Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital

by Matthew T. Huber

If our oil addiction is so bad for us, why don’t we kick the habit? Looking beyond the usual culprits—Big Oil, petro-states, and the strategists of empire— Lifeblood finds a deeper and more complex explanation in everyday practices of oil consumption in American culture. Those practices, Matthew T. Huber suggests, have in fact been instrumental in shaping the broader cultural politics of American capitalism. How did gasoline and countless other petroleum products become so central to our notions of the American way of life? Huber traces the answer from the 1930s through the oil shocks of the 1970s to our present predicament, revealing that oil’s role in defining popular culture extends far beyond material connections between oil, suburbia, and automobility. He shows how oil powered a cultural politics of entrepreneurial life—the very American idea that life itself is a product of individual entrepreneurial capacities. In so doing he uses oil to retell American political history from the triumph of New Deal liberalism to the rise of the New Right, from oil’s celebration as the lifeblood of postwar capitalism to increasing anxieties over oil addiction. Lifeblood rethinks debates surrounding energy and capitalism, neoliberalism and nature, and the importance of suburbanization in the rightward shift in American politics. Today, Huber tells us, as crises attributable to oil intensify, a populist clamoring for cheap energy has less to do with American excess than with the eroding conditions of life under neoliberalism.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Geography, Environment

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite books out of all the ones I’ve read in college! The introduction is quite dense and theory-heavy, which can be intimidating. However, once you get into the meat of the book Huber writes a really elegant and strong piece about how oil integrated itself with the American “way of life” and how geography, politics, and capitalism helped it do that.

[Knar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I rarely GoodReads-review, but this one is stellar, so here's a quick word:

Huber offers an elegant account of oil consumption in the United States, addressing the petrocultural forms (material, architectural, infrastructural, geographic, social) to which it gave rise. A really great portrait of the 'lived geography' of everyday American life and the particular modes of subjectivity and freedom that such a life permissions.

Lifeblood is a crucial contribution to the study of neoliberalism as it intersects with regimes of energy production, and the book makes compelling use of Marxist theory within the context of New Deal infrastructural projects and their ongoing force in the present. While highlighting the forms of profound political and social fragmentation that stand in the way of collective energy transition away from fossil fuels, this book also provides an eco-historical perspective from which to imagine what a 'Green' New Deal might look like, too.*

In the recent co-authored book "A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal," the authors reject elitist narratives about climate change as it relates to 'ordinary' people, suggesting that the core problem lies not in indifference but instead, in the way that "ordinary people have been stripped of their power." Reading Huber's Lifeblood, I developed a more complete (and materially grounded) understanding of this stripping-away of power, including the material geographies that enable (& lock in) the narrow, 'hostile privatism' upon which American freedom depends.

Thoroughly recommend.

*NB: while the GND is not addressed in the book, I do think its applications to that conversation are many

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book's contemporary Marxist analysis was thoroughly insightful. It really does an incredible job of contextualizing modern American Culture and the central role that oil plays in all of it. Despite this being an assigned reading for my Environmental Resources class, I'm very glad that I read it!

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extricating ourselves from oil dependence as society is so much more complicated than merely denouncing the oil industry. Petroleum is so deeply enmeshed in societal conceptions of success, quality of life, and leisure time. This book does a good job of outlining how much of a societal shift will need to occur in order to reduce oils supremacy. Really enjoyed the discussion of the ways in which environmental advocacy and consumption reduction can be construed as an attack on the “every man” because petroleum focused development of our spatial environment has made alternatives impossible.