Reinhold Martin

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

Abstract: This paper returns to a fundamental debate concerning the limits of the labor theory of value in terms of what the economist Piero Sraffa called in 1960 the “production of commodities by means of commodities.” I will consider the case of oil production in Texas from its origins around 1900 to its mature form several decades later, within a “petroleum complex” that includes land surveyors, geologists, and oil companies, as well as the material instruments and forms of labor associated with each. Within this nexus, the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas, Austin, provides an archive within which this complex appears. The paper’s title derives from a term used to describe the stratigraphic threshold at which wells owned by oil companies begin to “produce,” as recorded by the Bureau. The “Texon pay horizon,” mapped by the Texon Oil and Land Company in the Big Lake area of Texas in the 1920s, was among these. Texon, a holding company formally outside the Standard Oil monopoly and its successors, nevertheless provides a metonymic glimpse of the decades-long process constitutive of monopoly capital, by which oil was technologically and economically produced rather than simply extracted. Translated into Sraffa’s terms, oil was first produced as a useful thing—and only then as a commodity—through a combination of technical mediations introduced at different stages. Its value, therefore, cannot be reduced to that of the underlying labor. Put differently, when labor and technics combine inseparably, we must consider labor itself as an effect of technical and economic mediation as well as its precondition.