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Liquidate: How Money is Dissolving the World examines the emergence of money and its social and ecological repercussions. It will be of interest to scholars working in anthropology, sociology, economics, history, semiotics, comparative religions, and indigenous studies.

Introduction: The secret rationale of the industrial revolution -- Productive forces as social relations : technology as an object for social theory -- The shadow of progress : acknowledging ecologically unequal exchange -- References to technology in critical development theory -- Stealing time and space : the elusive magic of technology -- Energy and labour-power : when all people and all things became instruments -- Money and market valuation as the root of our afflictions -- Beyond objective values : human ideas in a material world -- Solar power for whom? The fantasies of leftist ecomodernism -- Mistaking machines for humans : delusions of the material turn -- The power of signs : the invisibility of social metabolism before the machine -- Progress or parasitism? Money and technology in the world history of inequality -- Dismantling the machine : problems in naming the evil -- Afterword: Beyond the machine.

Modern thought on economics and technology is no less magical than the world views of non-modern peoples. This book reveals how our ideas about growth and progress ignore how money and machines throughout history have been used to exploit less affluent parts of world society. The argument critically explores a middle ground between Marxist political ecology and Actor-Network Theory

Hornborg argues that we are caught in a collective illusion about the nature of modern technology that prevents us from imagining solutions to our economic and environmental crises other than technocratic fixes. He demonstrates how the power of the machine generates increasingly asymmetrical exchanges and distribution of resources and risks between distant populations and ecosystems, and thus an increasingly polarized world order. The author challenges us to reconceptualize the machine-'industrial technomass'-as a species of power and a problem of culture. He shows how economic anthropology ha

Abstract
This article surveys the emergence of theories of ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) and outlines the implications of an EUE perspective for a materialist conceptualization of trade and technological development. It briefly traces the progression of new perspectives and methodologies for identifying EUE from the early 1970s, reviewing the genealogy of concerns with asymmetric global transfers of embodied energy, materials, land, and labor that are obscured by the fictive reciprocity of market prices. Trade that is perceived by mainstream economists as balanced in monetary terms may be highly asymmetric in terms of transfers of biophysical resources. Contrary to the mainstream view, EUE theory holds that the material substance of traded commodities may have significant implications for the capacity of different geographical areas to accumulate technological infrastructure, achieve economic growth, and displace environmental pressures to other regions or countries. The article argues that such non-monetary transfers should be understood in terms of biophysical metrics rather than economic values, shifting the perspective from monetary valuation to the material properties of traded commodities. Net transfers of embodied resources through trade do not just represent economic cost-shifting but are physically constitutive of productive infrastructures. This focus on social metabolism signifies an ontological shift from neoclassical to ecological economics. The EUE perspective illuminates how modern technologies are no less fetishized than other commodities in the sense that they obscure social relations of exchange. It indicates that local technological progress, such as the Industrial Revolution in Britain, may reflect asymmetric global resource flows.

ABSTRACT"Postdualist" approaches, such as the material turn in the humanities and social sciences, represent understandable reactions to the humanist and idealist traditions in Western thought, but tend to be deluded by a focus on individual artifacts rather than on the global, material relations on which their existence depends. The attribution of agency and even desires to abiotic objects, championed by posthumanist researchers such as Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, is cognate to the category mistakes recurrently identified by social theorists as fetishism and anthropomorphism. Paradoxically, given their subversive ambitions, proponents of the new concern with materiality and artifactual agency are offering an ideology that ultimately buttresses the capitalist world order by ignoring the materiality of world trade and the causality inherent in the artifact of money. The concerns with distributed agency also tend to displace responsibility and accountability from humans to artifacts. Moreover, in converging with a deep genealogy of ideas that blur the boundary between nature and artifice, the material turn depoliticizes technology by naturalizing it. The article proposes a new anthropology of technology that acknowledges the reliance of modern technology on asymmetric global resource flows orchestrated by money and the fictive reciprocity of market prices. [material turn, posthumanism, fetishism, technology, postdualism]

Efforts to conceptualize the role of asymmetric resource transfers in the capitalist world-system have been constrained by the emphasis on surplus value and the labor theory of value in Marxist thought. A coherent theory of ecologically unequal exchange must focus on asymmetric flows of biophysical resources such as embodied labor, land, energy, and materials. To conceptualize these flows in terms of "underpaid costs" or "surplus value" is to suggest that the metabolism of the world-system can be accounted for using a monetary metric. This paper rejects both labor and energy theories of value in favor of the observation that market pricing tends to lead to asymmetric resource flows. The Marxist labor theory of value is an economic argument, rather than a physical one. In acknowledging this we may transcend the recent debate within ecological Marxism about whether "nature" and "society" are valid categories. Nature and society are ontologically entwined, as in the undertheorized phenomenon of modern technology, but should be kept analytically distinct. Since the Industrial Revolution, technological progress has been contingent on the societal ratios by which biophysical resources are exchanged on the world market. The failure among Marxist and world-system theorists to properly account for this central aspect of capitalist accumulation can be traced to the pervasive assumption that market commodities have objective values that may exceed their price. Instead of arguing with mainstream economists about whether market assessments of value are justified, it is more analytically robust to observe that market valuation is destroying the biosphere.