Simon Pirani reviews Crude Capitalism: oil, corporate power and the making of the world market by Adam Hanieh
Review by SIMON PIRANI of Crude Capitalism: oil, corporate power and the making of the world market by Adam Hanieh (Verso 2024) Witnessing genocide can be paralysing. The horror of Israel’s onslaught on the civilian population of Gaza seeps in to the spaces in our heads, interrupting and disrupting attempts to think. My memory keeps connecting Gaza to the Vietnam war, news about which filtered through to me as a young teenager. My sheltered world was shattered by the cruelty with which innocent people were slaughtered and tortured, on the orders of governments I had vaguely assumed should protect people. I see teenagers going through analogous thought processes now.
How can it be that, half a century on, the grotesque “civilisation” that stalked Vietnamese villages has evolved, to produce the monstrous Netanyahu regime? What does this tell us about the many-headed hydra we are fighting, and humanity’s attempts to resist it?
Adam Hanieh’s book Crude Capitalism dissects one of the hydra’s heads – oil, and the corporations and states that use it to reinforce their wealth and power – and offers us a view on the part it plays in the whole organism. Reading it helped me to think of the horror of Gaza not as an aberration, but as a logical outcome of capital’s dominance in the twenty-first century.
Crude Capitalism tackles its big, difficult themes with precision and attention to detail. It is beautifully presented and organised.
The first part of the story Hanieh tells, of oil’s initial growth, plays out in the early twentieth century, in the US, and to a lesser extent in Iran, Azerbaijan and in Latin America. In the second part, from the mid twentieth century onwards, Middle Eastern oil resources and the battles for control of them loom large. And this is part of the background to the deluge of war crimes now being committed against Palestinians.
The connections are not direct. Regimes centred on vicious ethnic cleansing, like Netanyahu’s, are produced by capitalism; capitalism thrives on oil. But there are multiple mediations. Hanieh’s approach to these is an antidote to the simplifications that all too often circulate in radical political circles.
Physical control over oil production was crucial in the early twentieth century, but that has long ceased to be the case, Hanieh argues.
In the 1960s and 70s, against the background of powerful anti-colonialist movements, control over oil production shifted substantially from the powerful US- and European-based multinationals to state-controlled national oil companies, in the Middle East above all.
But capital and its state machines adapted. The US, which during the 1950s and 60s had superceded Britain and France as the dominant imperial power in the Middle East, established strategic and military relationships with the Gulf states and the Shah’s regime in Iran (at least, until the latter was overthrown in 1979). In the 1970s, the Saudi and Iranian monarchies were one pillar of US power in the region; Israel was the other.
Brute military force was only one aspect of imperial domination. Crucial, too, Hanieh argues, were changes in economic relationships, and in the financial system, through which control was maintained over oil revenues.
In the 1960s, oil producer countries’ governments, led by Venezuela, had forced through changes in oil pricing that disadvantaged the powerful US companies that had stakes in their oil fields. The Saudi monarchy, too, demanded a bigger slice of the cake. The US responded by changing its own tax rules so that, while more oil money flowed to Riyadh, the largest oil companies continued to earn record profits.
In the 1970s, price shocks shattered the monopolistic pricing system that had served the biggest companies. Action by the producer nations, coordinated through the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), took control of prices out of the multinationals’ hands. Crude oil prices quadrupled in 1973-74, and doubled again in 1979.
In the 1980s, there was further momentous change: oil increasingly became a traded commodity; wealth and power poured into intermediary trading firms. The oil profits that had once flowed mostly to rich-country corporations were now pouring into the Gulf states especially.
Oil refining in Saudoi Arabia
These “petro dollars”, flowing to countries outside the circle of imperialist powers in unprecedented quantities, became a big factor in financialisation (the expansion of international money markets, supercharged by computerised trading) and globalisation (the minimisation of capital controls and other trade barriers associated with neo-liberal economics).
(Forty years later, the flow is greater than ever. The Gulf states accumulated an estimated two-thirds of a trillion dollars in current account surplus in 2022, when, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, oil prices shot up.)
“Petro dollars” became “euro dollars”, funding that gathered in markets outside the US, denominated in its currency. The dollar, the status of which as a reserve currency had been endangered when it was unhooked from the gold standard in 1971, was reinforced.
Forms of money and the rise of the euromarkets, the dollar’s position as international reserve currency, the dominance of Anglo-American financial institutions, the chains of debt and the rise of neoliberal orthodoxy – these were not the automatic outcomes of dry economic processes centred in north America and Europe, but inextricably linked to the geopolitics of oil and the US presence in the Middle East.
By focusing on these “subterranean global roots” of the new financial system, Hanieh writes, “it is possible to shift the ways that we usually think about the control of oil”.
This is not simply reducible to territorial power and the ownership of foreign oil fields – it is also a question of the control of oil’s wealth.
To understand the killing fields of Gaza, we need to think, on one hand, about US military supplies to the Gulf states and Israel and the deranged ideologies that propel Israeli soldiers to massacre – and, on the other, about these “subterranean roots” that run through the banks, financial centres, trading houses and the City of London.
We are dealing with a many-headed hydra that combines wealth, power and terror in complex ways.
These relationships belie myths, such as the idea that our enemies fight repeated wars for oil. Actually, they rarely do.
The devastating 2003 US- and UK-led invasion of Iraq, Hanieh reminds us in a footnote, was “not so much about the seizure of Iraq’s oil as about the protection of the Gulf monarchies”.
He quotes another historian of the Middle East, Toby Craig Jones, who pointed out that capturing oil and oil fields has not been part of the US’s strategic logic for war, “but protecting oil, oil producers, and the flow of oil, has been”.
Oil does not just produce cash wealth. Once out of the ground, it is transported long distances, usually by ship (itself a hellishly oil-intensive business). It is refined into products: tarmac and bitumen; fuels from petrol to aviation fuel, the supply of which has shaped military, industrial and agricultural practices, and consumer markets, for a century; and ethylene and other raw materials for petrochemical plants.
Hanieh, in contrast to other big-picture historians of oil, foregrounds this “downstream”. He shows that, from the start, the US and European oil giants’ strategy was vertical integration, i.e. control of the whole process, down to the petrol stations.
Motor cars, the ultimate consumer good that consumes so much oil, loom large in this story. So does the burning of oil in power stations. Hanieh picks out for more detailed treatment the petrochemical industry, where oil is used not as an energy carrier that can be converted into mechanical motion, heat or electricity, but as a raw material.
He traces the origins of petrochemical processing in Germany; its development (if that is the right word) during the second world war as an arm of the Nazi military machine; and the US’s post-war acquisition of German technologies by theft and expropriation. Petrochemicals, while US- and European-dominated through the late twentieth century, are expanding rapidly in the Middle East and China in the twenty-first.
Fossil-fuel-based plastics and other synthetic materials, Hanieh argues, have displaced natural materials such as wood, cotton and rubber. “By decoupling commodity production from nature, there was a radical reduction in the time taken to produce commodities, and an end to any limits on the quantity and diversity of goods produced.”
This was a qualitative transformation: petrochemicals helped capital to achieve revolutions in productivity, labour-saving technologies and mass consumption; “birthed in war and militarism, they helped constitute a US-centred world order”. Our social being is bound up with a seemingly unlimited supply of cheap and disposable petrochemicals.
I hope Hanieh’s arguments on petrochemicals are brought to the centre of discussions about the transition away from oil, and what that implies for the socialist project of confronting and defeating capitalism.
First, the flow of oil as a raw material through the petrochemical industry needs to be put in the wider context of the colossal flow through the capitalist economy of extracted materials, including metals, minerals, concrete, asphalts, and living matter such as biomass and farm animals.
A team led by Fridolin Krausmann recently estimated that the aggregate of these material flows swelled 12 times over between 1900 and 2015. Eric Pineault has attempted to draw on this work, and that of ecological economists, to develop a Marxist view of this aspect of capital’s earth-shattering drive to expand.
Second, an issue of interpretation. I do not think the petrochemical industry “decouples” production from nature: it is another way of processing, and reprocessing, materials accessed from nature. Hanieh has, though, pointed to something hugely important, and dangerous, in the way that synthetic materials corrupt and deform humanity’s relationship with nature. Pinning down exactly what should be a concern to us all.
In the final chapter of Crude Capitalism, Hanieh surveys oil companies’ response to the threat of climate change. Having spent decades funding climate science denial, they have in the last decade reversed their public stance, accepted global heating as a fact … and become “enthusiastic converts” to the concept of “net zero”, as warped by politicians, that displaces genuine greenhouse gas emissions reductions with chimerical techno-fixes, above all carbon capture.
“By appearing to transform themselves into part of the solution”, the oil companies “not only hide their ongoing centrality to the fossil economy, but aim to frame and determine the societal response to climate change”, Hanieh warns.
The companies embrace technical false solutions – biomass, electric vehicles and hydrogen – that have moved to the centre of establishment climate policy. They are betting on expansion of the synthetic consumerist dystopia underpinned by petrochemicals. And their Orwellian grip on politics, hand in hand with producing-nation dictators, is on display at the international climate talks – last year (Abu Dhabi) and this (Azerbaijan) more than ever.
Ecosocialists, who endeavour to bring together the fight to overcome humanity’s disastrous rupture with nature with the fight for social justice, must first confront the fact that energy production and infrastructure “remain solidly in the hands of the largest oil conglomerates”, Hanieh argues.
Secondly, though, we need to acknowledge that while these firms are a “major obstacle” to moving away from oil, “they are a manifestation, not a cause, of the underlying problem” of capitalist social relations.
Let’s not only recoil in horror at the genocide: let’s also dissect and better understand the many-headed hydra. This book helps.
Italian workers who occupied a GKN factory to oppose closure went on to make a plan which shows what a just transition can look like. Now it is time to support their plans to start production.
Italian workers who occupied a GKN factory to oppose closure went on to make a plan which shows what a just transition can look like. Now it is time to support their plans to start production.
Matthew Crighton reports on the latest developments.
See previous articles on this site on the workers’struggle here and here.
Workers at GKN near Florence occupied the factory against closure over 3 years ago and are still there, after winning 6 legal cases including successful challenges to the lay-offs. They have been sustained by cycles of mobilisation by supporters across Tuscany giving solidarity and practical donations.
The strong trade union organisation in the plant didn’t just oppose closure of their factory, they decided to build a case for re-opening with a plan for socially-useful production, rather than servicing the luxury car manufacturers. Pooling their expertise and reaching outwards, they now have a plan for just transition to make solar panels and cargo bikes.
I was pleased to join a UK delegation to the Solidarity Assembly at the site on 13 October and a public event on the day before about convergence between the trade union and climate movements and even got to speak at it. More of the detail of their story is covered in the articles to which there are links below so here I will just summarise the current situation which we learnt about.
About one third of the original 400 workers are still taking part, now organised into the GFF Collective. After a series of sales, neither GKN nor Melrose, the company which bought from it, are now involved and the workers’ struggle to retain employment has become focused on their plan to re-start production, not of the luxury car parts which GKN made, but products of vital importance for the transition to zero carbon – cargo bikes and solar panels, includingrefurbishment of old panels. This was prepared in consultation with the climate movement in Italy and potential users of the products and its purpose is seen as leading a switch to reindustrialisation through addressing environmental crisis.
The Regional Council of Tuscany has given this plan some support but it has not taken the key next step to provide the Collective with working capital. The most recent development has been that the factory site has been sold again to property companies and the workers fear that they intend to use if for warehousing, retail or housing. As a result, they are looking for options of other sites for their collective enterprise while not giving up on the first one.
The Collective launched an appeal for funds and in particular for the purchase of shareholdings. Two UNISON branches in Scotland have committed to do this and I was able to act for them at the Assembly and report back. The good news which we received is that the Collective has been successful in reaching its target of 1 million euros.
The worrying news was that the Tuscany Regional Council still has no timetable for passing the decision which can enable it to give the funding and support needed. In this light, the Collective’s resolution to the Assembly both set a deadline at which, if there is still not a decision, it will have to reconsider the viability of its plan; and set a target for further fundraising of another 1 million euro.
As things stand at the end of October, the workers have three demands:
Pay unpaid salaries to the workers
Administration by the national government: the Government is asked to appoint a special receiver to the company
That the regional government buys the factory off the current owners and hands it over to the workers to run themselves under workers’ control
The deadline which they have set is 15 November and the date of the next mobilisation and an assembly at which the situation can be re-assessed in 17 November. As the Collective says “It will be a celebration for the start of the plan or anger against an entire system”.
It was inspiring to witness workers reaching out to the climate movement and solidarity received in return. As the attendance showed this has been a rallying point for the left in Tuscany, Italy and wider in Europe.
I was able to bring our experiences in Scotland, of Friends of the Earth and STUC setting up the Just Transition Partnership, to the audience. I emphasised what each movement has learnt from the other and the need for a foundation of respect between them. I was pleased that the next day, Greta Thunberg spoke on the same theme of building a mass movement of workers who want to stop climate change and environmentalist in solidarity with workers struggles.
The ex-GKN workers need solidarity and have a call out to buy shares to raise working capital for their cooperative. The shareholding appeal remains open and also straight donations can be made – see below*. Lastly, this inspiring example and lessons from it need to be widely known. Speakers can be provided.
The inspirational impact of workers acting to defend their jobs, to defend the planet and transform the economy.
A concrete example of joint work between trade union and climate movements, at activist and formal levels – there is lots for activists in the UK to learn about this…
The inertia which arises from neither the trade union structures nor the local government being ready with support for this kind of initiative
The need for workers in all industrial enterprises to be thinking ahead and preparing just transition plans
The shift from a dispute with an employer about closure to a workers plan for production requires a new combination of skills, organising capacity and resources – fundraising for industrial production, securing a site, arranging finance and organising a workforce while continuing the political struggle is a big challenge
The importance of solidarity for keeping this going.
Matthew Crighton
matthewcrighton@gmail.com
* Donations can be made by single or continuous bank transfer to the following Banca Etica current account in the name of Soms Pinerolo IBAN IT81 E050 1801 0000 0002 0000 339 BIC ETICIT22XXX
Join the Friends of St Fittick’s Park for a demonstration to protect St Fittick’s Park in Torry from industrialisation.
Join the Friends of St Fittick’s Park for a demonstration to protect St Fittick’s Park in Torry from industrialisation.
The last remaining greenspace in Torry is under threat from a bogus “Energy Transition Zone” factory.
Aberdeen City Council are deciding on a planning permission in principle application that will deprive the wildlife in the park and the people of Torry, our much-loved environmental haven.
Come along to tell the council they’re nae getting awa wi it this time! They must reject the ETZ application.
We invite everyone to wear blue to create a wave of people and to show the flood waters in St Fittick’s Park are rising, a key reason why the application should be rejected.
Watery-related props are welcomed.
Meet at Marischal College, Broad St, Aberdeen, 7 Nov. at 9 am before we ‘flow’ over to the Town House.
After more than 3 years in occupation, the Florence GKN workers’ fight to save jobs and develop alternative production continues as an inspiration to workers and climate campaigners everywhere.
This article by Pete Cannell was first published on the rs21 website.
COP26 in November 2021 represented a moment when the climate and workers movements in Britain converged. The process of building for the huge demonstrations in Glasgow put the idea of ‘worker-led just transition’ to a sustainable economy firmly on the agenda. But that slogan hides real issues about what should be done. And in 2024, rather than workers driving just transition plans forward, we see big job losses in Port Talbot and now confirmation from Petroineos that the Grangemouth oil refinery will be closed in 2025 with the loss of around 500 jobs.
But it doesn’t have to be this way and we no longer have to look back for inspiration to the 1970s and the Lucas Plan for alternative production. In Italy the workers at the GKN factory in Florence are waging an inspirational campaign to save jobs and establish alternative production.
Until 1994, GKN Florence was a Fiat factory. The workers, members of the CGIL union, had a tradition of organising within the factory and standing in solidarity with other struggles. Ownership passed to the British firm GKN, and by 2019 when GKN sold the factory to Melrose, a Britain-based investment company, there were more than 400 workers engaged in producing components for the car industry – including most of the big luxury brands.
The Melrose takeover was controversial and workers suspected that there were plans to asset strip. They were right and on 9 July 2021 the whole workforce were sacked by email. The workers’ response was to occupy and organise through a process which they describe as permanent assembly. Their initial demands were for the sackings to be rescinded and after a demonstration of 40,000 on 21 September the courts ruled that the sackings were inadmissible. So formally they had their jobs, but Melrose had no intention of restarting production.
Two weeks later the workers joined an even bigger Fridays for Future demonstration of 50,000 in Milan. This was the start of an intense dialogue with climate activists. What to produce and why? Over the autumn the GKN workers worked on a plan for sustainable transport, converting the factory to produce cargo bikes and solar panels. By December the plan was complete and then Melrose sold the plant to a new owner. It rapidly became clear that the change of ownership was aimed at conning the workforce. There was no new investment and by August 2022 it was clear that there was no intention of restarting production in any form. Moreover, the new owner stopped paying wages. From August 2022 to July 2023 the workers received no wages and because they were under contract they were unable to claim unemployment benefit. Some were forced to resign – at the same time a system of social mutual aid was developed to sustain those continuing the occupation.
At the end of 2023 the workers once more faced formal dismissal and yet again mass mobilisation and demonstration on New Years eve pushed back the threat.
By itself the bare narrative of events testifies to the GKN workers commitment and resolve. However, these facts miss the dynamism and creativity of their response. The engagement with the climate movement was the catalyst for developing the plan for alternative production. The workers are clear that simply reopening the factory with new products is not possible. They know that they can’t build an island of sustainable production in an ocean of capitalism. They are clear that in the end it’s not just about GKN but developing collective production models that inspire similar struggles in multiple other sites. They also understand that cargo bikes are currently a niche product – selling either to well-off individuals who can afford the high price tags or enabling the exploitation of precariously employed delivery workers. Similarly, current practices in the production of solar panels are highly centralised, and entail rotten working conditions and little consideration of recycling and waste disposal.
The workers’ response is to think about and campaign for approaches that are networked into horizontal local energy communities. They are producing prototype cargo bikes and working with local networks and campaigns to develop new models for use, and also evolving systems in which feedback from users shapes the next round of production. They’ve also pooled their practical knowledge with supportive academics from local universities who bring specialised theoretical knowledge to research and develop innovative and sustainable technical solutions driven by the social and political insights of users and workers.
In building solidarity, the workers have also placed the campaign for jobs and alternative production at the heart of wider social struggles. Their organising contributes to wider struggle and also learns from it. They have fought over migrant rights, workplace safety, anti-racism and anti-fascism. Most recently they have made common cause with the Palestine movement. In fighting for the regional government to back their plans for cooperative production under workers control, they set up an encampment outside the regional government buildings, later moving the camp to the centre of Florence.
Throughout 2024 they have campaigned for donations to a one million euro fund. This, together with political demands on the regional government and the state government, would enable production to restart. Under pressure from the support that GKN has built locally, the regional government has given ground to the workers. The Italian government under Meloni is hostile, characterising the workers as undisciplined hooligans. But if they can get cooperative production started Italian law insists that the national government should contribute. The million euro target has essentially been met. Contributors to the fund – union branches, campaign groups and others – are entitled to a vote in the assemblies which will determine the future trajectory of the plant.
Over the weekend of 11-13 October in Florence, there will be a mass demonstration led by Fridays for Future on the 11th, an open assembly in the factory on the 12th, and finally on Sunday 13th an assembly for ‘shareholders’. The objective is cooperative production under workers control, linked through democratic processes and democratic decision making to local communities, and national and international networks.
Thanks to REELNews for their reporting and their help with this post. REELnews are organising a trade union delegation to Florence for the 11-13 October demonstration and assemblies.
On 17th September ScotE3 teamed up with REELnews to screen their documentaries on GKN where the workers fighting for jobs and a sustainable future have been in occupation for more than three years.
At least two Scottish union branches have bought shares in the cooperative – many more can do so. There will be a delegation from the UK going to the occupation assembly in Florence on 13 October – if you are based in Scotland and interested in going please use the contact form to get back to us.
Not enough people know about this inspirational struggle so we are sharing the videos and some of the text from the REELnews site to spread the word. Please share on social media, raise the issue in your union branch or climate group and think about ways of giving practical solidarity – including raising money to take out a share in the collective enterprise.
The three videos together chart the course of the occupation – the third is the most recent and if you only have time for one it’s the one to watch but for the full story do watch all three.
GKN factory occupation needs YOUR help to start green production under workers control
GKN Workers start hunger strike for a worker led transition in the most important struggle in Europe
GKN Florence: 3 years of permanent assembly, leading the way in bottom up worker led just transition
The following text thanks to REELnews
The most important struggle in Europe This July, workers at the GKN automotive engineering plant in Florence, Italy passed an incredible three years in permanent assembly – by some way the longest factory occupation in Italian history.
That would be historic enough in itself – but what started out as a standard industrial dispute to save jobs has transformed into a visionary rank and file worker led movement for just transition, with a reindustrialisation plan to move from producing parts for luxury cars, to solar panels and cargo bikes. All under workers control, and for the benefit of the community, not for profit.
They know that for this struggle to succeed and be part of a proper transition to ecological, non-exploitative production that benefits workers and communities and not the rich, the whole world has to change around the factory. So through mass assemblies of workers, a movement has been built that is challenging the capitalist model – in a country that has a far-right government. The occupied GKN factory is now acting as a focal point for all struggles to converge; not only to take serious action to combat climate change, but to support refugees, support the struggle for a Free Palestine, show solidarity with trans people under attack from the government, provide solidarity with anti-fascist campaigns and much more.
There have been enormous strides in the past few months. The regional government is now accepting that public intervention could be possible to buy the factory off the current owners and hand it to the workers; they now need to find the technical means to do it. The workers are producing protoypes of the cargo bikes which are being tested out in Italy and beyond to fit them to people’s needs, and most importantly, are being used to hold mass meetings to work out what else need to change and be fought for to make them, together with buses and trains, part of a real transition to sustainable mobility.
But most incredibly, nearly €1million has already been raised to start production via their popular shareholder scheme. Every individual or group who buys shares becomes part of the assembly that will collectively run the factory if the workers win – and the first international assembly is due to be held in Florence on 12-13 October.
Win or lose, the GKN workers have created the blueprint for a just transition – and shown us all how to do it. But if they do win, it would create a laboratory from which we could start activating a just transition everywhere – as well as providing the hope of a positive future so essential for stopping the growth of the far-right.
That is why a GKN factory occupation – UK solidarity network has been set up, involving union activists from rail, education, construction, firefighting and delivery unions. (If you’re interested in coming, email us at info@reelnews.co.uk, and/or join the Facebook group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1032188728576043/).
New Reel News film out today with all the details of this visionary struggle,as GKN workers mark three years in occupation with an incredible outdoor concert followed by a huge demonstration through the centre of the city – at 2 o’clock in the morning ….and with major steps forward in the most important just transition struggle anywhere in Europe, we’re asking for your help to fund a rank and file contingent to go over to Florence for the first international shareholders assembly.
For more details and how to join the delegation to the international assembly in Florence on 12/13 October 2024 co to the REEL News website
This ScotE3 article was first published in the August edition of the Scottish Rank and File Newsletter
The built environment accounts for 40% of end use carbon emissions. So, construction has a big part to play in tackling the climate crisis. Most of the emission reductions need to come through retrofitting the existing housing stock.
Campaigns in Edinburgh, Glasgow and elsewhere have highlighted the importance of retrofitting, the impact it could have on jobs for construction workers and on the quality of life of residents – particularly the hundreds of thousands current living in fuel poverty.
But there’s a real problem – both the Scottish Government and Local Authorities have no plans for large scale retrofitting in the next decade and they believe that the private sector will drive the transition. As University of Westminster researcher into the construction industry Linda Clarke says, this ‘is a sector beset with problems, not least low levels of unionisation in much of the private sector apart from engineering construction. Over half the workforce is classified as ‘self-employed’ for tax purposes, most firms (c. 97%) are SMEs – many of which are micro firms, the subcontracting chain can be very extensive, including labour-only subcontracting, and there are massive ‘skill’ shortages.’ And on top of all this there is no training infrastructure.
Retrofitting the Scottish housing stock requires planning, coordination and a big input from Further Education Colleges to provide the necessary skills training. Private construction firms have little interest in this. In ScotE3’s view it’s essential that construction workers and climate campaigners come together to campaign for the rebuilding of Direct Labour Organisations in every local authority. As Linda Clarke says ‘… DLOs, … operating on a non-for-profit basis, politically accountable, unionised, inclusive, offering secure, employment and good working conditions, and providing monitored work experience for trainees, are an obvious way to carry out large-scale retrofitting.’
Matthew Huber and Fred Stafford’s insistence that “electricity is poised to be a central site of political struggle in the twenty-first century” (2023, 65) is welcome and timely. But the approach they set out in “Socialist Politics and the Electricity Grid,” in Catalyst journal, is flawed. They argue that the basis for a socialist energy supply system is centralised electricity generation, primarily from nuclear power; that renewable electricity generation should play only a minor role; and that decentralised renewables are unworthy of support, for both technological and political reasons. Indeed, Huber adds, in an article on the Unherd website (2023), neoliberalism fostered decentralised renewables while undermining centralised generation, and socialists seduced by “green” renewables have unwittingly become neoliberalism’s allies.
“Make war on the nuclear monster”. More details in caption at the end
In this response, I suggest, first, that nuclear power has overcome none of the problems that led several generations of socialists to oppose it (links with the military, absence of waste disposal, and so on), and that it features only in the most impoverished views of the transition away from fossil fuels and the most conservative, state-centred versions of socialism. Second, I discuss the decades-long trend towards decentralisation of electricity networks – a reality for which Huber and Stafford fail to account. I argue that our focus should shift away from outworn pro-nuclear arguments towards a discussion of whether, and how, socialism can challenge capital’s control of electricity technologies, including decentralised renewables, and turn them to our advantage. Third, I challenge Huber and Stafford’s claims that renewables are, by comparison to nuclear, inherently inimical to labour organisation and to public forms of ownership. Finally, I question the misrepresentations on which Huber relies in an account of the relationship through history of energy technologies and neoliberalism. I build on arguments presented previously (Pirani 2023a, 2023b, 2023c.)
Nuclear and renewables
In their Catalyst article, Huber and Stafford (2023, 75) write: “From a socialist perspective aiming for reliable nonstop, zero-carbon power, nuclear energy would be the foundation of the grid.” The risks associated with nuclear are exaggerated in popular attitudes; problems with radioactive waste have been “overstated.” They do not engage with researchers of nuclear who assert that there is: (1) no long-term solution to the waste problem; (2) that there is “no working deep repository for high level waste anywhere”, despite limited progress in Finland and Sweden (Cullen 2021); (3) that a solution is “decades away”; and (4) that plans for new nuclear in the UK should be frozen “until we have a geological disposal facility”, which is timetabled for the 2040s but likely to take longer (Laville 2022).
Huber and Stafford pass over in silence the way that nuclear power implies and requires a strong state, and its close connection with the military – an omission all the more remarkable, given the occupation since 2022 of Europe’s largest nuclear plant, at Zaporizhzhia, by the Russian army, which bears responsibility for the collapse of the nearby Kakhovka hydro plant (Glantz et al. 2023). For the rich tradition of socialist writing on technology, the nuclear-military connection is not only about such “accidents,” but about deeper-going economic and technological relationships. Only nuclear reactors produce the fissile material needed for nuclear bombs; military imperatives shape national industrial supply chains more broadly; the overlaps in education, design, research and security are all extensively researched. Civilian nuclear power has been in long-term decline due to its high cost, but has proved “surprisingly resilient” to market conditions in a limited group of countries, due to this interdependence (Stirling and Johnstone 2018).
Ultimately, the way socialists see nuclear power is bound up with our views of potential post-capitalist futures. Huber and Stafford’s vision (2023, 79) is “of ‘big public power’, in which the public sector would subsidise the mass buildout of large-scale zero-carbon energy generation infrastructure including nuclear power and, where geography suits, renewables.” Against this, I commend the view held by Cullen (2021) that nuclear power is “antithetical to the world we want to see. From its origin as a figleaf to distract us from the grim truth of mutually assured destruction, to its recent resurrection as a bogus solution to climate change, it is inherently bound up with violent state forms and paranoid and secretive hierarchies.”
Views of nuclear also vary according to our approaches to the transition away from fossil fuels. The two most vital changes needed are: (1) to transform the way final energy is used (e.g. by insulating homes to reduce the need for heating, improving public transport to reduce the need for cars, ending wasteful forms of consumption), and (2) to reduce throughput of energy in technological systems (e.g. by replacing gas boilers with heat pumps). The remaining energy required must be produced with non-fossil-fuel technologies, of which renewables and nuclear are the most developed. The copious scenario analysis literature shows that climate change can only be dealt with in the course of deep-going social transformations (Grubler et al. 2018, van Vuuren et al. 2018, Allwood et al. 2019). For socialists these transformations are bound up with overcoming and superceding capitalism (Pirani 2018, Pirani, 2023a).
For the present discussion, there are three relevant points that I would like to emphasise. First, climate change deprives us of time. Nuclear power stations take many years to build, while decentralised renewable energy systems do not. Second, the future of electricity networks must be considered in the context of broader economic changes overshadowed by climate change, and the need for transforming final energy use and reducing throughput, mentioned above. (In his writing on “degrowth,” discussed elsewhere, Huber (2022, 31-32 and 162-175) has remained agnostic on energy consumption and throughput scenarios.) Third, highly flexible electricity networks are both necessary for reducing throughput and transforming final energy use – and, happily, also facilitate decentralised renewables. Integrating nuclear power stations that generate large, unchanging quantities of electricity into such networks may be less easy.
Under the present political conditions, in which labour movements and social movements are struggling for change under capitalism, choices made by the state about which energy resources to invest in do matter. Huber and Stafford (2023, 78) advocate opting for nuclear, despite the extraordinary expense: it “needs socialism to grow – or at least a form of public investment that socialises the costs of construction and does not privatise the gains.” The corollary should be spelled out: resources invested in nuclear would not be invested in renewables.
Discussions among socialists would benefit from greater attention to the transition scenarios mentioned above, which afford a way into some of the social and technological issues. It would also be worthwhile to develop a socialist critique of “100 percent renewables” scenarios (i.e. models depicting hypothetical paths towards electricity networks run solely from renewable electricity, without any fossil fuels or nuclear) developed by researchers from engineering and scientific backgrounds (Pirani 2023d). Huber and Stafford, characteristically, dismiss these scenarios as “largely based on the models of one researcher, Mark Z. Jacobson.” They are mistaken. A recent survey covered the work of some thirteen research teams (Heard et al. 2017, Brown et al. 2018).
Renewables and network integration
Huber and Stafford (2023, 65-66) propose “core principles” on which to base a socialist approach to electricity. They argue that electricity should be produced as a public good, rather than a commodity, that control by capital will always subvert this goal, and that for this reason “public or alternative ownership structures” are crucial. All this is welcome. Further, they propose that electricity is a “complex material system of production,” conducive to socialist planning, which “consequently requires a deep materialist understanding of how it works and how it might be transformed.” In my view, the conclusions they draw from this – that this understanding points toward “the importance of centralised, large-scale reliable power generation like hydroelectric dams and nuclear power, as opposed to decentralised, small-scale and intermittent forms of power like rooftop solar panels” – need to be challenged.
Huber and Stafford refer repeatedly to the supposed threat to electricity systems from decentralised renewables: intermittency “creates unavoidable problems for grid planning”; when there is too much wind and solar, that leads to curtailment, and when there is too little, electricity prices go up. They highlight the dangers of blackouts to “the very survival of the system,” but, unfortunately, remain silent on the fact that the world’s most devastating electricity blackouts (Puerto Rico 2017, Bangladesh 2022, Pakistan 2023) occurred in fossil-fuel-dominated networks for reasons that had nothing to do with renewables. They claim, mistakenly, that it is “still not clear how [renewables] can provide reliable power for the entire grid the way centralised power plants do today.”
These assertions are disproved by reality. While renewables’ share of global primary energy supply remains pitifully small, renewables generate a substantial share of electricity in a significant number of rich countries. Wind and solar account for 41 percent, 40 percent and 35 percent respectively of electricity generated in Germany, the UK and Spain, three of the largest European economies, and 43 percent in California, which consumes more electricity than most nations. Denmark generates 61 percent of its electricity from wind and solar and 23 percent from modern biofuel use. Variable renewables’ share of electricity generation in Scotland averaged 60 percent in 2019-21. This expansion of renewables, that like fossil fuels and nuclear are predominantly controlled by corporations and the state, is fraught with dangers, not least to the people of countries being plundered for minerals used in equipment manufacture. Grid integration, though, is less a danger, and more an engineering challenge (Pirani 2023b).
Wherever variable renewables expand, network upgrades are required. In particular, grids supplied by a large proportion of renewable generation need more, and newer, ways to store energy and to ensure grid stability. Because electricity grids are controlled by capital, just as the power stations are, the infrastructure investment needed to modernise them lags far behind the shift towards renewables in power generation. The most common problems caused by this failure to modernise are shortages of transmission and storage capacity (see e.g. IRENA 2023b, 11-14). The chronic level of curtailment of wind power in China in the late 2010s is noteworthy; so is the success of electricity transmission and distribution companies in fixing it (Chen et al. 2022) In the USA and Europe, the years-long queues for electricity generators to get a grid connection have become public scandals (Rand et al. 2022) But the underlying cause of poor infrastructure is not renewable technologies, but underinvestment. And the cause of that is, often, neoliberalism.
As for Huber and Stafford’s point that wholesale electricity prices may rise when less power than expected comes from wind – well, that’s how (pending improved weather forecasting) markets regulate supply and demand. (The example they cite, of too little wind in Europe in December 2022, is factually incorrect. See Pirani 2023b, section 2.4.) The problem is not the wind, it is the way markets function.
Not only does Huber and Stafford’s “deep materialist understanding” fail to explain what is going on in Scotland, California, and elsewhere; it also omits any account of the trends over several decades towards decentralisation of electricity networks, and, more recently, from uni-directional to multi-directional operation. The networks installed in rich countries in the first half of the 20th century, and across much of the global south in the second half, were designed to carry electricity in one direction: mostly from big coal, gas and nuclear power stations, to users. Peak centralisation was in the 1970s. Combined heat and power plants, and power stations using combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT) built in the 1980s and 90s were smaller; wind and solar plants, even utility-scale ones, smaller still. (Patterson 1999, 68-70, 72-75, 114-116; IRENA 2023a, 17-18, 64-66).
As the number and type of electricity sources increases, networks adapt to manage their inputs, in the context of the “third industrial revolution,” that started with semiconductors and gave rise to a new generation of technology, including personal computers, mobile phones and the internet. The next big change, now getting underway, is towards flows of electricity in multiple directions, with the potential for microgrids, including those using direct current only, and for supply by decentralised generators to local users. These changes raise vital political issues, including: (1) whether these decentralised technologies, which are largely but not completely developing under corporate and state control, have the potential to enhance, and be strengthened by, forms of social ownership and control, to work towards the decommodification of electricity; and (2) whether co-ops, community energy projects and municipal ownership forms may be stepping stones in these directions (Pirani 2023b.)
Huber and Stafford’s concern that the addition of renewables disrupts an existing system might have made sense ten or more years ago. But the technology – if not the economics – of electricity networks has moved on. Rather than engage with this reality, it is unfortunate that they fall back on the following polemical misrepresentations:
□ They quote Mark Nelson, a consultant and nuclear advocate, to the effect that “claiming cheap renewables are a viable solution for our grid system is like claiming flimsy tents are a viable solution for the housing crisis.” They incorrectly describe Nelson as an “energy analyst,” imputing to his words an authority they do not have.
□ Huber and Stafford claim that “cheap prices of renewable energy don’t include the transmission lines to their remote locales or the costly back-up required when the weather isn’t favourable,” and that “the limited use value of solar and wind” leads to “broader system costs” not covered by renewable generators. They ignore the complexities of the integration into grids of variable renewables, and the substantial body of research of the costs (e.g. Heptonstall and Gross 2021, IEA/NEA 2020, Elliott 2020, 7-9). They misrepresent modelling by Robert Idel to create an exaggerated impression of renewables costs. (For details, see Pirani, 2023a, “Note: infrastructure costs.”) The simplified framing of renewables as an economic burden to an existing system has long been a staple of fossil-fuel-based generators’ propaganda, answered by mainstream energy economists with proposals for market reform and by socialists with calls for public ownership and decommodification. It has no place in a serious discussion.
□ Huber and Stafford pay unwarranted attention to the microscopic portion of off-grid solar in the global North, writing: “While the Elon Musks of the world hawk the benefits of ‘delinking’ from the grid through the individual purchases of rooftop solar equipment and battery storage, we must fight for the expansion of electricity as universal public infrastructure.” Yes, Elon Musk is a dangerous clown, and, yes, a small number of rich households may see rooftop solar as the road to a reactionary, isolationist, off-grid existence. But in the big picture, they are irrelevant. The overwhelming majority of rooftop solar, whether household, municipal or corporate, is connected to the grid. All these solar panels are part of a universal infrastructure. The barriers to that infrastructure being geared to use, and not profit, is not that the panels are decentralised, but that neither panels nor networks are publicly or commonly owned and controlled.
It would be regrettable if discussion among socialists were to be dominated by outdated pro-nuclear arguments, rather than by the real-world problems in electricity networks and other energy systems posed by climate change and the crises of capital. Collectively we should develop a critique of the work by engineers in politically mainstream contexts who assume markets as a key regulating mechanism (e.g. Cochran et al. 2014, Kroposki et al. 2017, Hanna et al. 2018), and build on arguments for greater public control (Elliott 2017, Elliott 2020, Kristov 2019). Research by a group of European scholars on the potential for flexible grids and decentralised renewables to open the way to forms of common ownership and to decommodification of electricity deserves our attention (Giotitsas et al. 2020; Giotitsas et al. 2022; Kostakis et al. 2020). They envisage “commons-based peer production,” under which “smart” technology is used not to trade electricity as a commodity but to share it as a common good; they show how software technologies that currently “align with the existing liberalised market with ancillary and balancing services” also “open up the possibility for democratising electricity if governed as a commons.”
Renewables, labour and socialism
Matthew Huber proposes that (i) renewable electricity generation is, by its nature, hostile to working-class organisation in a way that nuclear and hydro are not; (ii) decentralised technologies are poorly suited to public ownership, and that using them to enhance forms of social ownership at sub-national level is a blind alley; (iii) in any case such “localism” is at odds with Marxism; and (iv) there is a split in “the Left” between traditional labour unions that go with centralised generation, and “environmentalists and ecosocialists” who like decentralised renewables. I suggest that each link in this logical chain is broken.
Let us take up some of these arguments, which are important to the direction of the climate justice and labour movements.
Is electricity from renewables hostile to working-class organisation?
Huber (2023) writes, on the Unherd web site, that, in the USA in the 1980s, “the shift away from utilities and towards decentralised merchant generation explicitly undermined the labour unions who had built up their power under the older, established utility system. […] It is much easier to organise workers in centralised power plants than scattered solar and wind farms whose [sic], after all, only provide temporary construction jobs.”
The message – that solar and wind are bad for unions, large nuclear and hydro are good for unions – is oversimplified. The break-up of the US utility system did indeed damage the unions, with the loss of 150,000 unionised jobs (Beder 2003, 125). But renewables played a negligible part: those merchant generators used gas and some nuclear instead. And there was a context, which Huber does not mention: the gigantic, global shifts in labour markets that has made precariousness the “normal condition of labour under capitalism,” especially outside the rich world and among women in rich countries (Huws 2019, 51-66).
It is not in dispute that many renewable energy and other “green tech” companies are ferociously anti-union, just as many nuclear companies are anti-union. Huber and Stafford (2023) point to energy sector unions that favour nuclear, and argue that we should “listen to what these workers and unions say.” Yes, we should. But we should also probe the extent to which unions really speak for workers. And we should confront the reality that in this case, as in others, there may be tensions between some workers’ sectional interests and the aims of the workers’ movement more widely.
Are decentralised technologies poorly suited to public ownership?
In his article for Unherd, and his book on climate change, Huber shows little sympathy for the widespread movement towards co-operative and municipal ownership of electricity generation, facilitated by renewables technologies. He opposes the “localist path” as a matter of principle. It is “deeply at odds with the traditional Marxist vision of transforming social production,” he writes (2022, 250). And to drive the point home: “Duke Energy does not care if you set up a locally owned micro-grid.” It should be noted, first, that the “traditional Marxist vision” had a far more generous attitude to coops: in his classic critique of utopian socialism, Friedrich Engels (1882) went out of his way to welcome Robert Owen’s co-ops, envisaged as “transition measures to the complete communistic organisation of society,” for having “given practical proof that the merchant and the manufacturer are socially quite unnecessary.”
Second, and relevant to 21st century practice, the limits to the potential of co-ops and municipal forms of ownership of electricity generation have not yet been sufficiently tested. The valuable contributions to discussion of this include: (1) the assessment by Trade Unions for Energy Democracy of the damage done to co-ops and community energy projects in Europe by pro-business market regulation (Sweeney et al. 2020); (2) commentary on the legislation passed in New York directing the municipal power company to plan, build and operate renewables projects (Dawson 2023); and (3) research on the damaging impact of state and corporate power on efforts to use co-operative and community energy forms to advance electrification in developing countries (Baker 2023, Ulsrud 2020). Huber’s blanket rejection of “localism” obstructs these important discussions, and offers a conservative view of socialism as something brought about primarily or only by state action at national level.
Is localism at odds with Marxism?
In his polemic against “localism,” Huber (2022, 250) writes that “capitalism produces the material basis for emancipation through the development of large-scale and ever-more centralised industry.” Marx, he writes, explained that capitalism “tends to centralise capital through the ‘expropriation of many capitalists by a few’. But through this centralisation process, production itself becomes more and more socialised.” This is a misunderstanding of Marx’s point, in my view. When writing about the expropriation of many capitalists by a few, he was referring to the centralising effect of money capital and the development of corporations. But it was the socialised nature of production under capitalism, not centralisation as such, that in Marx’s view laid the basis for social ownership and control. To conclude from this a principled approval of “centralisation” makes little sense. To transpose it to a 21st century context, to claim that Marxism embraces the physical centralisation of electricity generation, makes even less sense.
Is there a split between labour and ecosocialists over decentralised renewables?
For Huber and Stafford (2023, 67), those who see potential for building elements of opposition to capitalism in co-ops, community energy projects or municipal ownership of decentralised renewables, are on the wrong side of a political divide. They see a “split within the capitalist class” between “historically embedded investor-owned utilities” who claim a commitment to reliability, and “industrial consumers of electricity” who seek flexible supply contracts and “emphasise their green credentials.” This split, they write, is replicated in “the Left”: “traditional labour unions” are siding with utilities, and therefore with centralised generation, while “environmentalists and ecosocialists” are with “renewable energy producers, Google and increased marketisation of electricity.”
This is a contrived argument. The division between US utilities and industrial electricity consumers is not one of principle, it is simply sellers vs buyers. And the identification of more renewables with “increased marketisation” is a myth: the fastest expansion of renewable generation is in China, one of the most heavily regulated electricity markets on earth. As for the supposed alliance between “environmentalists and ecosocialists” with “increased marketisation”, “Google,” and so on, this is a declaration of guilt by association.
Renewables and neoliberalism
So powerful is his crusading fervour against decentralised renewables, that Huber (2023) does the following: (i) paints decentralisation as a product of neoliberalism; (ii) claims inherent links between renewables and private capital, and between nuclear and public ownership; and (iii) sees environmentalists and leftists who embrace renewable electricity dragged along behind an “anti-social [neoliberal] reaction against society itself.” None of this withstands scrutiny.
Is decentralisation a product of neoliberalism?
Huber writes that, in the 1970s and 80s, neoliberalism set out to demolish “large, rigid institutions” of the post-war boom – unions, universities, even monopolistic corporations – “in favour of smaller, more flexible production guided by a decentralised price mechanism.” He argues that this supposed “decentralisation” underpinned the rise of renewable electricity generation. But even in its use of price mechanisms, neoliberalism was the very opposite of “decentralised.” The weapons it wielded on behalf of big, centralised corporations included deregulation of finance capital, by such measures as abolition of capital controls and expansion of offshore financial zones. Financial markets were “globalised,” in many cases subordinating national markets to internationally-determined prices.
Huber cites the neoliberal ideologue Friedrich Hayek writing about “decentralised planning.” But those words tell us little about the neoliberalism that actually existed, which Marxists long ago understood as a “political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites” rather than a “utopian project to realise a theoretical design [of markets],” (Harvey 2005, 12-19; Cahill and Konings 2017, 94-98).
Are renewables inherently suited to private capital?
Huber also writes that neoliberal ideology “seized the [US] electricity sector” in the late 1970s; for neoliberals, electric utilities “epitomised the kind of inflexible and corrupt institutions targeted for demolition”; environmentalist ideology of the time, epitomised by Amory Lovins’s “soft energy path,” “conformed to this neoliberal critique of ‘big’ and ‘centralised’ utilities.” Thus, “against a complex and centrally-planned system, ‘grassroots’ local communities aspired to get off the grid entirely,” while at the policy level a “vision of a decentralised renewable-powered utopia actually accompanied a broader project of electricity deregulation” under president Jimmy Carter.
First, let us put aside local communities who aspired to get off grid. They are interesting for the history of counter-culture, but irrelevant to energy policy.
Second, recall the context for the neoliberal reforms in the US electricity sector: the “energy crisis” caused by the assertion of pricing power by Middle Eastern oil producers in 1973, and the dominant capitalist powers’ alarm at the shifting terms of trade. This produced a politically-driven investment boom in nuclear and other non-fossil energy that overlapped with market liberalisation.
Third, the technological development of wind turbines was taken on by the state, via NASA; the speculative wind “boom” that followed during the 1980s was a footnote in the story of electricity, that produced less per year than one typical power station’s output; and while as Huber notes neoliberal market reform helped the corporations who dabbled in wind, it was a tax dodge (the Energy Tax Act) that was decisive. When this subsidy was junked, the “boom” collapsed (Owens 2019, Newton 2015). Only in the 2000s did wind power expand significantly in the USA.
Huber’s “new class of capitalists building renewable energy projects,” who “need not care about the grid as a social system” is, at least in the 1980s and 90s, a phantom. His connection between Lovins’s (1979) “soft energy paths” argument (which in the 1970s was anyway focused on energy conservation and cogeneration, and not on renewable power), Carter’s market reforms, and the expansion of decentralised renewables a quarter of a century later, is a specious construct.
Yes, the market reforms weakened the utilities and reinforced wholesale electricity markets. Gas rose, coal retreated. But the overarching theme is not decentralisation, but neoliberal support for gigantic corporations, including the construction companies and nuclear generators whose lobbying led to a massive excess of generating capacity (Pope 2008.)
To tell this story as one in which renewables are identified with neoliberalism, and nuclear with public power, is to rewrite history in the service of ecomodernist ideology.
A brief glance outside the USA confirms that, as a rule in the 20th century, wind and solar technologies were developed by the state and by social movements; private capital only moved in later. In Denmark, the world’s leading developer of wind power, the initial impetus came from a community movement based on co-ops; later, the state, having accepted the dominance of wind power, brought in the corporations. In Germany, a parliamentary alliance of greens and social democrats gave the initial impetus, through state subsidies. Since the 2010s, China, where state direction of industrial policy is anything but neoliberal, has been overwhelmingly dominant in the production, export and deployment of renewable technologies (Maegaard 2013; Morris and Jungjohann 2016; Pirani 2023b.)
Leftists, environmentalists and a reaction against society
Huber also writes, with reference to the 1980s: “[I]f most of the 20th century was about large-scale social integration of complex industrial societies, the neoliberal turn represents an anti-social reaction against society itself. For parts of the right, there was ‘no such thing’ as society, only individuals. But the environmental Left made a comparable turn: large-scale complex industrial society was rejected in favour of a small-scale communitarian localism. In this framework, ‘communities’ could opt out of society and usher in democratic control over energy, food and life.”
Huber evidences this colourful denunciation by quoting the German philosopher Rudolf Bahro (“we must build up areas liberated from the industrial system”) – an absurd own goal, since, however widely you define the “left,” Bahro, by his own account and those of his colleagues, had in the 1980s long ceased to be part of it (Hart and Mehle 1998).
In contrast to Bahro’s drift to anti-industrial environmentalism, there is a wealth of socialist writing that saw capitalist social relations as the underlying cause of the 1970s “energy crisis” and environmental crises. Examples include the Italian autonomists who urged a “post-nuclear transition” that presupposed transforming “not only energy use but also the capitalist mode of production and social organisation” (Sapere 1985, 71), and the American writer Barry Commoner (1990, 193) who thought of environmentalism in terms of “transformation of the present structure of the technosphere,” in the context of social change.
André Gorz
Even André Gorz (1987, 19), perhaps the 1980s’ most forceful socialist proponent of decentralised energy, saw its development as inextricably bound up with social transformation. He wrote that objections could be raised to a focus on such technologies, on the grounds that “it is impossible to change the tools without transforming society as a whole.” “This objection is valid, providing it is not taken to mean that societal change and the acquisition of state power must precede technological change. For without changing the technology, the transformation of society will remain formal and illusory.”
It is to be hoped that collectively, we will develop a socialist approach to electricity systems, including the problems that decentralised renewables pose, in the context of the struggles for social justice and to tackle climate change. A robust critique of our above-mentioned predecessors would strengthen the foundations of such an approach. Huber’s misrepresentations of these writers as allies of neoliberalism is an unwelcome obstruction to such a critique that should be moved out of the way.
Conclusions
Renewable electricity generation is not perfect — the social and environmental impacts of its materials supply chains are only the most obvious of its drawbacks. But it operates without fossil fuels or carbon emissions. Unlike nuclear power, it is (i) free of inherent links with fearsome state structures and the military, and (ii) highly compatible with more flexible networks, reductions in throughput and rapid changes in energy end-use that are the most important ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The increasing decentralisation of electricity generation is not perfect either. It is a technological change that has been in progress for decades, in the context of the “third industrial revolution.” Huber and Stafford ignore this process, and suggest, mistakenly, that technological decentralisation equals political decentralisation, and that both are somehow inimical to working-class organisation and socialism. They ignore, too, the rich history of socialist writing on technology and its relationship to society, to construe a false alliance between nuclear power and working-class interests. To support this, Huber offers a sketched history of renewable electricity generation, rewritten to depict it as a child of neoliberalism, that is replete with distortions.
A starting-point for discussion on the role of electricity systems in the transition away from fossil fuels, and in struggles against capitalism, in my view, is an assessment of the technological changes underway, and the corrosive effect of the corporate and state interests under whose control it is taking place. Perspectives and policies must be considered together with the need for transformation of energy end use, for reduction of throughput and for the supply of electricity to the hundreds of millions of people who do not have it. In rich countries the potential of co-operative, municipal and other forms of public ownership must continue to be tested, alongside traditional demands for public ownership. Finally, the interests of workers directly employed by electricity companies must be considered not sectionally but as part of the broader working-class and societal interest.
□ With thanks to Daniel Faber and Marty deKadt for their comments on the draft of this article. All opinions expressed and mistakes made are mine. Simon Pirani.
A mural declaring war on the “nuclear monster”, in Italy in the 1970s, with a demonstration going past. The mural is signed by Autonomia Operaia. Reproduced from a publication of the time, on the Tactical Media Crew web site
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SUPPORT LOCHEND RESIDENTS DEMANDING FAIR RETROFITS: PROTEST AT EDINBURGH CITY CHAMBERS
Edinburgh City Chambers 10am Tuesday 27th August. (Meet outside Cafe Nero from 9:30)
Lochend is in the midst of a Council-led repair and retrofit project (“MTIS”) covering more than 400 homes, work that’s desperately needed to address years of neglect, reduce fuel poverty and climate-proof our community. But the Council’s plan leaves working class flat owners facing vast invoices, private tenants risking eviction, and social tenants missing out too when their neighbours can’t afford to pay.
In one of the most deprived areas of Edinburgh, this is not what climate justice looks like. Members of Lochend Living Rent have been campaigning for a retrofit programme done with us not to us, with enough support to ensure no-one is forced into poverty or out of their home. It’s vital the Council gets this right, now, before it rolls the scheme out to other communities.
Please join us at the City Chambers as we demand a real just transition for Lochend and beyond!
Reclaim The Power had planned to hold a protest camp near the Drax power station in Yorkshire from 8th – 13th August. Before the camp could begin the police made over twenty arrests and impounded tents, cooking equipment and a wheelchair accessible trackway. As a result the camp was unable to go ahead.
At the same time climate think tank Ember produced a report showing that Drax, which burns wood pellets imported from North America to generate electricity, was Britain’s single largest carbon emitter in 2023. Drax has received billions in subsidies since it started to switch from coal to biomass in 2012. In 2023 it was responsible for 11.5m tonnes of CO2, nearly 3% of the UK’s total carbon emissions.
Last week our peaceful camp was shut down by the police, acting as Drax’s private security.
A roundup of everything they have done to shut us down: 🚨 Over 20 people were arrested 🏠 Homes were raided across the UK 💻 Personal tech was seized 🚐 Vehicles have been impounded ⛺ All of the kit needed to set up camp has been seized
We are angry, but we are not giving up. To keep up the fight against Drax we need to replace what was seized, fund travel costs for arrestees and pay to get our vehicles back.
Employment, Energy and Environment 