Rent. Joe Collins

is the key factor – purely by virtue of controlling something valuable’ (italics in the original).³⁰ This new variant differs from its predecessors in that capitalism is so named because it is, at least according to its devotees, driven by the entrepreneurial nous of capitalists, employing labour and resources to produce goods and services, profiting in the process so as to invest in further rounds of production, promoting growth of the system. This new rentier variant, whereby profits are increasingly taking the form of economic rents, is characterized by rentiers seeking to expand their asset portfolios in order to increase rents, without actually producing anything. Capitalism is meant to be about getting rich by doing things to make profits. Rentier capitalism is instead about getting rich by having things that create rents and then capturing them. Several books on the subject have been published in the last few years alone, with many more academic journal articles and journalistic pieces taking up associated themes, putting ‘rentier capitalism’ in prime position to become the social science buzzword of the 2020s.

It is in the context of this flurry of intellectual activity that the problem of rent has taken on renewed significance. The spectre of rentiers pocketing that which they did not earn is once again haunting the world. Their first appearance in the conventional story of capitalism was as wealthy landowners, reaping the rewards gifted by hereditary title while immiserated workers, shrewd industrialists and savvy merchants toiled to create a new social system that rewarded effort rather than accidents of birth. Their second coming, as monopolists of technology, minerals, housing and most other goods and services required to enjoy decent lives, is concerning, if, as the rentier capitalism literature suggests, today’s economy is structured primarily to make it easier for them to get rich by holding what the rest of us want and need to ransom. Whether these claims stack up is, for now at least, beside the point. Such arguments have become so popular now that they set the tone and register for how people talk about current social problems. Topics like inequality, climate change, economic crisis and now even the causes and consequences of pandemics are increasingly linked to questions of rent in the popular imagination.³¹ Think inheritance tax and inequality, resource rents and carbon emissions, the Google tax and fiscal crisis, and now also vaccine nationalism in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

      This is as much a welcome development as one that is cause for concern. Attempts to reveal how capitalism works in real time are required by those who want to understand society by changing it. But the conceptual coherence of the literature on rent is already fragmented, even before the discourse of rentier capitalism has had the opportunity to mushroom and mature as did those of globalization, neo-liberalism and financialization before it. The charge of conceptual confusion levelled at the scholarship of neo-liberalism and financialization refers to a period of decline in which the intellectual terrain has been exhausted after years of debate and analysis. It is precisely because of the proliferation of contradictory positions on these topics that the concepts themselves became incoherent. The rentier capitalism scholarship, however, begins from a place of conceptual confusion on rent. The contested nature of rent theory in capitalism has either been forgotten or neglected or has simply been obscured by the sheer volume of output from mainstream economics passing off its own understanding of rent as the only one available. Those laying the foundation for the critical analysis of capitalism with its rentier inflection have started to lay these tensions bare. They could use some help.

Opportunities remain for sharpening the contrast between and within the different strands of rent theory. Rentier capitalism studies demonstrate how systems of ownership, the relationships between people that they create and the potential for changing them are bound up in how rent is first understood. Whether rentier capitalism can be fixed and by what means depends on how exactly so-called rentierization happens. Conceptual coherence is required for these questions to be asked, let alone answered. Those building an explanation of rentier capitalism demonstrated why through their previous critiques of financialization, asking how useful is the term ‘financialization’ in explaining current changes in capitalism and if such a meta-concept was necessary at all. Similar lines of inquiry considered if the concept of neo-liberalism reproduces the very state/market binary it seeks to despatch and if the generality of the term and inconsistency in its use make it useful at all in identifying strategic priorities for left politics. It is crucial that rent theory is itself brought in for what critical theorists call immanent critique – deconstructing rent theory to strip it down to its building blocks and then reconstructing it to check for consistency, logic and contradictions – lest similar fault lines crop up in the logic of rentierization.

The stripping down and building back up of theories of rent frame the structure of what follows. This first chapter sets out brief preliminaries outlining the aim and structure of the immanent critique of rent theory for the purpose of shoring up the conceptual coherence of the emerging scholarship on rentier capitalism. A simple but important question informs the chapter: what is rent? After dealing with some basic elements of rent theory and the social phenomena it seeks to explain, chapter 2 situates rent theory in historical perspective, sketching out the context within which specific contributions to the historiography of rent were made and, most importantly, reflecting on how they helped change the societies under investigation. Key mainstream views and alternatives from political economy are then surveyed, identifying merits and limitations of each, using real-world examples in chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 5 considers the significance of rent theory today by looking closely at how rents are implicated in the social processes generating economic inequality, stalling economic dynamism in global capitalism and the climate crisis. Specific episodes are examined with a view to spotlighting the role of rents in generating circumstances for what have come to be known as globalization, neo-liberalism and financialization. The discussion in this final chapter is concerned mainly with why and how the study of rent is important going forward.

      That takes care of the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ questions. How will the critique of rent theory proceed? While penning the introduction to the third volume of Capital after painstakingly assembling the manuscript from his dead friend’s mountains of chicken-scrawled notes, Frederick Engels made the comment that ‘where things and their mutual relations are conceived not as fixed but rather as changing, their mental images, too, i.e. concepts, are also subject to change and reformulation.’ Such phenomena, Engels argues, are ‘not to be encapsulated in rigid definitions, but rather developed in their process of historical or logical formation’.³²

      A little under a century later, Ben Fine dispensed the following scholarly rebuke of a pivotal contribution to mainstream rent theory by Joseph Buchanan. Fine contends that the ‘doctrines of the past should not be seen as an evolutionary approach to those of the present,’ but rather, ‘different theories utilise different concepts and theoretical frameworks as well as posing different questions, ones that may not be posed let alone answerable within another theory’.³³ This is, Fine notes, ‘a popular but misguided method of approach to the history of economic thought, or indeed to the history of any discipline’.³⁴

      The crux of both statements might seem like common sense, but it never ceases to amaze how some economic writing seems to lose sight of what most reasonable people would consider uncontroversial – things change, so our ideas for understanding them should too, and the different ways we make sense of our complex reality in motion cannot all be understood from a single perspective. It is on the basis of this sound advice that the inquiry into the character, causes and consequences of rent proceeds.

The contested meaning of rent: land or monopoly?

Rent is one revenue among a few in economic theory that designates flows of value through society. Wages, interest and profit are others. The task of rent theory is not only to track the direction and magnitude of rental flows, but also to understand how they came about, the consequences of where they go and also why it is they exist at all in any given society. As will be shown below, there are lots of different ways people have emphasized