Hornborg misunderstands or misrepresents the labour theory of value and Marx’s critique of political economy. Sadly, we have seen this before in the pages of this journal – for example, the debate between Kallis and Swyngedouw and the critique of Kallis by Schwartzman and Mauro. Even though I thought I clearly stated Marx’s distinction between labour and labour power, Hornborg says that he cannot make sense of it. I can only repeat that under free-market capitalism, wage levels tend to reflect the cost of hiring the workers who receive those wages, whereas the value produced by the labour of those workers tends to be greater than that cost (hence the term “surplus value”). And no, this does not mean that unequal exchange is “the difference between the exchange-values of the products and the wages of the labour that went into producing them” because, although such a difference certainly exists under capitalism (as otherwise there would be no profit), there is simply no exchange at all here. So this is a good example of Hornborg’s confusion.
Why does this misunderstanding keep happening? I think at least part of the explanation lies in Hornborg’s concept of value (which seems much the same as Kallis’). He claims to be materialist but asserts that “The notion of an objective value is a contradiction in terms”. So for him, value is inherently subjective. If there is no objective value, however, how is one to tell whether an exchange is equal or unequal, outside of the relationship between the actors making the exchange? And how does this differ from neo-classical economics, with its emphasis on the primacy of actor choice? In contrast, the labour theory of value is based on socially necessary labour time, which is materiality that can be measured, although Hornborg argues that such objective value can be measured only in terms of money.
Hornborg’s rejection of the labour theory of value has serious consequences. He misconstrues the nature of labour exploitation and of capitalism generally. For him, it is “not very useful” to try and explain the variations in the value of labour power (and associated wage levels) from one country to another. And he does not want to consider the political implications of his analyses. For example, his claim that “what is unequally exchanged between nations is embodied labour” would appear to imply that products made in the global South would tend to have more embodied labour than products in the global North. It follows that a more equal exchange would be one where Southern products have less embodied labour and/or Northern products have more embodied labour. But what would be the point of moving towards such an equality? It doesn’t take too much reflection to see that this would be politically irrelevant. The reality of labour exploitation is ignored and the reality of global inequality is thereby misrepresented.
As for capitalism generally, Hornborg doesn’t seem to understand that the externalisation of the environment is a product of how capitalism works. Capital expands through the appropriation of nature and setting labour to work to convert this nature into value. For capitalism, value is not inherent but is created by labour. This is politically important because it follows that going beyond capitalism involves the abolition of the value form. Only then will it be possible to live in harmony with nature rather than in opposition to it. I don’t expect Hornborg to understand this but I do expect him to recognise that, within capitalism, the problem of environmental harms is analytically distinct from the problem of labour exploitation (which he doesn’t address, anyway), even though in practice the problems are closely related and must be considered together politically.
On energy, I asked what is the energy exchanged for in EUE theory. Hornborg now tells us that it is exchanged for “the commodities exported from cores to peripheries”. This could refer to the energy embodied in those commodities, in which case an unequal exchange could mean that more energy is flowing from periphery to core than from core to periphery. For the exchange to be equal, presumably the flows in either direction should be equal but it is not clear why this matters. But maybe it means something else, as Hornborg refers to the resources dissipated in producing the commodities, which is not the same as the energy embodied in the finished products, and the dissipation is not an exchange. So here is another confusion. Maybe the unequal exchange means that more resources are going from periphery to core than from core to periphery. But this is not the same as an exchange of energy, and the fact that this happens is something that needs to be explained, e.g. in terms of the global value chains of late capitalism.
Rather than addressing the nature of this capitalism, Hornborg talks of “global social-material metabolism”. What this means is not clear at all but it seems to have the effect of obscuring important distinctions such as between value and use value, labour and labour power, exploitation and appropriation, and so on. Hornborg’s response to my critique serves only to confirm that the concept of ecologically unequal exchange is unhelpful and possibly irrelevant for making sense of global inequality chains or for explaining key features of global economic and social inequality or for point-ing to possible ways forward in mitigating such inequality.
Editors’ Note
The full version of this article appears in Capitalism Nature Socialism, Volume 33, Issue 3 (2022). To engage with its references and for purposes of citation, please visit the published version.