Suchergebnisse

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
The paper traces the common roots of climate change and diversity loss to the phenomenon of general-purpose money, viewed as a recent addition to the biosemiotics of the planet. Money is the driver of increasing greenhouse gas emissions as well as the homogenizing processes of globalization. From an evolutionary perspective, the money sign can be understood as emerging from the human capacity for symbolism, yet it is not itself a symbol, as it can be given any meaning that its owner wishes. The appearance of money has fundamentally transformed social and human-environmental relations, coinciding with a loss of concern about morally compelling forces in nature. As Marx observed, in exemplifying how human artifacts that are contingent on social relations are perceived as powerful in themselves, money is an instance of fetishism. In serving as a veil that obscures the asymmetric global trade in embodied labor and other biophysical resources, money prices are also the condition for technological fetishism. Money is central to the social condition of modernity and the decontextualizing logic of the market, which tends to reduce both biological and cultural diversity. In contrast, Indigenous societies suggest alternatives to monetization and homogenization, prompting us to revise aspects of our modern worldview.

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.