4 Journal of Ecological Anthropology Vol. 7 2003 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 power- less 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 rather 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 monopoly— that 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 The Unequal Exchange of Time and Space: Toward a Non-Normative Ecological Theory of Exploitation 1 ALF HORNBORG 2 1 A draft of this paper was presented at the 2002 Society for Economic Anthropology meeting in Toronto in a special session with Maurice Godelier. Over the past thirty years, I owe much inspiration to Godelier’s continuing concern with understanding power and social inequality and with unravelling the various mystifications through which power and inequality are reproduced. I am indebted to Eric Jones for several editorial suggestions. 2 Human Ecology Division, Lund University, Sweden. 3 Economists nevertheless acknowledge problems of inequality deriving from conditions of imperfect information. The economists’ solution is thus to try to create conditions for more perfect information flow. I would add that one very crucial kind of information that seems universally to be “imperfect” is the physical properties of the traded products and thus their capacity to contribute to the accumulation of infrastructure/capital (see below). A RTICLES