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The Kindred Spirits sculpture commemorates the 1847 donation by the Native American Choctaw Nation to Irish famine relief during the Great Hunger. It is inBailick Park, Midleton, Cork…. The stainless steel feathers honour an extraordinary act of solidarity in March 1847, when the Choctaw Nation gathered roughly $170 to help feed Ireland’s starving poor.
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.
