RS
Richard Seymour
Energetics and the cost of living
The cost of living, for working-class people, is the cost of the reproduction of their labour-power. This includes both an energetic and biochemical component, that which is necessary to restore the worker's physical and mental capacities so that work can continue, and what Marx called an "historical and moral element", which includes access to a share of energy and its products.
The class struggle over the cost of living is to a large degree a struggle over the "historical and moral element" of the wage, achieved through prior struggles. Historically, one of the ways capitalist states have acted to control wage growth without suppressing consumption is through various interventions designed to promote extraction, and disguise, suppress and externalise costs. This includes a range of subsidies, wars and political interventions to extend global supply networks. By controlling the cost of energy, they controlled the cost of commodities, heating and transport. And thus also, the cost of labour-power. By the same means, they secured popular consent for the political coalition between capitalism and the fossil fuels which have facilitated historically aberrant growth.
For the time being, this is their response to increased costs arising from Russia's war on Ukraine (on the latest of which, more in a future post). The G7's plans to cap energy prices follows recent measures to subsidise consumption with cash transfers in the UK, and gas tax cuts in the US. This is conspicuously designed to mitigate class struggle by softening the edges of soaring inequality. But in the medium-to-long-term, there is no way to avoid rationing energy use. This isn't because of 'peak oil'. Every time the peak has been sighted, it has receded further into the distance. In the year 2000, according to Vaclav Smil, the total amount of useful commercial energy available to the world was 25 times that in 1900, and yet – thanks to enormous technical improvements – the reserve/production ratios were much better in 2000.
Rather, it is because of the unacceptable costs of extraction. The declining energy return on investment is one issue here, although that may be temporarily overcome by further technical innovations (fracking is actually a very dangerous example of this). An unavoidable problem, though, is that the ability of capitalist states to contain the costs imposed by ecological blowback is limited. And as those costs rise, we start to see de facto rationing by price.
Another option for imperialist states is a form of accumulation by dispossession, wherein trade policy backed by military and treasury power is used to increase the export of energy and materials to the imperial core. As material-flow analyses show, for example, Latin America already exports six times more materials, energy and biomass than it imports. Such uneven, exploitative metabolic flows characterise the entire world-system. This is why in 2000, the 'affluent countries' used 70% of total primary energy supplies (compared with 98% in 1900). And in 2005, the energy used in different countries varied from 0.5 GJ per capita in sub-Saharan Africa, to 330GJ per capita in the US and Canada.
That, however, is a crisis-prone situation. The decline of dollar hegemony, the appearance of China as a serious regional power, serial US military defeats at the hands of weaker rivals, and the opening of cracks in the world system, all suggest that the world's dominant capitalist state is in a trajectory of decline. All of which means there will be more overt and brutal efforts to displace the costs onto the working-class, more direct conflicts in the world system, exacerbated nationalisms, and probably greater pressures to war.
The cost-of-living crisis is, then, a civilizational crisis. Trade union struggle is going to be essential, but insufficient. Trade union struggle can organise millions of workers to fight over the terms of exploitation and give them political education and self-confidence. But it can't by itself change our relationship to energy. It can't change the fact that living standards are dependent on capitalist growth and, to that extent, on growing energy use. Frequently, for that reasons, the unions are ambivalent allies of ecological struggles (for example, Unite's support for Heathrow expansion, or the RMT's opposition to the Green New Deal.) As Matthias Schmelzer et al point out in their new book on degrowth, the point of degrowth is not eco-austerity, but breaking these dependencies. And that requires an orientation to taking political power.
We can start to see the way out if we measure the cost-of-living in joules, rather than dollars or pounds. Human societies are subsystems of the biosphere, and – like other biological systems – expand by expanding the rate of the circulation of matter and the flux of energy through the system. As such, even taking into account class variations, you would expect there to be a strong correlation between economic growth, average living standards and the average use of energy. And that is true up to a point.
According to Smil's figures, preagricultural societies consumed only around 10 GJ/year per capita – and the majority of that was food, and phytomass for fire. During the rule of the Han dynasty in China, in which agriculture was driven by a vast tributary system of exploitation, it had risen to 20GJ. The comparable figure in medieval Europe, in which feudal agriculture still dominated and where coal was burned chiefly for metallurgical purposes, was 40GJ. By the late nineteenth century in England, before the main innovations in prime movers (the internal combustion engine) and energy (electricity) had found mass markets, the figure was 100GJ. By the year 2000, it was 170 GJ per capita in western Europe and Japan. Bearing in mind that capitalist economies tend, after an initial burst of industrialisation, to exhibit declining energy-intensity, that growth in energy use roughly tracks conventional GDP growth.
What about living standards? Here, the main benefits of high energy use start to drop off quickly as use rises. For example, the longest life expectancies at birth and the lowest infant mortality rates start to be reached when the average per capita use of primary energy is between 40-50 GJ. That's substantially below the global mean. The very best rates are achieved at 70 GJ/year, which is just above the threshold proposed by the Swiss Federal Institute of technology (the "2000-watt society" would give everyone 63.4 GJ/year). The same level of energy use corresponds to over 90% literacy rates, and mass access to higher education. The same is true, even in the framework of capitalism, of relative political freedoms: beyond a certain minimum level, higher energy use makes little difference. Average energy use above 70 GJ/year is linked to conspicuous consumption, wherein the benefits and pleasures tend to be more ephemeral. And with adequate investment in energy-efficient homes and workplaces, lighter electric vehicles and mass transit, more durable clothing and artefacts, and shorter food supply-chains, it would be possible for a much better standard of living to be achieved within that limit.
A Marxist analysis of energy uses must, of course, go further. Life is anti-entropy, an ordered system that arose due to some gradient of energy and chemistry. But each living system, as Erwin Schrödinger wrote, increases its entropy even. Everything it does by way of metabolism is intended to stave off maximum entropy: death, or extinction. And since human civilization is a biospheric subsystem, its thriving depends on how it systematically produces useful energy (low entropy), as well as on how it manages and mitigates the entropy that it produces. The capitalist mode of production has drastically increased the amount of useful energy. This is because, while capitalism is driven by the production of surplus-value (a social, not physical, category), energy is a factor in what Marx called "the natural fertility of capital". It improves surplus-value by increasing the productivity of labour-power. It also, over time, allows much larger pools of labour-power to be drawn upon. Statistics on the per capita consumption of energy obscures the reality of how and in whose interests that energy is consumed, viz. the reproduction of labour-power in its normal state. In other words, a great deal of the energy being consumed by us is part of the mechanism by which caloric energy is extracted from us.
Moreover, capital's historically unprecedented production of useful energy (low entropy) is more than matched by its matchless production of entropy. When we speak of the hidden costs of energy use – for example, that air pollution caused one in five of all deaths in 2018 – we are speaking of entropy. When we speak of costs that are externalised by the "screen of capital" (only to return in the form of "negative value"), we are speaking of entropy. When we speak of carbon emissions, ocean acidification, runaway wilfires, or the wild disruptions to the nitrogen cycle, we are speaking of entropy. It is capitalism which is driving us toward maximum entropy, not because of the conspicuous consumption of the majority, but because of the basic imperative of accumulation.
This, entropy, is the other side of the cost-of-living. It is a cost of capitalist production which the capitalist class would rather was not shouldered by capital. And that means that class and social struggles around the cost-of-living now and in the future will be about, not just our share of energy and its products, but our vulnerability to capitalist-induced entropy.