THE

ANTHROPOCEN E
Perspectives and controversies REVIEW

The Anthropocene Rev1ew

2014, Vol. 1(1) 62-69
The geology of mankind? A ©The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/2053019613516291
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Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg

Abstract
The Anthropocene narrative portrays humanity as a species ascending to power over the rest
of the Earth System. In the crucial field of climate change, this entails the attribution of fossil fuel
combustion to properties acquired during human evolution, notably the ability to manipulate
fire. But the fossil economy was not created nor is it upheld by humankind in general. This
intervention questions the use of the species category in the Anthropocene narrative and argues
that it is analytically flawed, as well as inimical to action. Intra-species inequalities are part and
parcel of the current ecological crisis and cannot be ignored in attempts to understand it.

Keywords
Anthropocene, inequality, society

Since Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen (2002) proposed 'the Anthropocene' as a new geological epoch
in his short piece 'The geology of mankind' in Nature in 2002, the concept has enjoyed a truly
meteoric career. The currently unfolding discourse on the Anthropocene represents a convergence
of Earth System natural science and post-Cartesian t social science as represented, for instance, by
Bruno Latour. Both fields suggest that the Enlightenment distinction between Nature and Society
is obsolete. Now that humanity is recognised as a geological force, the story goes, we must recon­
ceptualize not only the relations between natural and social sciences but also history, modernity
and the very idea of the human.2 Indeed, the increasingly inextricable interfusion of nature and
human society is incontrovertible, as evidenced not only by climate change but also by other kinds
of anthropogenic transformations of ecosystems.
The question we wish to address in this brief intervention is whether this should really prompt
us to abandon the fundamental concerns of social science, which importantly include the theoriza­
tion of culture and power. We shall suggest that the physical mixing of nature and society does not

Lund University, Sweden Corresponding author:

Andreas Malm, Human Ecology Division, Lund University,
Geocentrum I, Lund 22362, Sweden.
Email: Andreas.Malm@lucld.lu.se
Malm and Hornborg 63

warrant the abandonment of their analytical distinction. Rather, precisely this increasing recogni-
tion of the potency of social relations of power to transform the very conditions of human existence
should justify a more profound engagement with social and cultural theory. We find it deeply para-
doxical and disturbing that the growing acknowledgement of the impact of societal forces on the
biosphere should be couched in terms of a narrative so completely dominated by natural science.
Moreover, in line with the abandonment of Cartesian dualism in our approach to the material con-
ditions of human existence, we have no less reason to reconsider human economies and technolo-
gies as similarly hybrid phenomena interlacing biophysical resources, cultural perceptions and
global power structures.
According to the standard Anthropocene narrative, the Industrial Revolution marks the onset of
large-scale human modification of the Earth System, primarily in the form of climate change, the
most salient and perilous transgression of Holocene parameters. More precisely, in his 2002 piece,
Crutzen suggested that James Watt’s invention of the steam-engine inaugurated the new epoch, and
the chronology stuck: in the burgeoning literature on the Anthropocene, the steam-engine is often
referred to as the one artefact that unlocked the potentials of fossil energy and thereby catapulted
the human species to full-spectrum dominance (e.g. Alberts, 2011: 6; Beerling, 2007: 8; Berners-
Lee and Clark, 2013: 8–10; Irwin, 2010: 1; Lynas, 2011: 21; Robin and Steffen, 2007: 1699; Sayre,
2012: 58; Steffen et al., 2011: 844–845).
Theorists of the epoch have little to say about the actual causes of the rise of steam, but they do
propound a general framework for understanding the transition to fossil fuels in the Industrial
Revolution, which, for reasons of logical necessity, is deduced from human nature. If the dynamics
were of a more contingent character, the narrative of an entire species – the anthropos as such –
ascending to biospheric supremacy would be difficult to uphold: ‘the geology of mankind’ must
have its roots in the properties of that being. Anything less would make it a geology of some
smaller entity, perhaps some subset of Homo sapiens. Even when the Anthropocene is dated to the
time of Watt – and not to the rise of agricultural civilisations, as in the ‘early Anthropocene’ hypoth-
esis (e.g. Ruddiman, 2003; Smith and Zeder, 2013) – the fuse is often traced back into the mists of
time, lit in the early evolution of the human species.
A key component of the Anthropocene narrative is thus the manipulation of fire: the path to the
fossil economy was laid down when our hominid ancestors once upon a time learned to control
fire. Here was ‘the essential evolutionary trigger for the Anthropocene’, in the words of Rapuach
and Canadell: fossil fuel combustion is result of the fact that ‘long before the industrial era, a par-
ticular primate species learned how to tap the energy reserves stored in detrital carbon’ (Raupach
and Canadell, 2010: 210–211). Or, in the words of Will Steffan, Paul J Crutzen and John R McNeill:
‘The mastery of fire by our ancestors provided humankind with a powerful monopolistic tool una-
vailable to other species, that put us firmly on the long path towards the Anthropocene’ (Steffen
et al., 2007: 614, emphasis added; cf. Clark, 2012; Crosby, 2006; Steffen et al., 2011: 846). In this
narrative, the fossil economy is the creation precisely of humankind, or ‘the fire-ape, Homo
pyrophilis’, as in Mark Lynas’ popularisation of Anthropocene thinking, aptly titled The God
Species (Lynas, 2011).
A scrutiny of the transition to fossil fuels in 19th-century Britain (Malm, 2013a), however,
reveals the extent to which the historical origins of anthropogenic climate change were predicated
on highly inequitable global processes from the start (cf. Frank, 1998; Pomeranz, 2000). The
rationale for investing in steam technology at this time was geared to the opportunities provided by
the constellation of a largely depopulated New World, Afro-American slavery, the exploitation of
British labour in factories and mines, and the global demand for inexpensive cotton cloth. Steam-
engines were not adopted by some natural-born deputies of the human species: by the nature of the
64 The Anthropocene Review 1(1)

social order of things, they could only be installed by the owners of the means of production. A tiny
minority even in Britain, this class of people comprised an infinitesimal fraction of the population
of Homo sapiens in the early 19th century. Indeed, a clique of white British men literally pointed
steam-power as a weapon – on sea and land, boats and rails – against the best part of humankind,
from the Niger delta to the Yangzi delta, the Levant to Latin America (cf. Headrick, 1981, 2010).
Capitalists in a small corner of the Western world invested in steam, laying the foundation stone for
the fossil economy: at no moment did the species vote for it either with feet or ballots, or march in
mechanical unison, or exercise any sort of shared authority over its own destiny and that of the
Earth System.3
The ability to manipulate fire was, of course, a necessary condition for the commencement of
fossil fuel burning in Britain. So were tool-use, language, co-operative labour and a whole range of
other human faculties – but they were trivial necessary conditions, lacking correlation with the
outcome of interest. The error here is well-covered in historiographical textbooks. To invoke ultra-
remote causes of this kind ‘is like explaining the success of the Japanese fighter pilots in terms of
the fact that prehumans evolved binocular vision and opposable thumbs. We expect the causes we
cite to connect rather more directly to consequences’, or else we disregard them, as pointed out by
John Lewis Gaddis (Gaddis, 2002: 96; cf. Bloch, 1992: 158–159). Attempts to attribute climate
change to the nature of the human species appear doomed to this sort of vacuity. Put differently,
transhistorical – particularly species-wide – drivers cannot be invoked to explain a qualitatively
novel order in history, such as mechanized, steam-power production of commodities for export to
the world-market.
How about later stages of the fossil economy? The succession of energy technologies following
steam – electricity, the internal combustion engine, the petroleum complex: cars, tankers, aviation
– have all been introduced through investment decisions, sometimes with crucial input from cer-
tain governments but rarely through democratic deliberation. The privilege of instigating new
rounds appears to have stayed with the class ruling commodity production. Reflecting an intra-
species concentration on another level, as of 2008, the advanced capitalist countries or the ‘North’
composed 18.8% of the world population, but were responsible for 72.7 of the CO2 emitted since
1850, subnational inequalities uncounted. In the early 21st century, the poorest 45% of the human
population accounted for 7% of emissions, while the richest 7% produced 50%; a single average
US citizen – national class divisions again disregarded – emitted as much as upwards of 500 citi-
zens of Ethiopia, Chad, Afghanistan, Mali, Cambodia or Burundi (Roberts and Parks, 2007). Are
these basic facts reconcilable with a view of humankind as the new geological agent?
We would argue that, to the contrary, uneven distribution is a condition for the very existence of
modern, fossil-fuel technology (Hornborg, 2001, 2011). The affluence of high-tech modernity can-
not possibly be universalized – become an asset of the species – because it is predicated on a global
division of labour that is geared precisely to abysmal price and wage differences between popula-
tions. The density of distribution of technologies that are ultimately dependent on fossil fuels by
and large coincides with that of purchasing power. These technologies are an index of capital
accumulation, privileged resource consumption, and the displacement of both work and environ-
mental loads. After more than 200 years, we still tend to imagine ‘technological progress’ as noth-
ing but the magic wand of ingenuity which, with no necessary political or moral implications
elsewhere, will solve our local problems of sustainability. But globalized technological systems
essentially represent an unequal exchange of embodied labour and land in the world-system. The
world-view of modern economics, the emergence of which accompanied the Industrial Revolution
in the hub of the British Empire, systematically obscures the asymmetric exchange of biophysical
resources on which industrialization rests. This disjunction between exchange values and physics
Malm and Hornborg 65

is as much a condition for modern technology as engineering. The uneven accumulation of techno-
mass visible on satellite photos of night-time lights proceeds by means of a simple algorithm: the
more fossil fuels and other resources capital has dissipated today, the more it will afford to dissi-
pate tomorrow. Perceptions of ‘technology’, no less than perceptions of ‘Nature’, are cultural con-
structions conditioned by global power structures: the promises of fossil-fuelled technology to
humankind were illusory all along. Our narratives of this destructive force should not replicate
those illusions.
The best counter-shot for the Anthropocene narrative seems to be population growth: if it can be
shown that fossil fuel combustion is largely fanned by the multiplication of human numbers, the
species can indeed be held causally responsible. Thus the leading Anthropocene theorists like to
foreground this as one or even the major perturbation of the biosphere (e.g. Crutzen, 2002, 2006:
14; Steffen et al., 2007: 618; Zalasiewicz et al., 2008: 4, 2010: 2228–2229). Granted, there is a
correlation between human population and CO2 emissions, but the latter increased by a factor of
654.8 between 1820 and 2010 (Boden et al., 2013), while the former ‘only’ did so by a factor of 6.6
(Maddison, 2006: 241; United Nations, 2011), indicating that another, far more powerful engine
must have driven the fires. For recent decades, the correlation has been revealed as outright nega-
tive. David Satterthwaite juxtaposed rates of population growth to rates of emissions growth in the
quarter-century between 1980 and 2005, and found that numbers tended to rise fastest where emis-
sions grew slowest, and vice versa (Satterthwaite, 2009). The rise of population and the rise of
emissions were disconnected from each other, the one mostly happening in places where the other
did not – and if a correlation is negative, causation is out of the question.
A significant chunk of humanity is not party to the fossil economy at all: hundreds of millions
rely on charcoal, firewood or organic waste such as dung for all domestic purposes. Satterthwaite
concluded that one-sixth of the human population ‘best not be included in allocations of responsi-
bility for GHG emissions’ (Satterthwaite, 2009: 547–550). Their contribution is close to zero.
Moreover, 2 billion people, or nearly one-third of humanity, have no access to electricity, and so,
in the words of Vaclav Smil, ‘the difference in modern energy consumption between a subsistence
pastoralist in the Sahel and an average Canadian may easily be larger than 1,000-fold’ (Smil, 2008:
259). Depending on the circumstances in which a specimen of Homo sapiens is born, then, her
imprint on the atmosphere may vary by a factor of more than 1000 (Satterthwaite, 2009: 564).
Given these enormous variations – in space and in time: the present and the past – humanity seems
far too slender an abstraction to carry the burden of causality.
Now, proponents of the Anthropocene might object that from the standpoint of all other living
things, and indeed from the biosphere as a whole, what really matters is that climatic disruption
originates from within the human species, even if not all of it is to blame, and so a species-based
term for the new geological epoch is warranted. A Tuareg pastoralist or a Toronto paymaster, the
burner of fossil fuels is, after all, human. This seems to be a compelling argument, providing the
Anthropocene concept with a rather solid rationale. It is indicative of the term’s origins in the natu-
ral sciences, geologists, meteorologists, biologists and others having detected an overwhelming
human influence on ecosystems, now ranged alongside natural selection, solar radiation and vol-
canic activity. The ‘Anthropocene’ registers this moment of epiphany: the power to shape planetary
climate has passed from nature into the realm of humans.
As soon as this is recognised, however, the main paradox of the narrative, if not of the concept
as such, becomes visible: climate change is denaturalised in one moment – relocated from the
sphere of natural causes to that of human activities – only to be renaturalised in the next, when
derived from an innate human trait, such as the ability to control fire. Not nature, but human
nature – this is the Anthropocene displacement. It backs away from the vertiginous depth of
66 The Anthropocene Review 1(1)

perhaps the most ground-breaking scientific discovery of our time, which tells us that human
beings have caused global warming over the course of their history. This kind of history does not
appear in the biography of any other species: beavers and bonobos continue to construct their own
micro-environments as they always have, generation upon familiar generation, while a certain
human community may burn wood for ten millennia straight and then coal the next century.
Realising that climate change is ‘anthropogenic’ is really to appreciate that it is sociogenic.4 It has
arisen as a result of temporally fluid social relations as they materialise through the rest of nature,
and once this ontological insight – implicit in the science of climate change – is truly taken
onboard, one can no longer treat humankind as merely a species-being determined by its biologi-
cal evolution. Nor can one write off divisions between human beings as immaterial to the broader
picture, for such divisions have been an integral part of fossil fuel combustion in the first place
(Hornborg, 2001, 2011).
Following climate science out of nature, we should dare to probe the depths of social his-
tory: not relapse into the false certitude of another natural inevitability. The Anthropocene
narrative could here be seen as an illogical and ultimately self-defeating foray of the natural
science community – responsible for the original discovery of climate change – into the
domain of human affairs. Geologists, meteorologists and their colleagues are not necessarily
well-equipped to study the sort of things that take place between humans (and perforce between
them and the rest of nature), the composition of a rock or the pattern of a jet stream being
rather different from such phenomena as world-views, property and power. Now that the latter
layers of earthly existence mould the former, some epistemological confusion is perhaps to be
expected. Against this background, ‘the Anthropocene’ resembles an attempt to conceptually
traverse the gap between the natural and the social – already thoroughly fused in reality –
through the construction of a bridge from one side only, leading the traffic, as it were, in a
direction opposite to the actual process: in climate change, social relations determine natural
conditions; in Anthropocene thinking, natural scientists extend their world-views to society.
Needless to say, this re-naturalisation of climate change is as much (if not more) a product of
behaviour in the social sciences and humanities, namely the late awakening to a warming world.
The baton has failed to pass between ‘the two cultures’, and now that the latter is slowly catching
up, ‘the Anthropocene’ is already an entrenched concept and mode of thinking. Regrettably, many
a social scientist and humanist has swallowed it lock, stock and barrel, oblivious to its anti-social
tendencies, attracted by the idea of the anthropos as centre and master of the universe (be it produc-
tive or destructive), which speaks to certain humanist sensibilities (e.g. Alberts, 2011; Palsson
et al., 2013; Szerszynski, 2012).
Perhaps the most important interventions from critical theory into the Anthropocene debate has
been made by Dipesh Chakrabarty, who, in his essay ‘The climate of history: Four theses’, reflects
on some of the pitfalls of species-thinking, but ends up endorsing it as a necessary project
(Chakrabarty, 2009). Humanity really is constituted as a universal species agent that ‘flashes up in
the moment of the danger that is climate change’, most starkly in the extreme weather events
emblematic of the new epoch: ‘Unlike in the crises of capitalism, there are no lifeboats here for the
rich and the privileged (witness the drought in Australia or recent fires in the wealthy neighbor-
hoods of California)’ (Chakrabarty, 2009: 221). But this is a flawed argument. It blatantly over-
looks the realities of differentiated vulnerability on all scales of human society: witness Katrina in
black and white neighborhoods of New Orleans, or Sandy in Haiti and Manhattan, or sea level rise
in Bangladesh and the Netherlands, or practically any other impact, direct or indirect, of climate
change. For the foreseeable future – indeed, as long as there are human societies on Earth – there
will be lifeboats for the rich and privileged. If climate change represents a form of apocalypse, it is
Malm and Hornborg 67

not universal, but uneven and combined: the species is as much an abstraction at the end of the line
as at the source (cf. Malm, 2013b; Malm and Esmailian, 2012).
As for the drivers of climate change, naturalisation has an easily recognisable form. ‘Certain
social relations appears as the natural properties of things’, to speak with Karl Marx: production is
‘encased in eternal natural laws independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations
are then quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is
founded’ – or the human species in abstract (Marx, 1990: 1005, 1993: 87, emphases in original).
The effect is to block off any prospect for change. If global warming is the outcome of the knowl-
edge of how to light a fire, or some other property of the human species acquired in some distant
stage of its evolution, how can we even imagine a dismantling of the fossil economy? Or: ‘the
Anthropocene’ might be a useful concept and narrative for polar bears and amphibians and birds
who want to know what species is wreaking such havoc on their habitats, but alas, they lack the
capacity to scrutinise and stand up to human actions. Within the human kingdom, on the other
hand, species-thinking on climate change is conducive to mystification and political paralysis. It
cannot serve as a basis for challenging the vested interests of business-as-usual.
There is, however, a noteworthy difference between the bourgeois political economists Marx
attacked and the Anthropocene narrative. Scholars naturalising climate change are rarely if ever
working on behalf of the vested interests of business-as-usual. Most would likely wish to see them
gone. Insofar as it occludes the historical origins of global warming and sinks the fossil economy
into unalterable conditions, ‘the Anthropocene’ is an ideology more by default than by design,
more the product of the dominance of natural science in the field of climate change and, perhaps,
the general blunting of critical edges and narrowing of political horizons in the post-1989 world
than of any malicious apologetics. It is not necessarily any less harmful for that. It is one of several
theoretical frameworks which happen to be not only analytically defective, but also inimical to
action.

Funding
We thank the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agriculture and Spatial Planning (FORMAS) for
supporting the Lund University Centre of Excellence for Integration of Social and Natural Dimensions of
Sustainability, LUCID, which has provided us with the opportunity to write this article.

Notes
1. By ‘post-Cartesian’, we mean approaches that abandon Cartesian distinctions such as between Society
and Nature or between subject and object.
2. Programme for the conference ‘Thinking the Anthropocene’, Paris, 13–15 November 2013.
3. Nor is the Anthropocene narrative itself today conducive to democracy, but rather the opposite; cf. Leach
(2013).
4. The neologism ‘sociogenic’ is, of course, means to indicate that the driving forces derive from a
specific social structure, rather than a species-wide trait. Similarly, Richard Norgaard (2013) has
recently suggested that we think in terms of the ‘Econocene’, in view of ‘the 50-fold increase and
the globalization of economic activity during the 20th century’. Two other candidates worth consid-
eration – both proposed to better integrate social and natural aspects – are the ‘Technocene’ and the
‘Capitalocene’.

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607069
research-article2015
ANR0010.1177/2053019615607069The Anthropocene ReviewCunha

Perspectives and controversies

The Anthropocene Review

The geology of the ruling class?

2015, Vol. 2(3) 262­–266
© The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/2053019615607069
anr.sagepub.com

Daniel Cunha

Abstract
Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg argued in The Anthropocene Review that the Anthropocene
narrative should be challenged, because the material resources of the Earth are actually
unevenly exploited and consumed, with inequality across classes and nations. Though there is no
disagreement regarding this point, it is argued here that the implied notion of control of global
biogeochemical cycles by the ruling class is misplaced, and that the most fundamental concept for
a critical understanding of the Anthropocene is fetishism, i.e. the Anthropocene is characterized
by a lack of social (or class) control. We claim also that this theoretical discussion is of utmost
political importance.

Keywords
Anthropocene, fetishism, inequality

Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg made a good and important point in their essay ‘The geology of
mankind?’: the exploitation and consumption of material resources of the Earth is highly uneven
across social classes and nations. As they say, ‘intra-species inequalities are part and parcel of the
current ecological crisis’; ‘uneven distribution is a condition for the very existence of modern,
fossil-fuel technology’ (Malm and Hornborg, 2014), so that the species-being reference of the term
Anthropocene should be considered inadequate. I agree with the point regarding inequality; it was
an extremely important contribution to the Anthropocene debate. However, I would like to respect-
fully discuss the implied notion of control that is embedded in their reasoning.
Malm and Hornborg argue that the new energy system that initiated the sociogenic emissions of
global warming ‘could only be installed by the owners of the means of production’; ‘capitalists in
a small corner of the Western world invested in steam, laying the foundation stone for the fossil
economy’ and ‘the privilege of instigating new rounds [of energy technologies] appears to have
stayed with the class ruling commodity production’ (Malm and Hornborg, 2014) (emphases
added).1 It appears that the disturbance of the biogeochemical cycles of the Earth was a subjective
choice of the bourgeoisie. In this respect, Malm and Hornborg remain attached to the perspective
of conscious control (nöosphere) proposed by Paul Crutzen (2002).

Sinal de Menos, Brazil Corresponding author:

Daniel Cunha, Sinal de Menos, Rua Lima e Silva 480,
ap 9, Porto Alegre, 90050100, Brazil.
Email: dcunha77@outlook.com
Cunha 263

However, on closer inspection, this is not the case. When the owners of the means of production
started using coal-powered steam instead of water energy during the Industrial Revolution, they
simply wanted to increase their profits through the exploitation of cheap labor in cities, which was
much more difficult in the faraway and depopulated vicinity of waterfalls. It was a ‘blind’ process
elusive of the economic ‘invisible hand’: as new mills of the expanding textile industry should get
installed farther and farther from urban centers, where labor power was scarcer and therefore more
expensive, alternative technology became economically more advantageous: coal-powered steam
was mobile, not tied to the proximity of waterfalls, and therefore allowed the exploitation of
cheaper labor in cities (Malm, 2013). In the same way, the synthesis of fertilizers through the fixa-
tion of atmospheric nitrogen (the Haber-Bosch process) had no intention to disturb the nitrogen
cycle or to cause the eutrophication of natural water bodies, but was rather the outcome of a blind
dynamics of proletarianization and cheap food, because cheap food is a prerequisite for cheap labor
and therefore capital accumulation (Moore, 2010). The same is true for ocean acidification, aerosol
loading in the atmosphere, and so on: controlling (or even disturbing) the global material cycles of
the Earth was never an intention of the ruling class.
What emerges here is the notion that the so-called ‘Anthropocene’ is controlled neither by
humanity (antropo) nor by a part of humanity (the ruling class), but is much more a situation
increasingly out of control and a product of unconsciousness and objectification. ‘They do not
know it, but they do it’, that is what Marx said about social relations mediated by commodities
(Marx, nd). The most fundamental concept for a critical understanding of the Anthropocene is not
inequality – after all, inequality is not in itself incompatible with ‘stewardship’ – but rather fetish-
ism (Cunha, 2015). Fetishism, as conceptualized by Karl Marx, is the social process in which social
relations are objectified and inverted: ‘the process of production has mastery over man, instead of
the opposite’ (Marx, 1990: 175), because ‘the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself’
(Marx, 1990: 253). The accumulation of capital through the exploitation of abstract labor for its
own sake constitutes the ‘automatic subject’, ‘self-valorizing value’ (Marx, 1990: 255). The bour-
geoisie, though favored in distribution of resources with the exploitation of labor, does not control
the form of this social interchange (Jappe, 2003; Postone, 1993).
Before analyzing Malm and Hornborg’s interpretation of fetishism (a discussion that might
admittedly be harsh for non-Marxists), let me explain why this is crucially important for the debate
about the Anthropocene. There are two levels in which the Anthropocene narrative should be chal-
lenged from a socio-critical perspective. On the one hand, the inequality of distribution of Earth
resources and the different periods of history and social forms of organization make the use of the
all-equalizing term ‘antropo’ rather questionable; on the other, the irrationality of the whole social
process, in which even with all knowledge of the dangerous consequences of sociogenic activities
in their current form, very little is changed as this knowledge gets better and deeper and precious
time (and cumulative emissions) go on. In fact, there are only signs that the disrupting global change
is gaining momentum (Stephen et al., 2015) – recently the concentration of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere broke the 400 ppm mark for the first time since it was first measured, and its growth rate
from 2012 to 2014 was the highest ever registered over three consecutive years (NOAA, 2015), in
spite of all the alerts that have been made by the scientific community for decades.
The first level was very well addressed by Malm and Hornborg. I think, though, that the second
level should be more explored. It addresses the somewhat diffuse feeling of the scientific commu-
nity that there is something deeply irrational in the (absence of) attitude of governments and socie-
ties in general, considering the dangers involved. Some scientists expressed this concern regarding
the irrationality of societal reaction to the problem: ‘liberate the science from the economics,
finance, and astrology, stand by the conclusions however uncomfortable’ (Anderson and Bows,
264 The Anthropocene Review 2(3)

2012); ‘geoengineering is like a heroin addict finding a new way of cheating his children out of
money’ (Kintisch, 2010: 57); ‘irrational rejection of well-established science’ (Mann, 2014); ‘we
have to stop constantly ignoring the things that are truly harmful to our society’ (Elger and
Schwägerl, 2011). The concept of fetishism allows a structural explanation of this irrationality that
avoids simply assigning it to subjective ‘(class) domination’ (in a more Marxist tone) or ‘greed’ (in
more common-sense language). Contrary to liberal economic thinkers, who invariably depict capi-
talism as the ultimate rational system – as shown by the expression ‘optimal allocation of resources’,
which in the era of the disruption of global material cycles should be seen as clearly misleading –
Marx explicitly theorized capitalism as fetishistic or irrational.2
Malm and Hornborg do refer to the fetishistic character of the social process (though not men-
tioning it explicitly), quoting Marx: ‘certain social relations appear as the natural properties of
things’ (Malm and Hornborg, 2014). However, they do so with an interpretation that fetishism is
merely a mental illusion or mystification, a ‘false consciousness’ that, once removed, would unveil
the ‘real’ relations of exploitation. This becomes clear when they immediately afterwards criticize
the mistake of taking the ability to manipulate fire as the trigger of the Anthropocene – a critique
of a false historical narrative that does not advance to a critique of the immanent form of social
relations itself. Hence, they refer to the ‘vested interests of business-as-usual’ (Malm and Hornborg,
2014). But what vested interests? Who does not know what fossil-fuel companies want? Exxonmobil
CEO said it bluntly in an interview: ‘my philosophy is to make money’ (CBS News, 2013). This is
fetishism: capital accumulation as an end in itself, abstracting from every social or ecological
consideration.
The Marxian concept of fetishism, therefore, is not to be reduced to ‘false consciousness’ or
‘vested interests’, though they are part of it. For Marx, ‘to the producers … the social relations
between their private labors appear as what they are, i.e. as material relations between persons and
social relations between things’ (Marx, 1990: 166); ‘commodity fetishism … is not located in our
minds, in the way we (misperceive) reality, but in our social reality itself’ (Žižek, 2010: 190). But in
Malm and Hornborg’s interpretation it is, on the contrary, the autonomous movement of capital that
is the illusion, behind which the subjective will of a ruling class (‘vested interests’) could be
unveiled. In a proper reading of fetishism, it is the subjective will that is reduced to mere appearance
in a social process that is quasi-independent of the subjects involved (Kurz, 1993; Postone 1993).3
The Anthropocene is certainly not the ‘geology of mankind’, as correctly claimed by Malm and
Hornborg, but neither is it the ‘geology of the ruling class’. Capitalists execute functions that are
beyond their conscious control.4 Rather, it is a ‘domination without subject’ (Kurz, 1993), a ‘geol-
ogy without geologists’ or a ‘geology of capital’, a blind and uncontrolled process of material
exchange analogous to the ‘invisible hand’ regarding the exchange of commodities (Cunha, 2015)
– and that makes it a problem much more difficult to overcome than if it were merely a question of
subjective power and false consciousness. The fact that now ‘they know very well what they are
doing, yet they are doing it’ (Žižek, 1994: 8) confirms that fetishism is not merely a mental illusion.5
As already said, the concept of fetishism is a powerful tool to explain the uncontrollable and irra-
tional character of the social (lack of) reactions to the global environmental (catastrophic) change.
In spite of all that, the ‘Anthropocene’ embeds a promise. It has been suggested that the devel-
opment and integration of Earth System science, mathematical modeling and telecommunications
would allow the constitution of a ‘world subject’, that would solve the climate problem and the
general question of stewardship of the Earth System with the deployment of geocybernetics
(Schellnhuber, 1999; Schellnhuber and Kropp, 1998).6 But, as formulated by the young Marx,
alienated labor tears from humanity its ‘world subject’ or, in his words, ‘species-being’ (Marx,
1992: 322–334).7 The ‘world subject’ cannot emerge in a society permeated by class relations and
Cunha 265

fetishism and therefore characterized by fragmentation and unconscious social activity. That is
why the question of fetishism is more than a scholarly theoretical discussion, but is also of utmost
political importance: if we accept Marx’s critique, only the liberation of human activity (from capi-
tal accumulation as an end in itself) would then be the realization of the ‘world subject’ or species-
becoming and the actuality of the ‘Anthropocene’.8 Of course (and here I agree with Malm and
Hornborg again) this would imply an antagonism with the bourgeoisie, because it disposes of the
means of production that should be transformed and used differently in order to change the course
of the material fluxes of the Earth System. But for this qualitative change, it is necessary to recog-
nize the alienated form of social activity, and not only its more favored agents.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for the useful suggestions. Of course, the author is solely responsible
for the content.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.

Notes
1. I adopt the terminology ‘sociogenic’ proposed by Malm and Hornborg, rather than ‘anthropogenic’.
2. For Marx, capitalism is a ‘bewitched, distorted and upside down world’ (Marx, 1991: 969). This is not
constrained to the first chapter of Capital about commodity fetishism – the commodity as ‘a very strange
thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ (Marx, 1990: 163) – but proceeds
through the whole work all the way to its third volume, with interest-bearing capital as its ‘most superfi-
cial and fetishized form’, a ‘pure automaton’ (Marx 1991: 523), after depicting the boundless accumula-
tion of capital as a fetishistic end in itself.
3. It is well known that Marxism has many different branches often conflicting with each other. The per-
spective that I use here was inspired by a branch that started in the the works of the mature Marx (Capital
and the Grundrisse) and of the young György Lukács and Isaak Rubin in the 1920s, and was continued
through the works of the Frankfurt School, Guy Debord, Lucio Colletti, Hans-Jürgen Krahl, the Neue
Marx Lektüre (Hans-Georg Backhaus, Helmut Reichelt) up to today’s Wertkritik (Robert Kurz, Anselm
Jappe, Roswitha Scholz, Norbert Trenkle, Ernst Lohoff and others), John Holloway, Moishe Postone,
among others, all with their own specificities, some of them calling themselves ‘post-marxists’. More
traditional Marxists, however, such as Leninists, Stalinists, Trotskists, Gramscians and others, have
never really engaged with the question of fetishism and would probably disagree with this interpretation
and its consequences. I believe, though, that the perspective dealt with here offers important concepts for
the critical understanding and debate of the Anthropocene for Marxists and non-Marxists.
4. In Marx’s own words, capitalists are ‘character [masks]’ (Marx, 1990: 179), ‘personifications of eco-
nomic relations’ (Marx, 1990: 989).
5. It is an irony of history that the basic science that informs global warming (thermodynamics) was devel-
oped to improve the efficiency of coal-powered steam engines.
6. Schellnhuber and Kropp (1998) suggest that this ‘world subject’ would be the realization of the Hegelian
Weltgeist. But the Weltgeist is the autonomized movement of capital itself, the ‘automatic subject’, as
shown by Postone (1993: 71–83).
7. Later, the mature Marx developed the concept of alienated labor into value-producing abstract labor and
alienation into fetishism, denoting its socially mediating and historically specific character (Colletti,
1992; Holloway, 2010: 87–99; Marcuse, 1941: 273–287).
8. Dyer-Witheford (2010) suggested the term ‘species-becoming’ to denote its historical emergence and
reinforce the difference with anthropological interpretations of the ‘species-being’.
266 The Anthropocene Review 2(3)

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659675
research-article2016
ANR0010.1177/2053019616659675The Anthropocene ReviewHornborg and Malm

Perspectives and controversies

The Anthropocene Review

Yes, it is all about fetishism:

1­–3
© The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:
A response to Daniel Cunha sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/2053019616659675
anr.sagepub.com

Alf Hornborg and Andreas Malm

Abstract
Daniel Cunha misreads us as suggesting that climate change has been a conscious and deliberate
strategy of a global elite. This was very clearly not our suggestion. He proposes that the Marxian
concept of fetishism is applicable to anthropogenic climate change, apparently unaware of our
recurrent use of precisely this concept in a number of publications over the past decades. We
thus fundamentally agree with his position, but find his critique of our own interpretation of the
Anthropocene unfair and misdirected.

Keywords
Anthropocene, fetishism, inequality

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 minor-
ity, 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

Lund University, Sweden Corresponding author:

Alf Hornborg, Human Ecology Division, Lund University,
Sölvegatan 12, 223 62 Lund, Sweden.
Email: alf.hornborg@hek.lu.se
2 The Anthropocene Review 

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 cen-
trally 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 accumula-
tion 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 pro-
gress – 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 fundamen-
tal to human social life inasmuch as humans tend to anchor their social relations in external arte-
facts (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 prop-
erties 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 con-
scious 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 con-
vinced 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 socio-
ecological 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.
Hornborg and Malm 3

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.

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