ABSTRACT
The introduction provides an overview of the general argument in the book that money organises the material resource flows that are requisite to modern technologies. It proposes that modern technologies are contingent on the extent to which they can draw on labour and resources from other parts of the world. To account for the gap between the global North and the global South, we must recognise that what is technologically feasible and what is economically feasible are not separate matters. The main obstacle to exposing the arbitrariness of current global inequalities is the conventional incapacity to recognise how social relations and physical reality – society and nature – are interfused. In both mainstream and heterodox accounts, the physical constitution of machines and other artifacts is understood as lying beyond the concerns of social theory. However, technologies are not simply a politically neutral revelation of natural principles, as they tend to displace workloads and environmental loads to the peripheries of the world-system. Technological fetishism is based on the capacity of all-purpose money to obscure asymmetric transfers of labour time and material resources in world society by representing them as reciprocal exchange.
