Resisting coal: Hydrocarbon politics and assemblages of protest in the UK and Indonesia
Benjamin Brown, Samuel J. Spiegel⁎
School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom (2017)
As Bridge (2009a: 43) writes, ‘underground lies a world of ‘natural production,’ the deep-time processes beyond human control that create the hydrocarbon con- centrations we know as fossil fuels…Above-ground and freed from geological fixity, energy is thrown into a tumultuous world of ‘social production’”. Once extracted from the ground, coal is no longer con- ceived of as organic matter – it becomes ‘privatized and converted into standardized, appropriable, deliverable units’ (Lohmann, 2016: 1), commodified and incorporated into circuits of capital accumulation. This act of translation serves to dis-embed coal from its conditions of production, concealing both its geological origins and the processes and practices that deliver it to global markets.
coal isn’t ‘energy’, coal is a material that we prescribe a notion of ‘energy’ to.
His research illustrates the integral role of fossil fuels in underpinning particular forms of political and economic power, and demonstrates how the physical attributes of coal – its bulkiness and heaviness – were instru- mental in producing new forms of mass politics across Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Coal required an extensive labour force to mine and transport it, and the energy on which in- dustrial capitalism depended became susceptible to disruption through strikes and sabotage at mines and railways, enabling workers to make effective democratic claims.
the physical qualities of coal are a large factor in the way in which large labour forces could form ‘collective action’ and effect politics through democratic claims…
materiality of something equates to how the individuals who are effected by and affect that material can collect and enforce chnage
this corresponds contentiously to digital realms and the way modern ‘pretest’ often happens in cyber space where there is a distinct lack of materiality… how to make the digital space of protest physical. how to make online petitions autographic… how to make ‘the act of signing autographic…. celebrity ‘autographs’…
Movements are distinct from organizations or singular events, since they present sustained, collective challenges to those in positions of power and are contingent on a collective identity, common purpose and the diffusion of shared beliefs amongst participants (Della Porta and Diani, 2009).
While ‘modern’ environmentalism has a problematic history, marred by charges of elitism and racism (cf. Koseck, 2004), recent decades have witnessed the ascendance of new paradigms of environmental justice. Emerging critical approaches draw attention to the procedural inequities that occur when certain groups are ex- cluded from participating or marginalized in decision-making over re- source use, and the uneven distribution of environmental burdens and benefits as stratified by class, race and gender (Bell and Braun, 2010; Schlosberg and Collins, 2014; Urkidi and Walter, 2011).
Accordingly, there have also been efforts to challenge the Eurocentric representation of environmentalism as a purportedly ‘post-materialist’ movement, through highlighting the ‘environmentalism of the poor’, in which forest dwellers, peasant farmers, fishers and indigenous people have sought to preserve livelihoods by defending land and resources from encroachment by the state or capital (Martinez-Alier, 2014), and an ‘environmentalism of the malcontent’, using the example of protests against a coal power plant in Turkey to illustrate the different political logics which animate resistance. In this case, protests gained traction by incorporating a critique of neoliberal developmentalism and drawing attention to coercive and anti-democratic state tendencies, fore- grounding land acquisition, dispossession and displacement (Arsel
These insights have been supplemented by research from the Czech Republic, which demonstrates the significance of place attachment and broader political consciousness as important motives for participants engaging with anti-coal activity (Frantál, 2016), and from Colombia, emphasizing the anti-imperial character of resistance to coal mining following a long history of struggle against the foreign dom- ination and control of natural resources (Chomsky, 2016).
place attachment as necessary component of effective mobilisation of protest
Anna Tsing’s points of ‘friction’ as movements operate under increasingly globalized processes that create ‘zones of awkward engagement’ between chains of different actors at the local, national and international level (Tsing, 2005: xi). Attention to this politics of scale, understanding coal to be embedded within a networked ‘socio-spatial struggle’ (Swyngedouw, 2004), is critical to understanding how social movements form and coalesce across boundaries, as transnational movements mobilize people in disparate locations around a common cause to produce new norms and solida- rities (cf. Della Porta and Diani, 2009).
‘zones of awkward engagement’… similar to the early point about engaging digitally and having no material enactment to ground the solidarity / moitvaton … should look into this more though.
browse book ‘Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection’ by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing + read paper reveiwing it https://www.jstor.org/stable/24497582?seq=2#metadata_info_tab_contents
Our approach is informed by recent geographical scholarship emphasizing the co-constitution of nature and society, envisioned variously as ‘socionature’ (Swyngedouw, 1999), ‘natureculture’ (Haraway, 2003), or material semiotic ‘hybrids’ (Latour, 1993; Law, 2009)
… words used by various theorists to describe the intersection of ecology and society
Following Haarstad and Wanvik (2016: 2), we pursue an exploration of carbonscapes, ‘the spaces created by material expressions of carbon-based energy systems and the institutional and cultural practices attached to them’, and deploy the notion of as- semblage to map out the dynamic web of relations between social ac- tors and the material world that they inhabit. Appel et al. (2015: 24) speak of ‘the varieties of actors, agents, infrastructures, processes and imaginaries – what we call the oil assemblage – that give shape to our contemporary iteration of hydrocarbon capitalism’, and coal is similarly entangled, contingent upon particular socio-technical arrangements that facilitate its extraction and conversion into energy.
Colin McFarlane (2009: 561) has described assemblages as ‘materially heterogeneous, practice-based, emergent and processual’, highlighting the ways in which overlapping material, discursive and collective relationships produce particular configurations of power at different scales and particular historical moments (cf. Ong and Collier, 2005). By drawing on these insights, we are better placed to understand processes of rupture and transformation around sites of extraction, as protest assemblages disrupt the logics of incumbent, carbon-based energy regimes.
Coal remains an important marker of culture, territory, and history; it was coal that birthed the labour movement and sustained the trade unions (Rees, 1985)
Until the Conservative government’s assault on miners’ unions in the 1980s, coalmining was at the heart of communities where it occurred, comprising the core of social identities and fostering a culture of camaraderie, solidarity and collective organization.
In the aftermath of pit closures and privatiza- tion, structural unemployment and social dislocation has continued to blight former coal communities, and memories of the 1984–5 miners’ strikes have cemented the totemic status of coalmining as a former bastion of the British working class (Chatterton, 2008; Parry, 2003).
Indeed, in the aftermath of plummeting prices for coal, which dropped from $218 per tonne in 2008 to $53 in 2015, the country is now witnessing the departure of some foreign mining companies as profitability falls and operators are reluctant to accept responsibilities for abandoned or exhausted coal seams (Jensen, 2016).
what happens in these aftermaths…?
The hostile reception to opencast mining in the Welsh valleys is indicative of coal’s ability to encapsulate multi-scalar, hybrid political imaginaries and of its material potency in driving new forms of col- lective action.
the material’s network is still capable of collecting actors (/agents?) despite not being formed by those physically employed to handle it..
THINKING RESEARCH 