Leveraged Futurity: Markets and Militants in the Transition

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article provides an overview of a market-led energy transition, before enquiring into what this new terrain of struggle implies for militants. Market institutions such as central banks and private money markets dominate how transition is framed. A market-led transition requires leveraging vast amounts of capital, which in turn requires a monetary environment in which private capital dominates production. This remakes sites of political conflict: over asset values, over the state, and the profitability of energy forms. I focus on one aspect in particular: conflict over economic representations of the future. I call this ‘leveraged futurity’, analysing it in corporate narrations of energy transition as well as science fiction. This concept shows how transition constitutes a ground of struggle that has its origins in the relation between energy and value congealed in the factory, but extends far beyond it, into the time of fiscal and investment politics.