alf hornborg, use value, energy, and the image of unlimited good – counter
alf hornborg, use value, energy, and the image of unlimited good — counter
5 oct 2026 · 3,618 wordsin a certain way, hornborg is a fetishist about material actualization
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alf studies social systems through energy theory, and his early two thousandth's piece reflects that mindset quite heavily, although recently he's leaning back in on finance, which is probably where he's more interesting (such as in my separate counter to his work where he analyzes the magic of money). his famous and beaten down point is that technomass, as opposed to biomass, is unsustainable because biomass receives effectively unlimited solar energy and exports heat to space, whereas technomass consumes limited earthly resources and leaves pollution/entropy behind.
"use value, energy, and the image of unlimited good" is mostly not a viable analysis of the economy through thermodynamics, because hornborg doesn't want it to be. its instead, the closest we get to a conceptual understanding of industry in his own theory. so instead of evaluating economy, we can do the interesting thing of reading through his theory as such, and trying to understand where the rhetorics is leading him away from vs. towards the concepts.
the actual analysis happens in chapters three and four, which set up exergy and unequal exchange more formally and run the argument through british industrialization, but still, this analysis isn't as strong as global ecology and unequal exchange (which happens a decade later from this writing), which has his calculation of embodied land and labor in the british cotton trade in the nineteenth century. he does also have a shared recent paper in ecological economics, "global patterns of ecologically unequal exchange", which measures embodied material and labor flows between world regions, which i think should have the strongest actual analysis. but enough about that.
so, to the chapter itself: he spends the first three subchapters arguing within his own domain, with local thermodynamic theorists about, how, for example, exchange value was subtly constrained as being read synonymously with use value due to a passive influence baudrillard may have had on english theory and sahlins, influencing how value can be read as open ended when it ends up being synonymous with the abstraction that symbolic communication enables consumption to be read through, deformalizing the energy transfer or whatever hornborg won't like in his own theory. rather, baudrillard appears as an example of abandoning use value, and he traces the conflation to ricardo and neoclassical "utility", or the moment that labour came in to stand for value instead of land as it became profitable to frame it in that way. but nonetheless, i suspect he wouldn't be too fond of baudrillard's whole symbolic communication reframing of labour, as it pushes labour even further away from thermodynamic grounds.
the second subchapter uses georgescu-roegen to argue that industry depends on mining and agriculture almost entirely and that this messes with order, and that "technomass ultimately derives its order from within a finite, inorganic realm, and the economists of industrialism have reason to be concerned with thermodynamics." of course, as already argued, hornborg is never ready to concede the fact that the conversion from one material realm to another may at some point become genuinely possible without entropy somehow rapidly setting in to destroy whatever means are required to make this conversion self-powering. science fiction has already allowed full technological conversions between species-types. the questions which hornborg isn't interested in raising are among the realm of "what threatens inorganic reproduction, other than inorganic and organic beings and natural disaster?" or an even better one "are exotic synthetic materials somehow incapable, or is it not worth it for them to reproduce, if they are to be taken as creatures?". questions like these are set aside by the natural assumption that hornborg continuously forces.
he also spends time criticizing marxists who link the labour theory of value to thermodynamics by saying that their focus on labour obscures other energy sources in accumulation. more interestingly, he says that surplus labour as such isn't predation amongst humans, even if it's still politically oppressive, that the very existence of industrial labour is oppressive, in the sense of categorically being against our needs as a totality. so the real problem isn't the division of labour, but how to avoid industry altogether, because "products of labour can't be eaten directly." aka, stop trying to argue about who does what labour and start realizing that technomass pushes us to do labour that is generally energetically unproductive.
which does raise an interesting question: how come almost everything that is biomass is edible, but almost nothing that is technomass is edible? it's not just because of the material it takes to build it, or the assumptions of a non-edible world. it's about: "where is the energetic pay cost of all this industrial mass?"
maybe his implication is that evolution balances energy by sometimes making the eater be eaten, whereas labour never actually produces positive energy. it mostly makes use of the nearly infinite solar energy available on the planet, because biomass has already balanced itself efficiently. whereas, he does make the argument later that arguments about the division or ownership of labor are literally a trap, since labor is a synthetic invention meant to pull us away from maximizing energy returns per quota. or put another way, oil isn't converted into food. it's spent to provide the energy needed to harvest, so it never really produces food.
on a more interesting note, he says that hunter-gatherer/pastoral societies could exist in a steady state as long as the sun shines (literally, since it's technically an infinite energy source, at least in any timeline that matters). this is why they can imagine work as being "exchanged" for harvests, though this circularity is an illusion, since work gives access to food but is not incorporated in technically generating or being part of it in a way that directly feeds back into the order of energy.
that's because for him there's a difference between the meta order of a system (is it, as a process, able to wager on its future forms of ordering?) and it's supposed "ordering" as a structural feature, as well as, the primary way it converges on energy vs. what it assumes its exchanging and for what reason, and most importantly, it's ability to make use of vs. to harness and transpose energy (i use the term transposition he doesn't). transposing would mean that we are able to actually positively impact our energetic state by contributing to the longevity or generativity of its source, and harnessing is different from eating on account of whether the energy spent attaining a resource is actually incorporated into the resource that ends up being collected.
if transposition isn't possible, then we may be failing to equilibrialize whatever energy we are using, which is useful rhetorically for hornborg because as he sees the anthropocene make a bunch of irreversible decisions, its easy for him to label those as mistakes when, it is in many ways true, our current political economy has repeatedly failed to show how it will turn merchandizing (one of his focal points) as an actual economic institution into a sustainable practice.
on the one hand, the general line of thinking here makes me think: wait, your whole theory is predicated on trying to understand where "uneven exchange" is happening, without, for example, trying to see whether originally energetically useless states can occasionally create new kinds of technology that reach states of exergy, as much balance as possible, up to zero, which is apparently always less than the productive amount. but he's so energy-focused because of the sustainability question that he considers the entire civilizational order, on the one hand, oppressive, but on the other hand, a straight-up failed order (or rather that it literally fails at comprehending how to make sense of order)
if technomass is genuinely analogous to biomass, why couldn't it evolve something like autotrophy? biomass got its steady-state relationship with the sun because photosynthesis evolved. hornborg uses the biological metaphor for rhetorical force but forbids it the one property that made biomass sustainable. that lets him present a contingent empirical fact (industry hasn't closed its loop) as a structural, almost ontological one (industry can't). so let's take the autotrophic question on its own for a moment, without straying too far away from the material.
i think hornborg is too early to say technomass will never find its own energetic pay cost. we'll build machines that figure out how to use energy in new ways, that can eat each other and avoid a certain entropic speed. maybe. and how do we get to that point? first, a viable commercial fusion reactor that uses fusion, the same principle as the sun. let's call it a technosun, although i guess it wouldn't actually be a sun-type object, even if it has probably the same level of energetic non-wastefulness on average (although definitely not on a political level, which would be part of his point, which we'll get to). and then the other part is making the components of the robots more "edible"/reversible to begin with, which isn't just recycling, but avoiding inseparable composites. total modularity. but we'd need productive energy conversion too, like how organisms release heat into space according to alf, totalling on three separate principles of technobiotic mimicry to even achieve a speculative scenario where our critique counts.
one idea could be solar + electrolysis + synthetic-fuel production: harvesting incoming solar flux and turning it into portable chemical energy that other machines can eat, which is basically a direct comparison to biomatter. so then alf would say some shit like: you can't jump from "thermodynamically conceivable" to "technology can autonomously reproduce itself like life," because machinery still depends on social organization, mining, unequal exchange, infrastructure, maintenance, etc. and then i'd say something like, that's the cost of material conversion from bio to tech. and he'd say, okay, but why even do it? and that would bring us to a paper by him that attempts to predict this whole consequential discourse, chapter seven of his other work "global magic", titled the political ecology of technological utopianism.
of course he sees it as utopianism, because a large part of his argument is predicated on the idea that technomass is unsustainable, even if technomass has not actually had the chance to prove that it's able to solve the exergy dilemma, or convert different forms of energy efficiently by changing the material basis or ways of convergence or energy sources that make this possible, even if it apparently would have utopian reasons to do such a thing, regardless of the fact it is in fact of course destroying the planet.
page 104 and below deserve a closer reading. "thermodynamic theory asserts that energy quality and order are consumed in maintaining a structure, whereas economics is founded on the idea that value is generated in production. merely to manage maintenance, industry must be paid more for its products than it spends on fuels and raw materials, even though it has achieved a decrease in the overall sum of order."
this is because industry sees value as things that aren't entirely dependent on the reading of equilibriumizing some theory of energetics as involving the entire solar system and the revolution of all the stars and every forest and garden in the earth. it is true however that it has destroyed enough biomass to be considered an extinction. however, these facts arent fully reconcilable, and it doesnt lead to the assumption that now value cannot be considered outside of the chain of these values. industry may require more spending than it can logically attribute to its own "productivity" because as an autonomic system, it needs that amount of energy waste to actually excuse its existence.
thermodynamics isnt some evolutional theory, it isnt somehow failing to spread its genes or survive within some rigid physical order. this makes it both more conditional and synthetic, but also more self-reinforcing. criticizing it for things such as inefficient exchange or political domination or extraction or blindsided use of money also doesn't somehow extend to the idea that the sustainability critique would naturally manage this criticism, because they aren't even the same form criticism. there could be a speculative theory of superior industry that somehow both helps us slow down entropy and create sustainability, all whilst creating damaging industries that arent even autotrophical, and creating actual reputational damage for biomass itself, making even indigenous forms of living less likely to be argued in favor for thermodynamically.
imagine on earth, a speculative "superior industry" that wastes twice the energy, creates twice the pollution we do at time i'm writing this, has a theory of money that somehow makes it an economic index, as in, makes it literally explain energy waste and expenditure and refer back to the entire social order as an interconnected system and shows ecological damage in real time, an actual symbol of some place called "moneyland" that has the feeling of exchanging money actually orgasmically integrated into its sex life, and for some reason sends all the trash it generates into the sun in the form of sun-damaging combust, but not only maintains but temporarily extends the biomass of our earth, and is somehow aiding mars to develop life, and helping some third planet decrease entropy so much that it creates 18 times the net energy gain per individual, double the amount of the supposed indigenous kalahari hunter-gatherers that hornborg cites as obtaining, as it simultaneously massively damages the lifeline of the sun, and due to some mistake makes photosynthesis impossible and forces all plants to be primordially purple or something. this example trivializes hornborg's theory because it clearly shows the split, at least in this writing, of the rhetorical damage of industry and the already limited critique about exergy, my actual point of course being that exergy waste, ecological harm, and domination are separable dimensions.
hornborg continues "as luxemburg long ago observed capitalism cannot subsist by itself, because the money spent by industry cannot constitute a sufficient market for its products. this predicament is the motor behind (1) the imperative, continuous expansion of production ("growth"), primarily through increased mechanization ("technological development"), (2) the pursuit of new markets (imperialism), and (3) the pervasive process of inflation, stemming from the struggle to keep the sum of sales always one step ahead of the sum of costs".
this sentence is clearly interesting, but maybe not the whole story, and that's okay, because it's a story enough to believe hornborg about cultural mythology and the way linguistics propagandizes capitalism, but purely on the level of the claims, growth could (not saying it is) be a type of meta-growth of the volition inherent in wanting to pursue city-life, as in, the type of living that allows automation to change the diction, pace, way of economic acting, without changing the standards, expectations or ultimately inner experience of such an act. this matters as its related to how economies can actually change every material surrounding around us, without changing the basic normative principles it takes as related to our "way of living", or satisfaction, or how we actually integrate into the whole economy. take a video game analogy, when something in the game feels overpowered for players, developers tend to "patch" the game by changing the statistics of everything and how it feels to be made to play against, for or within a new statistical outcome, without the game experience itself feeling fundamentally different in any immediate sense. if this is what growth is subjectively, it means there's a reason to push economic principles that don't actually depend on the myth of "development" as a type of cope of potential better future outcomes. the other two points we can set aside for now and bring back later.
"if industry actually were to generate order, rather than extract it from elsewhere, it should be possible for money to circulate without chronic deficits: the sum spent on wages, fuels, and raw materials could be equal to the sum gained from sales, yet growth would be feasible. because this is not the case, growth, imperialism, and inflation are all symptoms of the accelerating thermodynamic waste of industrial production. to the extent that manual labor (biological process) is replaced by machines, the efficiency of this conversion is drastically reduced"
this is a problem that he runs into the text elsewhere as well, hornborg seems to treat a price surplus and an order deficit as the same thing, even if a wildly wasteful industry could run a balanced monetary circuit if the accounting worked out, because the total energy cost isn't immediately calculable, whereas the monetary circuit itself seems independent both from how damaging the industry is, and how efficiently it makes use of energy on a global scale, which is something hornborg seems to already know and criticize. the idea that replacing manual labor with machines drastically reduces conversion efficiency heavily depends on the case by case basis, because on a per hour basis machines seem to heavily increase efficiency, whereas overall for the entire global agricultural machines, human labour currently comes out as less wasteful, which is more to do with increasing attempts at optimization. on a power basis, an electric engine seems to convert a far larger amount of resources into energy than a human labourer does. of course, the labour to make, maintain, optimize, recycle, upkeep and whatever else is needed for that many electric engines, is a separate topic. yet notice how earlier automation was another problem for hornborg, one that you would actually come to realize is an early speculative basis for the future existence of the synthetic reproduction of technical life.
his inflation argument is dependable as well, given how for example, an economy like japan can survive nearly two decades without any, whereas apparently luxemburgs problem is already solved by kalecki's profit equation, or more generally, the idea that there is no net export from the globe to another planet, or any way to balance the profits against some competitive image where suddenly there is the possibility of capital accumulation reaching the point where it needs to put all of its extra contained resources in even more buyers, or the entire system inherently stops being able to push itself forward. the question would go something like "if firms pay out less than they want back, where does the extra money come from?"
and the answer would be, well, various things, from investing to credit to value over time, from the ability to create and sustain a business, to changes in what is valuable or how much something costs, and ultimately, to the idea that scaling markets dont actually even neatly translate to buyer possibility and demand. it is inherently true that industries scale, expand, monopolize, produce, innovate and so on regardless of the direct flow of spending, buying, leasing, waging and so on, because wages are only a small part of the total value that firms gain or lose by existing. how well a corporation pays its workers, how much money it makes from exporting items, how much it actually takes from the earth, how much profit it generates, how much waste it creates, how much money it will make in the future just from existing, and whether or not it will have competitors that threaten its market share are apparently factors that at times can be surprisingly divorced from one another.
in the final subchapter, hornborg goes back to hedging the question of linguistic appropriation, the idea that machines are social phenomena, and other relevant pursuits in his field, but he does leave us with one additional little proclamation: "the imperative of external input visualized by luxemburg (realization over and beyond domestic consumption) has haunted industrialism from the start. in the long run, industrialism is faced with the same problem whether restricted to eighteenth-century england or having engulfed the global niche to which it aspires. in the latter case, it will have reached the critical point at which expansion is no longer possible." it seems in fact that, what hornborg wanted to emphasize even with his earlier rosa quotation comes down to a slightly different issue, that being the idea that, in fact, the very aspect of realization over consumption seems to be troubling towards sustainability.
in a certain way, hornborg is a fetishist about material actualization, because having however many times the net energy efficiency inside of a human body without needing to somehow create future sources of potential energy investment is a positive thing, whereas any type of non-consumptive energy waste is generally an issue. if taken to such a thermodynamic absolute, then couldn't hornborg simply argue that humanity should either augment themselves into some type of proto-fungal or proto-bacterial species that helps biomass equilibriate to higher amounts of efficiency, or simply cease to exist? what is energetically "productive" in the non-technical sense about life, that isn't already energetically productive in simple plant matter? where is the teleological principle in being anti-industry, if ecology cannot actually explain why any creature should waste energy on anything at all?
finally, as a preliminary to a future article i'd write on this topic, let's quickly go over just one assumption raised in hornborg's far superior 2021 article on this topic about net embodied labour time, and that is that if the problem lies in embodied unequal exchange, it is possible that net problems in exchange show that industry is a rampantly destabilizing or dominating force in economic systems, but it still doesnt necessarily bridge the gap that hornborg suffers from, between the rhetorical belief that industry is unsustainable as an imperative vs. as an actual energetic principle, which all depend on whether automaticity, which he already seems to dislike, can actually optimize its expenditure in a way that is already being designed for.
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