The Alibi of Capital - by Timothy Mitchell (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Stealing the future and concealing the theft - capitalism's method, as examined by the author of the acclaimed Carbon Democracy

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 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, he traces the terraforming projects - the destruction of rivers, the colonising of territory, the expan­sion of infrastructure, and the burning of carbon - through which the future has been squandered. Terms such as finance, technology, the economy, and growth function as alibis that conceal this devastating form of extraction.

Review Quotes

"[A] paradigm-shifting critique of the logic that underlies the modern economy."
--Publishers Weekly

"Alibi is a novel theory and history of capital, crafted from Mitchell's extraordinary erudition, theoretical imagination, and discernment of entire constellations of power in what others pass over as minor details. His argument that capital preys on the future--encumbering, impoverishing, indebting, depleting, discounting and building it--is essential to grasping why capitalism is incompatible with both thriving planetary life and meaningful democracy."
--Wendy Brown

"In this path-breaking critique of the science of economics, Mitchell traces the roots of modern capitalism to the hundreds of new joint stock companies that sprang up in the late 19th century to capitalise the future so that stockholders could enjoy their unearned incomes in the present from new enterprises at home and in the empire. In the course of this magisterial demonstration, he traces the transformation of political economy into economics, shows how the economy and the market are in fact the effects of certain technical and computational tools that homogenise an immense variety of actual transactions and create the supposed distinction between a real economy and the fictive world of stocks and bonds. This book is an outstanding achievement of conceptual rethinking combined with deep historical scholarship."
--Partha Chatterjee, author of The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power

"Stock prices, interest rates, the advance of technology, and the economized concept of growth have privatized time, blinding us to the relationship between present and future forms of life. Timothy Mitchell shatters this blindness, shining a light on the distractions, obfuscations, disruptions, and commandments that have colonized territory and our sense of historical time. With a brilliance, a depth, and an urgency born of and responding to our age of catastrophes, he offers a political and material conception of time that rejects suffering, debt, and foreclosure."
--Sherene Seikaly, author of Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine

"Timothy Mitchell's remarkable new book gives a wide-ranging and detailed history of the development and deployment of this alibi. It is remarkable, in part, because Mitchell's central argument is both intuitive and, at the same time, overturns almost everything we thought we knew about capitalism - including the term 'capitalism' itself."
--André Dao, Australian Book Review

About the Author

Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist and historian who has written about colonialism, Middle East politics, economics, expert knowledge in the government of collective life, and the history and politics of energy. His previous books include Carbon Democracy, Rule of Experts, Questions of Modernity, and Colonising Egypt. His writings have been translated into many languages. He is the William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University in New York.