Kristóf Szombati reviews Timothy Mitchell’s The Alibi of Capital: How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow (Verso, 2026), 388 pp.
A director of the Suez Canal Company mentioned privately to officials at the World Bank that the tolls shipping companies would pay in future could cover the cost of repaying the loans for the Aswan High Dam. The dam, in other words, was a device for capitalizing wartime debts and an oil boom that had not yet happened. European engineering firms put its cost at around £200 million sterling. When the Bank finished its own calculations, the figure had more than doubled, to £500 million. It had added the irrigation canals that would let Egyptian farmers replace fast-growing food crops with the slower cotton and sugar cane needed to service the bonds it intended to sell on Wall Street. But it had added something more consequential than canals: a way of representing Egypt’s future as a single calculable object, which the postwar decades would learn to call the economy. Wages would raise demand, prices would climb, the currency would fall, borrowing would cost more, and all of it could now be seen at once. On the Bank’s reckoning the dam would consume the entire disposable spending of the Egyptian government, so Cairo would submit its budget to international inspection and control for fifteen years or more. Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal instead. Timothy Mitchell’s new book is an attempt to specify what was being refused.
The Bank was selling a mode of government. Its instrument was the economy, the apparatus through which claims on the future are calculated, stabilized and governed. Mitchell’s own opening case is better known. When Uber went public in 2019 the market valued it at 82 billion dollars. It owned no cars, had never made a profit, and its app had been hacked together by contractors. What was priced was a durable arrangement for taking roughly a fifth of every fare from drivers and passengers who had not yet made those journeys, to be repaid from the pockets of people living later. This, Mitchell argues, is what capital is: not a fund saved from the past and lent out to buy machines, but the power to encumber the future. The book’s title names the misdirection. Growth, technology, the market and the economy are, on Mitchell’s view, the concepts that make the extraction look like something else.
Readers of Rule of Experts (2002) will recognize the method. That book taught a generation to read development sideways, following mosquitoes and cadastral surveys rather than policies and ideologies, and it contained the essay “Fixing the Economy,” which first advanced the claim that “the economy” is not a perennial feature of human societies but an object assembled as a target of government between the 1930s and the postwar decades. The Alibi of Capital enlarges that argument into a general theory and pushes it forward to the climate crisis. More than half the chapters draw on Egypt: the long colonial reworking of the Nile after 1882, Schumpeter’s Cairo interlude with a failing sugar company, the assetization experiments of the 2000s. The continuity is the payoff of a lifetime spent in one archive.
The debt to Foucault runs deep. Mitchell’s key move is to refuse the object and study the effect. “The economy” does not stand outside some material reality it represents. It is an apparatus that produces the distinction between the real and the financial, and governs us through it. Following governmentality, he coins “economentality” for the mode of rule that took the economy as its object after 1945, and, with a nod to Bentham’s panopticon, calls the device the EconoCon. Where the Foucauldian tradition supplies no term he borrows one: the apparatus of capture from Deleuze and Guattari, framing and disentanglement from Callon, “oikodicy” from Joseph Vogl for the role economics plays in justifying suffering, and his own famous “state effect”. Throughout, nouns become processes. Capitalism becomes capitalizing and the economy economization, because, as he puts it, naming large structures “reinforces the powers of abstraction,” whereas attending to mundane, reiterative procedures “can draw attention to points of vulnerability or potential disruption.”
What follows inverts the standard ecological argument, which runs like this: capitalism requires growth, growth requires throughput, therefore capitalism is unsustainable. Mitchell reverses the arrows. Capitalization creates claims on future income; those claims must be serviced; a growing economy supplies the means of servicing them. Growth, in his formulation, is not the engine of the system but “a mode of indemnification,” a device for securing repayment, arising from rather than causing the extraction from the future. The nineteenth-century joint-stock company is his paradigm case, and he quotes Weber’s 1894 study of the Berlin and Hamburg exchanges: the dividend is a tax on future passengers, workers and freight. Infrastructure follows the same logic, and here Mitchell is at his most counterintuitive. We assume that railways, canals and grids exist to compress time. He argues that they are built “not to speed things up but to introduce a delay,” because what makes a claim on future revenue valuable is the deferral of payment, which allows the claim to be discounted and sold in the present. Veblen’s concept of sabotage, profit through obstruction rather than efficiency, carries the chapter.
The second inversion concerns fossil fuels and should interest readers of this journal most. Mitchell rejects an energy-determinist account. Coal and oil plainly transformed manufacturing, agriculture, warfare and empire, but neither their availability nor their technical affordances explain the timing or the form of the great acceleration. More than eighty percent of all fossil fuels burned since the start of the industrial age, he notes, have been burned since 1960, and more than half since 1990, and no story about the steam engine accounts for that. His answer is that oil suited a particular mode of capture: long-lived revenue streams, suburban mortgages, consumer credit, state revenues, and the arms purchases through which Gulf rents were themselves assetized. Chapter five, the strongest in the book, supplies the political half. The postwar strike wave, Taft-Hartley, Truman’s seizure of the railways, the four-week stoppage by 400,000 American coal miners, and above all the Marshall Plan’s decision to spend its largest allocation not on grain but on Middle Eastern oil, a conversion Mitchell says was “intended, in part, to weaken the coal miners of Europe and thus undermine the power of the left.” Coal concentrated workers at nodes where they could halt an entire energy system, while oil, moved by pump and pipeline and tanker, dispersed them. The weapon of the general strike, Mitchell writes, “was now dismantled,” and cheap Gulf crude underwrote the plausibility of an economy capable of infinite growth.
For anyone who followed the argument I made in these pages about Clara Mattei’s Escape from Capitalism, this is the next turn of the screw. I argued there that the opposite of technocracy is not democracy, because the technocratic settlement is not a usurpation of a democratic economy but a form the economy takes. Mitchell allows a sharper version. If growth is a device for servicing claims on the future, then growth and austerity are not opposites but two settings on the same machinery: austerity disciplines present livelihoods to meet the claims, growth expands the base from which they are met. Martijn Konings’s The Bailout State sits precisely between them. In his analysis, what the state ultimately has to backstop is the structure of asset values and future claims, which is to say the thing Mitchell says capital is. The backstop is not an exception to the machinery. It is its guarantee. There is a democratic implication Mitchell does not develop. If the economy is an apparatus of subjection rather than a mismeasured object, the demand to democratize economic policy presupposes a thing over which control might be taken, when the thing is itself an instrument of rule. Mitchell also puts a hard question to degrowth, engaging it seriously through Giorgos Kallis and Jason Hickel. Reducing material throughput by itself does nothing about mortgages, pensions, sovereign debt and corporate claims. A genuinely post-growth politics would have to confront, and perhaps substantially dismantle, the architecture of claims on the future, a far harder proposition than reducing consumption.
I should declare my position, since it shapes what follows. I read this book from a Marxian tradition, and my three reservations are recognizably those a Marxist puts to a Foucauldian: that the framework struggles to say what makes capitalism historically distinctive, what makes capitalist production productive, and how either has ever been politically contested. Mitchell has been having that argument since Rule of Experts and will not be surprised. Two of the three have since been pressed from a similar direction by Jack Copley in New Left Review. The reader may discount accordingly.
The first concerns periodization. The difficulty is not that Mitchell ignores earlier forms of credit or claims on the future. He devotes considerable attention to them, from the forward contracts of medieval Islamic legal practice to the armed trading corporations of European colonization, and he answers the charge that capitalization is too capacious with a good argument: pre-modern claims were bounded by the crop cycle or the length of a trade route, and merchant profit derived more from spatial price differences than from temporal postponement. The difficulty is that his account of that continuity makes it harder to specify what becomes distinctively capitalist about the modern apparatus, at exactly the moment when his climate argument requires historical specificity. “Climate collapse, although unavoidable, is recent. It is not ‘capitalism’” (p. 290), he writes. A framework organized around gradations of an ancient process must locate the break somewhere, and much of the explanatory weight ends up resting on the assembly of “the economy” between the 1930s and the 1950s. That is a great deal of causal work for a conceptual innovation, however brilliantly its assembly is documented.
The second concerns production. Here too Mitchell has anticipated the obvious objection, refusing the term financialization on the grounds that it presupposes the real-versus-financial distinction he wants to explain, and insisting that credit apparatuses are always built out of real forms of life. He is not saying that factories do not make things. He grants that “many devices have improved the human condition.” But acknowledgment is not explanation. Uber is a rigged case: a firm that demonstrably innovated nothing and profits by predatory pricing and regulatory arbitrage, and Mitchell is right about it. The framework’s mettle would be tested elsewhere, and Mitchell supplies the test. In chapter five he remarks in passing that the outsourcing of manufacturing “did not become significant for another two or three decades, following the development of containerised shipping” (p. 184), which let the industrialized countries import goods from East Asia rather than make them. That is a technical development doing the causal work the book denies to technology, arriving on its own schedule and reorganizing production around itself. Uber invented nothing. The container reorganized world trade. Whether capitalization can account for productive dynamism of that order, or only reclassify it as camouflage, is the question the book leaves open.
The third, and for this journal the most important, concerns political agency. Chapter five is full of people acting: Iraqi oil workers defeated at Falluja in 1948, Egyptian strikers suppressed the same week, European miners outflanked by Gulf crude. It is the only one in which collective action is a key mover. Across the remaining seven, political struggle recedes from the explanatory foreground, and the conclusion locates the contingency of capitalization not in struggle but in “the variety of powers and agencies, human and more than human” (p. 289), in rivers and soils and pathogens and carbon, which refuse to behave. This is a coherent position, not an oversight. But it means that in a book about who owns the future the demos appears once, and appears to be losing. The cost is analytical as much as political. If capitalization is disrupted mainly by rivers and pathogens and carbon, we lack the resources to explain how it has ever been constrained by anything else, and the twentieth century supplies rather a lot of instances.
Which makes the book’s finest passage all the more instructive. In chapter two Mitchell reconstructs, from medieval Arabic sources and three decades of fieldwork in an Upper Egyptian village, a system of water storage he claims no modern scholarship has described: brick-lined wells sunk into the gravel beneath the floodplain, recharged each year by the flood, lifted by animal-driven waterwheels, supporting a second and sometimes a third crop. Nineteenth-century travelers on the Nile complained about the creaking of those wheels, the characteristic sound of the countryside in summer. Nobody thought to ask where the water was coming from. Colonial irrigation did not introduce year-round storage so much as replace a dispersed system of floodplain and subsurface storage with centralized works, presenting the substitution as progress. What was destroyed was not backwardness. It was another way of holding the future in common. Mitchell does not press the point into a political conclusion, and modest hope is all he offers at the end. But the argument is there in the archive, and the question it opens is more interesting than how to stop growth. It is what arrangements allow a society to hold its future in common rather than capitalize it.
Kristóf Szombati is Editor of the Political Economy and Inequalities section.
