Unicef – “Foto des Jahres” 2011 by Kai Löffelbein –

If you scoured the globe looking for a location to film a post-apocalyptic dystopia, you might on visual grounds alone choose Agbogbloshie, the toxic scrapyard in Ghana where computers go when they die. At this technological graveyard, one can find workers from northern Ghana and the Ivory Coast scavenging through discarded motherboards, damaged keyboards, cracked television monitors, smashed microwaves, and broken cellphones for resalable materials. Fires dot the landscape as piles of ruble are set ablaze in order to disclose the precious copper and aluminum. Pollution seeps into the water and air. Crime is rampant and many of these workers will end up sick from toxic fumes or plagued with later health problems.

It doesn’t take much effort to imagine Agbogbloshie as specifically post-apocalyptic science fiction. While it has long been a racist cliché to depict Africa as a place that time forgot, Agbogbloshie looks like the future that might appear after a disruption of our world-system. But this e-waste graveyard isn’t capitalism breaking down, instead it is the ordinary functioning of the current system. Indeed, few places showcase the impasses of the system better. This is what makes Agbogbloshie so important for my larger project (to get caught up see the initial prompt “Is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism?” and Part I- “The Janus-face of Capitalism or Is Walmart Utopia?”).

By way of explanation, the term “capitalism” is often tossed about as a vague and intimidating abstraction either celebrated as the essence of progress and wellspring of modern civilization or condemned as the cause of all the world’s ills. But almost nobody agrees on the definition of capitalism or when it first came into being (if ever).[a] Plus, because our current world-system is so vast and complicated, our current problems are maddeningly difficult to even begin to diagnose. So even if you feel a sense that things are wrong, the scale alone might seem to make improving the world neigh impossible.

You’ll get a more explicit definition (or two) of capitalism in a later post. But here I’d like to try to grasp the dystopian inherent in the totality of the current-world system and figure out why precisely it is so hard to have sense of the objects in our world and their relationship to this system. To do that, if you’ll follow me across the fold, I’ll explore what Conrad’s Heart of Darkness can tell us about Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism.

Continue reading →