Power Beyond the Market

Eight months after American forces captured Nicolás Maduro in Caracas, Chevron announced plans to invest more than $7 billion in Venezuela. The American oil company intends to more than double its production in the country over five years.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves but produces only around 1.25 million barrels a day. Its petroleum industry has been devastated by mismanagement, corruption, underinvestment, the loss of technical expertise and American sanctions. Restoring production requires foreign capital and technology.

Military intervention came first. Political reorganisation followed. Venezuela then changed its hydrocarbons law, Washington assumed control over the disposition of Venezuelan oil revenues, and American officials began directing the reconstruction of the country’s energy sector.

The sequence reveals a reality: markets are not necessarily spontaneous arenas of voluntary exchange. They can be constructed through law, financial control and military force.

In return, Chevron gains access to additional oilfields, stronger contractual protections, exceptionally low prospective production costs and a long-term position in one of the world’s richest petroleum regions.

Chevron’s expansion is only one part of a much larger transformation. BP has obtained a licence to develop the second phase of Venezuela’s offshore Loran gasfield, which contains an estimated four trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas. Other companies are negotiating new agreements, while President Donald Trump has called for as much as $100 billion in energy investment.

The political-economic logic recalls the concessionary imperialism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Military superiority alters political authority. The new political authority rewrites domestic law. Resource access is redistributed. Foreign corporations enter. The resulting order is presented as modernisation and economic freedom.

What has returned is not colonialism in its old administrative form but its underlying grammar: power establishes hierarchy, hierarchy reorganises property and law, and the new structure is subsequently described as a market.

The same relationship between capital and power appears inside the United States.

In Texas, only 30 per cent of respondents to an August survey said they would support the construction of a data centre in their own community. Data centres consume enormous quantities of electricity and water, place pressure on local infrastructure, produce noise and light pollution, and often receive generous tax incentives without creating a corresponding number of permanent jobs.

According to election records, company disclosures and political committee filings examined by Reuters, technology companies are pouring more than $300 million into the midterm elections while launching a massive advertising campaign to explain the benefits of data centres.

The language of “educating” the public is important. It suggests that resistance results from a lack of understanding. Yet communities may understand the distributional consequences perfectly well. Corporate owners capture the profits, while communities bear much of the pressure on water, energy and public infrastructure.

When citizens resist, corporations do not remain within an imaginary economic sphere called the market. They use wealth accumulated in previous market activity to influence elections, regulation and public opinion. Economic power is converted into political power. Political power then helps create the conditions for further accumulation.

Citizens and corporations possess radically unequal capacities to make their preferences politically effective. An individual has a vote. A large corporation or billionaire-funded political committee can finance candidates, advertising, lobbying, litigation and years of sustained access to policymakers.

In Venezuela, political and military power open territory to capital. In Texas, capital enters politics to preserve access to land, water, energy and infrastructure. In one case, power travels from the state towards the market. In the other, it travels from concentrated wealth towards the state. The boundary between the two is far less substantial than conventional economics assumes.

A third development exposes what happens inside the productive process itself.

Since 19 March, BP has locked approximately 800 unionised workers out of its Whiting refinery in Indiana. The refinery is the largest in the American Midwest, supplies roughly a quarter of the region’s fuel and is BP’s last unionised refinery in the United States.

The workers are not striking and withholding their labour. BP is withholding their employment and wages. A multinational corporation can absorb a prolonged confrontation, but workers cannot. They must continue paying for housing, food and healthcare.

The longer the lockout lasts, the greater the pressure on workers to accept the company’s conditions. Exxon used a similar strategy during a ten-month lockout at its Beaumont refinery in 2021, eventually securing many of the contract terms it had demanded.

BP has sought wage increases below the national industry settlement, the elimination of scores of jobs, greater flexibility over staffing and the waiver of union bargaining rights concerning the operational effects of AI and automation. These demands have been made while BP and other refiners have recorded sharply higher earnings as the Iran war has pushed fuel prices upwards.

Capital recognizes no concept of sufficiency. Every level of profitability becomes the starting point from which a higher return is expected. Companies are evaluated against competitors, past performance, investor expectations and alternative uses of capital. High profits therefore do not reduce pressure on labour.

The AI provision takes this struggle further. BP is not merely proposing one identifiable technological alteration. It is seeking advance freedom to introduce AI and automation without bargaining over their operational consequences.

Ownership determines how AI is deployed, whose work it replaces and who receives the gains from greater productivity. AI could reduce dangerous tasks, shorten working hours and improve safety without reducing incomes. Whether it liberates workers or renders them disposable depends not on the technology alone but on the social relations governing its use.

The conflict is not simply between technology and workers. It is between labour and the unilateral control of technology by capital.

Taken together, Venezuela, Texas and Whiting provide a picture of how capitalism operates today.

The common element is control: control over resources, public decisions, production, technology and the distribution of economic gains.

Modern capitalism cannot be adequately described as a decentralised market system coordinated through prices. It is an institutional order in which private accumulation produces political power, political power creates new opportunities for accumulation, and technological development is organised according to the interests of those who own it.

Who determines the terms? Who receives the benefits? Who bears the costs? Who possesses the power to refuse?

Capitalism’s contemporary form becomes visible when these questions are considered together. Abroad, it can resemble imperialism. In politics, it can dilute democracy through concentrated wealth. At work, it can weaken labour and transform technology into an instrument of managerial control.

The market is only the surface. Beneath it lies the organisation of power.