The Alibi of Capital How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow

About this book

We live in an age in which extraordinary wealth seems to arrive from unfathomable sources, such as when tech firms that have never made a profit are valued at billions of dollars. While seeming extraordinary, this mode of acquiring unearned wealth is, in fact, commonplace. It is a key to understanding how capitalism came into being and a clue to grasping why the catastrophe of climate collapse has come upon us. The value is created by consuming the future.

The Alibi of Capital asks how we came to organise collective life on the principle of capturing the future, explores the development of this principle in the imperial expansion of the West, and examines how lives today are encumbered by the repayment of earlier extractions. The Alibi of Capital identifies the forms of capitalisation, credit, and coercion that turn prospective assets into present income. Rejecting the common idea that claims on the future create only financial or fictitious capital, it traces the terraforming projects – the destruction of rivers, the colonising of territory, the expansion of infrastructures, and the burning of carbon – through which consuming the future has operated. Arguing that terms like finance, technology, the economy and its growth provide alibis that conceal this mode of extraction, it develops a new approach for understanding how the impoverishment operates.

Contents

Introduction. Uber Eats: How Capital Consumes the Future
Chapter 1. Ground Breaking
Chapter 2. On Rivercide
Chapter 3. Capitalism as a Detour
Chapter 4. Reading the Book of the Future
Chapter 5. Economentality: How the Future Entered Government
Chapter 6. The Properties of Markets
Chapter 7. Infrastructures Work on Time
Chapter 8. A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow? Climate Crisis and the Alibi of Growth

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Biography

Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist and historian who has written about the place of colonialism in the making of modernity, the development politics of the Middle East, the role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge in the government of collective life, and the history and politics of energy. His previous books include Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, and Colonising Egypt. His writings have been translated into many other languages, including French, Spanish, Polish, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Japanese and Chinese. He is the William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University in New York.