1st Edition

Space, Oil and Capital

By Mazen Labban Copyright 2008
    192 Pages
    by Routledge

    192 Pages
    by Routledge

    The historical development of capital has produced a progressive increase in the demand for raw material and has consequently resulted in the concentration of capital in, and the geographical expansion of, the production of natural resources, globalizing and intensifying the competition for the control of production and markets.

    This book is an attempt to explain, at the theoretical and empirical level, the relationship between the production of oil and the process of inter-capitalist competition in the global economy, and why it is necessary to appreciate the underlying process of the social production of space in determining the access to and control of global oil production and world markets. It will appeal to those undertaking research in political economy, economic geography, resource geography and international relations.

    1. The expansion of capital, oil scarcity and the contradiction of space 2. Contradictions of capitalist accumulation: inter-capitalist competition, the production of raw material, and the contradiction of space 3. Imperialism and the geographical contradictions of monopoly capital 4. Oil in the development and decline of the Soviet Union 5. Geographical contradictions of state and capital in the development of Russian oil - competition for Russia, competition with Russia 6. Geographical contradictions of Iranian oil: capital verus the law

    Biography

    Mazen Labban is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.

    "Mazen Labban's insightful, dense, and short book applies a Marxian geographic analysis to the subject of oil with a focus on the Soviet Union, Russia, and the Iran. In doing so, he provides a fresh perspective on the causes of global price fluctuations and the geopolitics of access to the world's oil reserves. ... Labban offers an insightful analysis and challenging thesis on the place of oil within the dynamics and contradictions of capital circulation and accumulation expressed in the production of geographic integration (aka globalization) and fragmentation." -- Economic Geography (vol 86, Jan 2010) Paul. K. Gellert, University of Tennessee.