BP pockets $8.46 billion: war is good business

The facts first. According to The Guardian, BP announced on Friday an underlying replacement-cost profit of $8.46 billion for the third quarter, against $2.2 billion a year earlier. Analysts had expected $7.33 billion. The group explains that the war in the Middle East pushed up oil and gas prices and drove a "significantly higher" trading volume. The Guardian's headline adds the rise in refining margins.

What the wire report does not say: how much of this profit comes from trading, how much from refining, how much from production. Nor does it say what this money will become: dividends, share buybacks, investment. We may find out. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Cui bono? The answer is in the number. When prices rise, it is not the war that pays. It is the consumer, the haulier, the manufacturer, the employee filling up the tank. And it is BP that cashes in. Quadrupling profit in a single year is not the talent of a good manager. It is a crisis rent.

We readily speak of "market tensions" as if they were a weather phenomenon. They are nothing of the kind. Oil is controlled by a handful of major groups, which sell, transport, refine and speculate. In a structure of near-monopoly, instability is not an accident to be endured: it is an opportunity to be monetised. "Significantly higher" trading says it well enough. Volatility is being sold.

Leninist tradition describes imperialism as the stage where large capitalist blocs compete for raw materials, markets and spheres of influence, and where states provide the political shell for that competition: alliances, sanctions, arms contracts, military presence. Applied here, the framework is simple. A group of British origin profits from a conflict in a region whose hydrocarbons structure the global economy. The states on which it depends have every interest in keeping routes, refineries and prices under control. We have no evidence of direct intervention by London on BP's behalf; the wire report says nothing of the kind. But the structural question remains: what is military and diplomatic power for, if not to protect energy capital?

We will be served the usual talk of a rules-based international order. Very well. Let us simply note that these rules produce, for shareholders, a quarter worth $8.46 billion, and that nobody is talking about changing them.

Then there is the political question. An exceptional tax on these windfall profits would be a defensible measure, but it would be a concession that capital will take back as soon as its margins require it. The real test lies elsewhere: does this anger at the war rent strengthen the organisation of workers, or does it content itself with demanding a more decent management of the system? The conflict enriches BP. It will take more than a tax for that to stop being good business.

(Note: "8,46 milliards de dollars" rendered as $8.46 billion; "contre 2,2 milliards" as $2.2 billion, per the source figures.)