Re: [A-List] US state: increasingly worried about oil.American andcars.

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 4/19/2004 8:53:35 AM Central Standard Time, 
michael.keaney@mbs.fi writes:

>Compared with other rich economies, the US is notably energy-dependent.
Aside from Americans' umbilical attachment to their cars, life in the
rapidly growing cities of the southern and western states would be sweaty
and unpleasant indeed without air-conditioning. American energy use makes it
resemble a grimy, gas-guzzling developing economy more than a green rich
nation: a dollar of US gross domestic product takes one third more energy to
produce than a dollar of output in Japan or western Europe. Gasoline taxes,
though they have the advantage of making energy consumers bear the
associated environmental costs - "internalising externalities" in the
language of economics - remain politically toxic.<

Comment 

The apparent love affair Americans have with cars has to do with the specific 
development of the American Union national market, open spaces and the 
evolution of the industrial system as it embodies bourgeois property relations. This 
property relations involves wages, the sell and purchase of labor power, the 
law of value, etc., - but this detracts from the story. Our use of cars 
express a "need" created by bourgeois property - not technology as such. 

What determine the amount of automobiles in America and the world is the 
profit motive factor. The automobile as individual transportation manifest the 
bourgeois property relation, buttressed by the ideology of "freedom of movement." 
 
Automobiles are not produced to provide transportation but to make profits. 
If it was a simple question of transportation, common sense would dictate a 
complex mass transit system. Automobiles became the centerpiece of industrial 
capitalism   not industrial socialism, for most of the 20th century, consuming 
20% of the steel industry, 12 percent of aluminum, 10% of copper, 51% of the 
lead, 95% of nickel, 35% of zinc, and 60% of rubber used in America. Auto 
production on the basis of bourgeois property not only reconfigured these industries 
in its image as appendages also operating on the basis of profit motive, but 
became the impetus for the design of our industrial infrastructure and form of 
urban society. 
 
The “form of urban society” means a little bit more than Marx description of 
the economic and metabolic rift between town and country. We are talking 
about a historically specific form of urban society erected on the edifice of 
bourgeois property in a country without feudal economic history or historically 
evolved city structures dating back hundreds of years. 
 
The automobile configured the modern oil industry in its image or the fossil 
fuel infrastructure. The energy infrastructure is not an abstract "structure 
of energy capacity" but the embodiment of bourgeois property. Trace the 
evolution of the oil industry in connection with auto production. 
 
The issue of global warming (the greenhouse affect) in relationship to the 
automobile is a question of bourgeois property first and foremost and not an 
abstract question of entropy or technology. This means there is a technological 
and political solution to the “greenhouse affect” in respects to auto 
emissions. Well, over 700,000 vehicles on earth is a product of bourgeois production 
and not technology. The automobile is the scared cow of industrial capitalism, 
- not industrial socialism.  
 
This issue bears examination from the lens of property relations because we 
are talking about a complex of "needs" in society spun by bourgeois property in 
the first place. I beg of comrades to reread Marx “Economic and Philosophic 
Manuscript of 1844: The Meaning of Human Requirements.” 
 
Reconfiguring the transportation industry would probably reduce fossil fuel 
consumption by as much as 60-70% - perhaps 80-85%, because we are also talking 
about the physical infrastructure and factories that sustain auto production 
and not simply a tank of gas. Automobiles have seats and these seats are made 
of various fabrics, clothe and leather, etc. Auto production configures and 
reconfigures, these fabric industries on the basis of profit making, which 
requires an energy infrastructure and these industries in turn pollute. The workers 
in these industries require more than less private transportation to work, 
which in turn means the automobile begins to create its own need and urgency. 
This same force applies to the glass industry. Glass is not bad. Technology is 
not bad. The utilization of technology – glass, on the basis of bourgeois 
property – profit making, is called into question. 
 
Automobiles contain heating and cooling units and another industry arises as 
a “need” requiring an energy infrastructure with workers requiring private 
transportation.  We are talking about the process of reproduction and 
reproduction means cycles of producing what ever you are producing. The problem is the 
bourgeois property relations as it creates its own meaning, reasoning and 
cycles of reproduction based on its own needs and these “needs” are created for 
its self maintenance. The bourgeois character and nature of the history of the 
American Union offers the American Marxists a unique vantage point if we 
maintain the conviction to unravel what is in front of us.  
 
The auto industry as configured, its appendages - the showrooms, that part of 
the transportation system used to transport these vehicles; the system of gas 
stations, all the products used to service cars are slated for a radical 
reconfiguration. Vehicles are painted and a paint industry arise as the embodiment 
of bourgeois property. The paint industry workers evolve "needs" and means of 
transportation to work.  

Our system of individual transportation is designed for consumption and 
everything around it is geared to bourgeois reproduction - profit making. The 
bourgeoisie produces naked profits and here is a huge source of the modern 
environmental problems. The problem is not science "gone bad" but applied science on 
the basis of bourgeois production. 
 
Our wonderful interstate system is configured and reconfigured on the basis 
of individual transportation (also military considerations) with small shopping 
areas, gas stations and restroom facilities every five to ten miles. The 
workers servicing these out of the way facilities require individual 
transportation to get to work. The configuration of our society that we take for granted 
should not be imparted with a God ordained quality. We are dealing with a 
configuration that is the essence of the bourgeois property relations and the class 
struggle. 
 
Marx talks about how we recreate ourselves and the impact of property on what 
we recreate and how we think about what we create and give rise to. "Need" - 
the apparent love affair with cars, recreates itself as an internal compulsion 
of its own being, as it is driven by profit making. Let us go back to the 
automobile, the interstate system and individual transportation.  
 
The restroom facilities – sewage system, is no abstraction and dot the 
landscape of our interstate system. What people discharge from their bodies is 
determined by what has been eaten, or what you put into your body. What we eat is a 
complex of “needs” produced on the basis of bourgeois property as it created 
“the needs.” If obesity is the number one killer in America, and it is, then 
toilet paper production and the whole infrastructure of our sewage system 
express a pathological condition, inherited and reproduced in widening scope on 
the basis of bourgeois production. 

Driving along the highway - on the basis of individual transportation, 
requires an immense superstructure/infrastructure and energy grid “need” created by 
bourgeois property in the first and last instance.  

Factor in the advertisement on a planetary scale to sale individual 
transportation vehicles and its building, offices, paper use, computers, pencils, paper 
clips, desk chairs, lights, air conditioning in building, technology and 
equipment, film making, etc., and how these people travel to work each day and the 
infrastructure industries behind the aforementioned and their energy grid 
needs and the property question slowly comes into focus. 

The issue is the unsustainablilty of the bourgeois property relation. What is 
called heavy industry by Marxist is no abstraction, but the embodiment of a 
property relations. 

This is just a view of individual transportation as the automobile on the 
basis of bourgeois production. One can subject every commodity on earth to the 
same standpoint, including mother's cookies. What is the origin of the cookie, 
what ingredients and tools and infrastructure is necessary to sustain cookie 
making? 

I will of course be accused of attacking the saintly qualities of mother. 


Melvin P.