Overcoming the Fetishism of Money and Machines: Building on the Work of Alf Hornborg

To comprehend and work out what is wrong with the existing world order, Alf Hornborg embraced and advanced Karl Marx’s notion of fetishism of commodities, going beyond him by extending the notion of fetishism to machines. In doing so, he showed the role of technology in imposing and entrenching exploitative and ecological destructive social relations on a global scale. This fetishism is manifest in the belief that technological progress is unstoppable and underpins progress generally. While endorsing and defending Hornborg’s work, I will argue that Hornborg’s contextualist stance of human ecology should incorporate political philosophy, thereby spearheading a challenge to the dominant worldview of modernity and the socioeconomic order it has created. Hornborg’s advances have been facilitated by his point of departure in anthropology, particularly cultural ecology, economic anthropology and ecological anthropology, incorporated into the broader framework of human ecology, recontextualizing knowledge and experience and challenging the blindness to contextual relations characteristic of mainstream modernity. Theoretical work in human ecology, recognizing the distinctiveness of humans while situating humanity within nature, advances a process-relational ontology. To realize the full potential of this, I will argue, it is necessary for human ecology to fully overcome the opposition between the sciences and humanities and embrace and advance the humanities, most importantly, ethics and political philosophy. In doing so, human ecology provides the basis for overcoming the is-ought dichotomy and supporting advances in communitarian ethics and politics. Reviving radical politics, human ecology should then serve as the core of an open, dialogically developing grand narrative upholding the value of life and the conditions for it, working towards an ecological civilization.