Commodity Fetishism, Industrial Religion, and Fossil Fuel Extractivism

But still we are victims of word games,
semantics is always a bitch:
places once called under-developed and 'backwards'
are now called 'mineral rich.'

     from Gil Scott-Heron’s “Black History”

Marx’s notion of commodity fetish has long served as an evocative way for social theorists to describe capitalism’s alienation of labor from value. The concept also has a long history within the study of religion, advancing the critique of capital’s sacralization of goods and helping interrogate scholarship on so-called ‘primitive religion’ by colonial scholars. This paper takes seriously the question of capitalism’s addiction to fossil fuels as a form of commodity fetishism and asks pointedly about the forms of religious production that enable fossil fuel extractivism. In Marx’s time, ‘commodity fetishism’ afforded a particularly sharp criticism because it purposely inverted colonial cultural hierarchies that positioned ‘primitive religion’ as inferior to ‘civilized religion’. By associating capital’s reification of the value of commodities with ‘fetishism,’ Marx equivocated the symbolic functioning of capitalism with a variety of pejorative assumptions about superstition, irrationality, witchcraft, and cultural backwardness. Whether his analysis had the double purpose of critiquing capitalism and also the inherent racism of colonial ideas about religion is an interesting question for a separate paper. What is clear is that Marx and his interpreters provide us with an theoretical tool with which to see the religious characteristics of resource exploitation. In the case of fossil fuels as commodity fetishism, Marx encourages us to look closely at the persons, systems, and discourses that bundle and reify the value and meaning of coal, oil, and gas. Developing these lines of inquiry, the first section of this paper leverages the concept of commodity fetishism to establish parallels between the construction of racialized systems of religious classification and colonial systems of resource extraction.

If colonial ideas about primitive religion were at least in part projections of the covetous and idolatrous worship of raw materials, who are the priests and shamans of petroleum and what are their ritual techniques? The second section of this paper theorizes two conflicting claims widespread in popular discourse about oil politics as forms of “industrial religion” (Callahan et al 2010). The “resource curse” is an economic theory which posits that an abundance of natural resources tends to have a corrosive effect on the health of a nation’s political institutions. To think of the resource curse as a form of industrial religion is to notice how the social relations of extractivism are mystified by the purportedly inherent qualities of the resources themselves. Where the resource curse attributes to fossil fuels the supernatural power of social and political erosion, the Trump Administration’s celebration of oil and gas exports as “molecules of freedom” offers an inverse example of industrial religion, in which cheap and abundant fossil fuels serve to advance freedom and democracy at the chemical level. These two industrial religious discourses are in contradiction because they form a dyad, a pair in which the powers of fossil fuels to curse and to bless are apportioned to societies inequitably.

The final section of this paper synthesizes the first two sections, arguing that the industrial religions of fossil fuels operate according to racialized hierarchies that emerged through the invention of religion as a category of cultural comparison. Concentrating on the conceptual overlap between industrial religion and commodity fetishism brings the racist and racializing aspects of fossil fuel extractivism into clearer view. Discourses about the power of fossil fuels that invoke “religion” speak to cultural backwardness and naturalize the kinds of political and ecological degradation that attend extractivism. Discourses about the power of fossil fuels that invoke “secularity” speak to civilization and progress and mystify the kinds of political and ecological degradation that attend extractivism. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of commodity fetishism and industrial religion for environmental humanities scholarship on fossil fuels and extractivism.