Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange

Fetishism in a Zero-Sum World

Alf Hornborg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136658488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In modern society, we tend to have faith in technology. But is our concept of 'technology' itself a cultural illusion? This book challenges the idea that humanity as a whole is united in a common development toward increasingly efficient technologies. Instead it argues that modern technology implies a kind of global 'zero-sum game' involving uneven resource flows, which make it possible for wealthier parts of global society to save time and space at the expense of humans and environments in the poorer parts.

We tend to think of the functioning of machines as if it was detached from the social relations of exchange which make machines economically and physically possible (in some areas). But even the steam engine that was the core of the Industrial Revolution in England was indissolubly linked to slave labour and soil erosion in distant cotton plantations. And even as seemingly benign a technology as railways have historically saved time (and accessed space) primarily for those who can afford them, but at the expense of labour time and natural space lost for other social groups with less purchasing power. The existence of technology, in other words, is not a cornucopia signifying general human progress, but the unevenly distributed result of unequal resource transfers that the science of economics is not equipped to perceive. Technology is not simply a relation between humans and their natural environment, but more fundamentally a way of organizing global human society. From the very start it has been a global phenomenon, which has intertwined political, economic and environmental histories in complex and inequitable ways. This book unravels these complex connections and rejects the widespread notion that technology will make the world sustainable. Instead it suggests a radical reform of money, which would be as useful for achieving sustainability as for avoiding financial breakdown.

It brings together various perspectives from environmental and economic anthropology, ecological economics, political ecology, world-system analysis, fetishism theory, semiotics, environmental and economic history, and development theory. Its main contribution is a new understanding of technological development and concerns about global sustainability as questions of power and uneven distribution, ultimately deriving from the inherent logic of general-purpose money. It should be of interest to students and professionals with a background or current engagement in anthropology, sustainability studies, environmental history, economic history, or development studies.

1 Zero-sum world

How to think about ecologically unequal exchange

Researchers and policy-makers addressing sustainability in the early twenty-first century face a challenge so formidable that they may prove incapable of dealing with it, in which case our current capitalist civilization may well share the fate of ancient Rome and similar historical instances of socio-ecological collapse (Tainter 1988). This alarmist introduction is meant to underscore the urgency of the analytical task that I attempt to outline in this book. The currently globalizing connections through market exchange and technologies of trade and communication are widely celebrated as a road to a more integrated, prosperous, and even egalitarian future world, yet there is overwhelming evidence that precisely these connections continue to generate devastating ecological deterioration and increasingly severe inequalities within and between nations (United Nations Development Program 1998; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005). Almost seven billion human beings are currently implicated in a global system that seems inexorably to bring us all closer and closer to socio-ecological collapse. There is nothing inevitable about this process, many of us are aware of its fundamental direction, yet we seem quite unable to halt it.

This incapacity to evade catastrophe has two basic aspects that are intricately interrelated. One is that our way of thinking and talking about the world prevents us from grasping or at least efficaciously questioning the mechanisms propelling this development. The other is that there are extremely powerful interests at stake. We are not all sitting in the same boat, as the metaphor goes. We are sitting in at least two different boats, but one is pulling us all toward disaster. There are definitely powerful social groups who have very much to gain – at least within the anticipated timeframe of their own lifetimes – from the current organization of global society. As many social scientists have shown, it is precisely these groups who tend to exert a primary influence over the way social processes are defined – and even questioned. The language devised to manage socio-ecological ‘problems’ viewed through such system-serving lenses will naturally constrain our capacity to actually ‘solve’ problems in the sense of changing the direction of societal development, which may well require fundamentally reorganizing social institutions. The language of policy and management thus tends to avoid questions of power, conflicts, and inequalities. Although conspicuously present – and increasingly problematic – in global human society, such issues are rarely identified as problems to be solved. There is rather a pervasive assumption of consensus with regard to appropriate policy and management.

A crucial challenge for social sciences struggling with these issues is that the everyday assumptions about the world in which we are all suspended, and which are generally described for us in terms of flows of money and information, have very tangible material properties and consequences. These material aspects of global society are widely ignored in social science, in part because they implicate knowledge and methodologies generally reserved for the natural sciences. Nor can they be fully grasped by the natural scientists themselves, simply because these researchers generally have a poor understanding of society. Yet the logic of these material aspects of society – what are increasingly referred to as ‘socio-ecological’ systems – urgently needs to be understood (Berkes and Folke 1998; Hornborg and Crumley 2007). But even here, in contemporary attempts to transcend the academic distinction between social and natural sciences, there is a clear divergence between perspectives emphasizing, respectively, consensus and conflict. In this book, I will take power, contradiction, and ‘capital accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2003) as a point of departure for understanding the disastrous course of current socio-ecological processes, but I will also briefly demonstrate why the hegemonic interpretations and policies that instead assume consensus (e.g. the functionalist discourse on ‘resilience’) may be misguided.

The chapter is divided into three parts. The first discusses how a population’s perceptions of technology, economy, and ecology are conditioned by its position within global systems of resource flows, and how mainstream modern perceptions of ‘development’ can be viewed as a cultural illusion confusing a privileged position in social space with an advanced position in historical time. The second part traces some lineages of critical thinking on environmental load displacement and ecologically unequal exchange, arguing that such acknowledgement of a global environmental ‘zero-sum game’ is essential to recognizing the extent to which cornucopian perceptions of ‘development’ indeed represent an illusion. The third part, finally, offers some examples of how the rising global anticipation of socio-ecological contradiction and disaster is being ideologically disarmed by the rhetoric on ‘sustainability’ and ‘resilience’.

Machine fetishism: technology/economy/ecology as culture

In the mainstream language of policy for sustainable development, the words ‘technology’, ‘economy’, and ‘ecology’ are used in an unreflective, matter-of-fact way that suggests bounded categories of reality given once and for all and exempt from critical scrutiny. This is the language of positivism and simple empiricism, the diametrical antithesis to those traditions in social research that emphasize a deeper and second look at the surfaces of the world that present themselves to our senses. In this latter tradition I would include what David Harvey (1996) calls ‘dialectics’, but also the whole thrust of ‘deconstruction’ and ‘defamiliarization’ (Marcus and Fischer 1986) that has characterized so much of the work in humanities and some of the social sciences in recent decades. Researchers from these traditions will find it easier to digest what I am now going to propose, namely that our notions of ‘technology’, ‘economy’, and ‘ecology’ are cultural categories that train us to think about our socio-ecological realities in particular ways. These three categories represent overlapping phenomena, the analytical separation of which diminishes our chances of grasping the totality of which each gives a glimpse. The three concepts represent distinct and extremely influential fields of research lodged in separate academic faculties, yet each can simultaneously be used as a point of departure for extensive anthropological reflection on how mainstream thought is culturally constituted (e.g. Latour 1993; Sahlins 1976; Godelier 1986; Gudeman 1986; Croll and Parkin 1992; Descola and Pálsson 1996; Ellen and Fukui 1996; Ingold 2000; Hornborg 2001b). ‘Technology’ can thus be understood as referring to combustion engines and the development of new agrofuels, or it can be understood as a realm of fetishism, magic, and ritual. ‘Economy’ can be represented as dealing with market institutions and the measurement of GDP, or it can be thought of as concerned with ideology, permutations of reciprocity, and the driving forces of consumption. Finally, ‘ecology’ can be perceived as a biophysical domain of natural processes uncontaminated by human ideas and relations, or as the material-cum-relational substrate enveloping – and implicated in – all human life (including technology and economy).

David Harvey (1996) articulates the important but difficult ambition to bridge the divide between local particularities of experience, on one hand, and universalizing understandings of global socio-ecological processes, on the other. Much of the contemporary work in humanities and social sciences tends to focus on the former, to the exclusion of the latter. In this chapter I will have very little to say on local particularities of experience, but I agree with Harvey’s conclusion that social science can and should try to account for how they are recursively related to global socio-ecological processes. A promising approach is to focus, as he does, on money as a social and cultural institution that generates ‘space-time’ as simultaneously an objective, political-ecological framework, and a subjective experience (e.g. of ‘time–space compression’). Money is the very vehicle by which ideas about reciprocity and relations of exchange are translated into material processes capable of transforming not only human societies and technologies, but the entire biosphere (Hornborg 2001b). In looking at how different kinds of money can generate different kinds of material processes (or kinds of ‘space-time’), we come closer to an understanding of what is required for us to actually make progress in our pursuit of sustainability.

The main argument regarding ‘machine fetishism’ is that the modern concept of ‘technology’ is a cultural category (Hornborg 1992, 2001b). It refers to what is technically feasible to achieve at a given time and place, but remains largely oblivious to the extent to which a local increase in technological capacity is a matter of shifting resources from one social category to another within global society. The notion of ‘fetishism’ can be applied so as to suggest that the apparent generative capacity of machine technology is an instance of how the attribution of autonomous productivity to material artefacts can serve to conceal unequal relations of exchange. The unequal exchange underlying machine technology can only be revealed by exposing, beyond the monetary price tags reified by conventional market ideology, material asymmetries in the net flows of biophysical resources gauged in terms of alternative metrics such as energy, matter, embodied land (ecological footprints), or embodied labour. The mechanical ‘power’ of the machine is thus an expression of the economic and ideological ‘power’ through which it is sustained. Ultimately, what keeps our machines running are global terms of trade.

The prospect of peaking oil extraction presently prompts us to rethink processes of development and decline in the world system. Rather than simply revive Malthusian concerns over the dismal destiny of humankind as a whole, we need to approach the popular notion of ‘cheap energy’ as an experience situated in societal space as well as in historical time. Energy has been perceived as ‘cheap’ only within core segments of world society, whose ideology of progress and development has tended to construe contemporary global inequalities as representing different stages in time. Draft animals and wood fuel are here often perceived as elements of the past, yet remain an everyday reality for significant parts of the world’s population. Conversely, fossil-fuel technology is conceived as a ‘now’ rather than a ‘here’. For many post-Soviet farmers, we should recall, the age of the machine is already a thing of the past. The machine is an index of purchasing power and a specific form of capital accumulation that is as mystified and fetishized as any other power strategy in history. As we begin to anticipate its demise, we might reflect on the fact that the war in Iraq and global climate change are opposite sides of the same coin. The structural problem of fossil-fuelled capitalism is to maintain imports of energy (e.g. oil) and exports of entropy (material disorder, e.g. in the form of carbon dioxide), two imperatives of ‘development’ that are both increasingly difficult to sustain.

There seems to be a growing expectation, at least in North America and Europe, that the age of fossil fuels is approaching an end. This anticipation of peaking oil and a post-petroleum era may at first glance seem a straightforward, ‘practical’ problem of technology and resource management, but it is in fact a condition that must be understood through the lens of cultural analysis, particularly a cultural analysis of power within the capitalist world system.

Let us begin by recalling that all technological systems are embedded in cultural – and political – systems of significance that tend to remain invisible (because self-evident) to the users of these technologies. Technologies are never ‘merely’ material strategies for getting certain kinds of work done; they also tend to embody tacit assumptions about their own rationality and efficiency. In other words, significant aspects of the functioning of technological systems rely on beliefs about their efficacy. Many anthropologists have thus already accepted that the boundary between technology and magic is difficult to draw. It is generally not difficult for us to imagine, for instance, how the ancient inhabitants of Easter Island found it imperative to struggle with those huge stone statues because they were perceived as essential for the implementation of some practical task, as understood through the local cosmology. We can similarly rest assured that the temple pyramids of the Maya and the sun rituals of the Inca – in this sense – should be regarded as technologies. To the extent that social life progressed, by and large, as these pre-modern peoples hoped, they no doubt perceived their respective technologies as efficient in relation to the tasks they were assumed to fulfil. Early sixteenth-century Andean harvests of corn, for instance, testified to the efficacy of the Inca emperor’s sacrifices and ritual communication with his father the Sun.

But can our modern fossil-fuel technology really be compared to these exotic practices and cosmologies? Isn’t the crucial difference that our machines actually work, whereas Inca ritual was just mystification? I don’t think it is as simple as that. In both cases – the divine Inca emperor and our modern machinery – a particular material entity is perceived as productive or generative in itself: a cornucopia. In both cases, also, it is possible to demonstrate that productivity is the result not of properties intrinsic to either entity – the body of the Inca emperor or the design of the machine – but of the societal flows of resources that reproduce, and are reproduced by, these entities. Without the asymmetric exchanges with his many subordinates at different levels, the Inca emperor would not have been able to fill his warehouses with the stores of food, textiles, and other treasures that so impressed the Spaniards. Without those exchanges, he would never have appeared a generous cornucopia. And today, without the asymmetric exchanges of high-quality energy on the world market, our machines would achieve absolutely nothing. As many post-Soviet farmers have experienced, when there is no longer any diesel in the tractor, it is just an assemblage of scrap metal. Again, what ultimately keep the machines running are global terms of trade.

Most of us are probably prepared to accept as a fact that resource flows within the Inca empire were asymmetric, or unequal. When the emperor’s subordinates laboured on his fields in exchange for ceremonially served corn beer, it is obvious that their labour yielded more corn for his warehouses than they were able to consume in the form of beer, however great was their thirst. It is much more difficult to argue that the maintenance of modern machinery – as much as the maintenance of the Inca court – relies on unequal exchange. It is more difficult because we are now the ones inside the cultural bubble, so to speak. Much as the prevailing cosmology in sixteenth-century Peru probably made it difficult to question the divinity and productivity of the emperor, we are today suspended in a web of significance that makes it difficult to see – or at least to say – that industrial machinery relies on unequal exchange of resources in the world system. The currently hegemonic cosmology – known as economics – trains us to think that voluntary market transactions are by definition equal and fair. Of course, when gauged in terms of monetary price, they must be. But the cultural bubble of neoliberal economics excludes all those other possible measures of exchange – such as energy, materials, hectares, labour time – with which it is fairly easy to show that world trade is indeed highly unequal. The concept of ‘market prices’ thus performs an ideological function similar to the Inca concept of minka, that is, the ceremonial mobilization of labour in which the land-owning host was represented as generous, and the toil of the participants as reciprocation.

Maurice Godelier (1986) has argued that unequal exchange in human societies tends to present itself as a reciprocal exchange of services, and that economic anthropology should try to unravel the various ways in which this is done. Fundamental to these political arrangements is that the exploited are led to believe that they should be grateful to the exploiters. Inca ritual seems an obvious case, but are we now prepared to see that Godelier’s observation is equally applicable to our own society and the entire industrial world order? Ever since the first major ‘oil crisis’ over thirty years ago, the dominant enthusiasm over development and growth has been accompanied by the uneasy realization that the success of our techno-economic cornucopia seems to hinge on the world market price of oil. The least disturbing implication that might be drawn is that there is a ‘correct’ price of oil, which is defined by the rate at which industrial economies can continue to export their commodities in exchange for ever greater quantities of oil. A more disturbing conclusion would be that there is no ‘correct’ price of oil, only a more or less profitable price, from the point of view of industrial economies. It would imply that when that price – that is, that profitable rate of exchange between industrial products and the resources that go into their production – is no longer tenable, our machines will grind to a halt.

After two centuries of living with machines propelled by fossil fuels, most of us are highly committed to the notion of ever more powerful technologies. The thought that the high-energy age of fossil fuels may turn out to be an historical parenthesis is generally dismissed as ridiculous. Yet we should be open to that possibility. The age of fossil fuels has not just been a period in time, but a condition situated in socio-political space. It has provided a minority of the world’s population with an unprecedented source of power – in both a thermodynamic and a political sense. But we are now beginning to realize that the combustion of fossil fuels has represented an illusory emancipation from land. This illusory emancipation has two aspects. First, it has seemed to enable us to transcend the constraints of limited land area and soil fertility that so preoccupied the Physiocrats and other economic schools of thought prior to the Industrial Revolution. Second, it has until quite recently kept us largely ignorant about the negative consequences of burning fossil fuels for the long-term productivity of the biosphere as a source of human livelihood. For two and a half centuries, the more affluent parts of the world’s population have been building a technology based on solar energy accumulated on the surface of the Earth a very long time ago. Each year, we have been dissipating energy representing millions of years of ecological production over significant parts of the Earth’s surface. In other words, we have relied on acreages of the past. What the contemporary scramble for so-called biofuels (such as ethanol) really represents is our determination to try to sustain that same technology on the capacity of presently available land to accumulate solar energy. There seems to be a general confidence that it can be done. It is just a matter of getting the technology right. But what if it can’t?

Generally speaking, social scientists will probably not get too involved in discussions about ethanol with all those engineers, agronomists, and economists who are committed to keeping the global technomass going by feeding it with corn or sugarcane. But we can listen attentively to the debate. We are told, for instance, that the conditions of people harvesting sugarcane for ethanol production in Brazil are appalling. We are told that ethanol production might in fact generate more greenhouse gases than the combustion of fossil fuels. We are told that it will accelerate tropical deforestation and loss of biodiversity. We are told that it will probably yield less horsepower per hectare than just simply growing fodder for horses. And what undoubtedly worries us the most, we are told that it is making food more expensive and contributing to malnutrition and starvation among the global poor. None of this should really come as a surprise. The technomass accumulated over two and a half centuries of fossil-fuelled capitalism is now competing with human and other biomass for living-space on this planet. The human agents committed to keeping this technomass growing have pursued various strategies for doing so, including military intervention in oil-producing countries, refusal to accept restraints on carbon dioxide emissions, and the appropriation of vast land areas for the production of alternative fuels.

Anthropologists can show how all of this can be understood in terms of a cultural analysis of power. Like the statues of Easter Island or the temple pyramids of the Maya, our machine technology has become fetishized to the point where it ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Zero-sum world: How to think about ecologically unequal exchange
• 2. Fetishism, dissociation, and the cultural analysis of capitalism
• 3. Historical political ecology: Progress as environmental load displacement
• 4. Towards a truly global environmental history
• 5. The unequal exchange of time and space
• 6. Value, unequal exchange, and uneven development
• 7. Vital signs: How money transforms ecosystems
• 8. Possible moneys and impossible machines: To intervene in the logic of capitalism
• Notes
• References
• Index