ABSTRACT
Inter-capitalist competition for the control of oil is at the center of the political geometry of global capitalism. Beyond assertions of its vital centrality to the emerging geopolitical economy, particularly the continued hegemony of the US, little attempt has been made to theorize the relations among the production of oil, the process of capital accumulation, and the production of geographical space. Geopolitical analyses reduce the competition for oil to rivalry among nation states caused by a combination of an increase in consumer demands and growing populations and a decline in the quantities and quality of available resources. Thus, the rise in world consumption and inevitable decrease in the amount and quality of available oil resources not only explain geopolitical competition, but are certain to lead to what Michael Klare has called “resource wars,” and, on some catastrophic views, to nothing short of the extinction of the human species altogether. Wars are destined to erupt wherever shared resources are located until, in a matter of few years, no oil will be left to produce the energy necessary for the survival of the global human population and six of the seven billion people on this planet will become “redundant.”1 Political economic analysis has been careful to avoid the Malthusian, and erroneous, premises of this argument and point to the historical forces that made oil a “strategic commodity” upon which the integration of capitalist economies under US hegemony in the post-war period has depended, making the global competition for the control of oil a central aspect of the survival, or decline, of US hegemony in the global economy.2 Despite glaring differences in their explanation of the sources of geopolitical competition for oil, both conventional geopolitics and political economy share a focus on the security of supply of oil, determined by its geological finiteness, in terms of its limited quantities or in terms of its location, thus making the competition for oil a competition for the control of the geographical spaces in which it is located or through which it is transported to consumers in order to ensure its uninterrupted flow into the global economy. I aim to reverse this relationship in the chapters that constitute this book and argue that it is not the geological finiteness of oil that leads to geopolitical competition and makes space important, but the production of geographical space in the process of competition that is crucial to producing the finiteness of oil. In other words, I shall show that the competition for oil is not to guarantee its supply but
to guarantee that a part of it stays out of the market in order to make its production profitable. The problem of oil is not its scarcity but its abundance. It is, moreover, cheap to produce, making it necessary for competing oil producers, national (state) and transnational oil companies, to put in place mechanisms that prevent overproduction and oversupply in the market by regulating capital invested in the production of oil. In the process, geographical space becomes decisive in controlling the production of oil and negotiating the contradictions of the expansion of global capital into oil reserves, rather than simply the passive locus of competition.
