Trading Futures: A Theological Critique of Financialized Capitalism

by Filipe Maia

The discourse of financialized capitalism tries to create a future predictable enough to manage risk for the wealthy, to shape the future into a profit-making site that constrains and privatizes the sense of what’s possible. Here, people’s hopes and meaning-making energies are policed through the burden of debt. In Trading Futures Filipe Maia offers a theological reflection on hope and the future, calling for escape routes from the debt economy. Drawing on Marxism, continental philosophy, and Latin American liberation theology, Maia provides a critical portrayal of financialization as a death-dealing mechanism that colonizes the future in its own image. Maia elaborates a Christian eschatology of liberation that offers a subversive mode of imagining future possibilities. He shows how the Christian vocabulary of hope can offer a way to critique the hegemony of financialized capitalism, propelling us in the direction of a just future that financial discourse cannot manage or control.

224 pages, Paperback

Published October 28, 2022

Reviews

[Noah Trap · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few good moments reflecting on prophecy and suffering, a decent overview of financialization and neoliberaliszation, but for this you should just read Lazzarato and Meister. I think the arguments on changing “future talk” are useful but kind of just flutter out into nothing super concrete. More thoughts later