most powerful leverage we have.’25
While the basis of housing rent is simply the fact that people require housing to live, and that those who do not own it must procure it, these examples demonstrate there is nothing simple about the matter. In the case of the sex-for-rent scandal, gendered violence and the power structures that facilitate it seem to be aggravated by the financial hardships caused by increasing unemployment during the pandemic. Those calling and organizing rent strikes are doing so out of desperation, facing the very real prospect of deteriorating living conditions due to the pressures of having to pay the rent. It is clear also that there are financial imperatives constraining the benevolence of landlords, who might themselves be shackled to mortgages. The debtor, staring at an outstretched hand awaiting money they do not have, is probably not overly concerned about whether the appendage belongs to a financier or a rentier. What appears as a simple matter of payment for the use of housing is undergirded by several issues that extend beyond the individual actors to their societal context with very real and immediate consequences for all involved in the rental relationship.
While rent remains an income to landlords, it has also come to apply to lots of different types of property. Like any word, the meaning of ‘rent’ depends upon the context of its use. But unlike most other words, rent has become the subject of contention in economic theory, whereby its usage by those concerned with the subject matter of economics is loaded and requires some understanding of what is at stake in defining rent. Put simply, rent either must relate to land or it does not. Each leads to a different path for understanding what rent means today. This chapter is about working through some of these tensions, particularly in relation to this initial problem, of the relationship between rent and land. The next section looks at how and why rent is enjoying something of a renewal in interest across the social sciences and popular discourse.
Introducing the new ‘-ization’ of the 2020s
If ‘globalization’ was the overarching process occupying social scientists in the 1990s, ‘neo-liberalization’ took that title in the noughties before being replaced by ‘financialization’ in the 2010s. So say critics of the scholarship on financialization. The discourse, some claim, has lost its conceptual coherence, becoming so fragmented that, ‘to the degree that it is excessively vague and stretched, it is an increasingly nebulous and even, arguably, unhelpful signifier.’26 Similar concerns about the usefulness of the concept of neo-liberalism have been raised by some who claim that ‘the conceptual confusion outweighs the constructive debate around the term’s meaning and that there is insufficient consensual core of shared understanding to justify keeping the term.’27 In spite of these criticisms, or perhaps because of them, those urging caution for expanding studies of old descriptors for ‘new’ variants of capitalism are some of the loudest among the chorus of those advocating the next one – rentierization.28
Rentier capitalism is the latest stage of capitalism, according to this growing body of scholarship. To take one recent definition of the concept, rentier capitalism is a ‘system of economic production and reproduction in which income is dominated by rents and economic life is dominated by rentiers’. This system is not just one dominated by rents and rentiers, it is ‘in a much more profound sense, substantially scaffolded and organized around the assets that generate those rents and sustain those rentiers’.29 Rent, according to this account, is ‘payment to an economic actor (the rentier) who receives that rent – and this 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
