Rent. Joe Collins

Rent - Joe Collins


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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.

      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.

      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.


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