Trading Futures: A Theological Critique of Financialized Capitalism

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.

Author’s Note:

The work that led to this book is bookended by two global crises whose impact and lingering effects are connected and still unraveling. In the embryonic stage of this proj ect, the world was hit by the financial meltdown of 2007–2008. If there’s one moment when the thought of Trading Futures first became pos si ble, it was when I was confronted by the pious calls to “save the banks.” Although I was still early in my studies, my mentors in Latin American liberation theology had taught me well: this creeping in of theologically inflected vocabulary in the realm of capi tali st economics was not just a matter of a secularized religious ethic. Capitalism ought to be investigated as a mode of enchanting real ity according to its own princi ples. The calls to “save the banks” haunted me sufficiently that I entered a doctoral program in theology wanting to investigate financial capitalism.

The future, up to that point, was already at the center of my theological concerns. But what I learned surprised me: the f uture was also at the core of financialized capitalism. As I expose it in this book, in the age of banks, capitalism turns its energies toward projecting, predicting, and anticipating the future. I suggest that we have been thrown into this projecting spree of financialized capitalism. As I thought about this and investigated the critical lit er a ture on financialization, I realized that the work of theology, which to me was so centered around future- talk and the possibility of hope, could not remain the same after the advent of financialization.

Trading Futures thus attempts to offer a critical portrayal of financialized capitalism as a future- engendering social force. As this is a work of Christian liberation theology, I must begin in the calamity of the pre sent and linger on the wreckage inflicted by this all- consuming mode of future- talk. But I also insist that the Christian eschatological imagination might afford diff er ent forms of constructing our collective sense of futurity. The f utures predicted and promised by financialized capitalism are ubiquitous in social life. And yet the future remains fundamentally unpredictable, unpresent, and unpresentable. The future is a time that is not yet. The eschatology of liberation I offer in this book finds its edge— its theological vitality and po liti cal radicality— precisely in this “not yet.”

Contents:

• Introduction: Of Edges and Hedges
• Futures Devoured
• Promissory Notes
• Times That Matter
• The Time That Is Money
• Sighs of the Times
• Fugitive Futures

Trading Futures: A Theological Critique of Financialized Capitalism By Filipe Maia