Oil Addiction and Class Oppression

A hard hat from an oil worker lies in oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill on East Grand Terre Island, Louisiana. (Reuters/Lee Celano) Source: The Nation *

By Sirantos Fotopoulous

The political power of low gasoline prices does not lie in affordability alone. It lies in dependence. Cheap fuel is not simply a consumer benefit; it is a mechanism through which millions of people are bound to a particular economic order and disciplined into accepting it. When Donald Trump presents low gas prices as proof of economic success, he is not offering relief so much as reinforcing a system that demands obedience in exchange for survival.

Americans are not dependent on gasoline by accident. They have been made dependent through decades of deliberate policy choices that dismantled public transportation, encouraged suburban sprawl, and structured employment around long commutes and automobile ownership. In this system, access to work, healthcare, education, and social life often requires a car. Gasoline becomes not a luxury but a prerequisite for participation in society. When fuel prices rise, life becomes immediately harder. When prices fall, the system feels temporarily humane. This oscillation produces compliance rather than freedom.

 

Low gasoline prices are therefore politically potent not because they redistribute wealth downward, but because they mask an upward transfer of wealth that is otherwise constant. Even when gas is cheap, households spend thousands of dollars a year on fuel, vehicle maintenance, insurance, and debt. These costs flow upward to oil companies, financial institutions, automakers, and logistics firms. Cheap fuel does not break this transfer; it stabilizes it by making the extraction tolerable.

 

The oil industry benefits from this arrangement in ways that go far beyond pump prices. A population locked into car dependence guarantees stable demand regardless of price fluctuations. Workers cannot easily reduce consumption without sacrificing access to employment or basic services. This creates a captive market. The industry’s profits are not primarily the result of high prices at any given moment, but of structural dependence sustained over decades. Cheap gasoline preserves that dependence by preventing rupture.

 

This dependence also disciplines political behavior. When livelihoods hinge on fuel prices, energy policy becomes a matter of personal survival rather than collective choice. Calls for alternatives — pedestrian and bicycle friendly urban centers, public transit, electrification, reduced commuting, an end to suburban sprawl or other similar structural changes — are experienced not as emancipatory proposals but as threats. The fossil fuel economy thus produces its own ideological defense. People come to identify their personal well-being with the health of the oil industry itself.

 

Trump’s fixation on low gasoline prices exploits this reality. By presenting himself as the guarantor of cheap fuel, he positions himself as the protector of daily life against abstract enemies — regulators, environmentalists, elites, or foreign forces. The simplicity of the promise is crucial. Structural transformation is complex and uncertain. Cheap gas is immediate and legible. It requires no rethinking of how people live, only continued submission to how they already must live.

 

This is not economic populism in any meaningful sense. It is class management. Cheap gasoline functions as a subsidy not to workers, but to the social order that extracts from them. It allows wages to stagnate while commute distances grow. It allows employers to externalize transportation costs onto workers. It allows logistics firms to expand without bearing the social costs of pollution, infrastructure decay, or climate damage. The apparent benefit at the pump conceals a far larger upward transfer of wealth that perpetuates the immiseration of the working-class.

 

Over time, this arrangement produces a political base whose material survival is bound to fossil capital. Workers in energy-producing regions, logistics hubs, construction, trucking, and suburban service economies become structurally aligned with oil, not because it enriches them, but because its disruption threatens them. Fear replaces solidarity. Dependence replaces agency. Political loyalty follows.

 

This is the social foundation of Trump’s energy politics. His promise is not transformation but continuity — a guarantee that nothing fundamental will change. Low gasoline prices signal that the system will keep functioning as it has, regardless of how unequal, precarious, or environmentally destructive it becomes. For a population already trapped within that system, continuity feels comfortable and safe.

 

This dynamic reveals how class power is maintained not only through coercion, but through managed dependence. Capital does not simply extract surplus; it organizes life in ways that make extraction unavoidable. The fossil fuel economy is a textbook example. Workers are paid wages that require them to purchase the very energy that enables their exploitation, creating a closed loop in which value flows upward while dependence flows downward.

 

Additionally, this same system represents a profound loss of autonomy. A society organized around mandatory fuel consumption is one in which freedom of movement, association, and survival are mediated by corporate infrastructure and state-backed markets. Choice becomes illusory when opting out carries severe material penalties. Obedience is produced not through force alone, but through design.

 

The end game of this arrangement is political consolidation. Cheap gasoline does not challenge inequality; it neutralizes resistance to it. It binds ordinary people to an economy that steadily extracts from them while offering small, visible concessions in return. Trump’s energy politics do not aim to improve material conditions in a lasting way. They aim to secure loyalty by ensuring that dependence remains manageable.

 

The danger is not simply environmental, though it is that as well. The deeper danger is political. A population whose survival depends on fossil fuel flows is easily mobilized in defense of the system that controls those flows. Empire, inequality, and authoritarian ambition find fertile ground in a society trained to equate obedience with affordability.

 

Cheap gas is not freedom. It is the price of submission and renders us all as addicts.

*The Deepwater Horizon catastrophe was not an accident; it was market driven. See here:  The oil industry regulators allowed the industry to write its own guidelines (in pencil).