A quick glance at the greatest fortunes of the planet, headed by software corporations' CEOs, financial speculators, mass-media owners and Hollywood p...

A quick glance at the greatest fortunes of the planet, headed by software corporations' CEOs, financial speculators, mass-media owners and Hollywood producers, makes it clear that the creation of wealth is shifting from a hardware-related phase, in which value was generated by the production of objects through manual work, to a software-related phase, in which intellectual work gets the core of economy and society. We already live in a post-industrial context dedicated to the creation and handling of information, knowledge, cultural diversity, communication, innovation and emotions. From Henry Ford to Bill Gates, the change in what Marx denominated "means of production" has been incredibly fast: less than a century has elapsed between the last Ford T and the first PC. A split second in History.

As early as 1980, Alvin Toffler declared that the conflict between Capitalism and Communism was a transitory dispute within an industrial civilization, and predicted that it would be overcome by the truly political fight of the future: a megaconflict of planetary scale between the defenders of the second (industrial) wave and those of the third (post-industrial) one. Even though Toffler was right, industry was not the agent that led the defence of the status quo; it was - more exactly - the most obsolete branch of industry, which is in charge of energy supply and totally depends on its Majesty Petroleum. It is not by chance that the NY Times' journalist Thomas L. Friedman has recently originated an interesting polemic by enunciating what he called "the First Law of Petropolitics"¹. In short, Friedman stated that "the price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions in oil-rich petrolist states". Beyond the general accuracy of Friedman's statement, the use of the "Petropolitics" category marks the emergence of a deep and dangerous asynchrony between the information society - however we call it - and its incredibly antiquated source of energy: fossil oil.

Petropolitics and information society: two antagonistic paradigms
A quarter of a century after the publication of Toffler's "Third wave", the greatest and most urgent threats to the post-industrial global world (depletion of non-renewable resources, global warming, energy dependence, global terrorism, war for resources) come from a decrepit and polluting nationalistic-industrialist order, which intrinsically tends to militarism and confrontation. But let's take a look at the origins of Petropolitics.
The oil industry remains poles apart from the information and knowledge society. An oil barrel is worth nothing if someone takes it from us. On the contrary, computer programs can be copied without losing their original capacity and get more valuable for each individual who uses them. The intangible products of the economy of information are shareable. No matter how avaricious and monopolist their leaders are, the information economy needs cooperation and education to produce goods, and general well-being to sell them. The wealth it creates increases with general wealth and education, whatever the national and social origins of their owners, consumers and producers. The human intelligence on which it is based is a non-polluting and inexhaustible resource. As it is independent of territory, the loss of the economic centrality of land it has caused has abolished the classical model of conflict of the industrial era: the warlike dispute for territories and raw materials.
There has been no war between developed countries since intellectual workers - white collars - numerically surpassed manual workers - blue collars - in the Sixties. Since then, the economically and politically advanced units have been peacefully extended, due to the needs generated by new technologies, on the one hand, and thanks to the opportunities they created, on the other. Reliable statistics indicate that - on the contrary - welfare states do not exist or are disappearing in nations that are organized according to the nationalistic industrialist model. They also emphasize that post-industrial countries that have the highest average of foreign interchange have also the lowest levels of inequality. This is not accidental: an economy based on human intelligence implies high education standards and a well-developed social capacity to work in associated ways; two factors that are indispensable for the political process that is at the base of the redistribution of wealth.
Exactly the opposite happens within the economies based on raw materials such as oil. Like in every social matrix that depends on non-shareable and exhaustible resources, in mineral-extraction-based countries the economic and political processes assume a zero-sum type: the appropriation of a resource by an agent excludes all the others, which abolishes cooperation and leads to disputes.

The extraction of raw materials is also, for obvious reasons, strongly bound to the territory; therefore it tends to generate conflicts for geopolitical predominance. All these elements (non shareability / zero-sum processes / dependence on the territory) have led to the emergence of several Petropolitical nuclei. They grew from agreements between economic agents of extractive corporations and political agents that command the military apparatus. Since the intervention of people in the generation of wealth is minimal and depends on low labour-quality in extractive activities, general well-being and the population's capacity to work cooperatively becomes irrelevant. Consequently, the richness falls in the hands of a few; in the case of oil, corporate owners and public authorities who manage the access to and the control of resources. This is the kingdom where Petropolitics arises and has its dominions.

The world of Petropolitics
Wherever Petropolitics dominates, exasperation and conflict replace dialogue and consensus. The society splits between "us" and "them". The territory and the dispute for its control acquire a metaphysical value. No matter what use is made of the extracted wealth, foreigners are presented as a gang, eager to steal "our" resources. Beyond the speeches on nationalism and solidarity, wealth accumulates in the hands of the richest and more powerful. Democracy staggers, if it ever exists, or it never arises, when it does not. In spite of the nationalistic rhetoric that is used to conceal the real interests at stake, the national unity is put under pressure, which opens the way to a new destructive scheme: the intra-national (civil) war for resources, and the ethnic masked ball threatens to move nowadays from African diamonds to Bolivian gas. Political and religious fundamentalisms predominate in the Petropolitics universe. The world is divided between "friends", who are co-opted for the reproduction of the existing power, and" enemies", who are bound to symbolic destitution or physical destruction. Third-world-friendly theories on "unequal interchanges", which attributed underdevelopment to the low prices of raw materials, have shown their irrelevance, because even after decades of vertical ascent of oil prices, that originated an incommensurable flow of wealth towards the OPEC countries, the life conditions of their citizens experienced no significant change. The ambiguous properties of natural resources as factors of progress did not only make the theory of "unequal interchanges" obsolete, but are at the origin of the "curse of natural resources" thesis, an idea that is well confirmed by the fact that countries where per-capita resources are very low (such as Japan) have been able to develop rich and egalitarian societies, whereas in other countries with very high per-capita average of natural resources (such as Argentina) poverty and inequalities continue to increase. The fact that Latin America is the continent with the greatest amount of natural resources per inhabitant and also the one of bigger inequalities, and that Africa follows in both headings, is a confirmation of the thesis.
Africa, the continent where the weight of natural resources in the GDP is the highest in the world, has become the preferred territory of tribal barbarism. Secular tyrannies and ethnic cleansing are encouraged by corporations that are after diamonds in Sierra Leone and oil in Sudan. While the world was watching Iraq, millions of African died and hundreds of thousands became refugees in the most extensive humanitarian drama of the 21^st century. The tribalism and militarization of African societies generated a renewed Middle Age where spears and arrows have been replaced by Kalashnikovs and machine guns. It does not seem accidental that the Middle East, where oil is the basic economic resource, has become the center of world-wide political instability, insecurity and global terrorism.
Recent studies - such as Friedman's - show a strong correlation between the rise of oil prices
after the invasion of Iraq and the worsening of democratic rights and freedom standards.
However, although Friedman locates the phenomenon in "oil-rich petrolist states", the trend is visible not only in Latin American, African and Middle-East societies, but also in the United States of America, which is far from being "petrolist" but where the oil industry is very powerful and is very close to political power.

Petropolitical leadership
How many billion dollars have the big oil companies spent in financing campaigns that presented nuclear energy as a too dangerous option? How much money for presenting bio-fuels and hydrogen as if they were good only for science-fiction books? How many dollars in delaying investigations on alternative sources of energy? How much in obstructing the development of democratic global institutions that could - say - establish a world-wide tax on fossil fuels and provide monetary resources to the investigation, development and application of renewable and non-polluting sources?
Conspiracy or not, the certain thing is that we live in a world that has become completely different from the early-20th-century industrial era, but in which fossil fuels continue to be the basic source of energy. Significantly, the only sector in which the technological revolution has not fulfilled its promises, the energy sector, has generated a Petropolitical nucleus of pre-industrial nationalistic nature that has spread like cancer during the last decade.
Let us look at the map of the world: the first oil exporter is Saudi Arabia, a country dominated by an absolute monarchy, in the region where Osama Bin Laden was born; the second is Russia, a country presided over by the former KGB boss Vladimir Putin; the fourth is Iran, led by the belligerent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; the fifth is Venezuela, whose leader is the authoritarian Colonel Chávez; at the sixth place are the feudal Arab Emirates; the seventh is dynastic Kuwait; the eighth is the devastated Nigeria; the tenth is the Algeria of the criminal Muslim Brothers; the eleventh is Iraq, that was a private property of Saddam Hussein and the twelfth is Libya that is still Muammar Gaddafi's property.

This list matches the greatest warlike conflicts of the last decades and the most authoritarian regimes, which allow us to understand the true dimensions that Petropolitics assumes. Yet, it is not all. Symptomatically, the national character of companies (which is an anachronistic relic of national-industrialist times) is a generalized feature of the oil sector. Exxon, Chevron, BP and Repsol (from the First-world), as well as PDVSA and Petrobras (from the Third-world) are basically national corporations. Bi-national (English-Dutch) Shell is the insurmountable maximum of cosmopolitanism that big oil corporations have reached for the time being. In addition, the national list of oil producers shows the United States in the third position and the United Kingdom in the thirteenth. No need to say that these nations - whose oil companies dominate the global market - have led the disastrous invasion of Iraq, thus acceding to the control of the second largest oil reserve in the world and generating a rise of the price of oil that has made the fortune of the Petropolitical sector. Is this a mere chance or is it the fulfilled demonstration of a cause-effect relationship that affects advanced countries too?

A new global political polarity
Petropolitics has invaded national policies by placing reactionary leaders linked to corporative powers and nationalistic-industrialist conceptions at the head of national structures.
This is exactly the role that the Bush dynasty has played in the United States. Also the misfortune of Tony Blair, the man who was the most promising progressive leader of the advanced world, originated in the disasters generated by the Petropolitics kingdom.
When political analysts observe that the USA has been split into two divergent social universes: hyper-connected, cosmopolitan and progressive coasts² mostly dedicated to symbolic production, where Democrats always win, and a disconnected, nationalistic and reactionary countryside, mostly dedicated to agrarian and manufacturing jobs, which always vote for Bush and the Republicans, this is nothing but the confirmation of Toffler's prediction. It simply means that the 21^st century has entered America in the form of a fight for hegemony between the Second and the Third wave, that somehow reminds of the fight between the industrial North and the rural South during the 19^th century.
A US-only phenomenon? Not at all. Latin America's political scenario is also getting polarized by tensions between - on the one hand - Colonel Chávez (Venezuela) and his allies Morales (Bolivia) and Correa (Ecuador) (the three are presidents of the only South American nations where oil and gas are the predominant economic resources), and - on the other hand - the other governors of the subcontinent. Argentina, the other country where nationalism and authoritarianism have recently spread (although to a lesser extent), has - for the first time in its history - a president coming from a region (Patagonia) that concentrates 84% of the national oil production.

Nonetheless, Petropoltics is not just a Southplus North-American dilemma. The tension between nationalistic industrialism and the post-industrial world has become visible worldwide as a global polarity. Now, Petropolitical sheikhs who pretend to govern the world are facing a coalition of forces (its most powerful elements being the European Union, Japan and Canada) that are basically favourable to global agreements on environmental and financial regulations, that support the reinforcement of supranational institutions (such as the European Union, the International Criminal Court and the UN), and strongly oppose Petropolitical unilateralism and militarism.
Oil has replaced carbon as the main source of energy and the central raison-d'être of authoritarianism and war. In this sense, it should be reminded that the French-German dispute for coal was at the base of two world wars and that its settlement through the creation of the Coal and Steel Community was the advent of an uninterrupted period of peace and prosperity for Europe. If the future has to have a chance in the face of the forces of the past and if the third wave has to prevail over the second and first ones, world federalism and global democracy have to see to the pacific defeat of the Petropolitical nucleus of power. May the world follow Europe and use the lessons on political unity given by the 20th century to abolish Petropolitics.

1 See "The First Law of Petropolitics" by Thomas L. Friedman, in Foreign Policy, May-June 2006.
2 Which includes Chicago, Boston and the Northern Lakes region.