Abstract
The chapter integrates physicalist and constructivist approaches to phenomena conventionally categorised as ‘labour’ and ‘energy’ by unravelling how the two entangled concepts reflect nineteenth-century modernity’s increasingly instrumental approach to both society and nature. Energy technologies became understood as the efficient harnessing of nature’s powers in much the same way as economists focused on the efficient harnessing of human labour power. Although seemingly neutral in their references to objectively measurable, physical phenomena, concepts of ‘labour’ and ‘energy’ remain geared to maximum exploitation of humans and non-human nature, propelled by money and capitalism. The historical progress of energy technologies is consistently intertwined with political economy. No less than slavery, such technologies are strategies for displacing work and environmental loads onto less powerful segments of world society.
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Notes
- 1.
To be sure, a steam engine can operate without slavery, but not without the asymmetric resource flows of which slavery was an eighteenth-century expression. The market is as effective an institution for organizing such flows as whips and chains.
- 2.
Actually, the authors refer to an estimate of about three million slaves in Italy in the year 28.
- 3.
In the first century, the sources of the slave trade ‘began to dry up, leading to a rapid price increase; by the end of the first century AD, they were already ten times more expensive than they had been centuries earlier’ (Debeir et al. 1991 [1986], 39).
- 4.
This means that estimates of the ‘power density’ (Smil 2015) of a technology would arrive at much lower figures than calculations of the energy output per square metre of technical infrastructure.
- 5.
Significantly, technological systems are not included among Vaclav Smil’s (2017, 429) examples of ‘macroparasitism,’ defined as ‘a variety of social controls of energy flows relying both on coercion—ranging from slavery and corvée labor to military conquest—and on complex (and partly voluntary) relationships among unequal groups of people.’ Yet, many modern technologies should be recognised as vortices in—and inseparable from—precisely such parasitic flows.
- 6.
Given the huge global differences in the exchange-value of labour, I would add, the conversion of expended labour in the North into increasingly greater quantities of embodied labour from the South is an obvious index of widening inequalities. But the mainstream understanding of development is that such inequalities represent differences in historical time rather than societal space. Thus, for instance, the prominent historian of energy use Vaclav Smil (2017, 4016) remarks that ‘only about one-fifth of the world’s 200 countries have accomplished the transition to mature, affluent industrial societies supported by a high per capita consumption of energy.’
- 7.
The Marginalist Revolution refers to the establishment in the 1870s of neoclassical economic theory as the mainstream approach within economics.
- 8.
Mirowski’s (1988) list of such critics includes Wilhelm Ostwald, Patrick Geddes, Alfred Lotka, Frederick Soddy, Frederick Taylor (the father of ‘Taylorism’), the Technocracy movement of the 1930s, ecological anthropologists following Leslie White and ecologists such as Howard Odum. The historical genealogy of what is now known as ‘ecological economics’ has been traced in great detail by Martinez-Alier (1987).
- 9.
Mirowski (1989, 3–4) writes that the neoclassical economic theorists ‘did not imitate physics in a desultory or superficial manner; no, they copied their models mostly term for term and symbol for symbol, and said so. … Although it was ultimately called “energy” in physics and “utility” in economics, it was fundamentally the same metaphor, performing many of the same explanatory functions in the respective contexts, evoking many of the same images and emotional responses, not to mention many of the same mathematical formalisms.’ However, as highlighted by Georgescu-Roegen (1971), the theoretical framework of neoclassical economics remains ‘helplessly locked into the physics of circa 1860’ and is incompatible with the concept of entropy and the implications of the second law of thermodynamics (Mirowski 1989, 389–394).
- 10.
Engels famously rejected Podolinsky’s suggestion that the Marxian theory of surplus value could be understood in terms of energy flows (cf. Martinez-Alier and Naredo 1982).
- 11.
Georgescu-Roegen (1979, 1048) concluded that it is ‘perfectly clear that in absolutely no situation is it possible for the energy equivalents to represent economic valuations.’
- 12.
After centuries of tenacious but futile efforts to identify the substance of ‘value’ (cf. Mirowski 1989), the edifice of economic discourse on the topic assumes a vain and esoteric appearance cognate to that of Medieval theology.
- 13.
The extent to which it was held that the alleviation of fatigue could be accomplished through mechanisation raises crucial questions about the societal distribution of heavy work—and about whether industrial technology is to be understood primarily as a replacement or displacement of such work. Nineteenth-century British machinery had implications not only for British factory workers but also for African labourers harvesting cotton on American plantations (Hornborg 2006).
- 14.
This decontextualisation of technologically mediated work is a crucial condition for modern confusion regarding the purported agency of technological artefacts. I have elsewhere argued that agency should be reserved for entities that have purposes (Hornborg 2017). Posthumanist attributions of agency to artefacts (Latour 2005) illustrate how the mechanisation of work tends to obscure the human purposes (and agency) that have been delegated to and embedded in the technologies.
- 15.
Other Marxists vehemently reject Prometheanism, for instance John Bellamy Foster (2017).
- 16.
Both Mirowski (1989) and Rabinbach (1990) observe that Marx’s central concept of labour power is ambiguously defined. ‘Both a social and a physiological magnitude,’ says Rabinbach (1990, 74–75), ‘it is a measure of value and a measure of energy.’ Although obviously intent on anchoring his theory of capital in natural science, Marx could not circumambulate its pivotal reliance on relative exchange-values. With Engels, Rabinbach (1990, 82) suggests, political economy ‘took its place among the other economies of energy: physiology, physics, and chemistry.’ The fundamentally ambiguous position of Marxist theory—torn between natural and social science—is summed up by Rabinbach (ibid.): ‘Energy is the universal equivalent of the natural world, as money is the universal equivalent of the world of exchange.’ This formulation succinctly captures the point that our modern ontology of nature since the Industrial Revolution to some extent is a reflection of capitalist society.
- 17.
With globalisation, of course, this phenomenon has become global in scope. Although workers in the Global South may have average wages that are a fraction of European or American ones, they will naturally demand that their factories keep exporting their embodied labour to the Global North.
- 18.
Daggett (2019, 145) notes that the existence of a wage ‘became an indicator in the British public’s imagination that demarcated the line between slavery and free labor.’
- 19.
Daggett’s struggle to straddle the ‘distinction between energy-as-knowledge and energy-as-fuel’ leads her to imagine historical time ‘in loops and spirals’ and to evoke ‘the “widening gyre” of falcons’ flight and things falling apart in William Butler Yeats’s ‘Second Coming’ (ibid., 25).
- 20.
Daggett acknowledges the influence of posthumanists such as Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett and Timothy Morton.
- 21.
What is to be considered ‘successful,’ however, can be debated. As Andreas Malm (2016) and others have highlighted, the exorbitant economic and military ‘success’ of the nineteenth-century turn to fossil energy simultaneously initiated the global warming that is currently threatening to make much of the planet uninhabitable. In hindsight, then, the science that promoted that turn must be understood as fundamentally insufficient and thus ultimately flawed.
- 22.
The extent to which money obscures the relation between technology and labour is illustrated by the juxtaposition of two passages from Alfred Crosby’s (2006) book Children of the Sun. He notes that power in the cotton plantations ‘was still supplied by the primitive prime mover of muscle, in the form of slavery, an institution whose slumping status was revived by the profits to be made from the new textile mills’ (p. 78), and three pages later remarks: ‘Power had been about muscle for all of human history, and the most effective way to marshal it had been by assembling serfs and slaves. Now, by golly, the best way was to get yourself a steam engine.’
- 23.
That is, a currency that cannot make claims on embodied low-wage labour and resources from anywhere in the world.
- 24.
Arbitrage is a term used in economics for transactions taking advantage of varying prices in different markets.
- 25.
I have estimated that a British textile manufacturer in 1850, by selling £1.000 worth of cotton textiles on the world market and buying raw cotton for the same sum, was able to exchange the product of 14,233 hours of British factory labour for that of 20,874 hours of plantation labour and that of less than one hectare of British land for that of 58.6 hectares of plantation land (Hornborg 2013, 91). Such calculations exemplify how historical processes of industrialisation have been contingent on the unequal exchange of embodied labour and land.
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Hornborg, A. (2021). The Commodification of Human Life: Labour, Energy and Money in a Deteriorating Biosphere. In: Räthzel, N., Stevis, D., Uzzell, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71909-8_29
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