From New Left Review 159, May–June 2026:
As Joan Robinson once observed, defining ‘capital’ is a painful subject for economists, who commonly ‘set up models in which quantities of “capital” appear, without any indication of what it is supposed to be a quantity of’. Some, however, have offered an answer. For the dominant neoclassical tradition, capital names the assets—tangible or intangible, machine or know-how—that are used to satisfy needs. For an older tradition, adopting the practical language of businesspeople, capital is simply a fund of money put to work by the investor. Yet these static descriptions shed little light on the peculiar dynamism of their object. How is it that this thing, capital, grows through time, generating streams of income for its owners? The responses provided by economists have often confused explanation with apologia. Marx ridiculed the nineteenth-century dogma that profits are a reward for the capitalist’s abstinence in foregoing consumption. A more intuitive account centres the bold actions of the entrepreneur. It is the latter’s innovation—technological or organizational—that secures the superior growth of the capital under their supervision. Thus, ‘without entrepreneurial achievement, no capitalist returns and no capitalist propulsion’, Schumpeter claimed.
In his latest book, The Alibi of Capital, Timothy Mitchell sets out to dismantle this received wisdom. Look at Uber, he suggests in the book’s opening pages. The ride-sharing company had its Initial Public Offering in 2019, achieving a stock market valuation of $82 billion. Did this eye-watering number reflect the frugality of Uber’s owners or the novelty of its technical innovations? No. Uber had been burning through investors’ cash for a decade without ever earning a profit; its app was nothing out of the ordinary; it owned no cars; its foray into self-driving vehicles was a flop. The technologies it did rely on—smartphones, gps, the internet—were developed in part through public funding.
What Uber’s valuation really represented was the monopoly position that the company was projected to achieve in the years to come. By offering ultra-cheap fares (subsidized by its venture-capitalist backers), manipulating municipal regulations and undermining local public transport systems, the company would drive competitors from the field, after which it could freely prey on drivers and passengers alike. By 2023 the profits had begun to flow, making good on its prior valuation. People and planet are left footing the bill.
[Climateer here, this is also known as "The Amazon model"]
Uber’s case is well known, but it hints at a larger phenomenon. ‘Capital is not something saved up from the past’, Mitchell writes, whether machinery, knowledge or finances. Such backward-looking accounts obscure an uglier reality: capital is ‘a capture from the future’. The key is the process of ‘capitalization’, whereby a future income stream—tax revenue, mortgage payments or corporate earnings—is transformed into a present financial asset. When a company goes public, floating its shares on the stock market, it is selling discounted claims on its prospective profits. These profits derive more often than not from ‘an encumbrance imposed on the firm’s future customers and workers and on the communities and ecologies to which they belong’. Instead of competing to offer more and/or better goods and services at lower prices, in Mitchell’s account companies engage in what the father of institutional economics, Thorstein Veblen, called ‘sabotage’: they exclude rivals with the help of political authorities, eschew costly innovations, manufacture scarcity, drive up prices, sell flimsy products and run roughshod over the environment. Present stock market valuations are an index of the capitalized burden inflicted on the future. Competitive innovation, the satisfaction of demand, growth—for Mitchell, these are ‘alibis’ for capital’s true mechanism of time-bending financial predation. But is this all there is to it? Is capitalism’s seeming technological dynamism and expansionary character, noted by its defenders and critics alike, simply a ‘misdirection’?....
....MUCH MORE
