Oil Wars in the Americas with Dr. Ryan Cecil Jobson
Dr. Ryan Cecil Jobson in profile.
Dr. Jobson began this political education teach-in on “Oil Wars in the Americas” by historicizing the relationship between the imperial United States and socialist movements and figures in the Caribbean through the work of Tim Hector, Eusi Kwayana, and Andaiye.
In a short but propulsive essay titled “What is Socialism?” Antiguan and Barbudan leftist political scholar Tim Hector generously cites Eusi Kwayana, described by the Walter Rodney Foundation as a “political activist, educator, writer, journalist, dramatist, folklorist and historian” from Guyana. Their insights in this essay constitute a pointed rejoinder to a political moment in Guyanese history when the Burnham dictatorship self-described its government as “co-operative socialism.”
Hector’s and Kwayana’s dialogic encounter in this piece crystallizes into a revolutionary “soul/stice,” à la Kamau Brathwaite, refulgent with the kind of rhythms, language, and ideas that should spur us into action: to develop a strong political conscience and to collectively organize against imperial violence and capitalist modes of relation and production. Socialism cannot be brought about by proxy, our interlocutors assert. It must be the result of a pertinacious will held in common by the masses of working people.
Eusi Kwayana
"A socialist movement may start with a SMALL band but along the route it must become the movement of the majority of the population who must have a fair opportunity to IMPRESS their WILL.”
Andaiye, Guyana, and Proletarian Consciousness
Turning to Andaiye, founder of Red Thread, a comrade in the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), and an interlocutor of the Grenada Revolution, Dr. Jobson asserted the importance of gender as an indispensable category of political analysis for women in times of political crises.
Andaiye identified the housewife as occupying a political position that dissolved the boundaries separating the private sphere from the public and its labor market. In conversation with Andaiye, writing in the late 1970s and early 80s, Dr. Jobson characterizes housework as “a space of proletarian consciousness” and the site of an “insurgent political imagination.” The domestic sphere does not exist in a mutually exclusive relationship to the public sphere, and housewives are neither completely subsumed by nor atomized within the private sphere. The boundary between spheres is porous, allowing women to traverse both spaces, encounter each other, and form a politically conscious class. The 1983 food crisis in Guyana created an avenue for grievance solidarity as women were compelled to gather in public spaces in search of food to “reproduce” the domestic space.
A photo of Andaiye.
Housework as Real Work
Housework is imposed upon women and not viewed as real work.
Capitalism erases, yet depends on, women's labour in the home.
A wage makes your work visible and legitimate. It is accorded some value.
The consciousness-raising potential of gathering housewives in public is the kind that can engender resistance to capitalist exploitation and the will to agitate for systemic transformation.
“Understanding and consciously recognizing the housewives in the food rebellion as the unwaged sector of the working class (as distinct from individuals), might have led us to organize a housewives committee, meeting autonomously and then meeting with sugar and bauxite workers in one unity committee, so that the sectors acknowledged and strengthened each other. Each would have been changed in ways we can’t know.”
— Andaiye, “Housewives and Other Carers in the Guyanese Resistance of the Late 1970s and Early 1980s: Looking Back [2010],” The Point is to Change the World, pp. 146-47.
Oil Wars
Dr. Jobson also discussed the material viscosity and political economy of oil, and traced its thick history stretching across Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, and his profession toward socialism, and today’s U.S. invasion. He defined “oil” as a hydrocarbon that exists naturally in liquid form; a concentrated store of carbon energy constituted from remnants of prior organic life (hence “fossil” in fossil fuel and the oft-cited refrain of “the dinosaurs beneath the surface that need to be extracted”). Oil has to be refined before it can be used. Venezuela has a hydrocarbon-rich geology.
In a forthcoming post-session handout co-written by Dr. Jobson and me, additional reflections about gender are shared, including the gendered political economy of oil wars and its disproportionate impacts on women. Stay tuned…
Access Intersect's playlist of key clips from Dr. Jobson’s teach-in.
About Dr. Ryan Jobson
Dr. Ryan Cecil Jobson is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. He holds a Ph.D. in African American Studies and Anthropology from Yale University, which he earned in 2017. His research and teaching engage questions of energy and extractivism, states and sovereignty, climate and crisis, race and capital in the Caribbean and the Americas.
His first book, The Petro-State Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago, was published by the University of Chicago Press in December 2024. He is currently at work on two subsequent manuscripts, an intellectual biography of the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James, entitled C.L.R. James and the Question of Power, and collection of essays on anthropological theory and method in an era of climate extinction. Jobson serves on the editorial committee of Small Axe and as coeditor-in-chief of Transforming Anthropology.
