The Unequal Exchange of Time and Space: Toward a Non-Normative Ecological Theory of Exploitation

Abstract

Introduction In this brief essay, I would like to address the topic of unequal exchange-one that recurs in Maurice Godelier's work and is a cornerstone of Marxian social theory. Many social scientists, looking at the world around them, are intuitively convinced that there is such a thing as 'unequal exchange', but would admit to having a hard time defining it. The problem of 'unequal exchange' is a paradigmatically Marxian topic in that our difficulties in conceptualizing it can be seen as part of the conditions for its existence. Thus it cannot be understood other than through an analytically demanding combination of epistemological and ontological arguments that require at different steps in the analysis the approaches of both deconstruction and objectivism. This seems to be the only way open to those of us who want to pursue Godelier's (1998) understanding of power as based on consent; i.e., on the sharing of the same representations among the powerful and the powerless alike, such that the powerless will often see unequal exchanges as reciprocal. In this paper, I will first try to show how and why mainstream economic ideology must ignore the material substance of global commodity flows in order to reproduce the image of market forces as serving the interests of the many radier than the few. I will then suggest some analytical tools for deconstructing this image by identifying, beyond and underneath the price tags, asymmetric flows of material, productive potential (gauged in terms such as energy, labor time and hectare yields). Finally, I will briefly reflect on the implications of this line of reasoning for contemporary discussions of the epistemological ambitions of anthropology. Exchange and the Value of Things Few mainstream economists would recognize the notion of 'unequal exchange' as an acceptable and objective category of economics.3 The implicit notions of 'fairness' that underlie economic reasoning hinge on the subjective experience of the participants in exchange, rather than in any objective analysis of the substance of this exchange. As long as exchange is conducted in terms of monetary exchange values, and prices are understood to reflect the rational or even benevolent logic of market forces, there is no way-other than under conditions of monopolythat a market transaction can be classified as 'unequal'. A million dollars' worth of Swedish Volvos exchanged on the market for a million dollars' worth of Venezuelan oil is by definition perfectly 'equal' in terms of exchange value, which is the only gauge that neoclassical economic theory is capable of applying. It is simply beyond the horizons of neoclassical economic analysis to ask, for instance, what the difference between these two volumes of commodities might be in terms of productive potential; i.e., in terms of their physical contribution to the accumulation of productive infrastructure, or capital. However profoundly we manage to deconstruct the phenomenon of money as a semiotic delusion-aptly classified by Marx as a species of 'fetishism'-the ideological and practical hegemony of exchange value remains more intact than ever. The foundations of Ricardo's science were devised by and for British bankers and stock traders in the early 19th century (cf. Gudeman 1986), yet continue globally to pervade the lives and thoughts of dominator and dominated alike. But as the material and ecological inequalities of global society are accentuated, we have every reason to critically scrutinize the assumption that money and exchange value are the measures of all that is significant for understanding processes of economic growth and accumulation. Marxian theory has from the very start struggled with the analytical problem of how to effectively challenge the mainstream trust in money and in the fairness of market logic. Marx suggested that the market price of labor did not do justice to its real value. He thus offered a normative theory of value in the sense that it defined Value' not in terms of the actual valuations of market actors-as in the neoclassic notion of 'utility'-but in terms of an analytical construct (the labor theory of value) that claimed to show how things ought to be evaluated. …