Yes,it is all about fetishism: A response to Daniel Cunha

It has been gratifying to see so many people agreeing with us about the point we made in our article in the first issue of The Anthropocene Review. Daniel Cunha (2015) certainly seems to share our basic misgivings about the implications of the ‘Anthropocene’ label, namely that it suggests that humanity as a whole – rather than an affluent and powerful minority – has been propelling changes in global biogeochemical cycles. However, he completely misreads our argument when he believes that we are implying that global environmental change has been a ‘subjective choice’ of this minority, as if it has been in ‘conscious control’ of planetary processes. We are very well aware that the long-term consequences of fossil fuel combustion have been as opaque to the beneficiaries of the Industrial Revolution as to its victims.

Ironically, Cunha begins his critique by rehearsing points from an article written by one of us, on the factors behind the rise of steam-power in British industry (Malm, 2013). The shift from water to steam, he suggests, in an observation adduced against us, came about through the actions of manufacturers who merely strove to maximise profit and knew nothing about any atmospheric consequences of burning coal. Well that was exactly the thrust of that article. It begins with the words: ‘Global warming is the unintended byproduct par excellence’. If Cunha has read it, he should know that we would never entertain the view that capitalists adopted fossil fuels in a deliberate attempt to control and wreck the carbon cycle, evidently preposterous as it is. But that does not mean that these actions are of no interest.

It is no less ironic that Cunha should offer us the Marxian concept of fetishism as an alternative analytical tool for understanding the Anthropocene, as one of us for almost three decades has been preoccupied with applying precisely this concept to capitalist accumulation processes (Hornborg, 1992, 2001, 2013, 2014, 2015). Fetishism is a useful category for various unacknowledged aspects of capitalism – including its role as a driver of climate change, as Cunha suggests – but most centrally for our inability to grasp how our artefacts are ultimately expressions of social relations. Marx applied this insight to money and commodities, but its most difficult ramification is a radical reappraisal of what we have come to celebrate as modern technology. To understand the accumulation of fossil-fuelled ‘technomass’ in core areas of the world-system in terms of fetishism is to recognise the expanding mass of technological artefacts as a manifestation of unequal societal relations of exchange. The capacity to invest in steam technology in 19th-century Britain was largely contingent on the difference – created through systematic physical coercion – between the cost of raw cotton harvested by African slaves, on the one hand, and the income from selling cotton textiles to the traders and owners of slaves, on the other. The Industrial Revolution was founded on asymmetric flows of embodied labour time and natural space in the world-system. As an extension of Marx’s observations on the fetishism of commodities, we need to grasp that the operation of machines is a matter of societal relations masquerading as relations between things. Technological progress is thus not only a question of local ingenuity, as suggested by James Watt’s steam engine, but ultimately of global flows of embodied labour and other resources. The centres of such progress – those who have done most to push us into this new geological epoch – are built on a legacy of violence and unequal terms of trade. To paraphrase Marx, the machines of the ‘Anthropocene’ come dripping with blood and dirt.

Fetishism is the attribution of autonomous agency to inanimate or abiotic things. It is fundamental to human social life inasmuch as humans tend to anchor their social relations in external artefacts (Strum and Latour, 1987). The externalised interaction of their artefacts – whether money, commodities, or machines – tends to be perceived by humans as determined by the intrinsic properties of the artefacts themselves, rather than by the regulations and features bestowed upon them by human agents (Hornborg, 2016). Humans thus become subservient to their artefacts, rather than vice versa. Much as players of chess or a board game will refer to the rules, mainstream economists tend to refer to the logic of money and engineers to the logic of their technologies. The extent to which humans are themselves the authors of the social games enacted by their artefacts is obscured from view. The responsibility for human social relations – and for human–environmental relations – is delegated onto things. We agree with Cunha that the opaqueness of our artefact systems – the economy, production, technology – explains the apparently ‘irrational’ inability of world society to curb the inexorable increase of greenhouse gas emissions.

Fetishism is definitely not ‘merely a mental illusion or mystification’. We have never suggested anything of the kind. To criticise a false historical narrative is not equivalent to identifying a conscious conspiracy engineered and controlled by the vested interests of a demonised bourgeoisie. It is reasonable to believe that the wealthiest agents of the world economy are indeed sincerely convinced that the promotion of economic growth is the best anyone can do for the world. Although contingent on our collective beliefs about the magical agency of money and technology, the socioecological processes propelled by these artefacts are thoroughly and frighteningly material. To suggest alternative designations such as the ‘Capitalocene’ or ‘Technocene’ is to evoke the very real logic of a blind socioecological system, not the subjective choice of the ruling class.