The Argument about Things in the 1980s: Goods and Garbage in an Age of Neoliberalism
216
The Argument about Things in the 1980s: Goods and Garbage in an Age of Neoliberalism
216eBook
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Overview
Tim Jelfs’s The Argument about Things in the 1980s considers all this and more in a broad study of the literature and culture of the “long 1980s.” It contributes to of-the-moment scholarly debate about material culture, high finance, and ecological degradation, shedding new light on the complex relationship between neoliberalism and cultural life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781946684257 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | West Virginia University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| File size: | 839 KB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Triumph of Neoliberalism
In 1971, the Middle East Export Press, based in Beirut, Lebanon, published Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil. Its author was Wallace Stegner, the celebrated environmentalist and writer of the American West. In the mid-1950s, Stegner had accepted a commission from Aramco, the American Arabian Oil Company, to write the history of that consortium's successful search for oil on the Arabian Peninsula. That search had begun in 1933, when the California Arabian Standard Oil Company (now Chevron) started prospecting in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Aramco, which was formed when Texaco, Exxon, and Mobil joined the California firm's endeavors, in part to avoid the US government acquiring a major share of the company, initially saw little to be gained from publishing the fruit of Stegner's efforts, sitting on his manuscript for ten years before eventually publishing it in fourteen installments in Aramco World, its in-house journal. There is nothing to suggest that Stegner, whose literary environmentalism earned him honorary life membership in the Sierra Club and who would be instrumental in the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act, was at all embarrassed by the work he had carried out for the consortium as a pen-for-hire, and by the early 1970s, he was evidently happy for it to be published in book form, supplying the Beirut publishers with a new introduction.
The tone of that 1971 introduction is fascinating. The writer who had so zealously defended the conservation of American wilderness writes up this all-too-consequential tale of resource exploitation in surprisingly positive terms, even a decade-and-a-half after his association with the oil giant had ended. "American oil development in the Middle East has been, all things considered, responsible and fair," Stegner explains, insisting that "Aramco can congratulate itself on a record that is a long way from being grossly exploitative or 'imperialist.'" For all the environmentalist associations that cling to Stegner, those assignations of fairness and moderation had little, in fact, to do with the ecological interests of the Earth (which mankind had only just somewhat presumptuously granted its own "day" at the time Stegner was writing). Rather, they had to do with the way the power of corporate America had brought to Saudi Arabia what Mark Twain in his sardonically anti-imperialist mode had once called "the blessings of civilization." Those blessings extended in this case not just to the cutting-edge engineering techniques perfected by corporations like Bechtel but also to the development programs and "social engineering" projects that Stegner presents as part-and- parcel of the oil industry's hunt for profit on the Arabian Peninsula. These included "training and health programs," allegedly generous employee benefits and savings programs, and an entire division of the company focused on Local Industrial Development, which led the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia "into the American consumptive pattern and the productive patterns that supply it." For that is what, Stegner avers, "the Saudis themselves wanted — what, ultimately, they will not be denied." The sum total of such efforts was almost as extensive in its local effects, Stegner suggests, as "Europe's Marshall Plan."
Consider in this context the "bottle of black crude oil" that sat on the desk of an official involved in the management of the Tapline, the Bechtel-built Trans-Arabian Pipeline. It was there, according to Stegner, to remind the official "what business he was in." Even amidst all that corporate-led social and developmental uplift, Stegner's account of which reads now like an unintentionally ironic iteration of what Kipling in the late nineteenth century infamously called the "white man's burden," was it really likely that the manager might lose sight of the profits that were accruing from the commodity buried deep beneath his feet? Either way, it is clear what that bottle of oil itself was trying to do: narrate a story about the essential goodness of the United States and of the things it was both making for the world and taking from it by the early 1970s. At the same time, however, Stegner's mise-en-scène does offer, in spite of the corporate-financed conditions under which it was produced, an important reminder of the complexities of American imperialism in the 1970s. For, as we will see, one way to understand that bottle of black crude is as a material and symbolic embodiment of a geopolitically rooted reordering that was to have a profound effect on American life, ushering the nation into a phase of disorientating inflation that would give fresh impetus to a well-established feature of American cultural history while more or less ensuring the triumph of the now-hegemonic ideology of neoliberalism.
* * *
From the late nineteenth century, thinkers as diverse as J. A. Hobson, Lenin, Joseph Schumpeter, and Hannah Arendt understood "imperialism" as a process by which private capitalist interests of one sort or another successfully enrolled the powers of the state in defending those interests.Thus, the history of the East India Company's commercial exploitation of the Asian subcontinent had become the history of the British raj, that of various plantations along the Eastern seaboard of North America, British America, and, in due course, the independent but expansive United States. A version of such imperialist processes had already informed American literary culture, as can be seen from a work like Cabbages and Kings, by O. Henry. Based on the author's own experiences in Honduras, Henry's narrative, a deeply ironic saga of late nineteenth-century American imperialism, unfolds in the fictional Central American republic of Anchuria and opens with the image of a "small adventurer, with empty pockets to fill, light of heart, busy-brained ... bearing an alarm clock with which ... to awaken the beautiful tropics from their centuries' sleep." The collection of interlinked stories that follows is set against the backdrop of the kind of profit-led imperialist incursions into the nominally independent republics of Central America that would see the hard power of the United States deployed again and again in defense of "US interests" in the early 1900s: "Gentlemen adventurers throng the waiting-rooms of its rulers with proposals for railways and concessions. The little opéra-bouffe nations play at government and intrigue until some day [sic] a big, silent gunboat glides into the offing." Thus Henry reminds us that these often at-first very minor key imperial adventures were frequently tales of things and the profits that could be made from them. Think bananas, and banana republics. Think too of the history of the United Fruit Company, but think also of the two-way traffic in things that inevitably emerges from such endeavors, with the agents of Western capitalism carrying with them on their quests for commodifiable resources all the alluring accoutrements of modern manufacturing, the equivalent of Henry's "small adventurer's" alarm clock.
Dwelling on Henry's text sheds some light on Stegner's if only because, at first glance, Stegner's work mirrors aspects of the earlier writer's, albeit stripped of their irony. Listen, for example, to Stegner wax lyrical about what Aramco's oil prospectors brought to "eastern Saudi Arabia": nothing less than a "revolution of things ... For whatever they may think of the nations which produce and possess them, whatever distaste they have for their beliefs, their dress, and their politics, no people in history has been able to resist for half an hour the things that people like this small contingent of geologists bring with them." Woodrow Wilson had made a similar claim about the power of (American) things some decades previously, the historian-turned-politician having once instructed an audience of businessmen to "go out and sell goods that will make the world more comfortable and happy, and convert them to the principles of America." Once framed in this context, it is hard not to see the bottle of black crude that Stegner invoked in 1971 as merely the latest enabling commodity in the long tale of Western imperialism, with Bechtel and the oil companies in the role of Virginia planters or the gentlemen adventurers of O. Henry's earlier tale.
Indeed, the place occupied by things in such narrative meditations on imperialism à l'Américaine points toward one explanation, not only for the presence of Aramco and Bechtel in the Middle East in the mid-1930s but also for some of the central features of the world situation of today. After all, much of the suffocatingly close geostrategic engagement with the region that has seen repeated military and political interventions on the part of the United States has been predicated on the perceived strategic importance of being able to exercise some degree of control over the supply of oil from the Gulf region. This was made explicit in January 1980, when President Carter pronounced that an "attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force." Decades earlier, the CIA had orchestrated a coup in Syria after the sitting government refused to ratify the terms of an agreement with the Trans- Arabian Pipeline company. In 1953, the same agency conspired with British intelligence services to reverse the nationalization of Iranian oil by overthrowing the democratically elected Mossadegh. The Carter Doctrine thus formalized and extended a strategic process that has meant that today, one form "the big, silent gunboat" off the coast of O. Henry's Central American Republic takes in the Middle East is that of the US Navy's Fifth Fleet, permanently stationed since the mid-1990s in Bahrain, the oil-rich island state fewer than twenty miles off the coast of Al Khobar, which, as Stegner relates, is a city the discovery of oil in Eastern Saudi Arabia raised out of little more than "a couple of palm-thatch fishermen's barastis."
If in his account of Aramco's quest for Arabian oil Stegner takes great pains to insist that this was no "imperialist" endeavor, he takes even greater pains to distinguish American activities in the region from older European models of state-supported economic exploitation, stressing that the United States government "was so far from being involved" in the search for oil that "it didn't even have a representative in Saudi Arabia." Putting to one side the fact that Stegner was unlikely to have known, writing in the mid-1950s, the true extent of the CIA's presence within Aramco itself, nor to have been able fully to grasp the still-developing web of relations that would see Western "democracy" increasingly underpinned by the oil- rich autocracies of the contemporary Middle East, it is fair to say that the US government is now more than sufficiently represented in the region, projecting its military and political power in a way that simultaneously indicates the sheer extent of the agentic potency of oil: conjuring up cities and ships, resentments and wars as efficiently as any earlier incarnations of imperial objects of desire. In this sense, what spices and opium were to other geographic locales at earlier historical moments, so oil has proved to the Middle East since the end of the Second World War, a period in which the United States has assumed its own version of the imperialistic role once played by the older European powers in the region, proving itself as it does so no less powerlessly at the behest of things and the profits that might accrue from them than those earlier powers were in their own time. It was not just, as Stegner seemed to think, the case that "trade followed the flag," but as theorists of the causes of empire had explained, that trade sought out things and the state followed dutifully behind. As Timothy Mitchell has argued, the thing at the heart of the whole process is and remains oil itself, "whose energy is the force that oil firms seek to master and whose location, abundance, density and other properties shape the methods and apparatus of its control."
In elucidating those methods and that apparatus, Mitchell has shown how "the major oil companies, which were the first and largest of the new transnational corporations of the twentieth century, established their global presence at the historical moment when the old [European] system of empire, built up originally through colonising corporations, was finally disintegrating." For Mitchell, this was itself part of a longer historical process involving the "engineering [of] political relations out of flows of energy" that has seen the shift from coal power to oil power in turn transfer political power further away from organized labor in the West, which had previously been able to use its physical capacity to shut down or otherwise interrupt the flow of coal to demand, and achieve, "improvements to collective life." The material properties of the fuels in question were central to this process. The fluidity of oil, which enabled it to be drilled, traded, and transported via far less labor-intensive, and far-more grid-like, networks of derricks and pipelines has effectively disabled this political process, enabling instead a set of political relations that has seen the global power of transnational corporations, still attended by the military power of the US, operate in concert with more local forces of repression in the form of autocratic (and in the case of Saudi Arabia, familial) national governments. By means of such processes, Mitchell relates, the infrastructure of the modern state of Saudi Arabia has been developed, while the political power of its workforce has been constrained. Thus, oil energy and Aramco may well have built the nation's "towns, road system, railway, telecommunications network, ports and airports, and acted as banker to the ruling family and investor in Saudi enterprise," but oil energy and Aramco also conspired with the Saudi monarchical kinship-state to repress Arab workers' demands. Indeed, the year after Stegner first composed his account of Aramco's endeavors in the Arabian Peninsula, a general strike saw Saudi workers demand a constitution, labor unions, political parties, and "an end to Aramco's interference in the country's affairs." They also demanded the closure of the US military base that had been established at Dharhan. The outcome was, perhaps, predictable: "Aramco's security department identified the strike leaders to the Saudi security forces, who imprisoned or deported the organisers."
There are, though, risks in seeing the modern geopolitics of oil as a mere case of history repeating well-established patterns of Western imperial domination. For in retrospect, we might equally think of the contents of the bottle on the executive's desk as bespeaking Western vulnerabilities as much as Western power. In 1971, the same year Stegner's work for Aramco was finally published in book form, the landmark Tehran and Tripoli agreements more or less ensured such vulnerability by formalizing a far more powerful role for the governments of Middle Eastern oil-producing states in setting oil prices. The agreements mandated significant increases in the commodity's price per barrel and determined that for the first time, producer states would take in tax more than a fifty percent share of the profits generated from oil sales. King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia had himself been a pioneer in this regard, negotiating a 50/50 split of revenues with Aramco as early as 1950, which was perhaps why Stegner's corporate-sponsored account of Aramco's story in the Arabian Peninsula repeatedly gave embarrassingly Orientalist voice to fears about the perils posed by "emotional nationalists." The dread specter of what Stegner disapprovingly called "willful nationalization" had also led to the Anglo-American intervention in Iran in 1953; and nationalization, too, would in time be Aramco's fate, the company being taken under full control of the Saudi state in 1980. That, however, was not before the economic vulnerability of the West to imported oil had been demonstrated in the two oil shocks of the 1970s, the first in 1973–74, the second in 1979, when the leaders of Saudi Arabia and other oil- producing states, now organized into the OPEC cartel, increased oil prices.
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