Il Manifesto of 15 September reported this statement by Yamani, among the leading figures of the OPEC cartel: ‘the oil age will end not for lack of oil, but because of technology’. That is, he excludes an imminent depletion of the reserves. Moreover, not even high oil prices have been enough to bring about a revival of nuclear power, which the indicators show remains in a stagnation that is anything but cyclical: in Europe and America, the decommissioning of existing plants is multiplying and there have been no new orders for some time; even in the rest of the world, the rate of growth of nuclear power is now close to zero. It is completely misleading to list, as is customary, the series of alternative energy sources, non-renewable or renewable, if one does not compare their potential and specific costs, crucial in the present society based on profit.

The more developed capitalism is, the more sensitive it is to the scarcity of raw materials, the more acute the competition and the hunt for sources of raw materials throughout the world. Hence the tendency of finance capital to extend its economic territory in the furious struggle for the last strip of the earth’s surface not yet divided or for a new division of already divided territories.

In 1905, the world oil market was essentially divided between two large financial groups: the American Standard Oil Company, founded in 1900 by Rockefeller, and the Baku-based Russian oil masters, Rothschild and Nobel. These had for some years been threatened in their monopoly positions by adversaries: the competition of the Baku-based Mantashev firm and the very rich firms Samuel and Shell, linked to British capital. These latter three groups of enterprises were linked to the large German banks with the largest, Deutsche Bank, at their head. A struggle began for the division of the world. Lenin reports that the struggle ended in 1907 with the complete defeat of the Deutsche Bank, which concluded a very unfavourable agreement with Standard in which it undertook ‘not to attempt anything which might injure American interests’. The Standard Oil Company, between 1900 and 1907, paid the following dividends: 48%, 48%, 45%, 44%, 36%, 40%, 40%, altogether 367 million dollars. Between 1882 and the end of 1907, out of the 889 million dollars of net profit earned, 606 million in dividends were distributed, and the rest allocated to reserves.

The depletion of America’s oil reserves in the early 1900s was compensated by the discovery of new ones in Australia, Romania, and of transoceanic oil sources, especially in the Dutch colonies. The race for their conquest on the part of the monopolies, so as not to be threatened by possible adversaries, continues throughout the 20th century.

Today, in 2001, the deposits are all owned by states or monopolies, which divide among themselves, as with agrarian land, the differential rent proper to the capitalist exploitation of limited resources.

In the case of oil, the bulk of the price is differential rents, that is, surplus profits. The cost of extraction varies from a minimum in the Middle East, today about one dollar a barrel, to 15 dollars in the worst zones of the North Sea, with intermediate costs in the Caspian Sea and the United States, ranging from 5 to 10 dollars. A gap accentuated by the qualitative difference: the worst are those of the North Sea and the Chinese one, the best is Libyan one.

Oil has taken the lead in energy consumption, reaching 38%, as against 29% for coal and 20% for natural gas. Therefore, it can also command high prices, when all the oil extracted is consumed, with demand continually greater than supply. The monopoly of supply can keep prices as high as the price of production, at equal caloric value, of natural gas, or of oil extractable from oil shale, whose average cost per barrel is estimated at between 30 and 50 dollars, twice as high as the worst North Sea deposits. Resorting to shale would also raise Northern oil to high rents.

Present-day industry has been made possible, for the most part, by the existence of oil, the road and air transport industry would never have existed without oil, etc. Price fluctuations and threats of supply disruptions put much of the current technology inherited from the 20th century and founded on oil at risk, as no other energy source is able to replace it for the time being. This factor is added to the remaining ones that grip the capitalist system.

An intense struggle will continue to unfold among the industrial countries for possession of the richest oil fields, and which yield greater rent, passing it on to the others. It is not without significance that a French and a Russian delegation travelled to Iraq, a few days apart, where Saddam Hussein declared his intention to sell oil only in exchange for Euro.

Europe, poor in cheap oil, has turned to natural gas: they fear that ‘we all cook with Russia’s gas’. 20% of European energy consumption is supplied by Russia. Negotiations between the European Community and Russia for the reorganisation of the extraction and transport of the fuel, a high percentage of which would be dispersed, putting cold Siberia in a position to heat Europe’s homes and furnaces; in return, Russia would give up the fuel at a modest price. This is reminiscent of the dispute of 1905, with the difference that then was the beginning of the era of imperialist plunder of the raw materials of countries not yet industrialised, today, 2001, a far greater part of the world is won over to the reproduction of capital and equally hungry and devouring of minerals to be coated with the gold of labour power.

This is a struggle of European capital, with Germany at its head, to evade the tribute to be paid, in oil rent, to American imperialism, which is increasingly becoming, in all fields, including agriculture, a rentier country, based on rents of differing fertility and monopolies. The hegemony of finance capital is increasingly imperious, it commands the Central Bank, in an increasingly evident prevalence of economics over politics. Madam Democracy has only one (very important) function: to conceal the dictatorship of finance capital over the working class at home and internationally.

Lenin, in Imperialism, attributes to Marx the demonstration that, through the historical theoretical analysis of capitalism, free competition determines the concentration of production, and how this, in turn, at a certain degree of development, leads to monopoly. Monopoly is now the universal law of the present state of development of capitalism. For Europe, the definitive substitution of modern capitalism for the old can be established with some accuracy: it is the beginning of the 20th century. The true embryonic beginning of modern monopolies dates back to 1860-1870 at the latest. Their first major period of development is connected to the great international deprression after 1870 until 1890. This is followed by business boom at the end of the 19th century and the 1900-1903 crisis. This immensely accelerated the process of concentration, both in the banking system and in industry, transforming, for the first time, industry-finance relations into an effective monopoly of the big banks, and making them closer and more intense. The cartels became one of the foundations of the entire economic life. Capitalism rose to its imperialist phase.

The monopolistic associations of capitalists – Lenin again reminds us – cartels, syndicates, trusts, first of all divide up the internal market among themselves, and take over, more or less completely, the production of the country. But in a capitalist regime, the internal market is inevitably connected with the external market. Capitalism has long since created a world market. And as the export of capital grew, foreign and colonial relations and the spheres of influence of the large monopolistic associations expanded, naturally, progress was made increasingly toward international agreements among them and toward the creation of global cartels. This is a new step in the global concentration of capital and production; a stage much higher than the previous one, or super-monopoly.

Lenin brings up the example of the electrical industry, which better than any other represented the progress made by technology and capitalism between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. It had developed most strongly in the two new, more advanced, capitalist countries, the United Stares and Germany. Two electricity powers emerged in these two countries. In 1907, the two American and German trusts concluded an agreement, under which the world remained divided. Even in merchant shipping, concentration, enormously developed, had led to the division of the world. Liefmann calculated for 1897 approximately 40 international cartels in which Germany participated, and around 100 by 1910.

The international cartels show to what extent to which capitalist monopolies have developed. The form of the struggle may change, and in fact changes continuously, according to different partial and temporary conditions; but, as long as classes exist, the substance of the struggle, its class content, never changes at all. Capitalists divide up the world not out of their wickedness, but because the degree reached in concentration forces them to beat this path if they want to make profits. Force changes due to changing economic and political development, whether such change is purely economic or extra-economic, e.g. military, is a secondary matter, which cannot change anything about the fundamental conception of the most recent period of capitalism.

When the distribution of products among tens or hundreds of millions of consumers takes place according to a planned scheme (Lenin gives the case of petroleum distribution in America and Germany by the Standard Oil Co.), then it becomes clear that we are already in the presence of a socialisation of production and not merely a simple interweaving of individual producers and merchants; that the relations of private economy and private property form a shell no longer corresponding to the content, a shell that must inevitably decay, since its revolutionary elimination has been forcibly and artificially prevented. In this state of decay, it may last for a relatively long time (until the world proletariat rids itself of the opportunist blight), but, inevitably, it will finally be eliminated.