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No Blood for Oil!
Wed, July 12, 2017 @ 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
$6 – $15
An author presentation with discussion, co-sponsored with Autonomedia
No Blood For Oil!
Essays on Energy, Class Struggle and War 1998–2016
George Caffentzis
The oil industry is at the center of the major struggles of our time, but is Marxist theory able to explain its behavior? The oil industry presents a paradox to Marxist theory. How is it that oil companies employ relatively few workers and invest in a relatively large amount of machinery, but still are the largest and most profitable companies on the planet? It should be otherwise, if profits come from exploiting worker’s labor. In his book, No Blood for Oil, George Caffentzis shows how Marxism resolves this paradox and accounts for the peculiar role that the oil industry plays in contemporary capitalism as generator of ecological devastation, war and exploitation. Come to discuss the struggle over the exchange of blood for oil.
George Caffentzis is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. He has taught courses on oil and class struggle in many venues in Africa, South America and Europe. He is a co-founder of the Midnight Notes Collective and is the author of In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism (2013) and Exciting the Industry of Mankind: George Berkeley’s Philosophy of Money (2000).
“The papers in this collection are weapons we use to deconstruct the politics of war and oil, to uncover the multilayered class meaning of contemporary energy policy, and are the treasure that gives us a different sense of alternatives. Caffentzis’ critical understanding dissolves the fatalism of peak-oil arguments and posits our struggles to reclaim the commons as the real limit of capitalist use of energy.” — Massimo de Angelis, author of The Beginning of History