Join the Committee on Global Thought (CGT) for a book talk with Timothy Mitchell, William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, on his new book, The Alibi of Capital: How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow. The conversation will be moderated by CGT Chair Adam Tooze.
Today, extraordinary wealth seems to arrive from nowhere. The trick of conjuring this unearned wealth is, in fact, the key to understanding capitalism’s origins and a clue to why the catastrophe of climate collapse is upon us: value is created by consuming the future.
The Alibi of Capital explains how this came about through the imperial expansion of the West, encumbering today’s generations with repayments on earlier extractions. Timothy Mitchell identifies the forms of capitalization, 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, this book traces the terraforming projects – the destruction of rivers, the colonizing of territory, the expansion of infrastructure, and the burning of carbon – through which the future has been squandered. Finance, technology, the economy, and growth all function as alibis that conceal this devastating form of extraction.