In functioning democratic economies a structural balance must be found between state and capital. In Suharto's autocratic state, however, a third variable upset this equation: patronage. By using access to resources and business as the major lubricant of his patronage style of leadership Suharto actively encouraged the involvement of all powerful groups within the economy. Eventually, the military, politicians, and the bureaucracy became intimately involved in the most lucrative business ventures to the point that to be successful in Indonesian business one required an influential partner in at least one of these institutional groups, preferably with direct access to Suharto. When Freeport began negotiations with the new military regime in Jakarta in 1967 to mine the copper in West Papua, the American transna tional with the valuable political connections was the more powerful of the negotiating parties, enabling it to dictate the terms of its contract. As Suharto's political confidence grew and as the American company's finan cial investment in the province increased—and by association its vulner ability—the balance of power shifted in Jakarta's favor. Eventually Free port became another lucrative source of patronage for the president.

Early History of Freeport in West Papua
In 1936, while on an expedition to the center of the island of West New Guinea, a Dutch geologist working for Shell Oil, Jean-Jacques Dozy, was struck by the sheer magnificence of a 180-meter barren black rock wall covered in green splotches standing above an alpine meadow.1 Realizing he had discovered a huge copper outcrop Dozy knew that its inaccessibil ity meant "It was just like a mountain of gold on the moon" (Mealey 1996, 71). The advent of the Second World War and the physical impos sibility of accessing the site in the rugged and inhospitable Carstensz Range meant that Dozy's report of the discovery of Ertsberg, or ore moun tain, lay forgotten for years.2 Freeport Sulphur Company (now Freeport-McMoRan Copper and Gold Incorporated of the United States), became interested in Ertsberg in 1959 when a company geologist, Forbes Wilson, first heard of Dozy's report from a friend who, through his company Oost Borneo Maatschap pij (obm), had taken out a concession for the area from the Dutch gov ernment. Persuading the company to send him to West New Guinea in i960, Wilson was so excited by what he saw and sampled that he pre dicted correctly that Ertsberg would prove to be the largest above-ground copper deposit discovered at that time. Having recently had its nickel mining projects in Cuba expropriated by Castro, Freeport was nervous about making a substantial investment in the unstable region. Moreover, the only way for a mining concern to access the site was via helicopter, and even with the most powerful helicopter available at the time it would take months to move just one small drill rig and crew to the remote site. Thus, technical problems and political concerns saw Freeport shelving the Erts berg project in the early sixties.

Freeport's Entry into West Papua
In the boom times of the sixties, mining was the magnet for speculative international capital, and the company did not forget the possibilities it glimpsed in West New Guinea. In early November 1965, just a couple of weeks after a military coup sidelined Indonesian President Sukarno, two Texaco executives from Indonesia with close associations to the new mil itary regime approached Freeport. They informed the company that the time was right to open negotiations with the generals in Jakarta over Erts berg (Wilson 1981, 155). Freeport's subsequent decision to commit well over a hundred million dollars to the risky project seemed extraordinary given the political instability in Indonesia at the time. Freeport's confi dence, however, may be understood in the context of its connections to the highest echelons of power in Washington, the United States' expanding military power in the region, and its interest and influence in the events unfolding in Indonesia. DOWNLOAD

It has been suggested that to understand fascism we first need to explain its relationship to the commodity form as a structured social practice which conditions the ways in which reality is understood. As a social form, the commodity is independent of its material content, implying that ‘value’ – as a social mediation – is contingent on the specificity of historical-social relations in different commodity-determined societies. In this final chapter, we will be concerned with the kinds of body fascism produces by analysing the social production of gender and sexuality in fascist societies. Building on the argument in Chapter 8, the aim is to highlight not simply the aestheticization of gender and sexuality in fascism, but the connection between the triumphant fascist body and its cultural and economic coordinates. Here it is important to link our discussion of gender with Foucault’s (1977) conceptualization of productive power as control over the homeostatic social body, focusing on the techniques adopted by fascists to cultivate the internal equilibrium of the race-nation by adjusting its physiological reproduction. The organization of the social body in fascism exceeds the constraints of bourgeois law, medicine, demography and criminology to acquire a totalizing force: the fascist body becomes a ‘corporeal text’, the site of breeding practices and disciplinary projects which exceed the established framework of liberal governmental regimes. 

In what follows, we will be concerned with three themes. First, it is essential to locate the fascist representation of gender and sexuality in bourgeois culture and society. Mosse (1985, 1996) argues that modern definitions of masculinity and heterosexuality are closely tied to bourgeois nationalist discourse in the nineteenth century, and locates fascism in this tradition. Although it is no longer viable to view this discourse on gender in purely negative terms – as De Groot notes ‘women’s history has extended beyond exclusive concern with female subordination to explore the many and diverse forms of subversion, accommodation, and resistance which developed in order to deal with their situation’ (1989: 89) – it is impossible to explain the stratification and commodification of gender in fascism without reference to the historical relation between capital, gender and asymmetric power relations between men and women. To make sense of this relation, we need to understand the differentiation of forms of value between a relative masculine sphere of production, material exchange and control and an equivalent feminine sphere of reproduction, emotional exchange and subordination (Holter 2003). As noted in Chapter 2, fascism connects a mythical past with an idealized future through a revalorization of archaic themes, fixing and preserving an artificial value for ideological commodities through state intervention. This phenomenon is revealed unambiguously in the fascistization of gender and sexuality, which reinforces a type of gender asymmetry indicative of reactionary modernity. 

Second, we need to explain the construction of masculinity and femininity in relation to the corporeal aesthetics of fascism. Here we can link the discussion of gender with our earlier discussion of nationalism and racism, highlighting the links between gender, race and nation in the cultivation of the fascist social body. In bourgeois culture, alternative gendered and racial identities are things to be represented – to be contrasted against a rational ideal type of white, male heterosexuality, and so distantiated spatiotemporally from European modernity.1 The fascist discourse on gender offers an exaggerated defence of white masculine identity in a period of crisis: the mythic construction of masculinity and femininity in fascism is contingent not simply on the separation of gender roles or the legitimation/proscription of bodily practices, but on the ideologization of virility and fertility as political imperatives (Korotin 1992; Spackman 1996). Yet, while defence of white masculinity remains a consistent and defining feature of right-wing discourse, the cultural reinforcement of what Kaufman (2007) terms a mysterious yet repellent male identity remains vulnerable to the levelling force and abstraction of modernity in which feminine moral psychology competes with yet also completes a ‘surplus-repressive’ masculinism predicated on the fantasy of power. Fascist man, argues Theweleit (1987), actualizes the repellent masculinity which bourgeois man is prohibited from expressing in order to perpetuate a sex/gender system based on structured inequalities of power. 

Third, we must explain the ambivalent connection between fascism and homosexuality. The received view of fascism as a homophobic ideology conceals a more complex set of determinations. On the one hand, fascism is directed against all manifestations of effeminacy and sexual deviance, and the persecution of gay men and lesbians in Nazi Germany testifies to the extreme cruelty of fascist regimes. On the other hand, the performative enactment of hypermasculinity in fascist political culture militates against the stabilization of bourgeois gender roles through a suppression of feminine identities and a highly charged sentimentalization of male camaraderie outside the context of heterosexual domesticity. Although the normative idealization of heterosexuality in fascism is omnipresent and oppressive, the misogynist violence of fascism highlights the tension between a prescribed homosocial fantasy of ‘male autarky’ (where men are invulnerable to and independent of women) and a proscribed homosexual culture (where men dispense with the necessary mediation of capitalist patriarchal relations in the possession and exchange of women) (cf. Spackman 1996: 59–60). As a largely ‘male event’, fascism cultivates a homoerotic charge between men yet promotes a ‘cognitive and ideological apartheid around homosexuality’ (Sedgwick 1994: 51). [DOWNLOAD BOOK]

This study is intended as a critical introduction to the origins and development of fascist ideology, and will be of interest to students and researchers working in the fields of politics, history and historical sociology. The aim is to consolidate students’ theoretical understanding, and to help students acquire the interdisciplinary skills necessary to understand the concrete social, economic and political conditions which generate and sustain fascism. The text also offers students a critical resource to challenge revisionist approaches in fascist studies. In too many standard texts, a programmatic or essentialist reading of fascist ideology as a ‘secular religion’ is taken for granted, while researchers remain preoccupied with the search for an elusive ‘fascist minimum’. The emphasis on formal ideology in contemporary historiography has increased our awareness of the complexity and eclectic nature of fascist ideologies which challenge liberalism and social democracy; but many outstanding questions remain, including the relationship between fascism and modernism, the structural and ideological links between fascism and capitalism, the origins of fascist violence, and the link between fascism and masculinity.

The text begins with a critical overview of the debate on fascism, before turning to the core substantive themes in the discussion of fascism and poli tical theory. Chapter 2 examines ideological positions in the debate on fascism, rationality and modernity, looking at the work of key fascist intellectuals. The aim is to locate fascism within the ideological spectrum by examining its philosophical sources and cultural dynamics, to demarcate fascism from liberalism, conservatism and socialism, and to assess the economic and cultural significance of fascist modernism. Chapter 3 examines the central problem of the relation between fascism and social structure, asking whether support for fascist movements is linked to class or whether fascism can be explained as a pathology of industrial modernity, while Chapter 4 examines the relationship between fascism and the state, focusing on the tension between ideological hegemony and political sovereignty, and the exceptional nature of ‘totalitarian’ rule. This theme is continued in the discussion of violence in Chapter 5: fascism is often associated with the glorification of ‘creative violence’ for its own sake, in contrast with expansionist nationalism, although the similarities between fascist militarism and colonial subjugation suggest that fascism grew out of European civilization rather than in opposition to it. In Chapter 6, the emphasis turns to the political economy of fascism, which is analysed as a radical example of postliberal capitalism. The central feature of fascist political economy lies not simply in the turn towards economic nationalism, but in the corporatization of political power. This can be contrasted with non-totalitarian forms of postliberal capitalism, which share a common emphasis on protectionism and state regulation as solutions to the crisis of liberalism. The question of nationalism is investigated in greater detail in Chapter 7 in an attempt to explain the importance of the nation form in fascist ideology. The origins of fascist nationalism are complex and in some respects contradictory, but it is clear that attempts to define fascism as the logical outcome of primordial attachments are unhelpful as they fail to grasp the point that nationalism functions by connecting identity and power under changing historical conditions: in an important sense, nationhood is the outcome of economic and demographic changes which create and reproduce identity through the rationalization of commonalities functional for the group in question. In this sense, fascism can be understood as a type of ‘internal colonialism’ in which human life itself becomes the concern of the state, a theme continued in Chapter 8 on the question of race, where attention is paid to the causal links between fascism, imperialism and ‘scientific’ racism. This is followed in Chapter 9 by a detailed analysis of the role of gender and sexuality in fascist ideology, focusing on the glorification of virility and reproductive power in the fascist race-nation, and the controversial issue of fascism and homosexuality. [DOWNLOAD BOOK]

Increasing energy prices – especially for oil and gas – and recent geopolitical conflicts have reminded us of the essential role affordable energy plays in economic growth and human development and of the vulnerability of the global energy system to supply disruptions. To secure energy supplies is once again at the top of the international policy agenda. Yet the current pattern of energy supply carries the threat of severe and irreversible environmental damage – including changes in global climate. Reconciling the goals of energy security and environmental protection requires strong and coordinated government action and public support. As a consequence, the decoupling of energy use and economic growth, a diversification of energy supply, and the mitigation of climate change causing emissions are more urgent than ever. 

The major share of primary energy demand today comes from fossil fuels, oil, gas, and coal. The main suppliers of oil are the OPEC region, Russia, and the USA. If the oil demand continues to grow as fast as in the past decades, the demand for oil will be higher than supply 15 years from now (depletion point). Although the oil price would also rise with increasing demand and other oil reserves such as oil shale or tar sands would be financially attractive to exploit further, oil still remains the scarcest fossil resource on earth, followed by gas. The world’s largest gas reserves are in Russia, followed by Qatar and Iran. The supply of coal is more widely spread in many countries of the world, and the coal reserves will last for over 200 years. [Download Journal]