Tom Keefer | York University (original) (raw)

Papers by Tom Keefer

In developing an analysis of the rise of industrial capitalism, my paper will build upon the theo... more In developing an analysis of the rise of industrial capitalism, my paper will build upon the theoretical approach established by a group of Marxist scholars and historians – Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood and George Comninel – to explain the genesis of capitalism in the English countryside. These thinkers have argued that the development of agrarian capitalism holds the key to understanding the evolution of industrial capitalism and its technological breakthrough. The first part of this paper will examine their work and elaborate a framework for understanding the rise of agrarian capitalism and its internal “laws of motion” which encouraged the “putting out” system and the industrial or factory form of capitalism. I will do this by reviewing Comninel and Wood's critique of the "commercialization model" of capitalism and by also outlining Brenner's contribution to the debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. I will conclude by looking at the debate between Robert Albritton and Mike Zmolek on agrarian capitalism and the rise of the “putting out system” and raise the problem of the limits of relative surplus value extraction within pre-industrial forms of capitalist production. The second part of this paper will make the argument that were it not for the geological accident of the vast coal deposits present in England, the Industrial Revolution could not have happened in that country, and that agrarian capitalism, bound by the thermodynamic limits of the flow of solar energy, would have fallen victim to its own internal contradictions – intractable class struggle and the "metabolic rift" that led to declining agricultural sustainability. I will argue that the great depression of the 1830s and 1840s represented a crisis point for agrarian capitalismwhich was only overcome by a transition to a new energy regime based on coal, one able to contain class struggles, open up new avenues for economic production and inaugurate a new era of industrial capitalism.

The ruling elite of the United States has long been concerned with control of world oil supplies,... more The ruling elite of the United States has long been concerned with control of world oil supplies, as oil is a commodity crucial to the economies of all industrial societies. The precise tactics that the US has used to control world oil supplies have changed, but the goal has always been the same—the furthering of US hegemony. This paper will examine why oil is such an important commodity and how its control has proven key to the building and maintenance of US military and economic power. I will do this by examining the construction of US hegemony in relation to the control of world oil in four distinct periods: that of the discovery of oil and the development of the US’s industrial base from 1859 to 1918; the interwar period and transition between the British and US empires from 1919-1945; the emergence of the US as an informal empire in the period from 1945 to 1990; and the period from the fall of the Soviet Union to the present, 1991 to 2005.

I am focusing this article on the interventions of non-Native activists not because I think the a... more I am focusing this article on the interventions of non-Native activists not because I think the actions of Indigenous people are not worthy of study, but because I am trying to counteract the tendency of Canadians to view land claims struggles largely as a “Native problem” when in fact it is a “non-Native” problem, both in its initial construction and in its perpetuation. This means that an important part of any resolution to the historic injustices imposed upon Indigenous people will require active struggle against colonialism on the part of non-Native people. Indigenous led and directed struggles will, of course, continue to provide the concrete instances and socio-political context around which non-Natives are moved into action. These Indigenous struggles will no doubt continue to be alternatively inspiring and terrifying to non-Native groups resisting or propping up the status quo. But with Indigenous people making up less than 5% of Canada’s population, how the non-Native majority of the population responds to Indigenous activism will have a major impact in shaping the success or failure of 21st-century anti-colonial resistance movements in the north of Turtle Island. In looking at the specific dynamics playing themselves out in the struggle over the Douglas Creek Estates this article will examine the efforts of two activist groups based in the local settler population that have taken diametrically opposed positions on this issue, “Community Friends for Peace and Understanding with Six Nations,” which has worked to support Six Nations and the reclamation, and “Caledonia Wake-Up Call,” a group associated with Richmond Hill resident Gary McHale.

If we are interested in examining the relative strength and power of the US Empire today, our ana... more If we are interested in examining the relative strength and power of the US Empire today, our analysis must reckon with the status of the underlying energy system upon which its economy, technological prowess and military power resides. From one perspective, the fact that the US has managed to consume and produce such a disproportionate amount of the world’s energy – with 5% of the world’s population, the US consumes 25% of the world’s energy resources – is a testimony to the US’s unmatched position of strength and global dominance. From another perspective, the US’s very dominance over the consumption and production of the world’s fossil energies – its ‘non-negotiable way of life’ in the words of former Vice President Dick Cheney – could put it at a critical disadvantage in the technological race to develop and deploy alternatives to the fossil fuel energy regime. The US still produces a significant amount of the fossil fuel energy that it consumes, and the powerful companies which bring this energy to market are tightly integrated within the US state, and benefit from billions of dollars of long-standing subsidies. Fossil fuel-based corporations – oil companies in particular – are among the most profitable and capital intensive companies in the world and they are threatened by any transition to alternative energies, making this section of the capitalist class a source of resistance to the adoption of an alternative energy regime. Industrialized societies elsewhere in the world which have neither domestic reserves of fossil fuels, nor powerful corporate sectors committed to continued fossil fuel extraction at home or abroad will find it easier to initiate transitions to the renewable energy regime that will most certainly be the future of the industrial world.

Part I of this paper examines the historic shift in control of the world’s oil reserves since the... more Part I of this paper examines the historic shift in control of the world’s oil reserves since the rise of the National Oil Companies in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Part II will look at the evidence which suggests that we are already standing at the threshold of the global peak in conventional oil production. The third and final part of this paper will examine the approach which the US empire has taken to address this conjuncture – both through indirect attempts to open NOCs to the world market, and to forcefully reconfigure the international energy order through the invasion and occupation of Iraq. I will argue that this latter course of action was undertaken with the double aim of controlling the world flow of oil and increasing its production – a task that could only be achieved by breaking the monopoly that state oil companies hold on the world’s reserves and embarking on a program of maximum extraction with Western transnational oil corporations playing a dominant, but not exclusive role. The results of the violent restructuring of the Iraqi economy are still ongoing, and it is entirely possible that Iraqi resistance to American dominance will subvert a neoliberal solution to the redevelopment of Iraq’s shattered oil infrastructure—resulting instead in the building of neo-mercantilist relations with the
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NOCs of energy-hungry industrializing countries such as India and China. How the global oil industry is restructured – whether tendencies to national control and bilateral agreements are intensified, or whether the neoliberal tendencies towards the internationalization of the industry as pushed for by the US state are victorious – will have wide-ranging ramifications on the shape of class struggle and capitalist accumulation in the 21st century.

The capitalist world-ecology is a kind of gravitational field. At its vortex is the commodity. Ca... more The capitalist world-ecology is a kind of gravitational field. At its vortex is the commodity. Capitalism’s basic tendency, the commodification of everything, is often considered a social process; in fact, it is powerfully ecological. The commodification of everything says that human nature, as labour productivity, is what really counts. Extra-human nature is literally devalued, mobilized in support of rising labour productivity. Capitalism is the gravitational field within which the “big picture” historical movements of the past five centuries have unfolded. Financialization, shifts in family structure, the emergence of new racial orders, colonialism and imperialism, industrialization, social revolutions and workers’ movements – these are all world-ecological processes and projects, all with powerful visions for re-ordering human- and extra-human natures. Capitalism, in other words, does not have an ecological regime; it is an ecological regime.

In this text I argue that the analysis that Marx developed in Capital provides one of the most im... more In this text I argue that the analysis that Marx developed in Capital provides one of the most important starting points for understanding capitalism’s addiction to fossil fuels and its existence as a global economic system responsible for today’s ecological crisis. Following Marx’s discussion of the role of machinery in the capital- ist production process, I suggest that, in its transition from an agrarian form to an industrial one, capital came to rely on machinery as an indispensable tool to break workers’ resistance, increase the productivity of the labor it commodified, and to ag- gressively spread the capitalist system across the world. Because modern machinery requires a cheap and reliable source of low entropy energy to keep its machines go- ing, and because there are, at present, no ready alternatives to the fossil fuel energy regime, the capitalist system has always been dependent on finding and producing increasing amounts of fossil fuel resources. During the industrial revolution, fossil fuels provided the means to overcome both workers’ resistance to dispossession and the very real natural limits of agrarian capitalism. Coal, oil, and natural gas became the lifeblood of the capitalist system—providing energies that, like labor power, must be kept coursing through the system lest fixed capital and processes of accumulation should come to a shuddering halt.

This article appeared in the edited collection by Kolya Abramsky entitle "Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution: Social Struggles in the Transition to a Post-Petrol World." Published by AK Press, in 2010.

In recent months, the book "Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cu... more In recent months, the book "Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation" by Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard has ignited a firestorm of controversy. What is significant about this debate is that Widdowson and Howard are self-avowed Marxists and that they arrived at conclusions remarkably similar to those of neo-conservative specialists on Canadian Aboriginal policy such as Tom Flanagan. Widdowson and Howard argue that notions of Aboriginal sovereignty are politically unfeasible and socially regressive, and that Aboriginals would be better off integrated within the Canadian working class with their Indian status terminated. the book and its ideas in their campaign against Six Nations land struggles and are now working directly with Widdowson, who has invited them to speak with Tom Flanagan at a conference she is organizing on Aboriginal issues in Calgary.4 Disturbing as these developments are, radical leftists should be equally concerned that Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry claims to base its political conclusions on a Marxist or historical materialist methodology. To be sure, these claims may not seem particularly shocking to many non-Marxists who (especially since the publication of Ward Churchill’s edited collection Marxism and N ative Americans) have come to see little difference between Marxism and other Enlightenment ideologies in their treatment of indigeneity. However, they do raise serious concerns for anti- colonial activists who think that Marxism offers indispensable tools for both understanding and transforming settler capitalist societies like Canada. Most of the critiques of Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry have focused on the contemptuous anti-Native tone and racist assumptions that pervade the book; however few have touched on the broader question of whether or not Marxism itself can contribute to understanding Indigenous reality and struggles for self-emancipation. I will argue that Widdowson and Howard’s “Marxist” model of development is in fact an outgrowth of liberal political economy and that, while this “liberal materialism” has produced certain insights, as a political or methodological approach it is neither consistent with the development of Marx’s own thought, nor capable of offering an emancipatory political program for Indigenous people.

The Two Row Wampum is the foundational treaty agreement between European and Haudenosaunee people... more The Two Row Wampum is the foundational treaty agreement between European and Haudenosaunee peoples on Turtle Island. The Two Row articulates the coexistence of two very different socio-economic systems traveling down the same river of life side by side. The egalitarian society of the Haudenosaunee is represented by a metaphorical canoe, and the colonial capitalist system of the Europeans by the symbol of the ship. By examining the historic relationships between these two societies, I make the argument that the Two Row offers a coherent vision for the decolonization of Turtle Island. The repeated failure of Euro-American capitalist societies to live according to the Two Row suggests that a social revolution or “mutiny” must take place upon the ship in order to transform the vessel and its relationship to the canoe and the river of life.

Drafts by Tom Keefer

The environmental problems associated with the use of fossil fuels have been the subject of numer... more The environmental problems associated with the use of fossil fuels have been the subject of numerous studies, international conferences and well-meaning declarations, but there nonetheless seems to be little substantive analysis of what the root causes are of our ‘addiction to fossil fuels’ and why dominant interests are so unwilling to undertake the transition to a new energy regime. The failure to adequately grapple with this question stems from the fact that two of the most important schools of thought that hold important components of the analytical framework necessary for this undertaking -- ecological economics and Marxism -- miss crucial insights that the other brings to the debate. What is manifestly absent from most ecological economist thought is a critique of capitalism as a historically specific economic system which is not only based on ever-increasing expansion but is also compelled to substitute machinery and raw material for human labor in its quest for higher margins of profit, increased productivity and to undercut working-class self-organization and power. Moreover, in failing to recognize commodified, alienated and exploited labor as lying at the root of the capitalist system, the ecological movement has not, for the most part, been able to see the project of ecological diversity and sustainability as representing a class project based upon the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by an alternative economic and political order.

In a political conjuncture of increasing ecological degradation and the disintegration of much of... more In a political conjuncture of increasing ecological degradation and the disintegration of much of the old socialist left, the “subsistence perspective” as advanced by Maria Mies has become an important point of reference for ecological and social justice activists. The subsistence perspective is most fully articulated in the book The Subsistence Perspective by Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, but it was also developed in Mies’ groundbreaking work in feminist history and political economy Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale and in her book Ecofeminism with Vandana Shiva. In these works Mies’ and her co-authors connect concerns over ecological sustainability with the oppression and exploitation of women and third world peoples by a global patriarchal capitalist system. While small-scale non-commodified production has always existed, Mies’ perspective calls for the generalization of such production by women, the unemployed, peasants and indigenous people as the political program of ecofeminism. She argues that all of those who are not engaged in waged labour for capital and who instead produce their own means of subsistence outside of or despite capitalist social relations can lay the groundwork for a new social order in the here and now. As ecofeminists see it, the struggle for subsistence is taking place everywhere in the world, particularly amongst those sectors most oppressed by capitalist globalization and it is these struggles that have the greatest potential of remaking the globe into a fundamentally just and emancipatory social order.

With its imperatives to obey orders and to work hard for one’s country, the Boy Scout movement bu... more With its imperatives to obey orders and to work hard for one’s country, the Boy Scout movement burst onto the Canadian scene with the same kind of dynamism that it was renowned for across the world. Founded in 1908 by decorated British Boer war veteran Lord Robert Baden-Powell as a way to develop the “attributes of the pioneers of civilization” in young boys, the movement quickly found eager adherents in Canada. The Boy Scouts had a mantra that they were a “movement, not an organization”, but the fact that the movement came with a ready made handbook filled with carefully elaborated and easy to follow ideological and organizational guidelines adapted to the formation of Scout troops throughout the realms of the British empire belie this claim. Owen Sound boasted the first recorded Canadian Scout troop in 1909, and one year later there were fourteen different troops containing over 400 Scouts spread out across the dominion of Canada. By July of 1912, the organization reported a membership of 40,000 Scouts, and in 1913 Scout organizers were able confidently to state that “between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans there is hardly a township which has not at least a patrol of Boy Scouts.” What explains this unprecedented exponential growth and the ease with which the Scouting movement spread across not only the British Empire, but also Europe, Latin America and the United States?

Kwame Nkrumah was one of the most important figures of the post WW II anti-colonial liberation mo... more Kwame Nkrumah was one of the most important figures of the post WW II anti-colonial liberation movement that ended direct European rule in Africa and established independent republics in their place. Nkrumah led the Gold Coast to independence in 1957 through the vehicle of the Convention People's Party, a mass organization which he founded in 1949 and which under his leadership carried out a dramatic campaign of nonviolent "positive action" to pressure the British to grant independence. Nkrumah was not only an activist, but a writer and popularizer of anti-colonial ideas as well. He produced a torrent of books outlining his political perspectives that further cemented his legacy as an opponent of imperialism and colonialism. With titles such as Revolutionary Path, Neo-Colonialism, Dark Days in Ghana, Challenge of the Congo, Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare and Class Struggle in Africa, Nkrumah built an ideological legacy which occupies a prominent position in the pantheon of African anti-colonial revolutionaries.

However, events in Ghana were not the anti-colonial success story that many have come to believe, nor as simple and clean cut as the official version, put forward by Nkrumah and his supporters, of a progressive anti-imperialist movement crushed by a CIA-sponsored coup. In its quest for power, Nkrumah's pre-independence government made a number of unprincipled and opportunistic arrangements with the British that had the effect of condemning Ghana to exactly the kind of neocolonial economic relations that Nkrumah constantly critiqued. Despite a tremendous radicalization and movement of the Ghanaian people showing their own ability to transform society, Nkrumah insisted upon following top down and parliamentarian methods of struggle that made any real social transformation or committed struggle against imperialism impossible. Nkrumah, despite all the Marxist verbiage he deployed in his writings, put very little of this rhetoric into practice after he had used it to build a powerful mass party and come to a position of strength to negotiate terms with the British.

This is a draft of the first four chapters that I wrote for my proposed dissertation. The work is... more This is a draft of the first four chapters that I wrote for my proposed dissertation. The work is currently unfinished. Comments are most welcome.

Indigenous people from across the Americas supported the struggle of Six Nations, as did numerous... more Indigenous people from across the Americas supported the struggle of Six Nations, as did numerous non-native activists. Amongst the non-native groups, the trade union movement stood out as an early and significant supporter. Major trade union organizations from the Canadian Labour Congress and the Ontario Federation of Labour to individual unions such as the United Steelworkers of America, the Canadian Postal Workers Union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees and the Canadian Auto Workers were adamant in their support, calling for an immediate halt to further police action and demanding immediate negotiations. The union movement released numerous press and policy statements following the police raid, and union activists regularly appeared at the reclamation site with donations of food and money. This paper, drafted in 2010 attempts to examine the nature of the support for indigenous struggle at Six Nations by the Trade Union movement.

In recent years a number of writers have argued that the impending " peaking " of world oil produ... more In recent years a number of writers have argued that the impending " peaking " of world oil production heralds a new era of resource wars, environmental destruction, terminal economic decline, and even a massive " die off " of the human population. The debate over peak oil has primarily been conducted in empirical terms, focusing on rates of oil production and consumption, declining discoveries of new oil reserves, and the limited alternatives to fossil fuels. This paper, in contrast, examines the theoretical discourses and historical contexts within which peak oil theorists have developed their analyses, and assesses possibilities for transformative social change in an era of energy scarcity. The debate over peak oil, as I argue, can best be viewed in the context of an ongoing schism between neoclassical economics and a school of ecological economics stretching back two hundred years. Arguments concerning peak oil gain a new degree of theoretical consistency when placed in this context, but it remains the case that most writers on peak oil and most ecological economists have failed to study resource scarcity and the thermodynamics of production in relation to the realities of class struggle and the historically specific nature of capitalism. They are thus unable adequately to address the question of how to transcend, in a period of impending energy scarcity, the social and economic disruptions caused by the contradictions of capitalism. The failure of ecological economists and writers on peak oil to directly critique the capitalist system and to envision solutions to an energy crisis outside the ideological framework of capital imposes limits to the value of their otherwise very important work. This paper seeks to go beyond those limits by making the case for developing a materialist and ecological theory of energy in the class struggle.

This book was the product of a wave of student activism in Southern Ontario in the mid 1990s. Thi... more This book was the product of a wave of student activism in Southern Ontario in the mid 1990s. This is an edited collection of contributions concerning the 1997 occupation of the University of Guelph's administration office by student activists.