Post-Capitalist Ecologies: Energy, “Value” and Fetishism in the Anthropocene

This article argues that the widely acknowledged socio-political and ecological ills of capitalism are consequences of organizing human society by means of general-purpose money, which inexorably tends to increase global inequalities and accelerate the destruction of natural resources.Although Karl Marx and some of his followers have recognized the incompatibility of conventional money and their visions of socialism, political regimes inspired by Marxist thought have ubiquitously succumbed to the logic of money.The contemporary acknowledgement of the causal significance of particular artifacts can serve to vindicate the long-standing critique of money fetishism, and to render superfluous some of the esoteric elaborations of Marxist theory.Recent eco-Marxist critiques of what is theorized as the capitalist underpayment of ecological use values, understood as energy, paradoxically reflect a mode of thought shaped by the capitalist market, viz. the underlying assumption of an abstract equivalence among incomparable qualities.Technologies, like the money which makes them possible, in Marxist theory tend to be visualized as intrinsically innocent artifacts detachable from the unequal societal contexts in which they have emerged.To prevent such technological fetishism from continuing its destructive historical course, the money artifact itself must be redesigned so as to insulate local survival from the ravages of global capital flows.