Article

Theory, Culture & Society

2014, Vol. 31(4) 119–140
Technology as Fetish: ! The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276413488960

Cultural Foundations tcs.sagepub.com

of Capitalism
Alf Hornborg
Lund University

Abstract
This article discusses how the way in which post-Enlightenment humans tend to
relate to material objects is a fundamental aspect of modern capitalism. The difficul-
ties that conventional academic disciplines have in grasping the societal and political
aspect of ‘technology’ stem from the predominant Cartesian paradigm that distin-
guishes the domain of material objects from that of social relations of exchange. This
Cartesian paradigm has constrained the Marxian analysis of capital accumulation from
extending the concept of fetishism to the domain of technology. Both Marxian and
mainstream thought represent technological objects as empowered by their intrinsic
properties, which derive from human ingenuity and tend to progress over time. To
transcend this paradigm will be possible only through the kind of post-Cartesian
perspective on material artefacts that has been championed by Bruno Latour.
However, Latour’s own neglect of technological systems as social strategies of
exploitation reflects his lack of concern with global inequalities.

Keywords
capitalism, Cartesian objectivism, fetishism, Latour, Marx, technology

Introduction
This article discusses how the specific way in which post-Enlightenment
humans tend to relate to material objects is a fundamental aspect of
modern capitalism. On one hand, it argues that the rationale of most
new technologies since the Industrial Revolution has been to appropriate
and redistribute (human) time and (natural) space – embodied labour
and embodied land – in the world-system. The concept of time-space
appropriation thus offers a way to define and even quantify asymmetric

Corresponding author:
Alf Hornborg, Lund University.
Email: [email protected]
http://www.theoryculturesociety.org
120 Theory, Culture & Society 31(4)

global flows of resources that are fundamental to the accumulation of

physical capital. On the other hand, it argues that the difficulties that
conventional academic disciplines have in grasping this societal and pol-
itical aspect of ‘technology’ stem from the predominant Cartesian para-
digm that distinguishes the domain of material objects from that of social
relations of exchange. This Cartesian paradigm has constrained the
Marxian analysis of capital accumulation from extending the concept
of fetishism to the domain of technology. Instead, Marxian discourse is
generally aligned with mainstream thought in representing technological
objects as empowered by their intrinsic properties, which derive from
human ingenuity and tend to progress over time. The historical and
contemporary mystification of the exploitative aspects of many modern
technologies thus ultimately implicates their cultural dimension.
‘Technological progress’ emerges as a cultural concept reflecting the
historical experience of privileged sectors of world society. Paradoxically,
the modern (Cartesian) aspiration to achieve power over objects (and
objectified Nature) has generated an unprecedented human submission
to objects. I shall argue that the Marxian concept of fetishism remains
supremely useful as a way of understanding the political economy of
human-object relations, but that its (crucial) extension to a reconceptua-
lization of modern technological systems will be possible only through
the kind of post-Cartesian perspective on material artefacts that has been
championed by Bruno Latour. It appears, on the other hand, that
Latour’s own inability to recognize technological systems as social stra-
tegies of exploitation, while obviously not due to epistemological con-
straints, reflects his lack of concern with global inequalities of economy,
technology, and environment.1
The article thus aims to reconnect the discourse on fetishism, the
main thrust of which has become largely restricted to exploring per-
sonal phenomenologies of aesthetic or sensuous experience (cf. Apter
and Pietz, 1993; Spyer, 1998; Mitchell, 2005), to a general critique of
global capitalist relations. The ambition here is not to attempt to review
the voluminous discourses on fetishism, animism, epistemology, magic,
materiality, technology, or consumption, but to bring together a few
essential insights from these various topics to suggest new ways of
illuminating some cultural dimensions of modernity and capitalism.
More specifically, the goal is to combine some relevant perspectives
from cultural anthropology with perspectives from political economy,
world-system analysis, and ecological economics in order to ‘defamil-
iarize’ (Marcus and Fischer, 1986) our everyday understanding of tech-
nology. Intended primarily as a theoretical contribution, the discussion
only occasionally touches on empirical anthropological reference-
points, ranging from early British textile factories and the Luddite
movement to indigenous Amazonian animism and ancient
Andean ritual.
Hornborg 121

Expanding the Marxian Concept of Fetishism

Karl Marx (1867: 164–5) famously observed that relations between
people in capitalist society assume the form of relations between things:

[T]he relationships between the producers . . . take on the form of a

social relation between the products of labour. . . . It is nothing but
the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes
here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In
order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the
misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain
appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own,
which enter into relations both with each other and with the
human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products
of men’s hands.

The fetishism of money and commodities thus obscures the social foun-
dation of these objects, as a result of the alienating split between people
and the products of their labour. It simultaneously animates such things,
by attributing to them autonomous value, productivity, or growth. To
deconstruct fetishized human-object relations such as these, in order to
reveal underlying social asymmetries, can be a powerfully subversive ana-
lytical strategy. It helps us to understand phenomena as diverse as the
pervasive desire for consumer goods and the violence of physical sabotage
(iconoclasm). Ultimately, it provides a radically alternative perspective on
the economic, political, and environmental inequalities of global society.
In order to seriously challenge those global inequalities, we would
have to open our eyes to the social relations underlying modern technol-
ogies. Modern technological objects (here referred to as ‘machines’2) are
basically also inanimate things attributed with autonomous productivity
or even agency, obscuring their own foundation in asymmetric global
relations of exchange. Over the past 20 years I have been arguing that the
Marxian concept of fetishism can be extended from our understanding of
money and commodities to explain how we tend to be deluded by
modern technologies (Hornborg, 1992, 2001a, 2001b, 2009, 2011). All
three categories of objects (money, commodities, and machines) are
fetishes in the sense that they mystify unequal relations of exchange by
being attributed autonomous agency or productivity. The mainstream
interpretation of modern technology, however, is that it is an index of
human progress over time, even as a gift to humanity from the wealthier
nations of the world. This view of technology qualifies as a ‘world view’
in Kearney’s (1984) sense. As it is fundamental even to a Marxian per-
spective, it poses a peculiar contradiction to social science drawing on
Marx’s analysis of capital: How can capital, once it assumes the form of
technology, become exempt from political critique?3
122 Theory, Culture & Society 31(4)

An alternative and more critical interpretation is that modern technol-

ogy is largely an index of accumulation, rather than ingenuity in itself,
and that its capacity to locally save time and space occurs at the expense
of (human) time and (natural) space lost elsewhere in the world. This can
be illustrated by calculations showing that the Industrial Revolution in
England was founded on ‘time-space appropriation’, a concept which
combines the Marxian focus on the unequal exchange of embodied
labour with more recent ecological concerns with the unequal exchange
of embodied land (Hornborg, 2006a). In selling £1000 worth of cotton
textiles on the world market in 1850, and purchasing cotton fibre for the
same amount, a British factory owner was able to exchange the product
of a smaller number of hours of British labour for that of a larger
number of hours of less expensive (mostly slave) labour in overseas
cotton plantations. In terms of space, the same market transaction
implied the appropriation of the annual yield of almost 60 hectares of
inexpensive agricultural land overseas in exchange for the space occupied
by a British textile factory. This incentive to increase appropriation by
expanding production was the global context of the steam engine, and
the economic rationale underlying the shift to fossil fuels. It locally saved
time and space, but at the expense of human time and natural space
elsewhere in the world-system.
The rationale of mechanization is inextricably intertwined with global
differences in the prices of labour and resources. If the African slaves
harvesting cotton fibre on the colonial plantations had been paid stand-
ard British wages, and the owners of New World soils had demanded
standard British land rent, industrialization would simply not have
occurred. The existence of modern technology, like the lucrative trade
in spices, silver, or beaver pelts, is founded on strategies of conversion
between different parts of the world market, where labour and land are
differently priced.4
These perspectives should change our ways of writing history, particu-
larly environmental and economic history, but ultimately also the history
of technology. Not only must Europe and the ‘West’ be dethroned as
intrinsically generative of economic growth, modern technology and civ-
ilization, but these phenomena must in themselves be recognized as con-
tingent on specific global constellations of asymmetric resource flows and
power relations. In other words, not only was the ‘rise of the West’ a
geographical coincidence of world history – the location of Europe as
middleman between the Old and New Worlds (cf. Blaut, 1993, 2000;
Frank, 1998; Pomeranz, 2000) – but its economic, technological, and
military means of expansion, generally viewed as European ‘inventions’
and as contributions to the rest of humanity, were products of global
conjunctures and processes of accumulation that coalesced after the eco-
nomic articulation of the Old and New Worlds. The very existence of
industrial technology has thus from the very start been a global
Hornborg 123

phenomenon, which has intertwined political, socio-economic and envir-

onmental histories in complex and inequitable ways. Technological
rationality is never disconnected from the global distribution of purchas-
ing power. If historical hindsight helps to clarify this generally neglected
fact, the next challenge must be to spell out its ramifications for our
perceptions of economic growth and technological progress today.5 We
need to understand that technology is not simply a relation between
humans and their natural environment, but more fundamentally a way
of organizing global human society.6
In order to understand fetishism as a simultaneously cultural and pol-
itical phenomenon ultimately implicating macro-scale power structures
at the global level, we first need to consider the spectrum of ways in
which humans can relate to other beings and other things in their sur-
roundings. We begin by discussing the fundamental contrast between
animism and objectivism. Although it may seem remarkable today that
Karl Marx was optimistic about the new technologies that in the 19th
century enslaved the masses at home and abroad in the interests of
British capital, we must recall that, in some respects, he was irremediably
constrained by Cartesian objectivism.7 For Marxian analyses of capital
accumulation to progress, it will be necessary for it to relate to the past
several decades of critique against Cartesianism, even if it should imply
concessions to decidedly anti-Marxian approaches such as those of
Bruno Latour (1993, 2010).

Animism versus Objectivism: Modernity as Dissociation

The topic of animism continues to intrigue modern people. What, then,
do we mean by ‘modern’? As a number of social theorists (e.g. Latour,
1993) have suggested, the social condition and technological accomplish-
ments of European modernity have been founded on a categorical dis-
tinction between Nature and Society. It is by drawing a boundary
between the world of objects and the world of meanings that the
modern project has emerged. By, as it were, distilling Nature into its
material properties alone, uncontaminated by symbolic meanings or
social relations, modernists have been freed to manipulate it in ways
unthinkable in non-modern contexts. Objectivism thus suggests a kind
of moral or emotional dissociation from that part of reality classified as
object.
Animism suggests the very antithesis of this objectifying modern
stance. Yet it is not a phenomenon that can merely be relegated to a
previous period in human history. As Descola (1994), Bird-David (1999),
Ingold (2000), and other anthropologists have shown, many contempor-
ary people who are intimately engaged in gaining their subsistence from
local ecosystems continue to approach their non-human environments
through what is now being called a ‘relational’ stance. Entities such as
124 Theory, Culture & Society 31(4)

plants or even rocks may be approached as communicative subjects

rather than the inert objects perceived by modernists.
We might approach the diversity of human-object relations from the
perspective of what Latour (1993: 101–3) has called a ‘symmetric anthro-
pology’: an anthropology that does not merely represent an urban,
modern perspective on the non-moderns in the margins, but that is
equally capable of subjecting modern life itself to cultural analysis.
This ambition is often presented as a central rationale of anthropology
(e.g. Marcus and Fischer, 1986; Gudeman, 1986), but is easier said than
done.8 I turned to Latour (1993) after I had heard from colleagues that
he, too, wanted to show how the inexorable, material reality of modern
science and technology was in fact a fabrication guided by social inter-
ests. I must admit that it was with considerable frustration that I man-
aged to retrieve this general stance from a discourse that struck me as
tortuously imprecise, but Latour being a mega-star, I suppressed my
hesitation and found it appropriate to acknowledge the convergence
(Hornborg, 2006b). My continued reading of his work has been disap-
pointing to the point where I would agree with David Bloor (1999: 97)
that Latour’s reasoning frequently ‘looks like a formula for imposing
confusion on ourselves: it is obscurantism raised to the level of a general
methodological principle’. But although it is legitimate to ask why the
intellectual stardom of certain French philosophers tends to be propor-
tional to the difficulties their readers have in deciphering them, it is
incumbent on us to ask what Latour is basically saying, why it has
attracted so much attention, and to what extent it can enhance our
understanding of the human predicament.
Would modernity be impossible in a world where living things are
consistently recognized as subjects? Latour’s answer seems to be yes. It
is only by severing or submerging our capacity for relatedness that we are
set free to impose our modernist designs on the world. To make this
point, Latour refers to Descola’s (1994) suggestion that traditional socie-
ties of Amazonia retain their relative inertia – compared to Europe –
precisely because their conception of the non-human environment
remains embedded in their moral conception of society (Latour, 1993:
42). Animism, to Descola, is the projection of social metaphors onto
relations with the non-human world. In not separating Nature and
Society, Amazonian Indians like the Achuar automatically embed their
ecological practice in a compelling moral system. For centuries, main-
stream European society has refused to be thus constrained, and this
liberation of capitalist modernity has been founded on the incommen-
surable distinction between Nature and Culture.9
Surrounded by philosophers and sociologists of science such as Latour
announcing the end of Cartesian objectivism and acknowledging the
extent to which human meanings infuse the material world, many
anthropologists discussing animistic understandings of nature now take
Hornborg 125

them more seriously than a generation ago. But rather than going native,
or adopting some version of New Age spirituality, we need to analytically
sort out what epistemological options there are, and to ask if
‘pre-modern’, ‘modern’, and ‘post-modern’ people tend to deal with sub-
ject-object relations in different ways. Or rather, we could ask if these
controversial categories can in fact be defined in terms of distinct vari-
eties of subject-object relations.
The object – in the sense of a material, intrinsically meaningless, but
essentially knowable reality – appears to be a thoroughly modern inven-
tion. Whichever interpretative schemes were conventionally adhered to in
pre-modern societies, they enjoyed a kind of authority that modern
knowledge rarely achieves. It is the predicament of modern people to
remain chronically uncertain about the validity of their own representa-
tions. This modern condition of reflexive uncertainty can either be har-
nessed in the production of new but provisional certainties (as in science)
or assume the form of solipsism, disengagement, and indifference. The
latter alternative is what we have come to know as the post-modern. It is
a condition where the exhausting attitude of chronic scepticism tends to
give way to a kind of resigned gullibility. All hope of certainty has van-
ished, but precisely because no pretence to power or truth can be
admitted, any pretence is as good as any other. As in the pre-modern
condition, a sign is again naively perceived as an index of identity –
rather than an arbitrary symbolic convention demanding to be chal-
lenged – but now simply by virtue of positing itself as such, rather
than because of an assumed correspondence with some underlying
essence. This post-modern abandonment of essence is what Baudrillard
(1975) has aptly called the ‘autonomization of the signifier’.10
The problem with objectivism – as unimaginable for the pre-moderns
as it is unacceptable for the post-moderns – is the notion of a kind of
knowledge that is not situated as part of a relation. By posing as disin-
terested representation, decontextualized from any political aspirations,
modernist knowledge production suggests a relinquishment of responsi-
bility, but in fact serves – through technologies – to set the instrumental
rationality of the powerful free to go about its business in the world.
But the post-modern mirror-image of objectivism – that is, relativism –
certainly fares no better in terms of responsibility. Both these epistemol-
ogies have been spawned by the same, modern subject-object dichotomy.
The division into natural versus human sciences, pitting realism
against constructivism in Western knowledge production, remains a
projection of this fundamentally existential, dualist scheme. The
former takes the represented object as its point of departure, the latter
the constructing subject, but neither acknowledges their recursivity, i.e.
their relation.
Latour challenges Cartesian subject-object and Culture-Nature
dichotomies in different ways, some of which are pertinent and some
126 Theory, Culture & Society 31(4)

downright ‘sloppy’ or at least ‘incoherent’ (Bloor, 1999: 87, 103). For the
purposes of the present discussion, i.e. regarding the morally and polit-
ically non-neutral operation of modern technologies, it will suffice to
emphasize a fundamental strength and a fundamental weakness of
Latour’s position. A strength is his capacity to perceive even the most
incontrovertible understandings and efficacious practices of science and
technology as human fabrications or ‘factishes’ that are comparable to
pre-Enlightenment ‘fetishes’ (Latour, 2010). To use a terminology that
Latour himself would probably reject, modern constellations of artefacts,
actors, and understandings represent socio-cultural constructions that
are potentially as susceptible to deconstruction as the pre-modern con-
stellations which modern people believe they have definitively tran-
scended. This counter-intuitive critique of the fruits of Enlightenment
is very much in line with my suggestions on ‘machine fetishism’
(Hornborg, 1992).11 If Karl Marx would have had access to such post-
Cartesian insights, he would probably have been more hesitant in his
praise of technological progress. A glaring weakness of Latour’s social
science, on the other hand, is his next to total indifference to ‘questions of
power, gender, culture and ecology’ (Harris, 2005: 174; cf. Winner, 1993:
431).12 The ideological bottom-line of his deliberations may well be his
dismissal of ‘the tedious resentments of anti-imperialism’ (Latour, 2010:
34). If Bruno Latour would have shared the political engagement of Karl
Marx, or of the myriad social and environmental justice activists who
have followed in his footsteps, his analyses of technological systems
would have revealed not only social networks but exploitative social rela-
tions embodied in the artefacts.
When Latour (2010: 13–15, Figs 2–4) attempts to communicate the
core of his ‘symmetric’ argument on the universality of the fetish/factish,
he reveals a striking lacuna in his deliberations on the relations between
humans and objects. His concern here, it seems, is exclusively with the
consequences of human actors’ understandings of their interaction with
objects, rather than with the role of objects as mediators of human inter-
action. Whether actors are ‘free’ or ‘dominated’ by objects, however, is
generally not so much a matter of their own perceptions as of their pos-
itions within social systems in which the exertion of dominance is dele-
gated to objects of various kinds.13 This omission is particularly
surprising when identified in a writer who is known as a leading propon-
ent of the insight that material artefacts have agency.

Fetishism and the Cultural Analysis of Capitalism

If modernity is founded on the rejection of animism and the objectifica-
tion of Nature, as Latour (1993) has argued, it seems paradoxical that
animation is in fact fundamental to the Marxian concept of fetishism,
which in itself is central to modern capitalism (cf. Marx, 1867;
Hornborg 127

Friedman, 1974; Taussig, 1980; Pietz, 1985–88, 1993, 1998; Miller, 1987,
2005; Ellen, 1988; Hornborg, 1992, 2001b). It is thus important to ask
how animism relates to fetishism. There is a crucial difference between
representing relations between people as if they were relations between
things (capitalist fetishism), and experiencing relations to things as if they
were relations to people (animism and pre-modern forms of fetishism14).
The former is an ideological illusion underpinning capitalist political
economy, the latter a condition of phenomenological resonance. We
should probably further distinguish between the animation of living
things such as trees (animism, more narrowly defined) and that of non-
living things such as stones or machines (that is, fetishism, generally
defined).15 Cartesian objectivism and fetishism here emerge as structural
inversions of one another: the former denies agency and subjectivity even
in living beings, whereas the latter attributes such qualities to inert
objects. In this framework, a more strictly defined category of animism
would be reserved for the intermediate and quite reasonable assumption
that all living things are subjects, i.e. equipped with a certain capacity for
perception, communication, and agency. Animism, fetishism, and object-
ivism can thus be understood as alternative responses to universal human
problems of drawing boundaries between persons and things.
Perhaps some of these problems can be alleviated by recognizing the
difference between drawing boundaries in an analytical and an onto-
logical sense, respectively. Latour would deny us the use of concepts
denoting a subject-object distinction, but, as cogently argued by Bloor
(1999), such a conclusion merely confuses matters. We can probably all
agree with Latour that Nature is continually being intertwined with
Culture or Society in our landscapes, our bodies, and our new hybrid
technologies, which obviously invalidate ontological versions of the
Cartesian dichotomy. But does this mean that the categories of Nature
and Culture, or Nature and Society, are obsolete and should be dis-
carded? On the contrary, never has it been more imperative to maintain
an analytical distinction between the symbolic and the pre-symbolic,
while acknowledging their complex interfusion in the real world. Only
by keeping Society and Nature analytically apart can we hope to progress
in the demystification of that hybrid web in which we are all suspended,
and which more than anything else obstructs our pursuit of relatedness:
the realm of animated objects that we call ‘technology’. We more than
ever need to retain our capacity to distinguish between those aspects of
technology that derive from Nature and those aspects that derive from
Society. The Laws of Thermodynamics and the political economy of oil
prices require completely different analytical tools. To deny that Nature
and Society need to be distinguished in this way, as Latour could be
expected to do, would be indefensible.
What is sometimes referred to as the ‘anthropology of technology’
comprises some interesting attempts to explore the interface of culture
128 Theory, Culture & Society 31(4)

and materiality, but the field tends to be conspicuously detached from

considerations of global political economy (cf. Pfaffenberger, 1992;
Latour, 1996; Ingold, 2000). For instance, both Latour and Ingold are
preoccupied with the dubious modern distinction between persons and
objects and between Culture and Nature, both recognize that this dis-
tinction is paradoxically itself cultural (cf. Latour, 1993: 99; Ingold, 2000:
42), and both keep returning to the phenomenon of modern technology
as an arena where the distinction becomes blurred or at least problem-
atic, but neither of them is concerned with how this very arena is itself a
manifestation of global rates of exchange. Now that it is epistemologic-
ally much more feasible than in Marx’s time for philosophers of technol-
ogy to say that technologies are exploitative social strategies, it is ironic
that they should ignore such exploitative social relations. Even when
technologies are understood as aspects of social relations, in other
words, they will not appear to be exploitative unless global society is
perceived as such.
There is definitely something about the general concept of ‘technology’
that seems to mystify us, both as social scientists and as citizens. On one
hand, modern technologies often appear to be strategies for capacitating
an affluent minority of the world’s population through an asymmetrical
exchange – an expanding net appropriation – of resources from the rest
of the world (Hornborg, 1992, 2001a, 2006a, 2009, 2011). On the other
hand, technologies are generally represented as politically innocent and
intrinsically productive unions of human inventiveness and the pure
material essence of Nature – indeed as gifts of the wealthier, developed
nations to the rest of humanity (Adas, 1989, 2006; Marsden and Smith,
2005; Friedel, 2007; Headrick, 2010). How are these two contradictory
images of technology able to coexist, without the former contaminating
the latter?
Drawing on Latour, we might suggest that the answer lies in the rigid
categorical distinction between Nature and Society, between the world of
pure objects and the world of human relations. Once classified as object,
technology is automatically immune to political critique, even for Marx
and most of his followers. For how could pure objects be conceived as
sources of malign agency? If the behaviour of the early 19th-century
Luddites today strikes us as odd, we might reflect, it is because they
were not yet quite modern. Today we supposedly know better than to
direct our emotions at machines. The efficacy of technology, we hold,
comes from ‘objective properties intrinsic to the nature of things’
(Latour, 1993: 51). Like economic rationality and scientific truth, says
Latour, technological efficiency ‘forever escapes the tyranny of social
interest’ (1993: 131).
But if these modernist convictions were to collapse, and we were to
realize the extent to which our technologies are in fact politically con-
stituted, our machines would cease to present themselves as pure objects
Hornborg 129

and conceivably be accredited with a malicious agency far surpassing

that of any pre-modern fetishes.16 From having been fetishized into pol-
itically neutral, autonomous agents, they would emerge as social machin-
ations. To expose the agency of these cornucopian ‘productive forces’ as
a transmutation and deflection of the agency of other humans would be
to render morally suspect that which modernity had couched in the
deceptive neutrality of the merely technical.

Fighting against Machines

Machines were objects of political violence two hundred years ago, in
early industrial England, through the activities of the so-called Luddite
movement (Sale, 1995; Fox, 2002; Binfield, 2004; Jones, 2006). This
short-lived movement created considerable turbulence in the heartland
of early British industrialization (the counties of Yorkshire, Lancashire,
Cheshire, Derbyshire, and Nottinghamshire) from late 1811 to early
1813. Thousands of local, proto-industrial textile workers who had
seen their livelihoods eclipsed by the large-scale machinery of factories
perceived these new buildings and their technologies as immoral contrap-
tions violating traditional principles of justice and fairness. The embit-
tered workers who suffered dwindling incomes and unemployment
responded with revolutionary fury. Their response, which may then
have appeared somewhat less futile than it does today, was to attack
and destroy the machines themselves. In slightly over a year, damages
to technological infrastructure exceeded £100,000, and many factory
owners were attacked and injured.
Did the Luddites in 1811 really perceive sabotage of machinery as a
possible way of intervening in the logic of capitalism? Or were they
driven by the same kind of iconoclastic rage that has repeatedly
prompted embittered people to destroy the fetishized monuments and
images (the ritual ‘technologies’) of pre-modern elites such as those of
ancient Rome, the 10th-century Maya, or Easter Island? Are the two
incentives in fact inseparable? Whatever the case, historical hindsight
suggests that theirs was simply not a feasible strategy. Sale (1995) aptly
titled his book Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on
the Industrial Revolution. The social project of physically destroying
machines, however, deserves reflection.
In directing their anger at these mechanical objects, the Luddites can
be said to have engaged in a form of fetishism, if we define fetishism as
the attribution of agency to non-living things. On closer consideration,
however, the main difference between their view of machines and that of
modernists is that the latter tend to find their presence beneficial,
whereas the Luddites didn’t. The comparison exemplifies Latour’s
(2010) observations on the affinity between ‘iconophilia’ and iconoclasm.
Modernists tend to be no less convinced that technologies are
130 Theory, Culture & Society 31(4)

empowered by their intrinsic, non-societal properties. Machine fetishism

is thus an affliction of Luddites and modernists alike. As dramatically
illustrated by the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York,
physical sabotage against modern infrastructure, in merely inverting the
signs, has not been a viable strategy for subverting modern power.
Loving and hating the machine are epistemologically equivalent varieties
of fetishism.
The concept of fetishism as used by Karl Marx helps us to see how
human relations to objects are ultimately about their relations to other
humans. From this point of departure, David Graeber (2001, 2007, 2011)
has used ethnographic material from comparative anthropology to chal-
lenge mainstream modern conceptions of economy and power. In pursu-
ing such a strategy, he is following in the footsteps of Marx himself, who
in fact pioneered Latour’s (1993) ‘symmetric anthropology’ by turning
the notion of fetishism back on Europeans attributing it to exotic
Others.17 It seems that relations of social power are more or less univer-
sally mediated by fetishized objects (cf. Friedman, 1974; Taussig, 1980;
Godelier, 1986; Bloch, 1989).
Viewed in this light, it is revealing to see how closely related capitalism
is to slavery (Graeber, 2007: 85–112). The commoditization of abstract
human labour power achieved something prototypically modern by dis-
sociating (Karl Polanyi or Anthony Giddens would have said ‘disembed-
ding’) productive activity from all other aspects of human life. In thus
systematically alienating human beings from the products of their labour,
these systems make it possible for the extracted agency or life-force of
human workers to be appropriated by others in the form of objects rep-
resenting congealed abstract labour. This is the foundation of Marx’s
concept of commodity fetishism and in itself a powerful step toward a
cultural deconstruction of the naturalness of capitalism. The abstraction
of labour power is a means of transforming human energy into profits, or
capital.
But the analysis can be pushed even further, for, as we have noted,
Marx was not a Luddite. The very tangible, material operation of what
we think of as modern technology is no less than commodities an
embodiment of the deflected agency or life-force of human workers.
Every ‘technological’ solution is ultimately a social relation in the
sense that it will have implications for the societal distribution of the
burden of problem-solving. The car or computer that may save its
owner time represents losses of time for the myriad workers (such as
in mines or oil fields) whose congealed labour it represents. Moreover,
to the extent that modern technologies make possible a more efficient
use of urban or agricultural space, for those segments of global society
who can afford it, it is important to consider that they may represent
losses of natural space (such as for strip mines or oil fields) elsewhere
on the planet.
Hornborg 131

Machines, Magic, and Power

In struggling to grasp and communicate the magnitude of our failure to
perceive the political dimension of technology, I have found no better
framework than the Marxian concept of fetishism (Hornborg, 1992,
2001b). As also Graeber (2001: 239–46) has recognized, this concept
immediately prompts us to consider the issue of magic.18 Magic and
power share a similarly hybrid position between scam and efficacy.
There is an important sense in which the seemingly inexorable, material
logic of the capitalist world order ultimately rests on the beliefs and
conceptions of its participants. If restricted to the psychology of financial
collapse, this is quite obviously true. But I would seriously argue that
even technological efficacy is cognate to magic.19 I have repeatedly found
that the quickest way to communicate what I mean by the concept of
machine fetishism is to compare modern technology with the magical
‘soup stone’ of European folklore.20 In transferring attention from the
wider context to its imaginary centre, the stone in the soup is the proto-
typical fetish. Fetishized objects are in an important sense constitutive –
not just misrepresentations – of accumulation and power. They are visua-
lized as intrinsically generative or productive, and they are indeed
responsible for processes of accumulation, but only by orchestrating
them, whereas this orchestration itself hinges precisely on obscuring
their social basis in unequal exchange. No more than the stone contrib-
uted to the soup is a fetishized sacred king like the Inca emperor the
source of his people’s affluence (Godelier, 1986; Hornborg, 2000).
Similarly, the industrial machine (i.e. the technological object) is but a
fetishized node in a global system of resource flows. If those flows were to
cease, the machine would grind to a halt.
Now that I have said that modern technology works like magic, I
suppose it is incumbent on me to clarify the difference between them.
What is the difference between the efficacy of magic and the efficacy of
the machine? This question is simultaneously the question of how pre-
modern sacred and ritual power could be transformed into modern eco-
nomic and technological power.
Pre-modern power is cognate to magic because both rest on the premise
that illusions actually do work. For example, the import of fetishes such as
Spondylus shells to ancient Cuzco helped the Inca court to convince the
emperor’s ten million subjects that his ritual communication with his
father Inti (the Sun) was the prerequisite of agricultural productivity, and
that it was entirely appropriate for them to reciprocate by spending signifi-
cant amounts of their time working his fields and building his terraces
(Murra, 1975; Godelier, 1986). The illusion no doubt worked in the sense
that the metabolism of the Inca empire in part hinged on the flow of red
oyster shells from Ecuador to Cuzco. It was ultimately dependent on the
trade of pre-modern prestige goods along the west coast of South America,
132 Theory, Culture & Society 31(4)

through which merchants were able to acquire Spondylus in exchange for

other objects coveted in Ecuador, such as packs of axe-shaped pieces of
copper (Shimada, 1987). This trade, in turn, hinged on the cultural valu-
ations which determined the rates at which copper could be exchanged for
Spondylus (Rostworowski, 1977; Salomon, 1986; Hornborg, 2000).
Industrial technology, no less than theocratic ritual, is dependent on
pivotal exchange rates (e.g. oil prices). The difference is that, in industri-
alism, the transformation of imports into work has been locally objecti-
fied (into technology) so as to seem entirely material and non-social. But
what has actually happened is that the pivotal evaluative moment has
been shifted from the local to the global level. Locally, it has been dele-
gated to the non-negotiable, kinematic logic of machines, but these are in
themselves manifestations of global exchange rates. In ancient Peru, what
were imported over longer distances were primarily symbols, which were
ritually convertible into work in the form of manual labour. The pro-
ductive potential on which the system was based was still local labour,
and the rate at which prestige goods were converted into work was to
some extent negotiable. But in modern industrial centres, it is increas-
ingly the productive potential itself that is imported, which means that
the imports are physically convertible into work, and that it is the global
rather than the local conversion rates that ultimately determine the
feasibility of accumulation. No less than ritual, machines mystify us by
pretending to be productive independently of exchange rates. In modern
capitalism, however, the mystified exchanges have become even more
opaque than in pre-modern ritual, and the magic agency of fetishized
objects has become compelling in completely new ways.
Modern power relations based on economic and technological accu-
mulation are thus, like pre-modern power, dependent on the ability of
social elites to extract obedience and labour energy from the myriad
human beings who provide them with the means of asserting these
demands, and for this reason remain dependent on monopolies on legit-
imate coercion. They continue to operate only as long as the people they
control can be persuaded, by magic and/or coercion, to subscribe to the
claims to power offered by the elite. At this moment in history, these
claims hinge, for instance, on the promises of continued economic and
technological growth, and of global sustainable development. Perhaps
most centrally, they hinge on the promises of technology.
History tells us that, in the long run, coercion alone will never suffice
to maintain a power structure, rendering magic superfluous. The techno-
logical infrastructure accumulated in certain areas of the world unevenly
illuminates nightly satellite images. For the operation of the current
global order to continue, it is no doubt essential that the billions of
people whose daily labour maintains the asymmetric flows of energy
and matter to these areas do not recognize, in the objects composing
that infrastructure, the products of their own life-force.
Hornborg 133

Conclusion: Consumption as a Transformation

of Cannibalism
The concept of ‘consumption’, to the extent that it implies destroying
purchased physical resources in the process of creating meaning, high-
lights how that which capitalism would have us maximize is ultimately
destroying the planet. While there is no exemption from entropy – what-
ever the mode of production – the specificity of capitalism lies in its
relentless pursuit of ever higher rates of resource destruction
(Georgescu-Roegen, 1971). It is only by acknowledging the material,
biophysical dimension of the global economy that we can resist the
seductive neoliberal glorification of consumption as the right to creative
self-expression.
Marshall Sahlins’ (1976) useful elaboration of Baudrillard (1972)
taught anthropologists to view commodities as elements of semiotic
systems that shoppers sought to incorporate into their selves, as the
consummation of culturally constituted desires. Such consumer desires
are potentially infinite and quite possible to manipulate. Clearly,
it is this latter dilemma that raises the most incisive doubts about
capitalism. For if profits are proportional to our creative destruc-
tion of resources, it means that marketing will be geared to fabricat-
ing increasingly arbitrary incentives for us to maximize such
destruction.
If we follow Marx in understanding the commodities we consume (i.e.
metaphorically eat) as embodiments of other people’s life energy, not
only is capitalism a transformation of slavery, as Graeber (2007) has
argued, but of cannibalism. The defining feature of capitalism is its spe-
cific social and cultural organization of the appropriation of geograph-
ically remote labour and land. Modern forms of market exchange,
technology, and consumption represent net transfers of embodied
(human) time and (natural) space extracted from some social groups
for the disposal of others. Rather than directly controlling the labour
of other human bodies in the vicinity, as in slavery, this is achieved by
controlling the products of labour. Rather than shipping commoditized
labour (in chains) across the oceans, modern ocean-liners thus ship the
commoditized embodiments of labour. Ever since the first textile fac-
tories emerged in early industrial Britain, machines have assumed an
illusory dissociation from the social relations of exchange through
which their raw materials are extracted, appropriated, transformed,
and redistributed.
I have argued that this illusion rests on the cultural assumption that
material objects are politically innocent and immune to moral critique.
The same, ultimately Cartesian illusion liberates consumers to continue
devouring distantly derived objects without any significant moral qualms
about the social or ecological implications of consumption. As the use of
134 Theory, Culture & Society 31(4)

general-purpose money and objectified market exchange were under-

stood as immediate reciprocation and the severance of further social
relations between market actors, the spirit of the gift (Mauss, 1990
[1925]) was increasingly overshadowed by commodity fetishism. This
cultural framework became solidly entrenched in the currently hege-
monic economic discourse that was devised by (and for) successful
stock brokers such as David Ricardo (cf. Gudeman, 1986), situated in
the hub of a global empire.
A central paradox of this framework is that its point of departure
appears to be a generalized power over objects, as exemplified by both
consumption and by the fundamental severance of moral relations to
an objectified environment, while it simultaneously implies an unpre-
cedented submission to objects, as exposed in Marxian analyses of
fetishism. Although a prerequisite for modernity appears to have
been an abandonment of animism, this very objectification of
Nature may have paved the way for increasingly opaque varieties of
fetishism.
I have tried to show that the concept of fetishism continues to be
useful, not only within fields concerned with theology or the phenomen-
ologies of aesthetic experience, but also for extending a general Marxian
understanding of political economy. In particular, it can help us solve a
neglected but puzzling conundrum of social science, viz. how access to
technological objects (i.e. ‘development’) can simultaneously be con-
ceived as a result of exploitative accumulation and as the politically ben-
evolent emancipation of all humankind. The answer, in this analysis, is
that the fetishism of technology represents a specific mode of mystifying
unequal exchange.
To conclude, we can ask ourselves what is the common denominator
of the ideological pillars of modern power, which maintain the illusion
of a morally neutral economy and technology, mystifying the affinities
between capitalism and slavery, technology and magic, and consump-
tion and cannibalism. I think the key is the phenomenon of denial.
Johannes Fabian (1983) observed that the whole idea of development
is founded on the denial of coevalness. The implicit assumption is that
the people who don’t own machines somehow inhabit an earlier period
of time than those who do. In a similar manner, I suggest, the idea of
the world market rests on a denial of appropriation. The concept of
unequal exchange simply does not exist in the vocabulary of main-
stream economics. Finally, our image of technology – much like com-
modity fetishism – is based on the denial of embodiment, i.e. of the
interfusion of Society and Nature. In our Cartesian world view, objects
are automatically exempt from moral critique.21 And the denial of our
co-existence with, exploitation, and consumption of other people is, like
the Cartesian matrix as a whole, ultimately a dissociation from the
reality of the Other.
Hornborg 135

Notes
1. This lack of concern, along with a frustrating lack of clarity, has for me been
a source of deep ambivalence about Latour’s work, which is reflected here in
my selective endorsement versus rejection of different aspects of his
approach.
2. I use the word ‘machines’ to refer to technological objects the existence and
operation of which is ultimately dependent on access to inanimate energy
sources such as fossil fuels and electricity.
3. Ted Benton (1989: 76) suggests that Marx can be understood as ‘a victim of a
widespread spontaneous ideology of 19th-century industrialism’. In a
response to Benton, Reiner Grundmann (1991: 118–19) observes that
Marx’s contradictory approach to machine technology – ‘dead labour
endowed with movement’ – was ‘to attribute all negative aspects of machine
technology to its capitalist use, and to attribute all positive aspects to machine
technology as such’. It is precisely this notion of ‘technology as such’ that
social science can no longer consider tenable, not least after Latour. It thus
remains a central problem of Marxism.
4. To put it very succinctly, technology is founded on what the economists call
arbitrage.
5. Mainstream understandings of global disparities in access to modern tech-
nology tend to account for the disparities in terms of an uneven development
of purchasing power, without recognizing that this uneven development (i.e.
lower wages in certain sectors of the world-system) is what makes the tech-
nology possible (i.e. accessible to high-wage sectors) in the first place.
6. Needless to say, and in countless ways, technologies do not merely reflect
social interests and strategies but obviously also impose their own material
logic and constraints on social organization.
7. No doubt he was also constrained by the general technological optimism of
his time (Benton, 1989: 76), and by the expectation of the British labour
movement that his analysis of capital accumulation would yield an attractive
political vision.
8. Marcus and Fischer (1986: 141) propose that ‘a major task of the epistemo-
logical critique offered by anthropology is to deal directly and in novel ways
with the materialist or utilitarian bias of Western thought in explanations of
social life’.
9. Against this background, it seems ironic that calls are now being made for an
‘environmental ethics’. The very idea poses a conundrum for Cartesian
objectivism. How shall we be able to reintroduce morality into our dealings
with our non-human environment, now that we have invested centuries of
training and discourse into convincing ourselves that Nature lays beyond the
reach of moral concerns? Probably because animism would imply such moral
constraints, the few Western scientists who have seriously championed an
animistic world view (e.g. Uexküll, 1982 [1940]; Bateson, 1972) have inexor-
ably been relegated to the margins. This is not because their arguments about
the semiotic and communicative dimension of ecosystems have been shown to
be invalid, but because they have been found irrelevant to the modern project.
The primary interest of Western science is not to get to know living organisms
as subjects but as objects.
136 Theory, Culture & Society 31(4)

10. I have elsewhere suggested that this abandonment of essence is structurally

related to the final abandonment of the Bretton Woods gold standard
(Hornborg, 1999).
11. ‘Technology thus serves as the verification of science in the same way that
pre-Columbian Andean harvests verified the divine ancestry of the Inca
emperor and the efficacy of his ritual communication with the Sun. . . .
Science relates to technology as Ricardo’s economic theory to his own success
on the stock exchange: it works, therefore it is true’ (Hornborg, 1992: 15).
12. Although perhaps intended to counter such critique, Latour’s (2004)
obscure attempt to redefine ‘political ecology’ will surely not advance the
struggles for social and environmental justice. I venture, quite in line with
Latour’s own Foucauldian recognition that ‘truth’ is linked to strength, that
it may not be a complete coincidence that this book was commissioned by
the same government that authorized the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior.
The book has nothing to do with ‘political ecology’, lacking even a single
reference to the central literature in the field, but apparently assumes that
the term is synonymous with ‘environmentalism’ or ‘environmental politics’.
Considering Latour’s (2004: 6) disclaimer regarding his frail authority on
the topic, the usual profusion of diffuse prose is all the more embarrassing.
Although there is no space here for a systematic discussion of his argument,
it will suffice to point out that to acknowledge the continuous interfusion of
Nature and Society – and the obvious fact that any representation of Nature
or Society is a fabrication – does not imply that Nature or Society do not
have objective properties (cf. Bloor, 1999).
13. All such objects, inasmuch as they perform political functions, deserve to be
called ‘technological’, whether, for instance, pre-modern fetishes, temples,
keys, coins, credit cards, combustion engines, or nuclear missiles. The argu-
ment here is that most technological objects are not intrinsically neutral
items that are merely employed for political purposes, but phenomena
that for their very existence presuppose political relations based on uneven
control and unequal exchange.
14. It is advisable to distinguish between pre-modern and modern (capitalist)
versions of fetishism, where the former consists in attributing full person-
hood, the latter only agency, to non-living things. In aspiring to dissolve the
distinction between ‘fetish’ and ‘factish’, Latour (2010: 11) obscures this
important difference.
15. It will be observed that, in distinguishing between (objectively) living and
non-living things, I concede, contrary to Latour, that objectivism can be a
very useful analytical stance.
16. Cf. Pietz’s (1988: 114) remark that colonial European writers frequently
observed that pre-modern Africans were inclined to perceive technological
objects as magical beings.
17. However, in aspiring to criticize the fetishism of his contemporaries, Marx
(commendably) drew completely different conclusions from this strategy
than has Latour (2010). Even if provisional, the long-term project of critical
deconstruction must not be abandoned.
18. The etymology of the word ‘fetish’ can be traced through a Portuguese word
for magic and sorcery (feitico) to a Latin word for manufacture (facticius;
Pietz, 1987).
Hornborg 137

19. I here use the word ‘magic’ to refer to goal-oriented action, the efficacy of
which is perceived to be the result of other conditions (e.g. the intrinsic
power of a fetishized object) than those that are actually prerequisite to
making it efficacious (e.g. social relations of exchange).
20. Here is a short version: A hungry tramp is reluctantly admitted into a rural
kitchen, but the housewife has no intention of serving him any food. He
pulls a stone out of his pocket, asking merely for a pot of water to boil some
soup on it. The housewife is too intrigued to deny his request. After a while,
stirring and carefully tasting the water, the tramp observes that the soup
might be improved with some flour, as if this was the only missing ingredi-
ent. The housewife, still baffled, consents to offer him some. Then, one by
one, he similarly manages to lure her to add the various other ingredients,
until finally she is amazed to find a delicious soup cooked on a stone.
21. Regrettably, as I have shown, this seems to apply no less to the post-
Cartesian world view of Bruno Latour.

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Alf Hornborg is an anthropologist and professor of Human Ecology at

Lund University. He is author of The Power of the Machine (2001) and
Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange (2011), as well as lead editor of
several international volumes at the interface of environmental history,
world-system analysis and ecological economics.