and Crony Capitalism
Ruminations on the Distortion of Oil Prices and Crony Capitalism

Author: Raymond J. Learsy

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2013-07-08

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 1475994532

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At great cost and risk to the American and world economies, consumers are ripped off billions of dollars every day by oil interests and their malevolent influence on market pricing mechanisms. Its essential Americans and oil consumers throughout the world understand where the money they pay for oils downstream products goesincluding the money paid at the pump, the money paid to heat their homes, and the money paid for the array of other petroleum-based products. In Ruminations on the Distortion of Oil Prices and Crony Capitalism, author Raymond J. Learsy not only discusses the distortion of oil pricing, but also focuses on effects of the crony capitalism that has enriched a select few and left Main Street in the lurch as a result of government mismanagement, moneyed influence, and craven oversight. This collection of previously published writings shows how speculators ratchet up the prices of basic material goods essential to daily lives. Learsy describes how ceding the determination of those prices not to the laws of supply and demand but predominantly to gambling dens on the trading floors of commodity exchanges as well as the price fixing collusion of producer nations (OPEC) is crippling to the worlds economy. Focusing as well on Wall Streets corrupting influence on the price of oil, gasoline, and other commodities, Ruminations on the Distortion of Oil Prices and Crony Capitalism provides an overview of the basic and important theme: the United States enslavement to oil and the moneyed interests inextricably tied to it.

Lifeblood
Lifeblood

Author: Matthew T. Huber

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 9781452947402

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"If our oil addiction is so bad for us, why don't we kick the habit? Looking beyond the usual culprits--Big Oil, petro-states, and the strategists of empire--Lifeblood finds a deeper and more complex explanation in everyday practices of oil consumption in American culture. Those practices, Matthew T. Huber suggests, have in fact been instrumental in shaping the broader cultural politics of American capitalism. How did gasoline and countless other petroleum products become so central to our notions of the American way of life? Huber traces the answer from the 1930s through the oil shocks of the 1970s to our present predicament, revealing that oil's role in defining popular culture extends far beyond material connections between oil, suburbia, and automobility. He shows how oil powered a cultural politics of entrepreneurial life--the very American idea that life itself is a product of individual entrepreneurial capacities. In so doing he uses oil to retell American political history from the triumph of New Deal liberalism to the rise of the New Right, from oil's celebration as the lifeblood of postwar capitalism to increasing anxieties over oil addiction. Lifeblood rethinks debates surrounding energy and capitalism, neoliberalism and nature, and the importance of suburbanization in the rightward shift in American politics. Today, Huber tells us, as crises attributable to oil intensify, a populist clamoring for cheap energy has less to do with American excess than with the eroding conditions of life under neoliberalism"--Provided by publisher.

The Sovereign Entrepreneur
The Sovereign Entrepreneur

Author: Merrie Gilbert Klapp

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2019-05-15

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1501745220

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Capitalist governments around the world, however strongly they profess free market principles, have become deeply involved in the international market for petroleum. What success have they had as oil entrepreneurs, and what do their achievements and failures tell us about the nature of the state? In The Sovereign Entrepreneur, Merrie Gilbert Klapp develops a compelling comparative logic of state oil entrepreneurship. Drawing upon dozens of interviews with policymakers and company executives in Norway, Britain, Indonesia, and Malaysia, Klapp addresses a little understood determinant of policy—the pivotal bargaining power that domestic and international interests wield in different countries. Advanced capitalist countries, she finds, have generally not achieved their goals in the oil sector; they have been constrained by powerful, well-organized domestic interests. Less developed countries, by contrast, have faced little opposition at home, but the international banks and the multinationals have severely limited their attempts to expand into the global petroleum market. klapp argues that bureaucratic and domestic politics, not just economics, underlie the varying success of different countries in the marketplace.