Joan Robinson once said something to the effect that defining "capital" is an uncomfortable topic for economists, who "build models in which a quantity of 'capital' appears without ever making clear what it is a quantity of."
More than sixty years on, the discomfort persists. But in his new book Capital as Alibi, Timothy Mitchell does what most economists dare not: rather than say what capital "is," he says what it "does."
The conclusion is an unsettling one: capital is not saved up — it is grabbed. To be precise, it is grabbed from the future.
Uber Is Not Innovation; It Is a Receipt for Monopoly
Mitchell opens with Uber. When it went public in 2019, it was valued at $82 billion. What did that dizzying figure reflect? The thrift of its owners? The breakthrough of its technology?
Neither. Uber burned through investors' money for a decade and never turned a profit. Its app was nothing out of the ordinary. It owned not a single car. Its attempts at autonomous driving were a flop. The technologies it relied on — the smartphone, GPS, the internet — were partly developed with public funds.
So what did that $82 billion valuation represent? Mitchell's answer is cold and precise: it represented the monopoly position that Uber was projected to establish over the coming years. Through predatory pricing (subsidized by venture capital), the manipulation of municipal regulations, and the sabotage of local public transport, it drove its competitors out of the market and then began to extract from both drivers and passengers at once. By 2023 the profits finally flowed in, redeeming the valuation of years past.
Human beings and the planet were left to pick up the bill.
Uber's story is no special case; it is the epitome of a pattern. Every one of those dazzling valuations you see — whether it is an unprofitable tech company, an oilfield that produces no oil, a building no one lives in — is not a measure of "value created" but a receipt for the "capture of the future."
The Paradigm Shift: From "Saving" to "Capture"
This is the core thesis of Mitchell's entire book, and the part that Copley most forcefully brings out in his NLR 159 review.
Mainstream economics tells you that capital is "saving" — you refrain from consumption, put the money you save into production, and the profit is the reward for your thrift. Marx long ago ridiculed this version (the nineteenth-century doctrine, he noted, presented profit as the reward for the capitalist's "abstinence"). Schumpeter offered a more dignified alternative: profit comes from the entrepreneur's innovation.
Mitchell rejects both versions.
Capital is not something saved up out of the past. It is a capture from the future.
The key mechanism is called "capitalization" — the conversion of a stream of future income into a financial asset in the present. When a company goes public, what it sells is a discounted claim on its anticipated profits. And where do those profits come from? Not from innovation, not from thrift, but — in Mitchell's words — from "the burdens imposed on the company's future customers and workers, and on the communities and ecosystems to which they belong."
In other words: the valuations of the stock market are not an index of productivity but a plan for the plunder of the future.
The force of this thesis lies in how it rewrites your intuition about "wealth." You are not looking at "value created"; you are looking at "deprivation planned." Those S&P 500 numbers, those headlines about trillion-dollar market caps — translated, they say: a group of people has already calculated how much they will take, over how many years, from another group of people, and pasted that number onto today.
The Ghost of Veblen: Sabotage
If profit does not come from innovation, where does it come from? Mitchell summons the founding father of institutional economics, Thorstein Veblen.
Veblen had a word — sabotage — not the wrecking of machines by workers, but the capitalists' deliberate restriction of output to keep prices high. Firms do not compete by rushing to offer more, better, and cheaper goods; they profit by excluding rivals, manufacturing scarcity, inflating prices, selling shoddy wares, and riding roughshod over the environment.
Copley acutely observes that in reactivating Veblen, Mitchell is doing a piece of theoretical politics: he removes "competition" and "innovation" from the definition of capitalism. Capitalism does not win by efficiency; it wins by control — control over market access, control over regulation, control over supply chains, control over that situation in which you have no option but to accept.
This accords with Keynes's intuition. Keynes once said that for capitalists, productive investment is contra natura — contrary to nature. They would rather hold liquid assets and avoid the uncertainty of long-term investment. If capitalism did achieve productive expansion, it was not because it did so "naturally," but because some external force — the state, war, social movements — forced it to.
[Editor's Note] But here a more precise distinction is required than the one Mitchell and Copley offer. They treat "innovation" and "rent" as two perennial faces of capitalism — one a mask, the other the true face. But in fact their relation is dynamic, and there is a phase-transition threshold.
Before capital has crossed the threshold — when its holders still need to accumulate through innovation, when competition remains genuine, when market access has not yet been sealed off — laissez-faire toward capital does favor innovation and social vitality. At this stage the profit motive is not an "alibi"; it is a genuine engine. In this sense neoliberalism had a legitimate window: deregulate the excesses, release competition, let capital seek out the highest-return productive uses.
But once capital crosses the threshold — when the holder's direct use is already saturated, when additional wealth can no longer improve the holder's own life — the engine stalls. The attraction of innovation to capital drops sharply, because innovation means uncertainty, and excess capital prefers the certainty of control. At this stage, the former instruments of innovation (patents, mergers and acquisitions, R&D) become weapons of rent-seeking (patent thickets sealing off competitors, killer acquisitions that buy up and then shelve, R&D budgets devoted to maintaining monopoly rather than breaking frontiers). The incentive myth was not a myth from the start — it became one only after the phase transition.
This distinction matters because it explains a fact that embarrasses a merely anti-capitalist stance: capitalism has indeed produced astonishing productive achievements. To deny this is not critique; it is blindness. But to take those achievements as evidence of capital's "intrinsic nature" is equally blind — they are the expressions of the sub-threshold phase, not the eternal feature of capitalism.
The Politics of Rent: Who Controls Control
There is a further dimension to Mitchell's theory that most theories of capital neglect: rentier income depends on political authority.
A monopoly position does not form spontaneously in the market; it is manufactured — by lobbying to change regulations, by patent thickets sealing off competitors, by government procurement contracts fattening cronies, by trade barriers erected in the name of "national security." Copley stresses that the rentier regime in Mitchell's account is not an economic phenomenon but a political one: it requires the continuous intervention of state power to sustain.
This points directly to a conclusion that discomforts liberals: there is no such thing as a "free market." Every act of "deregulation" is an act of "re-regulation" — removing rules that protect the public and replacing them with rules that protect capital. Koskenniemi, in his legal analysis in NLR 154, made this very clear ("in the strict sense there is no such thing as deregulation"), and Mitchell issues the same verdict from inside economics: the process of capitalization is embedded in a legal and political infrastructure; without that infrastructure, "capital" is worthless.
Here Copley makes a brilliant connection: Mitchell's theory of rent and Koskenniemi's theory of legal infrastructure are in fact two sides of the same coin. One says, from the standpoint of economics, that capital is a creature of law; the other says, from the standpoint of jurisprudence, that law is the instrument of capital. Read together, you see the complete picture: capital is not a "thing"; it is a set of legally guaranteed future claims.
What About Capitalism's Vitality?
Copley is not unqualified in his praise. He raises a sharp question that Mitchell needs to answer.
If profit comes chiefly from rent and monopoly rather than from innovation and production — then how do you explain the enormous productive vitality that capitalism has in fact displayed? The industrial revolution, the electrical revolution, the digital revolution — these are not fictions. Mitchell calls "innovation" the "alibi" of capitalism, implying that it is merely a rhetorical cover. But if innovation did not exist at all, what has capitalism lived on for two hundred years?
Mitchell's answer is implicit: productive vitality is not an intrinsic attribute of capital but the result of state intervention under specific historical conditions. The postwar boom did not come about because capital suddenly grew industrious; it came about because of Cold War military spending, the construction of the welfare state, and the pressure of the labor movement — forces that compelled capital toward productive investment. When those forces receded (after the 1970s), capital immediately reverted to its more comfortable posture: financialization, rent, asset bubbles.
This answer has explanatory power, but Copley points to a gap: Mitchell is so intent on the rentier side that he makes productive investment sound almost wholly passive — something "induced" from the outside. Yet historical innovation — from the steam engine to the semiconductor to AI — has a momentum of its own, not entirely "forced out" by the state. Mitchell's framework here appears too flat.
Why This Essay Matters
This is the most worth savoring aspect of Copley's review: he admires Mitchell, but he does not let him get away clean.
Mitchell's contribution is decisive: he redefines "capital" from a static "thing" into a temporal operation — captured from the future, then discounted into the present. Once you grasp this redefinition, there is no going back. The next time you see a company "valued at a hundred billion," you will not automatically think "it has created a hundred billion in value" — you will ask: from whom, over how long, and by what means does it plan to take that money?
But Copley reminds you: do not, because the insight is so sharp, mistake it for the whole answer. Capitalism does have a productive side — to acknowledge this is not to defend capitalism but to diagnose it accurately. If rent were all there were, how would you explain the semiconductor, the rocket, the mRNA vaccine? These are not rent; they are genuine innovation. The question is not whether innovation exists, but: is innovation the master of capital or its servant? Does capital serve innovation, or does innovation serve rent?
The answer to this question may be more complex than Mitchell allows. But at the very least, he has dug up the most fundamental question — the one that mainstream economics has hidden for over a hundred years:
Profit — a reward for what, exactly?
For thrift? For innovation? For risk-bearing? All these answers are too decorous. Mitchell says: profit is the reward for control. Whoever controls the future choice space of others can extract from it without end. Capital "grows" not because it is creating but because it is harvesting.
The next time you see a dazzling valuation figure, there is no need to leap to "value." Try asking: of this number, how much is created and how much is planned appropriation — from whom, over how long. The answer may not be comfortable. But that question is, at least, closer to your life than "profit is a reward for what."