The Alibi of Capital

The author of the acclaimed Carbon Democracy argues that capitalism has always operated by consuming the future—and concealing its theft.

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 organize 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 book 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 colonizing 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.