Oil and Water Commons

Ra Energy Fdn.
Raleigh Myers
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Oil and Water Commons

THE PETROLEUM COMMONS:
LOCAL, ISLAMIC, AND GLOBAL

by George Caffentzis

1. All land and natural resources (including mineral resources) within the
Ijaw territory belong to Ijaw communities and are the basis of our survival.

2. We cease to recognise all undemocratic decrees that rob our
peoples/communities of the right to ownership and control of our lives and
resources, which were enacted without our participation and dissent. These
include the Land Use Decree and The Petroleum Decree, etc.

--The Kaiama Declaration (December 1998)

Introduction: Oil and Water

The struggles over the ownership of the two most important political
liquids of this era, petroleum and water, have had different fates. Though
water has been claimed to be either private, state or common property
throughout history, the novel feature of this neoliberal period has been
the move by corporations to totally privatize it. The powerful struggles
against this corporate privatization of water from Cochabamba in Bolivia to
Soweto in South Africa have focused world attention on the question: Who
owns water? The consequent efforts to keep water as a common property on a
local and global level are now some of the most important initiatives of
the anti-globalization movement.

Petroleum, on the other hand, has in the last hundred and fifty years been
considered exclusively as either private or state property. The pages of
the history books on the petroleum industry have been filled with
"magnates" like John D. Rockefeller or government "leaders" like Saddam
Hussain and Winston Churchill. Thus the "struggle over oil" has been
largely seen as a struggle between oil companies and governments, since its
beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century.

But over the last fifteen years there has been a major shift in the
physiognomy of the protagonists in the oil struggle. No longer do national
governments and huge energy conglomerates dominate the scene so
exclusively. The new protagonists include: "peoples" like the Ijaws, the
Ogoni, the Chiapanacos, the U'wa, the Cofan, the Secoyas, the Huaorani, the
Sumatrans; border-transcending social movements under the star of Islam and
subscribing to "Islamic economics"; elements of the UN system like the
World Bank, claiming to represent "global governance" of the "global
commons." These peoples, movements and global entities have entered into
the struggle for the control of oil production, legitimizing themselves
with a new (and yet, at the same time, quite archaic) conception of
property--common property.

Why is the notion of a petroleum commons emerging now, and what are its
consequences for the oil industry?

There are three levels of claims to petroleum as common property,
correlating with three kinds of allied communities that are now taking
shape, for there is no common property without a community that regulates
its use:

*First, some local communities most directly affected by the extraction of
petroleum claim to own and regulate the petroleum under its territory as a
commons

*Second, Islamic economists claim for the Islamic community of believers,
from Morocco to Indonesia, and its representative, the 21st century
Caliphate in formation, ownership of and the right to regulate the huge
petroleum fields beneath their vast territory.

*Third, UN officials claim for the "coming global community" the right to
regulate the so-called global commons--air, water, land, minerals
(including petroleum) and "nous" (knowledge and information). This imagined
global community is to be represented by a dizzying array of "angels" that
make up the UN system, from NGO activists to UN environmentalist
bureaucrats to World Bank "green" advisors.

These claims and their legitimizing discourse are displacing, with
different results, the monopoly hold of governments and corporations over
the ownership and regulation of the planet's petroleum. There is much in
common in these conceptions of the petroleum commons, but they are also
often in conflict. These conflicts will determine how the struggle over the
ownership of petroleum and the regulation of its extraction and use will be
transformed by the entrance of the "commoners" into a field dominated for
over a century by nation states and global corporations.

The Local Petroleum Commons: Nigeria, Chiapas, the Amazon

One of the most important areas where the petroleum commons is emerging as
a political reality is the Niger Delta. This area is located in a
crossroads of the world market. Three centuries ago the region from
Escarvos to Calabar was the main storage and transshipment point of African
slaves bound for the plantations of the Americas. This trade poisoned the
Delta people's social relations then. Today the Delta people are caught in
the middle of the global oil industry that is poisoning them physically and
economically as well as socially. They have been struggling against this
fate with great courage and originality, taking a political road that began
with a demand for reparations for past damages caused by the oil companies,
and has evolved to the declaration of a petroleum commons in the Delta.

This story begins in the early 1990s, when the Ogoni people decided that
the time was ripe to transform what had been a long-fought but largely
unknown and parochial struggle against both the Nigerian government and the
global oil companies into an internationally-recognized one. The Ogonis are
a relatively small ethnic group in Nigeria (with a population of less than
a million), but they have been in the middle of oil production in Nigeria
from its beginning and have suffered greatly for it. Some Ogonis realized
that if they had to fight a global oil company--in their case, Royal Dutch
Shell--to get reparations, they had to become global themselves. But how
was a relatively small, impoverished ethnic group in the midst of an
"obscure" part of Africa to "globalize itself"?

Parochial ethnic politics had to be transcended to make clear that the
Ogoni struggle was part of the worldwide ecological struggle against the
major oil companies. On the heals of the "No Blood for Oil" struggle
against the first US-Iraq war, the Ogonis pointed out that they too had
suffered to fuel the profits of Shell and the industrial machines of Europe
and the US. And with the help of one of their leaders, playwright Kenule
Saro-Wiwa, who had built up an international audience with his writings,
the message made a connection with environmental groups around the planet.

The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) helped stimulate
a "recomposition" of the anti-capitalist movement, since it made it clear
that the Ogonis' demands for reparations for Shell's destruction of their
environment were an integral part of the wider demand that the total costs
of capitalist development be recognized and paid for by corporations
everywhere. In 1995, Saro-Wiwa was arrested and hanged on false charges of
murder by the Nigerian military regime of Gen. Sani Abacha--actions Shell
was complicit with. In response, Greenpeace and other environmental groups
organized an effective worldwide boycott of Shell, protesting the blood
being painfully exchanged for oil in Nigeria as the Middle East. Ken
Saro-Wiwa paid with his life for connecting the Ogoni with a world
environmentalist movement, but his organizational model has been used again
and again by other small ethnic groups throughout the world.

The high cost the Ogoni paid for their struggle was noted by other militant
groups in the Niger Delta, which have de-emphasized the
internationalization of their struggle and focused directly on negotiations
with oil companies and the Nigerian government based upon their capacity to
hinder or halt production or shipment of oil. These groups, however, have
pushed the demands of the struggle to a new level--instead of demanding
reparations as MOSOP did, they are claiming ownership of the petroleum
underneath their territory as common property.

Thus the most prominent movement in the Delta after the MOSOP effort was
the Movement for the Survival of Ijaw Ethnic Nationality (MOSIEN). The
Ijaws form one of the largest ethnic groups in the Delta (with a population
of approximately eight million), and their struggle has largely rejected
non-violence and resurrected the militant symbols and memories of their
collective past. The cult of Egbesu, their traditional war god, has been
the recruiting ground for young militants who have liberated their leaders
from government prisons, taken over oil installations, and kidnapped oil
workers.

MOSOP was formally a non-violent organization. Ken Saro-Wiwa and the other
Ogoni leaders believed that it was folly to think that a small ethnic group
could directly confront the might of the Nigerian army--which was then
controlled by a military government. The Ijaw armed resistance has rejected
this path, even though it has faced devastating attacks by the Nigerian
military--including the horrendous Christmas massacre at Odi in 1999 that
left 2,000 dead. This shift in tactics put into question much of the
international support that the Ogoni struggle and Saro-Wiwa's martyrdom had
engendered for struggles in the Delta.

There were other important changes in the struggle beside the turn to armed
confrontation with the government and oil companies. These included the
Kaiama Declaration, that formally claimed the petroleum within Ijaw
territory as the common property of the Ijaw community. This notion of the
petroleum commons has become the ruling discourse in much of the armed
resistance in the Delta. A good example of this is the reply a former
president of the Ijaw Youth Council and current militia commander, Alhaji
Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, gave to a Financial Times reporter when asked about
much his men take from pipelines each day, "As much as we can. It's free."
Another is the graffiti left behind after the Odi massacre by invading
soldiers: "Na you get oil? Foolish people." ("Does the oil belong to you?
Foolish people.")

Another dramatic political development was the entrance of women's
organizations into the struggle for a petroleum commons. Local women from
the Ijaw and Istkeri ethnicities remembered the old tactic of shaming
soldiers by appearing before them collectively naked--which was used to
effect in the Aba Women's War of 1929 against the British. After being
brutally beaten by oil company guards in November 2002, one group of women
protesters in the Delta threatened that "within 10 days from today, if our
hospital and rehabilitation bills are not paid, we will all come out en
masse fully naked, and we shall occupy not only their gates but their flow
stations throughout the Niger Delta..."

What was more threatening to the oil companies and the Nigerian government
than the presence of thousands of naked women occupying their oil
installations, however, was the fact that women from different, often
conflicting ethnic groups had come together at all. For the most powerful
weapon the government and the oil companies have in escaping paying
reparations and recognizing the Niger Delta communities' communal ownership
of the petroleum under their territory is the division between the groups
themselves. However powerful ethnic ties are in strengthening the will to
resist, they are also extremely divisive, resulting in thousands of deaths
in the last decade. The fact that women from the oft-warring Itsekiri,
Ijaw, Ilaje and Urhobos groups could join in a united front indicates that
at least they have understood the secret of power. Whether their unity will
set the pace for the petroleum commons movement in the Delta is still an
open question.

Just as the early 1990s was a crucial turning point for the first step to a
petroleum commons on the Niger Delta, that time also saw the organization
of indigenous peoples around similar demands in Mexico, Ecuador and
Colombia. We know that at that time the Zapatistas were organizing an armed
rebellion in Chiapas, launched on New Years Day 1994--the precise moment
NAFTA took effect. The Zapatistas' Subcommendante Marcos frequently pointed
out that when the indigenous cut firewood for their homes they are arrested
and fined. But when the oil developers cut huge swathes through the forest
for their roads and blow down trees with their dynamite, they are
congratulated for their productivity!

But as fate would have it, post-rebellion Zapatista communities are often
located near or directly over oil deposits. Consequently, the San Andres
Accords--the main document arising from the peace talks between the
Zapatistas and the Mexican government--included the recognition of the
indigenous communities' "collective right to evaluate federal and state
plans to exploit strategic resources in their region in order to determine
those plans' effects on indigenous territories." This provision which, in
effect, gave the indigenous communities a veto over oil exploration and
exploitation, was certainly one of the main sticking points that prevented
the approval of the Accords.

Similar developments took place in Ecuador in the early 1990s. Although oil
exploration and extraction began in the Ecuadorian Amazon in the 1960s, it
took some time for the indigenous peoples most affected by the industry's
pollution of their environment and the disintegration of their social life
to organize: first to demand a clean-up and compensation, and then to claim
the oil as a common resource whose disposition depended upon their will and
not the state's or the oil companies'--up to and including "The Right To
Say, 'No.'"

The Right To Say "No" became extremized in the struggle of the U'wa people
in Colombia against Occidental Petroleum's attempt to explore for oil in
their territory, beginning in 1993. The U'wa threatened to commit
collective suicide if Occidental Petroleum, which was granted exploration
rights in U'wa territory by the Colombian government, actually drilled in
their territory. The oil company had estimated over a billion barrels of
oil there, and was anxious to verify the estimate. But a combination of law
suits in Colombian and international courts, shareholder resolutions,
demonstrations in front of its California offices and the home of its CEO
carried on by the U'wa and their allies--as well as the threat of mass
suicide by the entire U'wa community--somehow almost magically managed to
"hide" the oil from the exploratory drills' reach. Occidental Petroleum
then pulled out of U'wa territory without making the second try which is
usually standard procedure. Not surprisingly, these failed efforts by
Occidental to penetrate the U'wa resistance have been followed by the
exploration activities of Ecopetrol, the Colombian state oil company--which
will face similar resistance and similar defeats.

The U'wa are one of many local peoples throughout the planet that are going
beyond the position of supplicants demanding compensation from the oil
industry for the harm oil extraction has caused. The growth of these
non-corporate, non-state actors who claim communal ownership of petroleum
is remarkable, and is having a decisive impact on the development of the
oil industry. This is especially true of the expansion of oil exploration
into the "margins"--areas that had previously been too distant from the
main centers of the oil industry. It is exactly there that the oil industry
is continually confronting people who still have a sense of the commons,
since they often have common property resources such as land, and methods
to regulate them. Consequently, the state and market paradigms of oil
ownership are clashing with dozens of new, often "small," local movements
and communities that, when integrated across the planet, are beginning to
have an impact on the legal status of oil ownership.

The Islamic Petroleum Commons: From Morocco to Indonesia

Another notion of a petroleum commons has developed in Islamic economic
theory and political practice since the 1970s. It claims that petroleum
found beneath Islamic territory is the common possession of the world-wide
Islamic community and neither state nor private property. This conception
is challenging the relations that have been worked out between global oil
companies and Islamic nation-states since World War I.

A key event in the development of the global oil industry was the
destruction of the last Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, at the end of World
War I. A Caliphate requires a secular military-political entity that is
pledged to defend the world-wide Islamic community, and the Ottoman Turks
had been performing this role of the "defenders of the faith" since the
fifteenth century. Their imperial lands included Iraq, Kuwait, and parts of
Saudi Arabia--i.e., the center of the main oil reserves of the planet. In
order for the petroleum industry to operate on a completely capitalist
basis, the large international oil companies and major imperialist powers
at the end of World War I (US, Britain, France) tore up the Ottoman
Caliphate and created a number of rentier states that were largely under
their control.

This antithesis between a Caliphate and the regular for-profit operation of
the oil industry is simple. An Islamic Caliphate had to recognize certain
redistributive economic principles (including the notion of a petroleum
common owned by the ummah, the entire Islamic community) that are
problematic to the kind of total corporate control envisioned by the
founders of the oil industry in the Middle East in period between 1918 and
1945. A genuine Caliphate would have had to invest in ways that would have
made it autonomous from the directives of the imperialist powers
(governmental or corporate). Finally, a genuine Caliphate would have had
worldwide reach, and be committed to intervening in areas where the Islamic
community resided. These areas were often essential parts of the empires of
Britain, France and Holland. (e.g., India, Algeria, and Indonesia).

What is called Islamic fundamentalism, or political Islam, or Islamism, is
an effort to revive the Caliphate almost a century after its end. This is
what gives these social movements their "global reach," for they claim to
unite and to "protect" the Islamic community--which presently stretches
from Morocco to Indonesia and, via immigration, into the heart of Europe
and North America.

Whatever the ultimate fate of this type of patriarchal politics and
whatever its class composition, this drive to a Caliphate is an important
reality for the oil industry since both are operating at the center of the
major oil reserves of the planet. Indeed, if one correlates the
nation-state members of the Organization of Islamic Congress with the oil
reserves that are estimated to lie in their territories, one sees that
nearly two-thirds of the world's petroleum is "Islamic." Such a drive, of
course, is toward an "imagined community"--but then again, what community
except the most intimate is not imagined?

Along with the revival of Islam as a political force has come the
development of an "Islamic economics" that has a number of tenets relevant
to the oil industry. First, since oil is a sub-soil resource, it is seen
from an Islamic perspective as a gift from Allah and hence a community
good. Although Islamic economics respects private property--after all,
Islam is a religion founded by a merchant--it also recognizes the role of
communally shared resources. Islamic economics accepts the standard
division of private, state and common property, and oil is definitely
included in the category of common property. It is now traditional to
repeat at this juncture the famous statement of Mohammed: "The people are
partners in three things: water, pastures and fire [today, petroleum]." The
recognition of an Islamic petroleum commons is seen as a first step in the
realization of an Islamic economics.

It is true, of course, some common property must be mined (like oil, gold,
silver, and iron), but the minerals themselves remain the common property
of all Muslims. The Caliphate might mine them itself or sub-contract their
collection, but all revenues gained from their sale should be kept in the
Bait al-Mal--the same treasury that the zakat or redistributive tithe, is
destined for.

The second principle of Islamic economics is the redistributive one.
Islam, for all of its respect of private property, instituted from its
beginning a system of income transfers. Even non-Muslims know of the zakat,
but there are many other redistributive mechanisms (e.g., the prohibition
of charging interest) that make doctrinaire neoliberalism literally
anathema in Islamic discourse. For a Caliphate is duty-bound to fund the
poor, the needy, the travelers, the debtors and jihad from the funds in the
Bait al-Mal. This is especially true of revenues derived from oil
production, since they are directly derived from the sale of a communal
good. Thus the charges of corruption hurled against the Saudi Arabian elite
by Islamists are especially damning, since the Saudi elite's extravagant
ways are literally denying bread to the mouths of poor Muslim babes that
Allah destined it for.

The third principle of Islamic economics is one based on the prohibition of
waste and the concern for conserving scarce resources. Indeed, if the
conspicuous consumption and self-protective expenditure on military
hardware of the present elites are stopped, there would be an imperative to
leave more oil in the ground. Such an economic policy would have an
enormous impact on the pricing of oil, since it would not be considered a
state or corporate commodity to be sold to the highest bidder; it would be
a common good whose conservation is of value in itself.

Common property in the Islamic tradition is often not emphasized in typical
academic expositions of Islamic economics, where the pride of place is
taken by a symbolic zakat and a banking system that denies a role to
interest. The works of Pakistani social thinker Savyid Abul-Ala Mawdudi
(1903-79), martyred Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb (1906-66) and Iraqi
writer Muhammad Baquir al-Sadr (1931-80)--the intellectual progenitors of
Islamic economics--are often taken to task for trying to impose unrealistic
constrains on the development of capitalism in the Islamic world, instead
of heeding the free market wisdom of Frederick Hayek! But while critics
cite the zakat and prohibition of interest, in fact their doctrine of the
petroleum commons that would certainly have a much greater impact on world
economics, if it were actually put into place throughout the Islamic world.

This oil doctrine is the theoretical basis of economic planning for an
Islamic world of more than a billion people. If a number of Islamic nations
actually transformed their petroleum resources into a commons, then three
important, perhaps even revolutionary, changes would follow. First, it
would lead to a tighter control of the pace of extraction and a willingness
to exercise the "Right to say 'No'," resulting in a much higher oil price.
Second, the surplus of the commons would immediately flow into
redistributive projects in the Islamic world and not into the financial
systems of Europe and the US. Finally, of course, the whole basis of the
neo-liberal program for the Middle East (as outlined in George W. Bush's
plan for the outcome of the Iraq war) would be definitely challenged.

The Global Petroleum Commons of the Future and the UN System

If we put together the local petroleum commons claims with those of Islamic
economic theorists, then more than 70% of the oil on the planet is
notionally claimed to be a part of a commons. Yet, there is still a third
notion of petroleum as a global commons that incorporates all oil deposits,
whether discovered or not. The proponents of this notion argue that the
consequences of the exploration, extraction, distribution and consumption
of petroleum are so problematic for "humanity" that they cannot be left to
the devices of private companies or nation states. There is, in this view,
a global petroleum commons that needs an appropriate regulative community.
But what is this community in its present incarnation? The most prominent
contemporary answer is: the United Nations system.

Indeed, the concept of a global commons has stimulated the revival of the
UN system's legitimacy in the 1990s--since the system had an identity
crisis after the end of the Cold War. For the UN system is increasingly
claiming to be the surrogate for a truly global community of humanity that
clearly does not yet exist. On the basis of this official representation of
the future global community, the UN system has negotiated a number of
accords with mining and energy companies that promised these companies
ideological legitimacy. These include the Global Compact and the Global
Mining Initiative as well as, of course, the Kyoto Accords. This makes the
UN system--which includes the World Bank and IMF--the global "partner" to
and regulator of the oil, gas and coal companies of the planet.

It is crucial to understand why in the last fifteen years the UN system
dares to claim the right to regulate petroleum as a global commons. During
this time the extractive industries, with special emphasis on mining and
oil, have been in crisis. This was not due to their reaching the absolute
limits on supply of minerals or oil. It was due to the refusal of billions
of people around the planet to accept the social and environmental impacts
of their destructive activities. What appears to be the "natural" limit of
extraction (as explained by either the Club of Rome's "asymptotic depletion
curves" or by M. King Hubbert's "peak oil" graphs) is simply the resistance
of an ever-wider circle of people to suffering the consequences of private
or state mineral or oil extraction with no compensation or redress. Global
warming, environmental pollution and illness, hazardous working conditions
have increasingly been the source of anxiety about, protest against and
disruption of operations in the extractive industries. Inevitably these
responses and the problems they address--not the difficulty of finding new
fields of coal, copper or petroleum--have led to these industries'
long-term loss of trust. The extractive industries needed some "legitimate
partner" to negotiate with that would not pose the immediate threatening
demands that organizations of workers and local communities increasingly
present.

Just as the extractive industries were undergoing their crisis, the UN
system was facing it own. After all, it was set up to negotiate the
conflicts of Capitalism vs. Communism and Colonialism vs. Anti-Colonialism.
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and collapse of apartheid in South
Africa, what was the UN system to do with itself? Here is where the call of
the extractive industries, especially the oil industry, became one of its
lifelines. Its identity crisis could be resolved by becoming the "partner"
of the extractive industries and regulating them as a representative of the
coming global community.

The difficulties of such a surrogate global community has been brought to
every one's attention after more than a decade of the anti-globalization
movement's critique of the UN system's most powerful elements besides the
Security Council--the World Bank and IMF. Instead of the inherent problems
of the nation state being transcended by the rise to a global level, the
experience of the neo-liberal turn of the World Bank and IMF demonstrates
that the UN system often just magnifies the problems of nation-state
capitalism. This UN-based "coming global community" once again poses the
classic solution to all distributive problems: "What's yours is mine, and
what's mine is mine." Thus this "virtual community" (actually composed of
the UN-system and its satellite NGOs) feels free to demand, for example,
that indigenous people in the South respect "ecological zones" or
"conservation regions" it designates even though the actual indigenous
community has no real power to control the behavior of this imaginary
global community actually substituted for by the UN system. Indeed, the
global petroleum commons as defined by the UN system can be seen as merely
a preemptive strike against the local and Islamic commons.

The Petroleum Commons as Conflict and Opportunity

The entrance of "commoners" (indigenous peoples, Islamists, or UN
officials) into the world of oil ownership and production on the three
levels discussed here is undoubtedly creating major changes in the oil
industry worldwide. The logic of both market and state rationality is
increasingly losing its compelling power to determine the future of oil
extraction and, with it, the whole system of capitalist production it
energizes.

Critics of capitalism, however, cannot be complacent about the rise of the
petroleum commoners. This social reality also poses political problems that
can easily divide the anti-capitalist movement as well as make
neoliberalism stumble. Every local commons requires a regulatory community
with insiders and outsiders, and the outsiders might rightly demand to
become insiders, with all the attendant possibility of conflict. Similarly,
the regulation of the Islamic petroleum commons can conflict with the rules
of local communities and their claimed commons. Finally, the demands of the
global commons have already conflicted with the needs of local communities
and with the Islamic ummah. But whatever the results of these conflicts,
actual or potential, the assumption that petroleum is a different political
liquid from water has been put in doubt by the demands and struggles of the
petroleum commoners. Will petroleum be as common as water one day? Perhaps

----------

This article is based on the text of a talk given at the Fusion Arts Museum
in New York City on Nov. 7, 2004

---------------------

George Caffentzis is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective. With the
Collective he has edited two books, both published by Autonomedia:
"Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War 1973-1992" and "Auroras of the Zapatistas:
Local and Global Struggles in the Fourth World War." Midnight Notes is
online at: www.midnightnotes.org.

For more on Nigeria and the Shell boycott, see:
http://www.essentialaction.org/shell/issues.html

-------------------

Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Dec. 10, 2004
Reprinting permissible with attribution

WW4Report.com

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