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Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism
How the asset—anything that can be controlled, traded, and capitalized as a revenue stream—has become the primary basis of technoscientific capitalism.
In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines argue that the asset—meaning anything that can be controlled, traded, and capitalized as a revenue stream—has become the primary basis of technoscientific capitalism. An asset can be an object or an experience, a sum of money or a life form, a patent or a bodily function. A process of assetization prevails, imposing investment and return as the key rationale, and overtaking commodification and its speculative logic. Although assets can be bought and sold, the point is to get a durable economic rent from them rather than make a killing on the market. Assetization examines how assets are constructed and how a variety of things can be turned into assets, analyzing the interests, activities, skills, organizations, and relations entangled in this process.
The contributors consider the assetization of knowledge, including patents, personal data, and biomedical innovation; of infrastructure, including railways and energy; of nature, including mineral deposits, agricultural seeds, and “natural capital”; and of publics, including such public goods as higher education and “monetizable social ills.” Taken together, the chapters show the usefulness of assetization as an analytical tool and as an element in the critique of capitalism.
Contributors: Thomas Beauvisage, Kean Birch, Veit Braun, Natalia Buier, Béatrice Cointe, Paul Robert Gilbert, Hyo Yoon Kang, Les Levidow, Kevin Mellet, Sveta Milyaeva, Fabian Muniesa, Alain Nadaï, Daniel Neyland, Victor Roy, James W. Williams
In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines argue that the asset—meaning anything that can be controlled, traded, and capitalized as a revenue stream—has become the primary basis of technoscientific capitalism. An asset can be an object or an experience, a sum of money or a life form, a patent or a bodily function. A process of assetization prevails, imposing investment and return as the key rationale, and overtaking commodification and its speculative logic. Although assets can be bought and sold, the point is to get a durable economic rent from them rather than make a killing on the market. Assetization examines how assets are constructed and how a variety of things can be turned into assets, analyzing the interests, activities, skills, organizations, and relations entangled in this process.
The contributors consider the assetization of knowledge, including patents, personal data, and biomedical innovation; of infrastructure, including railways and energy; of nature, including mineral deposits, agricultural seeds, and “natural capital”; and of publics, including such public goods as higher education and “monetizable social ills.” Taken together, the chapters show the usefulness of assetization as an analytical tool and as an element in the critique of capitalism.
Contributors: Thomas Beauvisage, Kean Birch, Veit Braun, Natalia Buier, Béatrice Cointe, Paul Robert Gilbert, Hyo Yoon Kang, Les Levidow, Kevin Mellet, Sveta Milyaeva, Fabian Muniesa, Alain Nadaï, Daniel Neyland, Victor Roy, James W. Williams
344 pages, Paperback
Published July 14, 2020
About the author
Kean Birch
11 books6 followersKean Birch is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at York University, Toronto.
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February 10, 2023
Comps reading largely because I read about half of this book for a course (lol). It’s an open-access book that can be downloaded for free from MIT Press.
The book focuses on the sort of rentiership that occurs through the ‘asset’ form (and its processual nature termed as ‘assetization’) under ‘technoscientific capitalism’ which the Introduction cautiously attributes to Lyotard. As the introduction, rightly points out: “To a Marxist political economist, the term [assetization] might hold no relevance, with a preference for the term capital.” Nonetheless, a few justifications are provided for making the distinction:
“the term asset is less loaded with theoretical controversies and terminological quandaries than the term capital... Using assetization here serves our purpose better, since it emphasizes the socially transformative character of the phenomenon of turning things into assets... The notion of capital, in contrast, is used to refer to everything from fixed capital (e.g., machinery) through circulating capital (e.g., goods, labor) to commodity-capital and money-capital in critical political economy (Chiapello 2007). Its underpinning in a theory of labor value, moreover, does not do enough to help us understand contemporary capitalist phenomenon... Our focus on the asset form and the process of assetization provides a means for cutting across such potential impasses while enabling overlapping analyses of accounting practices, cultural metaphors, and political-economic trends, each of which entails a different analytical tone. The notion of assetization surely speaks to the notion of financialization too.”
Whatever you might think about the justifications for yet another new coinage in this introduction, I think there are quite a few very interesting chapters in this edited volume.
Definitely the Les Levidow chapter was very good. Levidow was involved in the original Science for the People magazine, was managing editor of the Marxist publication Radical Science Journal in the 1980s, and continued on as editor of the journal after it became Science as Culture. One of the most interesting things in the Levidow chapter are examples of how carbon credit schemes (as well as biodiversity credits, biofuel quotas, ecosystem services) have been used to justify land grabs (basically the eviction of poor peasants living off the land, under the guise of ‘conservation’) and how these processes are also entangled with projects of land speculation and the commodification and assetization of nature more broadly.
The Victor Roy chapter on biomedical capitalism was also excellent. It focuses on how sustained growth is a central focus for pharmaceutical research, such that: “curative therapies are assets that eliminate the very possibility of growth on which its value as an asset relies. In this financial context, therapies for chronic diseases that require patients to take medicines over a long duration are—in contrast to cures—the optimal vehicle for accumulation.” It sounds absurdly conspiratorial except for the fact that it’s hard to believe Roy is a crank, somehow managing to complete his PhD at Cambridge and his MD at Northwestern, and now practicing as a physician affiliated with the Yale School of Medicine. Perhaps he actually does have a very good idea of how inhumane biomedical capitalism actually is. Roy writes:
“…after its share price reached a peak near $120 in 2015, Gilead’s market value dropped by almost half by early 2017 (Nisen 2017). The reason: by curing hepatitis C and reducing the potential patient population, Gilead was diminishing its opportunity for future growth. In a 2017 research report for industry leaders, financial analysts at Goldman Sachs posed Gilead’s predicament with hepatitis C as a cautionary tale for the future of genomic therapies. In asking “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” ”
The Natalia Buier chapter on the struggle over privatization of Spanish Railways was very fun:
“Company reorganization thus became essential to the pursuit of economic profitability. This is how Gonzalo Martín Baranda, socialist railway manager and author of an autobiography, remembers the period: “In order to close lines the cost of the train for the citizens had to be exposed to public opinion. This generated in the people an animosity against the ferroviario that was lived through with anger in RENFE” (2011, 68). During the first socialist government the biggest closure of railway lines took place.”
You also get a little glimpse at Spanish anarcho-syndicalism in action:
“CGT, Confederación General del Trabajo, is the confederation that represents the majoritarian sector of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism. The railway section of CGT is among the strongest in the confederation, and the 2015 elections, despite a frontal attack against the union aimed at reducing its representation, secured the presence of CGT in the works’ council of both RENFE and ADIF (Administrador de Infraestructuras Ferroviarias, the Spanish railway infrastructure manager), with two members in each... In the railway sector, CGT pushes for an alternative “public and social railway” (ferrocarril público y social)… Flipping through CGT leaflets immediately alerts you to a story told differently. As opposed to the timid recuperation of state ownership that CCOO and UGT (the two majority union confederations) sketch, where the state-owned railway is at best opposed to the private one, the brief historical sketch that the CGT promotes for general audiences speaks of the cyclical history of the railways. Twentieth century railway history, we are told, is a history of oscillation between public and private ownership, where liberalization, privatization, and (re)nationalization represent different moments in processes of capital accumulation… The capitulation of railway management to economistic criteria occurs in both phases, with the state implementing policies that are designed to benefit capital and the private accumulation of profit. So while defending the public railway, CGT appears to qualify the history of public ownership as state ownership. The case against the AVE that CGT builds can only be understood as an extension of the broader vision of the railway that the union promotes. The AVE is, in opposition to the public and social railway, an elite railway, built for the benefit of the few at the cost of the many.”
Paul Robert Gilbert’s chapter on mining also had a few interesting parts, mentioning in passing both the importance of flexible labour and contracting (something Ching Kwan Lee has emphasized as a strategy of private capital to reduce the likelihood of labour union organizing) as well as a plan for “a “jobless” automated mine on South Africa’s platinum belt” which promised that “less employment means less cost, means higher NPV.” This logic is consistent with minimizing expenses (which is the way mines view environmental protections, guaranteed local employment, and other benefit-sharing regulations). It is interesting how capitalists frame these ‘obstructions’ as ‘aggressive resource nationalism’:
“In their survey of executives’ and investors’ concerns for 2012–2013, Ernst & Young (2012, 7–14) identified resource nationalism as a key political risk facing mining and metals exploration firms. Their conception of resource nationalism was expansive, incorporating moratoria on investment licenses (Mongolia), plans to tax coal based on market prices rather than volume (China), enforcement of higher royalty payments by an anticorruption commission (Indonesia), as well as moves to legalize nationalization of mineral assets (South Africa) (see Ernst & Young 2014). This all-encompassing approach to classifying nonbeneficial regulatory acts as resource nationalism was shared by many analysts in the City of London, as well as by international investment lawyers providing advisory services to exploration firms (see Gilbert 2020).
Analysts, investors, and prominent political risk consultants like Ian Bremmer also shared an understanding of resource nationalism as a global phenomenon linked to an upswing (or supercycle) in commodities prices, and a desire for resource-rich states to secure a greater share of ‘rent’ for themselves—even if local “social or political upheaval” conditioned the particular form taken by that resource nationalism…
“At one of our meetings, Colin related how during the 1990s, “London was the fountain of all knowledge on privatization. All countries were realizing government should never be involved in business. I mean, look at Venezuela!” This treatment of any putative acts of resource nationalism as evidence that a jurisdiction was lined up to be the next Venezuela was a common refrain among analysts during 2012–2014. (see Bremmer and Johnston 2009). Colin then reached for a sheet of paper and began to draw. First, he sketched the axes of a graph, and then a flat horizontal line: the expected annual revenue a mine would produce over its life. Then he superimposed a large parabolic curve toward the end of the time series on the graph. “You see, the private sector brings the cost down. Then the price [of the mineral] goes up, and the government says, ‘Wait a minute, you’re making a lot of money, and we want to take this off you. Oh well, we will nationalize you.’ And of course, it doesn’t work, because their objective is to make jobs, and there is no reinvestment. In twenty years, you have to privatize again.” As crude as this narrative—of which Colin’s rendering is not atypical—may be, it plays an important role in the capitalization process. It is brought into relation with the capitalization devices discussed above primarily through references to cut-off grades.”
There was also mention of: “Opposition to previously colonized resource-rich states being beholden to royalty and taxation regimes established by colonizing powers (who tended to treat domestic extractive industry corporations operating in the colonies favorably) was crystallized in the Third World jurists or Third World Approach to International Law (TWAIL) movement in the 1970s and 1980s… The arguments put forward by these jurists—that it was entirely unjust for corporations to benefit from concessions or taxation rates agreed with pre-independence administrations when resource prices were historically low—is a direct inversion of the arguments put forward by analysts, mineral economists, and consulting geologists in the contemporary City of London.”
“Layers operating in the TWAIL tradition, however, view BITs [bilateral investment treaties] as sustaining an imperial system of investment law, according to which transnational corporations’ freedom to contract is given priority over the rights of postcolonial nations, who may be sued for legislative decisions taken in the public interest, or attempts to exert sovereignty over their natural resources (Anghie 2007; Gilbert 2018; Sornarajah 2016).”
The chapter by Veit Braun mentions all the additional expenses required to maintain crop seeds as an asset and protect them from ‘infringement’ (i.e. enclosure can be expensive):
“Through increasing yield and improving seed performance, hybridization can assetize varieties in corn and protect them from infringement. It is not suited, however, for protecting transgenes in the same varieties (Pottage 2011, 109f.)—the latter require an extensive apparatus of patents, snitch lines, technology use agreements and biomolecular detection techniques in order to work as assets (Schubert et al. 2011), making them socially and economically much more expensive.”
The chapter by Sveta Milyaeva and Daniel Neyland that frames student loans as assets providing a flow of future returns was a very bleak but useful way of framing what higher education has become under capitalism:
“Although this move to study the practices of valuation that underpin the constitution of public goods is appealing, what of the move to transform such goods into assets? The empirical case considered here is how English higher education funding underwent a transformation from direct public financing (a public good) to funding through the provision of loans to students; since loans are considered to be financial assets, here we focus on this type of asset being fully aware that an asset could be anything that enables capitalization. A financial asset is a category of financial accounting that is defined as “a resource controlled by the entity as a result of past events and from which future economic benefits are expected to flow to the entity” (IASB 2015, 220). Accounting for this resource thus requires stating a financial position that includes not just its costs but also the likelihood of accruing future financial benefits from an asset. In this way, financial assets, as an income-generating resource, produce capital, and can be viewed as vehicles for capitalization.”
Finally, James W. Williams has an interesting chapter on social impact bonds where philanthropists have attempted, with little success, to treat former offenders and unhoused and unemployed people as investment opportunities under the guise of philanthropy:
“what is most noteworthy about SIBs (social impact bonds) is not simply the transformation of social problems into investment propositions but rather a distinct form and practice of valuation through which the work of nonprofits is reconfigured as a type of asset yielding savings to government and returns to investors.”
“Viewed from a distance, SIBs would appear to confirm fears about the spread of finance into more and more aspects of social life. The fact that marginalized populations—offenders released from prison, the chronically homeless, the unemployed—are being transformed into investment propositions is thoroughly in line with the dystopian vision of finance. And yet, while this view may be faithful to the logic of SIBs and the aspirations of proponents, a closer look reveals a market that has struggled to take hold and to translate this vision into reality. The return-motivated investors prized by advocates and feared by critics have largely failed to materialize, and the main drivers of the market are not financiers but a small group of advisors and consultants backed by government and philanthropy.”
Anyway, there are some rather interesting examples of how capitalism is trying to extract profits out of every dimension of life. What the asset form offers is a more rigorous examination of the temporality of that process, and attempts to sustain rent extractions into the future — whether through student loans, social control programs for formerly incarcerated people, crop seeds, pharmaceutical patents for chronically ill people (who investors are anxious about being cured), or land subjected to carbon credit schemes from which poor people are evicted.
The book focuses on the sort of rentiership that occurs through the ‘asset’ form (and its processual nature termed as ‘assetization’) under ‘technoscientific capitalism’ which the Introduction cautiously attributes to Lyotard. As the introduction, rightly points out: “To a Marxist political economist, the term [assetization] might hold no relevance, with a preference for the term capital.” Nonetheless, a few justifications are provided for making the distinction:
“the term asset is less loaded with theoretical controversies and terminological quandaries than the term capital... Using assetization here serves our purpose better, since it emphasizes the socially transformative character of the phenomenon of turning things into assets... The notion of capital, in contrast, is used to refer to everything from fixed capital (e.g., machinery) through circulating capital (e.g., goods, labor) to commodity-capital and money-capital in critical political economy (Chiapello 2007). Its underpinning in a theory of labor value, moreover, does not do enough to help us understand contemporary capitalist phenomenon... Our focus on the asset form and the process of assetization provides a means for cutting across such potential impasses while enabling overlapping analyses of accounting practices, cultural metaphors, and political-economic trends, each of which entails a different analytical tone. The notion of assetization surely speaks to the notion of financialization too.”
Whatever you might think about the justifications for yet another new coinage in this introduction, I think there are quite a few very interesting chapters in this edited volume.
Definitely the Les Levidow chapter was very good. Levidow was involved in the original Science for the People magazine, was managing editor of the Marxist publication Radical Science Journal in the 1980s, and continued on as editor of the journal after it became Science as Culture. One of the most interesting things in the Levidow chapter are examples of how carbon credit schemes (as well as biodiversity credits, biofuel quotas, ecosystem services) have been used to justify land grabs (basically the eviction of poor peasants living off the land, under the guise of ‘conservation’) and how these processes are also entangled with projects of land speculation and the commodification and assetization of nature more broadly.
The Victor Roy chapter on biomedical capitalism was also excellent. It focuses on how sustained growth is a central focus for pharmaceutical research, such that: “curative therapies are assets that eliminate the very possibility of growth on which its value as an asset relies. In this financial context, therapies for chronic diseases that require patients to take medicines over a long duration are—in contrast to cures—the optimal vehicle for accumulation.” It sounds absurdly conspiratorial except for the fact that it’s hard to believe Roy is a crank, somehow managing to complete his PhD at Cambridge and his MD at Northwestern, and now practicing as a physician affiliated with the Yale School of Medicine. Perhaps he actually does have a very good idea of how inhumane biomedical capitalism actually is. Roy writes:
“…after its share price reached a peak near $120 in 2015, Gilead’s market value dropped by almost half by early 2017 (Nisen 2017). The reason: by curing hepatitis C and reducing the potential patient population, Gilead was diminishing its opportunity for future growth. In a 2017 research report for industry leaders, financial analysts at Goldman Sachs posed Gilead’s predicament with hepatitis C as a cautionary tale for the future of genomic therapies. In asking “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” ”
The Natalia Buier chapter on the struggle over privatization of Spanish Railways was very fun:
“Company reorganization thus became essential to the pursuit of economic profitability. This is how Gonzalo Martín Baranda, socialist railway manager and author of an autobiography, remembers the period: “In order to close lines the cost of the train for the citizens had to be exposed to public opinion. This generated in the people an animosity against the ferroviario that was lived through with anger in RENFE” (2011, 68). During the first socialist government the biggest closure of railway lines took place.”
You also get a little glimpse at Spanish anarcho-syndicalism in action:
“CGT, Confederación General del Trabajo, is the confederation that represents the majoritarian sector of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism. The railway section of CGT is among the strongest in the confederation, and the 2015 elections, despite a frontal attack against the union aimed at reducing its representation, secured the presence of CGT in the works’ council of both RENFE and ADIF (Administrador de Infraestructuras Ferroviarias, the Spanish railway infrastructure manager), with two members in each... In the railway sector, CGT pushes for an alternative “public and social railway” (ferrocarril público y social)… Flipping through CGT leaflets immediately alerts you to a story told differently. As opposed to the timid recuperation of state ownership that CCOO and UGT (the two majority union confederations) sketch, where the state-owned railway is at best opposed to the private one, the brief historical sketch that the CGT promotes for general audiences speaks of the cyclical history of the railways. Twentieth century railway history, we are told, is a history of oscillation between public and private ownership, where liberalization, privatization, and (re)nationalization represent different moments in processes of capital accumulation… The capitulation of railway management to economistic criteria occurs in both phases, with the state implementing policies that are designed to benefit capital and the private accumulation of profit. So while defending the public railway, CGT appears to qualify the history of public ownership as state ownership. The case against the AVE that CGT builds can only be understood as an extension of the broader vision of the railway that the union promotes. The AVE is, in opposition to the public and social railway, an elite railway, built for the benefit of the few at the cost of the many.”
Paul Robert Gilbert’s chapter on mining also had a few interesting parts, mentioning in passing both the importance of flexible labour and contracting (something Ching Kwan Lee has emphasized as a strategy of private capital to reduce the likelihood of labour union organizing) as well as a plan for “a “jobless” automated mine on South Africa’s platinum belt” which promised that “less employment means less cost, means higher NPV.” This logic is consistent with minimizing expenses (which is the way mines view environmental protections, guaranteed local employment, and other benefit-sharing regulations). It is interesting how capitalists frame these ‘obstructions’ as ‘aggressive resource nationalism’:
“In their survey of executives’ and investors’ concerns for 2012–2013, Ernst & Young (2012, 7–14) identified resource nationalism as a key political risk facing mining and metals exploration firms. Their conception of resource nationalism was expansive, incorporating moratoria on investment licenses (Mongolia), plans to tax coal based on market prices rather than volume (China), enforcement of higher royalty payments by an anticorruption commission (Indonesia), as well as moves to legalize nationalization of mineral assets (South Africa) (see Ernst & Young 2014). This all-encompassing approach to classifying nonbeneficial regulatory acts as resource nationalism was shared by many analysts in the City of London, as well as by international investment lawyers providing advisory services to exploration firms (see Gilbert 2020).
Analysts, investors, and prominent political risk consultants like Ian Bremmer also shared an understanding of resource nationalism as a global phenomenon linked to an upswing (or supercycle) in commodities prices, and a desire for resource-rich states to secure a greater share of ‘rent’ for themselves—even if local “social or political upheaval” conditioned the particular form taken by that resource nationalism…
“At one of our meetings, Colin related how during the 1990s, “London was the fountain of all knowledge on privatization. All countries were realizing government should never be involved in business. I mean, look at Venezuela!” This treatment of any putative acts of resource nationalism as evidence that a jurisdiction was lined up to be the next Venezuela was a common refrain among analysts during 2012–2014. (see Bremmer and Johnston 2009). Colin then reached for a sheet of paper and began to draw. First, he sketched the axes of a graph, and then a flat horizontal line: the expected annual revenue a mine would produce over its life. Then he superimposed a large parabolic curve toward the end of the time series on the graph. “You see, the private sector brings the cost down. Then the price [of the mineral] goes up, and the government says, ‘Wait a minute, you’re making a lot of money, and we want to take this off you. Oh well, we will nationalize you.’ And of course, it doesn’t work, because their objective is to make jobs, and there is no reinvestment. In twenty years, you have to privatize again.” As crude as this narrative—of which Colin’s rendering is not atypical—may be, it plays an important role in the capitalization process. It is brought into relation with the capitalization devices discussed above primarily through references to cut-off grades.”
There was also mention of: “Opposition to previously colonized resource-rich states being beholden to royalty and taxation regimes established by colonizing powers (who tended to treat domestic extractive industry corporations operating in the colonies favorably) was crystallized in the Third World jurists or Third World Approach to International Law (TWAIL) movement in the 1970s and 1980s… The arguments put forward by these jurists—that it was entirely unjust for corporations to benefit from concessions or taxation rates agreed with pre-independence administrations when resource prices were historically low—is a direct inversion of the arguments put forward by analysts, mineral economists, and consulting geologists in the contemporary City of London.”
“Layers operating in the TWAIL tradition, however, view BITs [bilateral investment treaties] as sustaining an imperial system of investment law, according to which transnational corporations’ freedom to contract is given priority over the rights of postcolonial nations, who may be sued for legislative decisions taken in the public interest, or attempts to exert sovereignty over their natural resources (Anghie 2007; Gilbert 2018; Sornarajah 2016).”
The chapter by Veit Braun mentions all the additional expenses required to maintain crop seeds as an asset and protect them from ‘infringement’ (i.e. enclosure can be expensive):
“Through increasing yield and improving seed performance, hybridization can assetize varieties in corn and protect them from infringement. It is not suited, however, for protecting transgenes in the same varieties (Pottage 2011, 109f.)—the latter require an extensive apparatus of patents, snitch lines, technology use agreements and biomolecular detection techniques in order to work as assets (Schubert et al. 2011), making them socially and economically much more expensive.”
The chapter by Sveta Milyaeva and Daniel Neyland that frames student loans as assets providing a flow of future returns was a very bleak but useful way of framing what higher education has become under capitalism:
“Although this move to study the practices of valuation that underpin the constitution of public goods is appealing, what of the move to transform such goods into assets? The empirical case considered here is how English higher education funding underwent a transformation from direct public financing (a public good) to funding through the provision of loans to students; since loans are considered to be financial assets, here we focus on this type of asset being fully aware that an asset could be anything that enables capitalization. A financial asset is a category of financial accounting that is defined as “a resource controlled by the entity as a result of past events and from which future economic benefits are expected to flow to the entity” (IASB 2015, 220). Accounting for this resource thus requires stating a financial position that includes not just its costs but also the likelihood of accruing future financial benefits from an asset. In this way, financial assets, as an income-generating resource, produce capital, and can be viewed as vehicles for capitalization.”
Finally, James W. Williams has an interesting chapter on social impact bonds where philanthropists have attempted, with little success, to treat former offenders and unhoused and unemployed people as investment opportunities under the guise of philanthropy:
“what is most noteworthy about SIBs (social impact bonds) is not simply the transformation of social problems into investment propositions but rather a distinct form and practice of valuation through which the work of nonprofits is reconfigured as a type of asset yielding savings to government and returns to investors.”
“Viewed from a distance, SIBs would appear to confirm fears about the spread of finance into more and more aspects of social life. The fact that marginalized populations—offenders released from prison, the chronically homeless, the unemployed—are being transformed into investment propositions is thoroughly in line with the dystopian vision of finance. And yet, while this view may be faithful to the logic of SIBs and the aspirations of proponents, a closer look reveals a market that has struggled to take hold and to translate this vision into reality. The return-motivated investors prized by advocates and feared by critics have largely failed to materialize, and the main drivers of the market are not financiers but a small group of advisors and consultants backed by government and philanthropy.”
Anyway, there are some rather interesting examples of how capitalism is trying to extract profits out of every dimension of life. What the asset form offers is a more rigorous examination of the temporality of that process, and attempts to sustain rent extractions into the future — whether through student loans, social control programs for formerly incarcerated people, crop seeds, pharmaceutical patents for chronically ill people (who investors are anxious about being cured), or land subjected to carbon credit schemes from which poor people are evicted.
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