Paper short abstract:

Based on an ethnography in a petrochemical corridor in Southern Italy, this paper presents a critique of an idea commonly associated with the theory of disaster capitalism, namely the doctrine of “shock economy” .

Paper long abstract:

Petro-capitalism is a form of capitalism that hinges on the production, exchange, and consumption of petroleum (Behrends, Reyna, Schlee 2011). This model of economic development has suffered a period of acute crisis in recent decades, giving rise to financial, geopolitical and socio-economic consequences. Even the capitalist imaginaries that emerged in the areas most closely involved with what has been defined as "the demiurgic power of oil" (Appel, Mason, Watts 2015) are conditioned by this paradoxical trajectory of negative growth. Based on an ethnography in a petrochemical corridor in Southern Italy, this paper presents a critique of an idea commonly associated with the theory of disaster capitalism, namely the doctrine of "shock economy" (Klein 2007). According to this doctrine, a rapid and irreversible cataclysm produces a trauma that has the power to transform what is "politically impossible" into something "politically inevitable," paving the way for forms of capitalism capable of asserting themselves stubbornly and violently. By describing the long trajectory of petro-chemical industrialization in the area locally known as the "triangle of death" in south-eastern Sicily, this paper discusses how the widespread, long-term and nearly invisible nature of everyday forms of disaster generates equally radical effects, effects which at times are even more insidious than the disaster itself. Like the fumes rising from an industrial smokestack, these effects insinuate themselves into the imaginaries and epidermis of the people for whom oil represents both a blessing and a curse.