When I look out across the Clyde from my home in Glasgow, just south of the river, I like to think that I am gazing over the site where the modern world was invented. My claim rests on a patch of grass on the Green, Glasgow’s people’s park on the north bank of the Clyde. It was here that Bonnie Prince Charlie rallied Jacobite rebels and where generations of popular protests and May Day demonstrations have gathered. Critically, on a quieter day in 1765, it is also where Scottish Enlightenment inventor James Watt had a famous epiphany, leading to the invention of the modified steam engine and what would ultimately become the iconic technology of a new coal-fuelled age.
In Giovanni Arrighi’s book, Adam Smith in Beijing, he argues that the twenty-first century could be understood through the thought of another Scottish Enlightenment figure: political economist Adam Smith, and his expectation China would recover its historically dominant place in international trade. I argue that a full picture of the twenty-first century also requires us to consider James Watt in Shenzhen. Watt’s steam engine, having laid the basis for a world founded on generating unprecedented energy by burning fossil fuels, now fuels the manufacturing heartland of the modern world on China’s East Coast as it becomes the central location in the global transition beyond fossil fuels. Just as Glasgow became a centre of coal-powered steam technology, so Shenzhen now hosts the firms manufacturing the world-leading solar panels and advanced maglev wind turbines which are making China a global titan of renewable energy.
The idea that Glasgow Green is the birthplace of the modern world is a claim I’ve often made while leading tours of Glasgow’s energy history. Usually, I’ve been addressing attendees from nearby, some of whom have memories of, or have heard family members discuss, the city’s past as a centre of shipbuilding and locomotive manufacturing. Occasionally, I’ve also led visiting trade unionists and scholars from further afield. The interests expressed by groups on these tours have often spoken to an implicit understanding of how energy is intimately linked with politics, power and the unfolding of history.
Capital, in Marx’s turn of phrase, “comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”, but it has also been covered in coal soot and smeared with oil. As it spread across the globe between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, industrial capitalism was shaped by fossil fuels. In the process, unprecedented volumes of energy were generated, and political and economic transformations were unleashed in eras defined by the new possibilities stemming from carbon, electricity and steel.
The generation of power and the wielding of political power have always been closely intertwined: embracing carbon technologies has throughout history enabled bosses to disempower workers who challenged them, like the handloom weavers displaced by steam engines; at the same time, new work-related collectives have been empowered by the same processes. Today, we are in the midst of a new energy transition, one which presents the possibility of radically different paths for ownership and labour. As it has throughout history, politics is shaping and will continue to shape this transition, with potentially profound implications for labour and the wider structure of our economies. To understand how energy in transition can form the basis of an emancipatory agenda — and not the inverse — we should look to the relationships between energy infrastructures and workers’ power that have defined the trajectories of the global economy since James Watt’s epiphany in Glasgow Green.
James Watt goes global
At the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, a pair of giant steel mill cooling towers created a distinctive backdrop to the ski jumping event, and underscored the extent to which the fossil fuel economy has shaped China’s emergence on the global stage. Indeed, China’s contemporary political economy exemplifies the continued symbiosis between coal economies and industrialisation. As the heart of China’s manufacturing sector, Shenzhen has served as a central location in the spread and intensification of carbon capitalism during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Shenzhen is best known as the city where iPhones and sundry Apple products are made, but it is also a vital node in the global energy system, epitomising both China’s carbon-fuelled growth and its transition toward a renewables-based energy system.
The mining and burning of coal to make steel, produce electricity and propel manufacturing processes from cars to consumer electronics has powered China’s reemergence as a dominant economic power. At the same time, the working class in Shenzhen and beyond has suffered the deprivations of an unjust global economy and a factory system with origins in Britain’s era of imperial dominance and industrial revolution. Watt epitomised the links between the expanding cotton mills and North American plantations where the raw materials were grown through his own involvement in slave trading. China’s rise to manufacturing preeminence has been closely identified with a new international division of labour marked by parcelling tasks across expansive geographies, with the electronics assembly plants in Shenzhen and other Chinese coastal cities central to today’s disaggregated “global value chains”.
The same global value chains structure the vastly unequal distribution of rewards reaped by companies like Apple and paid for by workers at their suppliers. For instance, at Foxconn’s vast assembly plant at Longhua in Shenzhen, workers have endured dormitory conditions and suppressed wages; infamously, and tragically, “suicide nets” were erected after several workers took their own lives in 2010. By contrast, Apple has captured the lion’s share of the value created across the complex chains and distributed this to its shareholders through dividends and large buybacks. Critically, factories like Foxconn’s are serviced by a growing coal-fired energy sector: in 2021, China relied upon coal for more than 60 per cent of its electricity production, over five billion kilowatt hours.
Yet the electricity flowing through Shenzhen’s factories is changing. China is now the major player in the global solar panel sector, with much of this capacity based in Shenzhen. The city hosts leading solar manufacturers such as Prim Root and BYD, China’s largest private employer with over 700,000 workers on its books in 2023. BYD manufactures batteries as well as panels, and now also produces more electric vehicles than Tesla. As well as diversifying into wind farms and solar energy, Shenzhen Energy Group has emerged as a multinational, generating electricity in the United States as well as in China through its ownership of renewables sites across continents.
Grangemouth and the making of carbon capitalism
Beijing is not the only place where ski slopes stand next to cooling towers. Grangemouth, a town in the midpoint of Scotland’s Central Belt between Glasgow and Edinburgh, also hosts an (artificial) slope. The Polmonthill Snowsports Centre opened in 1973 around the peak of optimism and local government opulence stemming from the growth of the town’s oil refinery and petrochemical plants. Petroleum jobs partially replaced the area’s dependency on a declining coal sector, but the good times were relatively short lived: beginning in the 1970s, despite the high levels of investment which have followed, the workforce has shrunk through decades marked by jobless growth.
Grangemouth’s history exemplifies the importance of the relationship between carbon-based energy generation and industrial production in transforming economies over two and a half centuries. The town stands at the meeting point between the Union and the Forth and Clyde canals, which were crucial waterways for carrying coal to industrialising areas of Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The initial large-scale application of steam engines was to the mines themselves, making coal a cheaper and more abundant form of energy, which encouraged its use in processes like iron founding.
These shifting relationships, in conjunction with the struggle between water and coal-powered infrastructures, animate the concept Andreas Malm’s has termed “fossil capital”. Based on a detailed history, Malm asserts that industrialists’ reasons for investing in coal-fired technologies cannot be limited to conventional arguments about economic rationality and lower costs. Instead, industrialists were motivated by the need to control energy and labour.
Watermill owners were dependent upon working together with their competitors through shared ownership of large integrated power systems. Furthermore, watermills had to be located near fast flowing water, confining them to particular riverside communities. By contrast, steam engines enabled employers to dominate their workforce through the power and regularity which coal gave them in factory settings, but also through enabling the relocation of industry away from riversides and into urban centres. As such, the concept of fossil capital illustrates the power dynamics behind the adoption of technologies and the imperatives that drive new forms of energy generation — what is often now referred to as an energy “transition”.
Rather than a merely technological question, politics — be that the politics of the workplace or the nation state — are fundamental to understanding these shifts. Today, the same strategy of adopting new forms of production to manage and control labour employed by early industrialists persists, albeit in new forms. Rather than rely on traditional systems of hierarchy and coercion, the “green” solutions to which employers, financial investors and governments now flock — from driverless trains to forms of renewable energy where relatively small workforces can be largely concentrated in construction and maintenance — minimise the need for large numbers of skilled workers. In doing so, they also minimise the associated “risks”, namely their unionisation.
We can therefore follow a trajectory of efforts to control and crush labour as a central strategy in power, from the origins of fossil capital through to the contemporary shift towards renewable energy, from Scotland to Shenzhen. Hopes for new forms of battery storage, along with the remote control of generating units and infrastructures, continue to inspire visions founded upon increasingly capital-intensive processes where labour is marginalised and disempowered. These strategies reveal important insights into the conflicts that will shape the continued march of green capitalism.
Building power
As we grapple with a constantly shifting transition toward green energy, it is important to recognise the ways in which historical changes in the organisation of labour and production associated with energy transitions have also held the potential to empower workers. Where the artisanal handloom weavers may have appeared the victims of nineteenth century industrial transformation, the coal miners emerged instead as a powerful occupational force, with their numbers in Britain peaking at over one million in the 1910s and 1920s.
Steel production needed coal, but factories, steamships, railways, gasworks and power stations all did too, marking qualitative as well as quantitative shifts toward a new energy regime. Coal unleashed the forces of capitalism, enabling the production of unprecedented quantities of iron and steel — essential to the making of a more traversable and communicable world marked by revolutions in transport and the spread of electricity.
The growing thirst for energy created by these shifts concentrated power in the hands of miners, but also in those of related workers in the emergent system of coal-based infrastructures. Coal mining, rail and the docks were centres of fraternity through union organisation and the strength of associational lives and collective cultures which extended underground, along expansive rail networks, and across oceans. It was no accident that one of the most powerful coalitions of British workers was known as the Triple Alliance, which united miners, railwaymen and dockers. The emergence of this alliance, along with union affiliation to the Labour Party, encouraged the formal politicisation of industrial relations and workplace conflict.
British workers won several crucial victories under the 1945-51 Labour government when coal mining, rail and electricity were nationalised along with gas, whilst employment at the docks was formalised under the National Dock Labour Scheme. Trade unions and the senior managers of nationalised industries, who sometimes had labour movement backgrounds, mingled with government ministers in the corporatist structures which made pivotal choices on Britain’s future.
By the late 1960s, Britain’s energy economy looked very different than it had twenty years prior. The old “commanding heights” were increasingly residual as coal was quickly replaced by oil and rail by road transport, and job losses in both predecessor industries ran into the hundreds of thousands. Far more British miners lost their jobs in the 1960s than were made redundant during the better known closures of the 1980s and 1990s, but this earlier phase was eased as a result of occurring in the context of a more vibrant labour market, assisted by government policy directing investment in manufacturing jobs toward depressed coalfields as mines closed down.
Critically, these changes were neither politically neutral nor the mere working out of market forces: archived minutes by civil servants in the Ministry of Fuel and Power who served Conservative government ministers in the mid-1950s avidly discuss how the transition to oil would help to break the miners’ “stranglehold” on Britain’s energy supplies.
Carbon capital to carbon democracy
Timothy Mitchell’s concept of “carbon democracy” is a useful guide for interpreting this history. Mitchell posits that coal-based industrial capitalism empowered workers politically as well as economically by distributing power across labour-intensive sectors. Conversely, he argues, the transition to an oil-based economy was disempowering. Advanced economies such as Britain became dependent on importing oil, which was capital intensive — pipelines and tankers replaced railways just as distant oil derricks replaced coal mines.
There is an engaging logic behind Mitchell’s arguments. Workers are rarely so central to discussions of energy as they are in his theorisation, and rarely are the literal production of energetic power and the wielding of political power synthesised so compellingly. Yet there are also factors missing even for explaining the transformation of Britain, a case which clearly shaped Mitchell’s perspective and whose trajectory appears to bear out much of his prognosis: namely, even as its role in industry declined, coal continued to dominate electricity, which was becoming an increasingly pivotal utility.
By the early 1970s, most households in Britain had a refrigerator, while the television was central to family entertainment. Industrial demand pivoted from coal to electricity as light industry replaced heavy engineering and the steel sector declined. Essential public services such as lifesaving medical care were increasingly reliant on stable electrical supplies. However, these changes only made the country more connected to and dependent upon the coalfields, albeit through the powerlines of the National Grid rather than household deliveries by coal merchants.
Miners were thus still a powerful force in Britain in the 1970s, and so were electricity workers. Industrial action caused at least three rounds of major blackouts in Britain in the first half of the decade. Power workers undertook a “work to rule” during December 1970, restricting their activities and stringently applying work agreements, and coal miners subsequently fought national pay strikes in 1972 and 1974. The failure of the miners in their better-known year-long 1984-5 strike can primarily be explained by the fact the government was able to keep the lights on. The miners’ stranglehold had been broken, in part by the addition of new oil and nuclear plants and by coal imports. A proliferation of gas fired stations was then built in the 1990s by new private generators. These changes signalled the longer-term direction of Britain’s energy economy: the embrace of liberalised global markets, privatisation and the disempowerment of unions along with the intensification of pit closures.
Ultimately, just as the handloom weavers were disempowered by the steam engine, so eventually were the miners and other workers in Britain’s coal economy displaced by new forms of energy along with imported coal. This was a political objective of employers along with ministers and state officials who were hostile to union power. Thus, much like the early industrialists inspiring the concept of “fossil capital”, the second half of the 20th century in Britain underscored that energy transitions are not a straightforward outcome of technological advance or economic inevitability. Inst ead, they are implemented and shaped through political decisions.
The experiences of Britain in this period also demonstrate the crucial role of “mediating infrastructures”, particularly electricity, which both generate energy and transform it into useful forms before dispersing it to millions of users. With projections for a transition to net zero fundamentally resting on increased electrification, it is vital to grasp the potential in this “transition” for new sites of worker power.
Green capitalism, from the Clyde to Shenzhen
At least within the confines of Britain, a “greener” capitalism is emerging. Certainly, this is a problematic approximation, given Britain’s place at the centre of international financial flows and hosting the headquarters of two leading oil and gas companies. Nevertheless, the British coal age is now coming to an end, with the final coal rail freight delivery in the summer of 2024 anticipating the decommissioning of Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in Nottinghamshire. Emissions are falling and carbon intensive economic activity is in decline, often at a cost to workers, through the announced closure of Grangemouth oil refinery and job losses at Port Talbot steelworks.
However, to date the renewable energy economy, primarily mediated in the UK through onshore and offshore wind, bears the imprints of the late carbon era. Manufacturing job creation has been disappointing. The rewards, bolstered by public subsidies, are flowing to the coffers of companies created by the privatisation of publicly owned utilities as well as foreign owned multinationals, including state-owned enterprises. Public inducements for the private sector are essential to ensuring profitability of an abundant and cheap but not very profitable form of generation. The potential for an emancipatory “transition” from fossil fuels is thus far from realised, and we run the risk that this process leads to escalating exploitation.
The new renewables economy does hold out the seeds of something different where and when workers are able to fight for it. Both Scottish and Chinese renewables workers have been at the forefront of industrial struggles. In 2014, more than 1,000 Shenzhen workers downed tools at ABB’s subsidiary Power One, which manufactures solar inverters — crucial components of solar power systems. The strike ended after around a fortnight, with workers winning the bonus payments they had previously been denied, along with the payment of outstanding insurance charges and more secure contracts. In 2017, workers at the “BiFab” wind turbine fabrication yards in Fife on Scotland’s east coast succeeded in preventing their yards from closing down by occupying them when their employers were facing bankruptcy. To keep the company afloat, the Scottish government supported a change in ownership to a Canadian company.
Despite this important success, the outcome was disappointing. BiFab received a second Scottish government bailout and another change in ownership followed in 2021. Employment in renewables manufacturing remains low in Scotland. Workers in the Chinese solar panel industry are now bearing the brunt of overproduction, facing layoffs and plant closures. “Green” capitalism thus closely resembles carbon capitalism in the potential it creates for industrial workers to exercise power through their collective agency, but also in the instability and misery it enforces on them.
Watt’s epiphany and the explosion in steam power that followed led to new levels of private industrial power that was in turn met by mobilised public responses. Capitalism has been fuelled from its earliest days by energy infrastructures which have successively empowered and disempowered workers. Persistent consumer and environmental interest, along with the prerogatives of national sovereignty, sustain governments’ often central role in structuring even nominally privatised energy sectors. Energy shows every sign of continuing to serve as a theatre for workplace and political conflicts; the task now is to build the workers’ power necessary to make this transition an emancipatory one. Success or failure will determine the future of our economic and political model, from the Clyde to Shenzhen.
Notes
Image credited to NASA Earth Observatory/Wanmei Liang.
