Energy—Capital—Metabolism

Organized by the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization and the Shapiro Initiative on Environment and Society, Department of History, The University of Chicago
April 24–25, 2025 | Social Science Research Building & 1155 E. 60th St.
Register↗

Energy—Capital—Metabolism

Organized by the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization and the Shapiro Initiative on Environment and Society, Department of History, The University of Chicago

Social Science Research Building & 1155 E. 60th St.
April 24–25, 2025

Register↗

← Conference Overview

Geopolitical Economies of Energy

Moderated by Aaron Jakes, Department of History and CEGU, The University of Chicago

Friday, April 25, 2025, 10:45am–12:15pm
John Hope Franklin Room, Social Science Research Building
(2^nd Floor, 1126 E. 59th St.)

In recent years, expanded readings of extraction have put into focus the extent to which the reproduction of resource-based industries increasingly rely on global circuits of finance, logistical infrastructure, and digital technology. The extent to which the global circulation of capital—and its energetic basis in the fossil economy—is also driven by specifically geopolitical dynamics of imperialist and oligarchic power, however, is yet to be more comprehensively explored and theorized. By means of a dialogue between Marxist Dependency Theory (MDT) and theories of the circulation of capital, this article suggests that the ownership and control of technology lies at the basis of the relations of power that structure a world capitalist system in which primary commodity exporting economies are placed and also maintained in a subordinate position. To provide a theorization as well as an empirically-grounded assessment of international technological subordination (ITS), the article measures new dynamics of energy and of industrial-technological dependency in mining and agriculture, especially in the onset of the rise of China and of the 4.0 industry agenda. With this, the article illustrates the extent to which technological modernization in the extractive industries reflects the changing architecture of power in the international division of labor, and sheds light into the geopolitical economy of circuits of extraction.

Martín Arboleda is Associate Professor of Sociology at Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile. He obtained his PhD in Politics from the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. His research interests encompass the fields of global political economy, critical social theory, and development studies. He is the author of the books Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism (Verso, 2020) and Gobernar la utopía: sobre la planificación y el poder popular (Caja Negra Editora, 2021), as well as of several scholarly articles. He is currently working on a long-term research project on the political economy of globalized extraction, as well as on the social and political history of Latin American theories of development.

How and why did the lean pig emerge and proliferate? This talk will tell the story of how pig bodies were shaped by mid-20th century wartime nutrition science and the incentives of industrial production, and explore their ecological and sociopolitical effects upon ‘returning’ to China in the 1970’s.

Pigs in China were penned up to 6000 years ago, used primarily for their capacity to eat human scraps and produce up to 10x more shit than humans do. Their manure became essential to Chinese agriculture as the growing population exerted an increasing pressure on China’s relatively little arable land. The fat and docile pigs that emerged from centuries of selective breeding were the most domesticated and specialized pigs in the world, with unparalleled fertility, disease resistance, and taste. These pigs provided the majority of the genetic foundation for the “purebreds” that emerged in 19th-century industrializing Britain, whose techniques of lineage tracking and in-line breeding created the commodified animals that went onto take over the world via industrial production.

Today, these UK/US owned pigs, tinkered with to prioritize rapid lean meat growth based on industrial soy-based feed, have taken over the Chinese pork industry, which is the world’s largest by a long shot. Though Chinese pigs continue to supply Western breeds with much-needed genetic diversity, Western breeds dominate even Chinese small-holder pig productions due to their capacity to reach market weight between 4-6 months. These industrial pigs have provided for the meatification of Chinese diets, but are dependent on soy-based feed whose cheapness relies on the deforestation of the Amazon, require a host of medical treatments to maintain their precarious homogeneity, and have become the #1 polluter of Chinese waterways. Meanwhile, in both the US and China, people became fatter as pigs became skinnier as part of an inadequate and unpalatable compensation. In telling this story, this talk will link matters of taste and definitions of health in rendering the capitalist transformation, or disruption, of the nitrogen cycles pigs once held together, and today break apart.

Niu Teo is a PhD Candidate at the University of Chicago writing a dissertation on the history of the global pig.

After the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, state enterprises were rapidly and disastrously privatized via a process of “shock therapy.” The largest of these enterprises were coal, oil, and steel concerns. In most cases, majority shares in these companies were vacuumed up by a new class of oligarchs: former high-ranking Party functionaries, anti-communists who emigrated before the end of socialism and returned to their home countries after the collapse, and some ordinary citizens who were savvy or lucky. In many cases, the new owners of former state enterprises siphoned off what value they could through layoffs and the sale of enterprise equipment, real estate, and intellectual property, stashing these newly liquid assets in tax havens in Cyprus or the Bahamas before declaring bankruptcy. In a few short years, infrastructures that were designed for the extraction and distribution of energy in a political economy without a profit motive were abstracted into financial assets, a concept beyond the epistemic grasp of many former socialist citizens who had grown up in a society where the private ownership of capital was illegal. Based on examples from across the region, this paper traces the movement of fossil capital from Eastern European industrial centers through tax havens and ultimately into the hands of very few wealthy elites. This process can be understood and the creation of a “global rust belt.” If the United States rust belt is defined by the movement of capital from northern industrial cities to southern and western ones, then this is a similar process but on a much larger and much quicker scale.

Julia Mead is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago and is interested in the history of socialism, gender, and energy. She is completing a dissertation titled “Lights Out: Mining Masculinity and Energy Crisis in Czechoslovakia, 1948-1992” and recently published an article, “The 1970s Energy Crises and the Threat to Czechoslovak Consumer Socialism,” in the Journal of Contemporary History.