“​But the degree to which petrochemicals drove the ‘replacement of living labour by dead labour’ extends far beyond petrochemical plants themselves. At a more elemental level, petrochemicals marked a qualitative shift in the nature of commodity production: the substitution of naturally occurring, labour-intensive goods – often sourced from far-flung colonial territories – with synthetic materials that had an average necessary labour content approaching zero. This was not simply an increase in the quantity or scale of production. Rather, the functional attributes of natural materials such as wood, cotton, or rubber would now be served by petroleum-derived chemicals.”