Marxian Thermodynamics?

The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment

Alf Hornborg, 2001

Alf Hornborg is a Cultural Anthropolgist in the Department of Human Ecology at Lund University in Uppsala, Sweden. This is the first of many books that increasingly delve into the relationships between ecological and economic systems using the lens of thermodynamics. “Like all power structures,” Hornborg began, “the machine will continue to reign only as long as it is not unmasked as a species of power.” My first reaction was, if only it was so easy. We may realize that the emperor is naked, but that doesn’t stop him from being the emperor.

Hornborg’s analysis was built on two big ideas. The first was a definition of power as “a social relation built on an asymmetrical distribution of resources and risks.” When I read this, the image that came to my mind was Beowulf. Risks can either be taken or imposed. When you take a risk voluntarily, you accumulate honor. When you impose a risk on someone else, you accumulate power.

The second is the idea that beyond the cultural construction of our idea of “the machine,” there are actual machines. And Hornborg said “the actual machine contradicts our everyday image of it.” Taking an approach that differed from tech-celebrators such as Vaclav Smil, Hornborg suggested “the foundation of machine technology is not primarily know-how but unequal exchange in the world system, which generates an increasing, global polarization of wealth and impoverishment.” We believe machines embody progress and an escape from Malthusian disaster. But “We do not recognize that what ultimately keep our machines running are global terms of trade. The power of the machine is not of the machine, but of the asymmetric structures of exchange of which it is an expression.”

The trick machines employ to concentrate resources from the periphery into the center while seeming to be making something out of nothing, is keeping our attention firmly focused on that center. To support his point, Hornborg cited the Second Law of Thermodynamics and Ilya Prigogine’s elaboration of it in his theory of Dissipative Structures. Increases in order, which Hornborg called negative entropy or Negentropy, are only possible locally and are made a the cost of the wider environment. “Any local accretion of order,” Hornborg said, “can occur only at the expense of the total sum of order in the universe.” In the case of biomass, the energy to create this order is taken from sunlight by photosynthesis. This isn’t a completely efficient process, but it hardly matters on a human scale (so far). Where the entropy law becomes really important, though, is in the creation of what Hornborg called “technomass” out of non-renewable resources. This is not only a zero-sum game, Hornborg said, but it has distributional implications that are deliberately, “systematically concealed from view by the hegemonic, economic vocabulary.”

“Industrial technology,” Hornborg said, “depends for its existence on not being accessible to everyone.” If anyone could produce shoes, the shoe factory would go out of business. Further, industry presupposes cheap energy and “raw material” inputs, and high-value outputs. Entropy insures that there isn’t enough to go around. “The idea of distributing [technology] evenly among all the peoples of the world would be as contradictory as trying to keep a beef cow alive while restoring its molecules to all the tufts of grass from which it has sprung.” This is why the 19th-century British tried to talk the South Americans into not industrializing, but rather sending their natural resources to Britain to be “more efficiently” turned into manufactured goods.

What are other historical implications of this bleak argument? Well for one thing, once machines and the exchange relationships they use and represent “assumed the appearance of natural law…the delegation of work from human bodies to machines introduced historically new possibilities for maintaining a discrepancy between exchange value and productive potential, which in other words means encouraging new strategies for underpayment and accumulation.” Why?  Because while it is relatively easy to recognize the basic justice that an individual owns his own work, it’s harder to say who should own the profits from products of the machines, built with (cheap) resources and (cheap) labor bought far from the high-priced central markets.

This was a point that Marx missed, either because it was harder to see in his time or because (as Hornborg suggested) he “fetishized” machines and expected them to solve the historic problem of the proletariat (there’s an interesting chapter redefining Marx’s theory of fetishism and applying it, but I won’t go there now). At some point, Hornborg said, global growth became primarily based on “underpayment for resources, including raw materials and other forms of energy than labor.” Hornborg replaced Marx’s labor exploitation with resource exploitation as the central factor in capitalist accumulation. This change may be the bridge from a traditional Marxist critique of capitalism, to a “green” critique. Money values may increase and the illusion of global economic growth may temporarily hide the zero-sum nature of the game, but in the long run, “what locally appears as an expansion of resources” turns out to be “an asymmetric social transfer implying a [hidden] loss of resources elsewhere.”

Another implication is that, historically and “still today, industrial capitalism is very far from the universal condition of humankind, but rather a privileged activity, the existence of which would be unthinkable without various other modes of transferring…resources from peripheral sectors to centers.” This should impact discussions of the “market transition” in history just as it affects our understanding of contemporary economic development.

The other major implication, for me, is that locality is important. In nature, systems tend to regulate themselves. “As long as a unit of biomass is directly dependent on its local niche for survival, there will tend to be constraints on overexploitation and a long-term (if oscillating) balance. Industrial growth, however, entails a supra-local appropriation of negentropy.” That is, entropy happens at the periphery and order at the center. The concept of capital breaks local ecology, and creates what Hornborg called "a recursive (positive feedback) relationship between some kind of technological infrastructure and some kind of symbolic capacity to make claims on other people’s resources.” When capital can begin to be accumulated far from its source, we’re on our way to a world where “the 225 richest individuals in the world own assets equal to the purchasing power of the 47 poorest percent of the planet’s population” (he said in 2001; since then it has gotten much worse).

So how should historians respond to this? One possible response might be to point out that people in the past did not necessarily know what thermodynamicists now know, and what Hornborg argues applies to society. So there may not necessarily have been the same sense of a conspiracy to evade this knowledge in the past, that Hornborg suggests there is in the present. After all, enlightenment rationality grows out of and responds to the longstanding medieval world view, in which people took for granted that the world had been created and peopled for a purpose. Critics could also argue that technology actually breaks the zero-sum nature of the game and acts as a rising tide that lifts all ships. One element I do sense is missing as we shift from a labor theory of value to Hornborg’s greener resource theory, is the role of technological inventions and ownership of intellectual property in the accumulation of value. The final objection to Hornborg might be that as an anthropologist/economist, he is a bit too theoretical and not sufficiently grounded in (contingent) data. So if theories like these haven’t been conclusively proven, what’s the solution while we gather evidence? Locality? Honor instead of power? Maybe history, seen through the lens of thermodynamics, will provide some illustrative stories.