The political ecology of money: Uneven development,materiality,and unequal exchange

Abstract

This review of a selection of literature in critical geography, political ecology, eco-Marxism, and ecological economics over the past five decades reflects on the paucity of discussion on the phenomenon of modern, all-purpose money. This is paradoxical, given the almost universal denunciation of mainstream economics and capitalist political economy in this literature. The critiques of environmental injustices and uneven development tend to target an abstract capitalist ‘system’ rather than the peculiar and historically recent artefact of money through which it operates. A rethinking of the role of money in the modern world economy can unravel ambiguities in Marxian concepts of value, unequal exchange, and exploitation. In remaining confined to the hegemonic worldview, monetary framings of inequalities miss the mark of exposing the veiled material asymmetries in social metabolism. It is argued that the concept of value refers to money, rather than vice versa, while unequal exchange should be understood as asymmetric transfers of material resources, rather than values. Monetary and biophysical flows must be approached as analytically distinct phenomena, where the latter are mystified by the former. Rather than attempt to straddle this distinction, the Marxian labour theory of value can be understood as addressing a subset within a wider range of exploitative, biophysical exchange relations. The monetary theory of value indicated here appears to be aligned with some recent Marxist scholarship.

Introduction

The burgeoning academic and activist literature which over the past half century has gravitated toward political ecology appears to suffer from a blind spot. Countless people identifying with human geography, environmental sociology, environmental history, sustainability science, ecological economics, degrowth, and related fields have been deliberating on the unsustainability and environmental injustices of the global capitalist system but generally tend to avoid what is arguably the core of the problem. There is a widespread consensus that this system, unless checked, will lead to disaster. Frequently marshalling data from natural science, radical scholars and activists representing the transdisciplinary concerns of political ecology, widely defined, have expressed increasing alarm about the socioecological trajectory of modern civilisation. Yet, there is a conspicuous lack of agreement about the ultimate root of the problem. Diagnoses have ranged, for instance, from capitalist property relations, mainstream economic ideology, demography, and the use of fossil energy to patriarchy, greed, or even human nature. Like the blind men feeling their way around the elephant, each perspective seems to offer but a fragment of a more fundamental disorder. This more fundamental problem, I shall argue, is the phenomenon we know as money.

To an overwhelming extent, the disturbing social and ecological predicament of humankind derives from a unique cultural feature that emerged a mere 2600 years ago but that most people today rarely reflect upon: the use of standardised, impersonal tokens signifying abstract exchange-value. In the wider discourse on political economy, there have been several useful critiques of money, even visions of abolishing money altogether (Cleaver, 2017; Holloway, 2022; Nelson, 2022; Nelson and Timmerman, 2011; Project Society After Money, 2019), but the field of political ecology has generally remained silent on the topic. Indeed, in most contexts, to question or relativise money today tends to provoke ridicule. I take this as an indication of how thoroughly entrenched modern social life is in the everyday meanings, concerns, and routines generated by this seemingly self-evident artefact. Yet, general-purpose money must be understood as a recent and peculiar artefact not only in an evolutionary perspective but also in human history (Hornborg, 2025a). Some decades ago, anthropologists reminded us that it is by no means a human universal, particularly if we apply a historical time frame (Bohannan, 1955; Dalton, 1968). Nevertheless, although the brief period of human history in which we have used all-purpose money coincides with a rapid devastation of the biosphere, deliberations on political ecology very rarely attend to the connection.

Political ecology is often defined by geographers and anthropologists as the extension of approaches from political economy onto environmental issues. It seems, however, that a vital perspective essential to anthropology has failed to be incorporated into the political ecology practiced by geographers: the acknowledgement that political economy itself is founded on tacit cultural categories that deserve to be unpacked. The defining assumption of general-purpose money – namely, that almost all things are commensurable – is such a cultural phenomenon (Hornborg, 2026). It is fundamental not only to capitalism, as abundantly demonstrated by Marx, but to the entire history of commercial civilisation since its emergence in ancient Greece (Seaford, 2004). This is not to deny that money in capitalism encouraged new modes of accumulation that have been incisively analysed by Marx, but, as Marx himself acknowledges, the monetary reification of abstract exchange-value goes back to the time of Aristotle. Marx devoted much time and space, both in Grundrisse and Capital, to the phenomenon of money, but, except for David Harvey (1996, 2018), few radical geographers and political ecologists have followed in his footsteps. The main reason for this omission appears to be the comparatively scant attention granted to culture and semiotics in a field customarily committed to materialism.

A predictable reaction to the denunciation of all-purpose money is to ask what alternative there might be to such money. I will not devote space in this article to attempting to answer that question, ¹ as it must be considered irrelevant to the project of analytically grasping the roots of the socioecological predicament of our species. Even if there currently is an absence of politically realistic alternatives, this should not impede our pursuit of a valid understanding of that predicament. In other words, acceptance of the problem definition should not be contingent on the presentation of a credible solution.

The florescence of political ecology reflects the widespread understanding that environmental degradation and socioeconomic inequalities – nature and society – are fundamentally entwined, but the precise way in which they are interrelated continues to be contested. In what follows, I trace a cursory genealogy of theoretical concerns in critical human geography that have converged in addressing the interrelations between nature and society. The review emphasises the emergence of political ecology from Marxist analyses of the ‘production of space’ and uneven development in capitalism, which formed part of the background to the expansion, in the 1990s, of geographical literature presenting itself as political ecology. Further on, it considers the confluence with approaches from the field of ecological economics, which since the turn of the millennium has increasingly used the concept of political ecology for its concerns with how the human use and abuse of nature boil down to sociopolitical issues of justice and distribution. Both Marxist and ecological economic theories are founded on critiques of mainstream neoclassical economics. Their heterodox approaches to economics have generated materialist conceptualisations of global inequalities in terms such as ‘world-system analysis’, ‘ecologically unequal exchange’, and ‘metabolic rifts’. At the theoretical macro-level, concepts like these have helped consolidate the transdisciplinary field of concerns now recognised as political ecology, largely formed at the intersections of environmental justice studies, ecological economics, and ecological Marxism. They provide modes of conceptually integrating analyses of political economy with the material spatiality of nature. In illuminating the spatial polarisations that organise human societies at various scales, they provide backgrounds to a vast range of empirical case studies exploring the details of environmental injustices from around the world. The engagement in case studies has stimulated extensive collaboration with activist movements confronting the economic and political interests responsible for environmental degradation.

As human-environmental relations all over the world have become increasingly encompassed by the extractivist and dissolvent logic of capitalism, the preoccupation of political economy with material aspects of power has resulted in a comparative neglect of its less tangible, semiotic dimensions. Given the centrality in political ecology of the contradiction between capital and global ecology, it is remarkable to find so little discussion in these discourses on money – as a unique semiotic and cultural phenomenon. I argue that, precisely because of its seemingly self-evident ubiquity in modern life, money must be defamiliarised and theorised from the perspective of semiotics and economic anthropology, which means going beyond traditional Marxist concerns with the political economy of capital. We must emphasise how cultural notions of exchange-value are fundamental to the social processes through which labour and other resources are dislodged from their local ecological contexts and embodied in distant commodities and infrastructures. At the same time, however, a genuinely materialist approach to world trade must address the relevance of international flows of embodied labour, exploited land, extracted materials, and dissipated (nonhuman) energy. Human geography should be an ideal academic space for such transdisciplinary investigations, as it has long been navigating the difficult terrain between the social and the natural. ²

Tracing the spatial repercussions of money

As an anthropologist with Marxist leanings, I find it intriguing to learn about the struggles of Marxist geographers over the decades to find ways of theoretically articulating critical approaches within their discipline. Edward Soja (1989) shows how critical human geographers in the 1970s and 1980s were compelled to ‘spatialise’ the predominantly historical narrative of Marxism. Up until this struggle to reassert space in critical social theory, the traditional concerns of geography – widely associated with environmental determinism – had not been conducive to critical thought:

To be labelled a geographer was an intellectual curse, a demeaning association with an academic discipline so far removed from the grand houses of modern social theory and philosophy as to appear beyond the pale of critical relevance. (Soja, 1989: 19)

Typically, the conspicuous global gaps between European modernity and the ‘undeveloped, traditional, not yet fully modernized parts of the world’ (Soja, 1989: 33) were interpreted in terms of the history of industrial capitalism, that is, in terms of temporal lags rather than spatial polarisations. By 1960, Soja laments, the discipline was ‘theoretically asleep’ (Soja, 1989: 38).

Then geography discovered Henri Lefebvre. He was, in Soja's assessment, ‘the leading spatial theoretician in Western Marxism and the most forceful advocate for the reassertion of space in critical social theory’ (Soja, 1989: 47). Citing David Harvey, Soja observes that Marx had failed to incorporate a spatial dimension into his thought (Soja, 1989: 65). For Lefebvre, the peculiar spatiality of capitalism consists in its production and mystification of a geographically uneven development, generated by simultaneous processes of homogenisation and stratification. The tendency of capitalism to produce spatial inequalities was subsequently identified by Marxist geographers throughout the whole range of social scales from individual cities to the entire world economy. In 1973, Harvey's book Social Justice and the City inaugurated a Marxist urban geography and a spatial turn in critical social theory. At roughly the same time, but largely outside of geography, there emerged critical studies of global asymmetries and underdevelopment under the banners of Latin American structuralism, dependency theory, world-system analysis, and theories of unequal exchange. Soja notes that the spatiality of urbanism was difficult to ignore, while the fact that the capitalist world economy is similarly polarised was much more elusive in the 1960s and 1970s (Soja, 1989: 55). Common to both these social polarisations, however, is the ideological function of spatial separation as a way of ‘hiding consequences from us’ (Soja, 1989: 62–63; emphasis added). The tendency in capitalism to generate oppressive socioeconomic inequalities, whether between neighbourhoods or nations, is made less conspicuous by keeping rich and poor geographically apart.

Largely inspired by Lefebvre, Harvey and his student Neil Smith elaborated a theoretically ambitious Marxist geography focused on the spatial dimensions of capitalism. Foundational studies in this genre include Harvey's The Limits to Capital (1982) and Smith's Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (1984). The level of abstraction in these volumes can be daunting for readers who are not specialised in Marxist theory. To give an example, in a single paragraph, Smith ([1984] 2010: 164–165) refers to five different varieties of capital, and over the following 30 pages, another six. ³ There is also a troubling inclination in this work to anthropomorphise capital, or at least to represent it as an agent with purposes and intentions. Here is a typical formulation:

As capital stares into the future and runs from the past, it is tempted continually to embrace mobility or fixity as alternative versions of the spatial fix. (Smith, [1984] 2010: 202)

Another example of this mode of representing the logic of money in the modern world economy is Smith's assertion that ‘[c]apital has no choice whether to expand into pre-capitalist societies but it does have a “choice” about how it does this’ (Smith, [1984] 2010: 187). There is an ambiguity in such wordings about whether it refers to the temptations and choices of human capitalists or (incongruously) of their money. This ambiguity about the locus of agency has been pervasive throughout the century and a half since Marx launched his critique of political economy. The target of Marxist critique is both a category of humans (capitalists) and a mindless (capitalist) ‘system’ enabled by specific social institutions such as money, markets, and wage labour. But capital is neither a purposive agent nor a coherent system but the emergent effects of the artefact of all-purpose money, which has continued to generate new strategies for accumulation ever since its appearance in the seventh century BCE. It is an idea about general fungibility that is engendering profitable forms of human interaction faster than economists can devise labels for them (cf. Varoufakis, 2023).

While class antagonism is a predictable outcome of industrial capitalism, it is not evident that hostility between groups of people is the most likely engine of progressive social change, as Marx affirmed. Rather than target the human agents of an increasingly unequal social system, it may be potentially more transformative to locate the root of the evil in money itself – to identify this peculiar human artefact as the source of all those infinitely complex social strategies that preoccupy economists, financial consultants, and some geographers. ⁴ Individual human agents will always be replaced, but a general recognition of the role of all-purpose money in generating inequalities and environmental degradation (much as the recognition of the role of fossil fuels in generating climate change) at least has prospects of prompting a radical transformation of the persistent, underlying structures.

The issue of how to approach money from a Marxist perspective is, of course, of singular significance. To attribute ‘agency’ to money is, paradoxically, to fetishise it, which is precisely what Marx challenged. Yet, we must concede that the inherent properties of general-purpose money do stimulate specific patterns of human behaviour, namely, those unravelled by economists, financial consultants, and some geographers. Finding a balance between the two positions means rejecting the notion that money has autonomous powers or purposes while acknowledging that, like the pieces in a board game, it does generate regularities in the processes and trajectories of social interaction. This must be the first step toward transcending its grip on humankind, rather than simply identifying its current beneficiaries as villains, as if they had designed the rules of the game. When exposed to critical scrutiny, the tacit rules of the game can be changed through collective decisions, without necessarily condemning the most fortunate players.

A central question for a Marxist approach to money must be how capital accumulation is generated by the relation between money signs and the material substance of social life. This means taking into consideration features of both money and material reality, a topic to which we now turn.

What is unequally exchanged?

Marx's analysis of political economy in nineteenth-century Britain focused on the exploitation of workers by capitalists. Its foundation in the labour theory of value identified the former's labour-power as the substance that is appropriated by the latter. In this conceptualisation of capitalism, it suffices to examine exploitation – the unequal transfer of labour value – as occurring within the confines of a factory. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, radical social thinkers increasingly addressed economic asymmetries between nations. In mainstream economic thought, disparities between what we today call the Global North and the Global South have widely been attributed to temporal (historical) lags in development, but some Marxist theorists have understood inequalities between cores and peripheries as generated by and inherent in capitalism (Brewer, 1990). In the latter view, the differentiation of the world into ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ nations and regions is a spatial reflection of the polarising logic of capital. In the 1970s, such spatial perspectives on development were dominated by theorists like Andre Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein, ⁵ Arghiri Emmanuel, and Samir Amin. Emmanuel (1972) and Amin (1973) focused on how international exploitation could be understood in terms of the ‘unequal exchange’ of labour value embodied in trade. This notion, as Soja (1989: 112) notes, seems ‘a straightforward derivation from the general discussion of the transfer of value found in Capital, Volume III’. Yet, Emmanuel's study may have been the first to systematically explore ‘the material significance of capitalist spatiality’ in terms of the geographical transfer of value (Soja, 1989: 115). Although the implication that regions could exploit other regions became controversial among Marxists, Soja observes that the ‘parent “model”’ for such value transfers and core-periphery relations can be found in Marx's own discussion of the antagonism between town and countryside (Soja, 1989: 114, n10). ⁶

This observation of Soja's is significant, as it highlights a problematic ambiguity in Marxist theory. Marx's discussion of the relation between town and countryside has repeatedly been marshalled by eco-Marxists as evidence of Marx's concerns over the ‘metabolic rift’ between urban and rural areas and, by extension, between capitalism and the planetary biosphere (Foster, 2000; Foster et al., 2010). As evident in both Marx's and Foster's accounts, this metabolic rift between exploiter and exploited refers to asymmetric flows of soil nutrients and other material resources, rather than values. Emmanuel's transfers of abstract labour value and Foster's metabolic flows of ‘natural-material use values’ (Foster et al., 2020: 36) are quite separate ways of conceptualising the unequal exchange generating geographically uneven development in capitalism. To equate them would be to conflate economic value with material entities like nitrogen and phosphorus, which most Marxists would reject.

As an obvious manifestation of the relevance of space in critical social theory, the topic of uneven development became central to Marxist geography. Smith ([1984] 2010: 4) declares that ‘uneven development is the systematic geographical expression of the contradictions inherent in the very constitution and structure of capital’. His book Uneven Development devotes much space and theoretical effort to the subject, but it remains almost entirely confined to the labyrinthine realm of Marxist theory. ⁷ This is a paradox, as the geographical focus on spatiality could be expected to address empirical, material aspects of capitalism. ‘At root’, writes Smith, ‘the stuff of nature is matter; in its “nature”, nature is material’ (Smith, [1984] 2010: 17). Citing Alfred Schmidt, he explains Marx's use of the concept of ‘metabolism’ as the process by which humans add their own ‘essential forces’ to natural objects to produce use-values (Smith, [1984] 2010: 34). However, in a chapter titled ‘The Production of Nature’, he provides no indication that these essential forces or the objects to which they are applied implicate tangible physical phenomena of matter or energy. In hindsight, the abstract discourse on capital and value suggests that some critical geography, in its eagerness in the 1980s to become relevant to social theory, largely jettisoned its concerns with genuine materiality.

The contradictory approaches to social metabolism in Marxist theory no doubt reflect a fundamental ambiguity in Marx's own thinking. On numerous occasions, Marx couches his discussion of human labour in the idiom of natural science, prompting the modern eco-Marxists Paul Burkett ([1999] 2014, [2005] 2009) and John Bellamy Foster (2000, 2014) to argue that his theory of surplus value was deeply grounded in thermodynamics and ecology. On the other hand, Marx's labour theory of value and account of capital accumulation have spawned a huge theoretical literature for which thermodynamics and ecology are completely irrelevant. ⁸ It is thus no wonder, for instance, that Harvey's (1996: 194–196, 1998) and Foster's (1994, 1998) perspectives on ecological politics are so incompatible. Regardless of whom of these scholars Marx would have sided with, the question remains whether the unequal exchange between affluent and impoverished segments of society at various scales should be conceptualised in terms of values or material resources. Given Marx's framework, it could arguably be both. The unequal exchange calculated by Emmanuel and Amin referred to monetary values, whereas the expended labour-power that is embodied in the traded commodities – for Marxists the only source of value – is sometimes equated by Marx with energy (Burkett, [2005] 2009: 185). Marx's ambition to integrate natural- and social-science perspectives on labour can thus inspire two separate theoretical projects, one based on economics and the other on physics.

If we do not keep money and energy analytically separate, we would be offering an energy theory of value. In recent decades, the most famous proponent of such a theory is Howard T. Odum (1996). Unsurprisingly, Foster is intrigued by convergences between Odum's approach and the Marxist labour theory of value (Foster and Holleman, 2014). Indeed, there are structural similarities between the two approaches (Lonergan, 1988). However, attempts to straddle the differences between them must lead to inconsistencies, as they offer competing accounts of the alleged sources of economic value. Moreover, both are contradicted by empirical evidence. There is no clear correlation between the price of a commodity and the quantities of either labour or energy that have been expended in its production.

So, how would a genuinely materialist approach to unequal exchange be articulated? It would recognise capital accumulation and the asymmetric flows that sustain it, although orchestrated by market prices, as non-monetary, material phenomena that can only be gauged in biophysical metrics such as embodied labour, land, materials, and energy (Dorninger et al., 2021). These biophysical flows must be kept analytically distinct from the value systems that orchestrate them. The failure to do so, as in the derivation of economic value from embodied labour, impedes Marxist theory from fully acknowledging – indeed, escaping – the ideological role of money. This analytical peculiarity in Marx is succinctly expressed by Oliver Schlaudt (2025: 39):

He [Marx] criticises money as a mystification of exploitation, but is able to quantify its amount in monetary terms.

Similarly astute is Jan Overwijk's (2024: 24) remark that exploitation, in Marxist theory, ‘works with a commensurability of ecology and economy in which muscle power and bank notes are exchangeable’. Given that it should be unreasonable to postulate a quantitative difference between metrics as incommensurable as labour-power's use-value and its wage (Hornborg, 2019: 34; Keen, 1993: 112), the Marxist theory of exploitation would seem to be reducible to the difference between the monetary cost and the monetary output of labour.

If we recognise money as the ideological means of exploitation and refrain from using it as a measure of exploitation, it will be easier for us to see Marx's fundamental point that what is being appropriated by capitalists from workers is their labour-power. As Marx observed, labour-power is energy. But it is not the only kind of biophysical resource that is appropriated in capitalism, nor is it the only input in production that contributes to the value of the finished product. It is misguided to phrase unequal exchange in terms of monetary values (Hornborg, 2025b). Common to Marx's foundational analysis of the exploitation of industrial labour and recent calculations of ecologically unequal exchange (Dorninger et al., 2021) is the insight that money serves as an ideological veil of fictive reciprocity that mystifies asymmetric transfers of biophysical resources. The logic of market pricing is such that increases in the economic value or ‘utility’ of a set of resources transformed through production correlate with their material dissipation, which reduces their future availability and productive potential (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971). This means that core areas of production will continuously be rewarded with access, through monetary profits, to increasing volumes of the resources required to produce their exported commodities and maintain their infrastructure (Hornborg, 1992). This is a radically transdisciplinary argument that juxtaposes thermodynamics and semiotics, thus fitting uneasily in fields that are dominated by a focus on either objective or subjective phenomena. Particularly problematic is its inaccessibility for mainstream neoclassical economics, which is exclusively concerned with the ultimately subjective concept of utility.

The asymmetric resource transfers resulting from the inverse correlation of value and productive potential are the stuff of social metabolism and should be an obvious focus of studies claiming to be ‘materialist’. Importantly, the unequal transfers are pervasive in international trade, reaching very far beyond the confines of Marx's factory and yet contributing to the accumulation of the industrial technology that he celebrated. The progress of the productive forces under capitalism is thus neither morally neutral nor ultimately beneficial for humankind but a measure of global exploitation. A genuinely materialist perspective will acknowledge the insidious symbiosis of money and technology in generating uneven development. Yet, it seems that the critical geography that once aspired to expose the logic of uneven development now takes both money and technology for granted. Invoking Gramsci's concept of hegemony, we may ask if political ecology has unwittingly been coopted by neoliberal ideology?

Money, materiality, and political ecology

The 1990s were a foundational period for political ecology. It was also a time when critical human geography, in the footsteps of David Harvey, ambitiously addressed the politics and phenomenology of money (Corbridge et al., 1994). As Corbridge and Thrift (1994: 22) conclude their introduction to the volume Money, Power and Space, ‘money is more than just an economic phenomenon, … [it] is also a social and cultural relation bound up with asymmetries of power’. They argue that the modern ‘production of differences and distinctions is only made possible by concrete abstractions like money’ and are baffled by how we ‘have placed our faith first in gold and silver, then in paper monies, and now in electronic representations of these paper tokens of “real” value’ (Corbridge and Thrift, 1994: 20–21). They continue:

Fantastic as our faith might be, it is a necessary faith. We must believe in the modern money form because money greases the wheels of industry; money makes the world go round.

Following Marx's and Harvey's definition of credit money as the fictitious capital through which ‘capitalism displaces crisis, both temporally and spatially’, Susan Roberts (1994: 91–92) reflects:

In a fundamental way money is the central enigma of capitalism. … The realization that money only works because people believe in it underscores the fictitious quality of money.

Citing Simmel, Michael Watts (1994: 411) in the same volume shows how ‘money itself is a “frightful leveller” whose colourlessness and indifference “hollows out the core of things”’. The frequently repeated insight that money is a fiction becomes even more disturbing when we invert, as I believe it is valid to do, the relation between money and value. Whereas most people would hold that money is a measure of (some kind of) value, it is equally or more reasonable to observe that our notion of ‘value’ is a measure of how much money some item or service will fetch on the market. Dictionaries trace this definition of value (that is, the amount of money that something is worth) back to the fifteenth century. Given Roberts’ reflection above, we are led to conclude that value is as fictitious and constructed as the money of which it is a measure. As has become obvious in the current age of financialisation, money and value tautologically define each other. Financialisation raises the question how self-referential definitions of value and money can be reconciled with the objectivist concept of value that is so central to Marxist theory.

Of David Harvey's many books, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996) is both the most relevant to political ecology and the one that most elaborately explores the phenomenology of money. In his Introduction, Harvey explains:

[It seemed] appropriate to let the question of money permeate the various chapters in much the same way that it permeates almost every facet of socio-ecological, personal, and collective life in the world we have now constructed. The process of money valuation is, it transpires, simultaneously a process defining space, time, environment, and place and I shall endeavour to unravel that connection in some detail. (Harvey, 1996: 11)

A chapter in Harvey's book titled ‘Valuing Nature’ opens with a section persuasively reviewing the many reasons why the idea of applying monetary valuation to nature is deeply problematic yet concludes that ‘it will be impossible in practice to avoid money valuations’ and that such valuations ‘are not an unmitigated evil’ (Harvey, 1996: 150–157). The general thrust of much of the book is to temper arguments from passionate environmentalists and environmentally engaged scholars while emphasising more anthropocentric arguments for an environmental justice that is, above all, a matter of social justice. In arguing that it is unfeasible to distinguish ‘society’ from ‘nature’ or ‘environment’, both Harvey and Smith undermine categories that are essential to many environmentalists. Harvey (1996: 186–187) challenges his readers to try ‘drawing the boundary’ between ‘society’ and ‘environment’ in their own daily lives, while Smith ([1984] 2010: 244) calls it ‘a fool's debate’ to try to distinguish social vis-à-vis natural contributions to climate change. ⁹ Predictably, this position has been vehemently rejected by climate activists and theorists of climate change (Malm, 2018: 28–30). Paradoxically, given that the discipline was once associated with environmental determinism, geographers like Harvey and Smith adopt a form of theorising about society that appears to neglect nature by refusing to engage seriously with it as objective reality.

On the other hand, Harvey's (1996) explorations of the phenomenology of money remain unsurpassed in human geography and political ecology. In drawing on the anthropologist Nancy Munn's (1986) analysis of exchange in precapitalist societies in Melanesia, he understands how the webs of social relations created by the movements of gifts of food and valuables constitute dynamic fields of ‘space-time’ that define the extent and qualities (‘fame’) of each individual person. The exchange of shell valuables between islands in Melanesia is a classic illustration of so-called ‘primitive money’, and in the light of Munn's analysis it does illuminate the very essence of money even in its modern forms. Beyond the chasms of cultural difference that separate the kula shell valuables from modern all-purpose money, even the latter are tokens of social trust and indebtedness that are constitutive of our personhood in the sense that they reflect the spatial reach of our selves. Significant among the differences is the level of abstraction, anonymity, and generality of modern money: its detachment from specific interpersonal relations, its standardised design, and its axiom of universal commensurability. This universality of modern money distributes our agency (unequally) throughout the world economy while arguably creating a deficit in terms of the specificity of our personal identity, generating a characteristically modern hunger for meaning barely satiated by ever accelerating consumption. In both respects, Munn's and Harvey's insights should be highly significant to political ecology. Yet, more recent practitioners of political ecology rarely try to unravel the phenomenology and concomitant socioecological repercussions of money. Rather than subject the phenomenon of modern money to defamiliarisation and critical reflection, critics of capitalism tend to take it for granted. No less than mainstream economists, most critical geographers and other proponents of political ecology would find the idea of questioning money naïve and ridiculous. Precisely this, I maintain, is an unmistakable sign of ideological hegemony.

Political ecology, ecological economics and the critique of political economy

Entwined with the emergence of a Marxist geography, many critical geographers in the 1970s and 1980s began presenting their research as political ecology. Frequently mentioned pioneers within the discipline include Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield (1987). From the start, the field was oriented toward rethinking resource use and ecological issues in development theory, abandoning the local and largely functionalist approach of cultural ecology in favour of global and political perspectives on case studies in what was then called the Third World or ‘the developing world’ (now known as the Global South). There was thus a clear continuity between Marxist geographers’ concern with uneven development and the focus of political ecology on less developed countries (cf. Castree, 2015). These early decades of political ecology have been summarised in several publications (e.g., Bryant and Bailey, 1997; Peet and Watts, 1996b; Watts, 2015).

The edited collection Liberation Ecologies (Peet and Watts, 1996a) consists almost exclusively of case studies conducted by geographers in ‘the developing world’. Citing Arturo Escobar, the only anthropologist among the contributors, the editors sum up the ambition of political ecology to radically rethink development theory:

[P]olitical technologies which sought to erase underdevelopment from the face of the earth end up, instead, multiplying it to infinity. (Peet and Watts, 1996b: 17)

In Third World Political Ecology, Raymond Bryant and Sinéad Bailey (1997: 3) similarly characterise political ecology as focused on ‘the spatial and temporal impact of capitalism on Third World peoples and environments’ through resource extraction, urbanisation, industrial pollution, and the dumping of toxic waste from more affluent countries. Drawing on a rich range of case studies, Bryant and Bailey systematically consider the roles of several significant actors – states, institutions, businesses, environmental organisations, and grassroots actors – in environmental conflicts in less developed countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In their chapter on states, they note that, together with other considerations such as cheap labour, ‘the relative lack of pollution controls in the Third World proved increasingly attractive to transnational corporations’ in the 1960s and 1970s (Bryant and Bailey, 1997: 55). Economic incentives, in other words, inexorably encourage corporations to contribute to environmental degradation.

More recently, the collection Global Political Ecology, edited by Richard Peet, Paul Robbins and Michael Watts (2011a), also deals with environmental crises primarily from a Global South perspective and with most of the contributions written by geographers. In their introductory chapter, the editors articulate a radical critique of the environmental consequences of the globalised market economy:

Market prices do not represent social and environmental costs and long-term consequences at all. As a result, market systems are environmentally destructive and socially irresponsible. … [P]olitical ecology has repeatedly shown … that environmental degradation is not an unfortunate accident under advanced capitalism, it is instead a part of the logic of that economic system. (Peet et al., 2011b: 14, 26)

In his monograph Political Ecology, Robbins similarly affirms that ‘[n]o explanation of environmental change is complete … without serious attention to who profits from changes in control over resources, and without exploring who takes what from whom’ (Robbins, [2004] 2012: 59). In their recent textbook Discovering Political Ecology, geographers Gustav Cederlöf and Alex Loftus (2024: 13), too, emphasise how environmental change is interwoven with ‘social inequalities, economic activities and political processes’. There is thus a recurrent recognition in recent political ecology and critical geography of the fundamental disharmony between ecological and economic systems. Yet, as before, there is little attention to money.

The problematic relation between ecological and economic systems is also, of course, the defining concern of the field of ecological economics. The overlap of interests between political ecology and ecological economics is evident in the contributions to The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology (Perreault et al., 2015) and the Routledge Handbook of Ecological Economics (Spash, 2017a). Many years earlier, Joan Martinez-Alier's book The Environmentalism of the Poor (2002) was explicitly presented as a contribution to the establishment of both fields and an investigation of their interrelations. Martinez-Alier's critical approach to mainstream economics, which has been foundational to ecological economics from the start, is evident in his wish to eliminate ‘the spurious logic of monetary valuation’, or rather to relegate it to ‘its proper place as just one more point of view’ (Martinez-Alier, 2002: 150).

[P]olitical ecology is contributing to the development of an ecological economics which moves beyond the obsession of ‘taking nature into account’ in money terms, and which is able therefore to cope with value pluralism … The emerging field of political ecology analyses the links between power inequalities and environmental degradation. (Martinez-Alier, 2002: 271)

The convergence of political ecology and ecological economics is further underscored in the title of the recent festschrift for Martinez-Alier, The Barcelona School of Ecological Economics and Political Ecology (Villamayor-Tomas and Muradian, 2023), which gathers over 50 contributors from both fields. Several chapters deal with the topic of environmental justice, which has been central for Martinez-Alier for several decades and was the foundation for his famous EJOLT ¹⁰ project, which brought academics and activists from several continents into collaboration on the EJOLT Atlas of environmental conflicts and other subprojects.

The boundary between academic work and activism in political ecology is highly permeable, and not just in the EJOLT project. The indignation over environmental injustices is unmistakable in most academic publications in political ecology (for some obvious examples, see Dunlap, 2024; Leff, 2015; Martinez-Alier, 2002; Spash, 2017b), while environmental justice activists readily adopt the concepts and perspectives presented in such publications. In their research on empirical case studies, academics generally engage in close collaboration with activists. Given the extensive consensus and commonality of interests between the many people active in the field, it is nevertheless disheartening to find that, after five decades, the objectives of anti-capitalist struggles for environmental justice, by and large, tend to recede ever further into the distance. Why do the prospects for ‘system change’ seem poorer than ever? After 50 years of political ecology, there are reasons to ask if its guiding analysis is incomplete. In consequence with the argument so far, I submit that the missing perspective is a critical approach to money.

Conclusions and implications

In tracing the concerns of political ecology – the interface of environmental degradation and socioeconomic inequalities – we have found continuities in the deliberations of critical geographers, development theorists, eco-Marxists, ecological economists, and environmental justice activists. Over more than five decades, they have shared a fundamental critique of the system of political economy that we refer to as capitalism. Much of this critique is aimed at the destructive impacts of the world economy on people and environments in the Global South. There is clearly a spatial dimension to the logic of capital, which relentlessly displaces impoverishment and degradation beyond the purview of most people in the so-called ‘developed world’. For those of us sitting in ‘the belly of the beast’, it is difficult to accept that the ‘system’ we are denouncing is the aggregate of our own actions. When we routinely shop at the supermarket or charge our mobile phones, we are inadvertently reproducing the global market whose distant social and ecological repercussions occasionally surface in our consciousness. This does not mean that the average person in the Global North is guilty of more evil than the remote victims of his or her consumption patterns, but that the globalised reach of our modern money and the technologies that it enables is continuously turning their losses of time and space into our gains. Beyond concluding that ‘the enemy is us’, we must turn our attention on the artefacts that shape our interaction with people and landscapes on the other side of the world. We must acknowledge how astonishing it is that millions of critical people keep denouncing an abstract system of political economy without questioning – or even contemplating – the peculiar pieces of which the game is composed. Could it be, then, that half a century of deliberations on uneven development, exploitation, unequal exchange, and political ecology have failed to see the elephant in the room? Given that tokens of abstract exchange-value have only circulated in human societies for less than 1% of our species’ history (Hornborg, 2025a), it is remarkable how quickly an innovation can become so self-evident that its absence is regarded as unthinkable, even ridiculous.

It is bewildering to find, in the literature on political ecology discussed in this review, a widespread silence about the phenomenon of money. Of all the geographers and political ecologists that I have mentioned, only David Harvey has followed Marx in profound and extended contemplation of money. Thirty years ago, Harvey's (1996: 215–222) reflections on the exchange of valuables in Melanesia showed that he grasped the way in which even modern money defines our persons as fields of space-time. No longer personally connected to the social relations engendered by our money, we can anonymously and asymmetrically draw on human time and natural space throughout the world, seemingly without violating any norms of reciprocity or sociability. What I have called ‘time-space appropriation’ (Hornborg, 2006) is prerequisite to what Harvey has identified as time-space compression; they are two sides – a biophysical process technologically transmuted into subjective experience – of the same coin. Given his early insights on the peculiar properties of money, it is noteworthy that Harvey in a more recent book (2018: 104–105) exerts himself to dismiss the several Marxists who are now proposing a monetary theory of value, such as Fred Moseley (2015). Harvey concedes that ‘[v]alue cannot exist without money as its mode of expression’ (2018: 52; emphasis added), but with those five last words he clings to a metaphysical theory of value that some Marxists are now prepared to abandon. Some of his quotes from Grundrisse suggest that such a move would not be to defect from Marx but to refine his critique of our economic fetishism. To accept a monetary (rather than labour) theory of value would focus the attention of critical political economy and political ecology on the prospects of redesigning money itself (Hornborg, 2025c), instead of retaining the classical Marxian conviction that such efforts would be futile unless an abstractly conceived system of capitalist property relations were overthrown first. To take that step should not be an insuperable hurdle. Harvey writes that ‘[d]aily life is held hostage to the madness of money’ and cites Marx's observation that money gives its possessor ‘a power over society, over the whole world of gratifications, labours, etc.’ (Harvey, 2018: 172, 176). Denouncing the ‘corrupting and alienating power of money’, Harvey concludes his chapter on ‘The Madness of Economic Reason’ by quoting a vision from John Maynard Keynes:

The love of money as a possession … will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. (Harvey, 2018: 205)

Can there be hope that such candidness about money, expressed by a celebrated economist, will find its way into political ecology?