Carbon fetishism: towards a libidinal economy of net-zero capitalism

This article argues that political-economic analyses of climate change in terms of economically rational incentives, governance mechanisms, and the structural contradictions of capitalism overlook the constitutive irrationalities of economic behaviours. Drawing on the Global Libidinal Economy perspective, the paper outlines and develops the concept of ‘carbon fetishism’ to account for these dynamics. Our approach to fetishism is informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis, which complements the structural grammar of critical IPE with a subjective grammar that maps libidinal investments to economic investments. This develops the concept of fetishism beyond a Marxist account of commodity fetishism, emphasising commodification and production, to consider the libidinal aspects of fetishism and fantasy that animate debates over carbon, and its absence as ‘net-zero’. Combining these analyses, we argue that classically Marxist strategies of defetishisation are inadequate to addressing the lived realities of climate change, proposing a qualitative form of re-fetishisation instead: returning to anthropological and animist fetishisms of the natural world as a way to reimagine human/ecology relationships that might resist the dominant, quantitative fetishisms of CO2 equivalents that dominate political economic climate change imaginaries.