Presentation short abstract

This paper draws on a political ecology perspective and fieldwork on employment protests in Southern Iraq's oil fields to examine why capitalism and the unfettered extraction of oil are accepted as a self-evident good by people with lived experience of the toxicity of extractive industries.

Presentation long abstract

The political economies of Middle Eastern states are typically approached through theories of neo-patrimonialism. In these arguments, the importance of oil to countries in the region is often explained through the argument that the distribution of the rents it generates is crucial to maintaining the stability of state-society relations. However, my fieldwork on grassroots mobilisation for employment in Southern Iraq’s oil fields makes apparent that it is not necessarily the redistribution of oil rents that propels capitalism in the region, but the fantasy of such gains in the form of low paid and highly precarious work. To this end, I build on Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism to develop the term “crude attachments” to describe how despite the fact that most people in Southern Iraq do not gain materially from the presence of the oil industry in their communities, and are in fact harmed by its pollution, they continue to see the carbon economy as the only feasible route to the “normative life” which capitalism offers as the path to the “good life”. Moreover, drawing on work in political ecology, I show that rather than shattering these crude attachments, toxicity shapes socio-ecological relations and my interlocutors’ desires in ways that are useful for capital. This works to keep an unequal and hierarchical capitalist system in place and stops them from pursuing broader structural change.