The Accumulation of Capital and the Socialization of Labor in the North Atlantic Offshore Wind Energy Industry (2002-2024)

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the development, transformation, and expansion of the offshore wind energy industry across Northwestern Europe and the Northeastern United States of America. Within geography, global political economy, and other related social scientific disciplines, there is growing attention to the development of the global renewable energy industry, the regionalized phaseout of fossil fuels, and the complex spatiality and conflictual nature of these processes. This work aims to advance the scholarship on the geographical political economy of global energy system transformation through an analysis of the alienation of human creative powers for the transformation of the natural world as the productive powers of capital, showing how the contradictory development of these powers necessarily unfolds through the increasing socialization of private labor and the growing accumulation and centralization of capital. Through this analysis, the research provides insights into some of the concrete spatial and organizational forms assumed by the growth of large-scale renewable energy infrastructures in contemporary capitalism, and thus also some of the transformative potentialities that the global working class would have to face to consciously organize its own political action and to constitute itself as a historical subject. The work consists of an introductory chapter, three main chapters, and a general conclusion. Each of the main chapters was originally written as a stand-alone scientific article.

Chapter 1 provides unity to the dissertation as a whole through a demarcation of the object of research, a discussion of method, a critical review of the geographical and political-economic scholarship on global energy system transformation, and an analysis of the growth of the global renewable energy industry in general and the offshore wind energy industry in particular in terms of the general determinations and historical-geographical dynamics of the global accumulation of capital.

Chapter 2 analyzes the dynamics of inter-capitalist competition and the contradictions of the division and integration of labor in the North Atlantic offshore wind energy industry. As the industry develops across Europe and the United States, its own internal contradictions violently assert themselves as barriers to expanded reproduction, as crucial offshore wind power projects are cancelled and as major wind turbine manufacturers are facing billions of euros in losses. However, these barriers are also important spurs to restructuring, and amidst the present situation, significant shifts are now underway in the geographical organization of the offshore wind industry, with project developers and equipment suppliers transforming production processes and reorganizing their operations as they expand into new geographical territories. To understand the concrete forms assumed by this transnational process of restructuring, it is necessary to analyze the natural conditions of production, the essential social determinations, and the fundamental contradictions shaping the dynamics of capitalist competition in the key branches of the offshore wind industry. In so doing, the chapter revives and advances a Marxian approach to theorizing geographical and organizational transformations of complex production-systems in the capitalist mode of production.

Chapter 3 deepens this analysis of the transformation of social labor in the North Atlantic offshore wind energy industry through a focus on the development of maritime labor regimes within the branches of offshore wind farm installation and operations and maintenance. In this chapter, emphasis is placed on the continuous introduction of new means of production and associated transformations in the productive subjectivity of the collective worker within these branches of industry. It is argued that the development of labor regimes is shaped by the contradiction between the production of relative surplus value through the objective and subjective socialization of private labor and the necessity of capital to maintain control over the workforce in the spheres of production and social reproduction. This contradiction is mediated by the system of bourgeois nation-states through the sovereignty of the states where vessels are registered and the production of particular forms of territoriality in maritime zones. It is also managed in different ways by firms with varying demands for labor power, producing class relations that are not only explicitly disciplinary, but more cooperative in their forms of appearance, at least for the present moment.

Finally, Chapter 4 turns to the analysis of the development of qualified labor-power for absorption into the accumulation process of the North Atlantic offshore wind energy industry. Presently, there is a so-called “skills shortage” imperiling the rapid expansion of the global renewable energy industry, and the North Atlantic offshore wind energy industry is no exception. Taking up the problem of the skills shortage, this chapter analyzes it in Marxian terms, as the overaccumulation of capital with respect to the specific forms of developed labor-power demanded in key branches of the offshore wind energy industry. Subsequently, it is shown how skills shortages are actually being addressed in this growing industry, as the production of qualified labor-power is subsumed to a process of geographical industrialization that necessarily unfolds through competition between different territories for inward investment and class struggle over wages and working conditions. Theoretically, the chapter brings an alternative perspective to debates concerning the historical tendencies of capital accumulation and the absorption of living labor-power by the renewable energy industry, while also showing the enduring relevance of the theory of geographical industrialization as a tool in grasping the growth and qualitative transformation of the global renewable energy industry.