Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

[Dave Monroe]

On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 8:40 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote
:
> Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil
> by Timothy Mitchell
>
> http://www.versobooks.com/books/1020-carbon-democracy

For Pynchon, World War II was a monstrous holocaust, a cataclysm of 40
million souls, resulting from a competition among technologies. The
old dynasty, the J. P. Morgan dynasty, was built on the technologies
of coal, steel, and railroads; the newer Rockefeller dynasty on the
technologies of oil (petrochemicals, plastics), aluminum, and
aircraft. Pynchon says that World War II was a corporate war
reflecting those technologies, that for many their “first loyalty,
legal and moral, is to the estate [corporation] she represents. Not to
our boys in uniform [the nation-state], however gallant, whenever they
died” ( Lot 49, 53).

In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon has to bring up the long ago
relationship between Standard Oil and the I.G. Farbenindustrie.
Standard Oil and I.G. Farben did arrange to share world markets in
1936, and as an act of good faith, they exchanged some 2,000 patents
just prior to World War II. Their multinational character forced them
to make arrangements for the contingencies of war.

When World War II erupted, their loyalties were so strongly with each
other that the US government had to bring legal action against both
the Standard Oil Co. (NJ) and I.G. Farbenindustrie (see Pynchon’s
list, Rainbow 538) for illegal monopolistic practices involving
gasoline, toluene, and synthetic rubber patents. The US government
seized many of these patents ultimately. Standard Oil, it seems, also
gave Farben the technology, personnel and equipment for the production
of tetraethyl lead, without which there would have been no high octane
aircraft fuel, no luftwaffe, and no war. Then Sen. Harry S. Truman,
the investigating committee’s chairman, viewed the relationship
between these multinational corporations as treasonable.

By referring to this multinational liaison as “the century’s master
cabal,” Pynchon is suggesting more than corporate cooperation. He is
suggesting that World War II was part of the “Plot Which Has No Name,”
the concerted effort by the new dynasty to bring down the old
dynasty....

[...]

http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/inferno.htm