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Breaking The Earth To Steal The Future / Timothy Mitchell

Mar 10
Episode 1889: Breaking The Earth To Steal The Future / Timothy Mitchell
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We now know that capital is not something saved up from the past. It's a claim on the future. It's some way of accessing future incomes, whether those are, in any form that we could talk about. And making that future available to investors in the present in such a way that those investors get it a cheap price. And everyone in the future pays it back with interest. We're not taught any of that. We're not taught it in mainstream economics and we're not taught it in popular accounts even critical accounts of capitalism. So that's one part of it that. It’s not taught. And the other is that built into the popular and the misleading way of thinking about capitalism are a whole set of ideas about technology and technical improvement to which shapes is set to shape our relation to the future and about the idea of growth. That this thing called the economy when it was invented, was invented as an object that by nature grows and therefore our relationship to this future that is being purloined. That is being stolen from us is actually a positive one because we relate to it through a progress of growth. So there is both misunderstanding and there's directly misleading terms.

Academic and writer Timothy Mitchell joins This Is Hell! to talk about his new book his new book "The Alibi of Capital: How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow”, published by Verso Books. Mitchell is the William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University. His is based in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies.

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Timothy Mitchell

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Timothy mitchell
Guest

Timothy Mitchell

Timothy Mitchell writes about colonialism, political economy, the politics of energy, and the making of expert knowledge. Trained in the fields of law, history, and political theory, he works across the disciplinary boundaries of history and the social sciences. Many of Timothy’s writings explore materials from the history and contemporary politics of Egypt, where he has conducted research over many years.  Mitchell is the William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University. His is based in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, for which he served as chair from 2011 until 2017. Much of Timothy’s writing can be found on his website.