DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICITED] BOOK RECOMMENDATION - CRUDE CAPITALISM by Adam Hanieh

Available DRM free here.

I've been hinting at and promising this book review for a while now, and so here it is.

In a recent workshop I ran on digital/'AI' literacy, I discussed the known phenomena of pareidolia, or the human trait of finding and ascribing meaning to patterns that do not actually exist. Part of the problem with discussing pareidolia as briefly as I will here, of course, is that proving whether or not an observed pattern is actually a pattern or a product of a bias like survivor's or confirmation bias is a lengthy process. I have spent entire terms teaching statistics modules on the perilous process of proving causality in a given model, and ended numerous times with the statement, 'but of course, this is also a flawed understanding, a subject of debate between established statisticians'.

I bring up pareidolia here because Western historians, especially 'pop' historians, have a desire, dating back to what we call the Enlightenment Era at least, to divide history into neat little discrete categories. Some of these divisions are easier to justify, as they do have a 'natural' beginning and end, in the Commonwealth one often refers to the 'Victorian era', which is easy to define, as it begins with a noted historical event, the coronation of Queen Victoria on 24 May 1837. It also ends with a naturally occurring and equally well defined event, when she joined the choir invisible in 1901. Of course, since people extend the Victorian era beyond the reign of Victoria, pushing it back to the end of the Napoleonic War in 1815, and all the way to the dawn of the First World War in 1914. Alternatively, some have called that 'expanded' era Pax Britannia, or the 'great British peace', etc., etc. The problem with a lot of this periodisation, of course, is a lot of phenomenon we associate with this era originates outside this era. The first modern railway, for example, the Liverpool-Manchester railway, began service on 15 September 1830, setting the British 'railway mania' into motion. We associate the spread of rail with the Victorian era, but 1830 is notably seven years prior to Victoria's coronation, and as Gareth Dennis points out in How Railways Will Fix the Future, whilst the Liverpool-Manchester Railway was the first rail to give regular inter-city service, it was not the oldest rail in Britain, with smaller railways emerging as far back in the 1820s, and non-steam powered ones going back even further into the 18th century.

Truth is, people weren't just sitting around waiting for Victoria to become Queen to pop off and invent the train. The invention of the steam locomotive and subsequent rapid expansion of railways was a process that took years to happen before the Liverpool-Manchester Railway opened for business. Further, of course, whilst the English speaking world fancies itself the centre of the universe, it isn't. Plenty of the world could not care less that some random mildly inbred rich teenaged white girl had become Queen of a random European Empire, even back then. Even within Britain itself, the majority of people didn't notice any material change just because a 'new era' had begun. Most other European invented periodisations of history fall apart, not only outside of Europe itself, but also within Europe once you move away from the 'elites first' version of history we tend to focus on. The European Renaissance Era was not the rebirth of mankind, rather just European intellectuals and merchants catching up to their Ottoman and Mughal counterparts. The brutality of the European 'dark' and 'middle' ages hadn't been so brutal in the Muslim world, except the times that the Pope needed a war with the western most Muslim powers in order to obfuscate local political failings within the 'Holy Roman Empire', an entity that Voltaire and countless hack YouTube historians have all noted was neither 'holy, nor Roman, nor even an Empire'. Indeed the 'middle ages' had also seen a flourishing of civilisation in Africa and the Americas, and other places that had missed the memo that the Europeans were having a series of bad days. The death of 'antiquity' with the collapse of the Roman Empire had little bearing on China, nor indeed by the time the Roman Empire had fully collapsed, had the people in ancient Hibernia (Ireland) or Germania (er, Germany) even noticed the absence of those pesky Romans.

I bring all this up for you to keep in mind, as one of the periodisations that may have caused the most damage in our time is that of the narrative around the 'post war' economy. The war in question, of course, is the Second World War (1937-1945). The argument for the 'post war' narrative is one of rapid economic shifting, with the US becoming far more central to the global economy, with the 'Marshall Plan' becoming the major economic impetus for development in post-war France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and West Germany, as a means of containing the 'Bolshevik' menace, whilst old man Britain struggles to find meaning as the transition from British Empire to Commonwealth picks up momentum. Meanwhile in the 'other' part of the world, the Soviets are 'consolidating power'. We have Keynsian economics, the Bretton-Woods agreement, and a whole host of other 'post-war' agreements to steer a great 'global reset', we even have a United Nations to look to for guidance and optimism. Yes sir, for both global capitalism and global Communism, the late 1940s offered a 'great reset', and so it's fine all of our modern datasets begin in 1948. No real need to get bogged down on pre-war economies, or how they might impact us.

I say this, of course, because often when discussing 'big tobacco' or 'big oil' in the context of their (mis)deeds during the 'golden age' of capitalism in the 1950s and 60s, we all too often act like they, big oil especially, just popped up in the post-war era and there is no way anyone could have seen this coming. This, of course, could not be further from the truth. Much like the railways and Victoria, oil corporations weren't just sitting around waiting for the great powers to all try and destroy each other in the 1930s and 40s. Although, unlike the trains and Victoria, there was a great deal of profit for the oil corporations to make from this global conflagration, and make it they did.

I'm not, and neither is Hanieh, going to say that Standard Oil invented capitalism. We largely have the British and Dutch versions of the East India Company to thank for that. (And what a lovely little start for capitalism, that, two horrifyingly genocidal, pro-slavery firms with their own private militaries, which were controversial even their time). What Standard Oil did do, however, was create a play book that would be studied by business majors and replicated repeatedly through the late 19th centuries and up until today. As a specialist in modern 'digital capitalism', I was unsurprised to see many tactics employed by Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, et al., had largely originated with Standard Oil. The British EIC was, in many ways, the 'beta' version of a multinational corporation, discovering that you do the vile, evil shit far away from your claimed 'home jurisdiction'. British law, the EIC would often argue, doesn't apply in the British colonies, especially since the limited communication technology of the 17th and 18th centuries inhibited the capacity for the average Briton to find out what the EIC was up to, minimising the chances for an unprofitable bit of public backlash to occur. By the 19th century, some of this public outrage had lead to the abolition of slavery, the dissolution of the EIC itself, a call for universal education, and an end for the exploitation of child labour, especially in the metropole.

Learning from the EIC's mistakes, Standard Oil sought to circumvent various laws by creating the idea of the modern subsidiary, as well as becoming the monopolistic buyer. Standard Oil didn't monopolise oil extraction, they were in fact, keen to leave the 'dirty work' to thousands of small independent oil fields across the US, and later the world. Rather, they monopolised the trains, the pipelines, the refining, and the selling. The 'upstream' part of the oil business. The small firms had no choice but to sell to Standard, and therefore Standard could set the rates. The 'independent firms' had no leverage to change the rates in their favour, and could become the local scape goats for Standard's poor conduct. Independent and legally sacrificable in name, but hardly in practice. As the World Wars loomed, and naval warfare threatened strategic oil supplies across the belligerent European powers, the US-based Standard Oil and it's post 'break up' network of cartel sellers, stood the profit immensely, as the land-based US oil market would be safe from German raiders. U-boats don't work so well in Texas, and can't disrupt oil lines in the middle of the US mainland.

Before the war, the main competition to the US oil monopoly had been formed by Churchill's friend, D'Arcy in the form of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which would become the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which would become British Petroleum. To give BP, as I'm going to refer to it for simplicity, the benefits of government subsidy without oversight, the then First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill forced the transition of the Royal Navy from being principally coal burning to being oil burning. As such, the perennial cash cow of defence contracting gave BP a remarkable return on investment that most young firms could only dream of. During the war, the RN's newfound dependence on oil, and the interference of German and Ottoman raids on BP's oil lines and ships made the Royal Navy an excellent customer for Standard Oil as well. The Royal Dutch Oil Company and the British Shell Corporation also saw more profit to be made in the British Empire and Commonwealth, and so merged into Royal Dutch Shell, but don't let the name fool you, it is entirely headquartered in London and benefited (and benefits) chiefly from Nigerian Oil and Indian refineries. Standard's children would also rebrand as 'Standard Oil of New York', 'Standard Oil of New Jersey', and 'Standard Oil of California' just didn't give a good ring, and thus we ended up with Mobil, Exxon, and Chevron (in that order). Five of the 'seven sisters' of 'big oil' were born, and as they raced across the interwar period to secure oil wells in and around their respective countries and colonies, as well as else where, the idea of 'vertical integration' and 'upstream monopolisation' from the original Standard Oil play book spread.

Before the first Japanese incursion into Chinese soil, 'post war' capitalism wasn't just born, it was already thriving, and frankly the war was only going to help it realise profits that even the EIC at its 18th century height could only have dreamt of.

This is not to say that capital wanted the Second World War. Fascists are bad, and fighting to put an end to them is always a good goal. Of course, we could point out how many members of the American, German, and British bourgeois supported the German Nazi party, (looking at you, BMW, Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz, Ford Motor Company, International Business Machines, Coca-Cola Company, Bayer Pharmaceutical, and on and on). But capital didn't have to have caused the war or done some George Lucas style 'behind the seens' manipulation to have profited from it. And of course, we can always point out that capitalist imperial extraction was the cause of the economic malaise that led to the rise of fascism in the first place. (It's no mistake that the up-start car companies, the 'big tech' of their day were so pro-fascist, not unlike the 'big tech' of our day).

This is also to say that the Bretton Woods agreement also wasn't a 'break from the past' like it is often presented as, rather a formalisation of practices already emergent in both British and American economic and foreign practice, designed cheifly to protect their interests, and the interests of their corporations. Of course, the leading corporations in Britain and America by the time of the 1944 conference, and throughout the post-war wrangling were already the oil companies, and thus it is unsurprising how much British and American post-war manoeuvring was done in the best interest of the oil corporations.

Hanieh does a great job of going through the development of the biggest of the British and American oil corporations, and how their machinations shaped our modern world, and modern capitalism, starting in the mid-19th century to today. I bring up the EIC so much in my review, because the fairly obvious parallels between the EIC and the early oil companies, especially BP and Shell is not present in this fairly American-centric narrative. Of course, what is present is how oil didn't have to become the central figure it is to our lives today, but it was aggressively pushed by oil companies looking to diversify their portfolios. Not only is modern life dominated by oil and petrol, but a whole host of petrochemicals, all of which have contributed greatly to the climate crisis we are currently living through. No single industry has done as much damage to our planet as the oil industry, a fact even the oil industry is aware of, given the sheer amount of resources they have spent covering up this very fact, as far back as at least the 1960s. The modern tricks of 'both sidesism' and misinformation were not invented by 'big oil' but they perfected it, and other industries took note, most infamously, of course, the tobacco industry. In more recent times, we see big tech, gambling, and even media conglomerates using tactics borrowed from big oil, which has proliferated itself through the dark world of business school group think.

Hanieh also examines how Germany's lack of access to oil during the world war and interwar eras led to the rapid expansion of its synthetic chemical industrial base, and how that led to many other monopolies that we see today. He also examines the Soviet Union's complex relationship with oil and the potentially colonial relationship that early Soviet leaders struggled with in Azerbaijan as they transitioned the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union, and of course the role of the oil and gas industry in modern post-Soviet Russia.

But perhaps most interesting to me, and I'm sure this will be of little shock to regular readers, is the discussion of the formation, successes, and eventual failure of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). In development economics, there is considerable debate around whether or not the 'resource' curse exists. In my personal experience, this is one of those debates wherein liberal theorists are forced to acknowledge a part of one of Marx's, or broader Marxism's arguments are valid, but still must dress it up in the guise that free market solutions or capitalist logic can fix the problem. The 'resource curse' for the uninitiated is an acknowledgement amongst liberal and even conservative academics that countries rich in 'high value' resources, in this case oil are more prone to economic and political instability. A great deal of literature around the 'resource curse' focuses on trying to identify why so many of these states trend towards political and economic instability.

Marxists don't bother, because the answer is fairly straight forward: the political instability benefits the interests of the British and American capitalist classes, and can almost always be traced back to either a British or American corporation, or the CIA/MI-6, Western 'economic sanctions', and/or substantial 'aid' either purely economic or military to 'Western friendly' factions in the countries in question, undermining any domestic movements that might want to break centuries of colonial imperialistic holds over their homelands.

To this end, Hanieh analyses the anti-colonial formation of OPEC, the racist response to OPEC in the metropoles of the 'seven sisters' (the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands), as well as the ways in which the largely British and American corporations, militaries, media, and espionage agencies undermined the original intention of OPEC, bending the organisation instead into the bourgeois benefiting, neo-colonial enforcing entity that we all know and hate today. As well as considerable discussion around how the 'seven sisters' used the economic crisis of the OPEC embargo to steer Britain and America away from the Keynesian post-war agreement and into the neo-liberal hell-scape we all live in today. It also fully explores how the Keynesian 'socialism lite' of largely post-war US and UK politics was always damned as long as it lived alongside the extreme capitalism of the oil-funded bourgeois class. These inherent contradictions of the Keynesian system spelled its doom from the start, as neither Britain nor America were willing to address the actual causes of the late 19th and early 20th century economic instabilities that had led to the collapse of the global economy and political order that led to the world wars. All these lessons ignored so the UK and US could continue to play empire.

I'm hitting my self-imposed limit here, and so I'll cut to the chase. I highly recommend this book. It is a vital examination of how the oil corporations might not have invented capitalism, monopolies, colonial imperialism, or far right politics, but they've benefited immensely from all of them, and so have spent considerable resources into maintaining and expanding all of them. Further, 'big oil' has created a play book so successful that it has been borrowed extensively by other groups, most notably 'big tobacco', 'big pharma', and 'big tech'. This play book has created what is likely the most toxic and destructive form of capitalism ever known, and the version of capitalism that might actually finally bring about human extinction.

We should probably nationalise all these companies.