Rent, chapter 4, Handbook of marxism

The capitalist mode of production (hereafter, CMP) has undergone major transformations over the last decades. While the appearance of new forms of rent blurred the classical distinctions between wage, profit and rent, it also stimulated a new wave of both theoretical and political debate addressing the nature and function of factor payments. In particular, a robust consensus has emerged within a certain Marxism of Ricardian inspiration, which understands rent as a pre- capitalist inheritance and, as such, as an impediment to the dynamic of capital accumulation. In this framework, the key function of ground rent is replaced with that of financial rent and a ‘pure' and ‘efficient' capitalism is depicted as rent- free. The economic stagnation which affected the advanced economies from the 1980s is therefore related to a presumed conflict between financialization and productive capitalism, whose accumulation-oriented rationale is assumed to foster both full employment and growth. According to another kind of approach endorsed by the neo-workerist theo- rists of cognitive capitalism (see, e.g., Vercellone, 2005, 2007; Marazzi, 2009; Hardt and Negri, 2010; Fumagalli and Mezzadra, 2010; Lucarelli and Vercellone, 2014), this line of reasoning – based on the rigid distinction between profit and rent – is flawed, both hermeneutically and theoretically. By understanding rent along with the associated stigma for productive efficiency, as completely external to the process of capital accumulation, it overstates the positive role of profit and thus misconceives some of the key messages in Marx's thought. In addition, it also overlooks the transformations of capitalism which followed the demise of Fordism, thus failing to capture the deeply renewed dynamics of capital accumu- lation and the correlated changes in the capital/labour relationship. Such trans- formations determined the exhaustion of the historical system of accumulation of industrial capitalism, whose qualitative features were largely consistent with the theoretical takes of the Marxian–Ricardian approaches. The explanatory power of this readings, however, has been seriously compromised by the transforma- tions of the social structure of accumulation, which increasingly allowed the emergence of what we call the ‘rentier vocation of productive capitalism' and, relatedly, of the ‘becoming-rent of profit'. To better understand what we mean by these definitions, we first need to discuss our understanding of rent. In our view, any form of rent is the historical outcome of a process of dispossession, which simultaneously constitutes the antediluvian element of the CMP and a structural component of its reproduction in time and space. As capitalism reproduces itself through a regime of perma- nent revolution – as already noted by Deleuze and Guattari (1983) – one may argue that: [a]s a general rule, there is primitive accumulation whenever an apparatus of capture is mounted, with that very particular kind of violence that creates or contributes to the creation of that which it is directed against, and thus presupposes itself … It is a violence that posits itself as preaccomplished, even though it is reactivated every day. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 448–9) In this framework, the distinction between the so-called ‘ordinary' mechanisms of enlarged accumulation and the ‘extraordinary' mechanisms of primitive accu- mulation loses much of its coherence, just like the profit/rent dichotomy. While this is consistent with many other neo-Marxist approaches, such as Harvey's (2010) conception of ‘accumulation by dispossession' – two other theoretical takes clarify further the originality of our notion of the becoming-rent of profit. It is our contention, indeed, that rent not only represents the origin but also the becoming of contemporary capitalism. Within the society of the General Intellect, wherein the law of value/labour-time loses much of its consistency (Vercellone, 2010) and the social cooperation of labour is increasingly independent from the managerial functions of capital, the very boundaries between profit and rent blur. Ultimately, in cognitive capitalism profit – just like rent – manifests itself as a rela- tion of distribution ‘pure and simple' (Marx, 1993a: 1023), completely unlinked – in most cases – to any positive function in the organization of production. This has major implications for the way in which labour is divided, monitored and organized at the firm-level and, more broadly, for the mode in which control is exercised over society at large. The transition from an industrial capitalism characterized by the hegemony of the logic of profit to a cognitive capitalism characterized by the hegemony of the logic of rent, in fact, is symmetrically mirrored by the transformation of disciplinary societies into societies of con- trol (Deleuze, 1992). Put differently, as production changes, so does the ‘mode of accumulation of men' (Foucault, 1995: 202). Within the general paradigm in which workers behave as Foucauldian ‘self-entrepreneurs' and produce value without managerial supervision, rent must be understood as a mere appropria- tion over surplus value, whose capture discontinuously requires both violent and directorial operations. The new apparatus of command for subsuming the poten- tial of emancipation inscribed in the General Intellect society is thus based on mechanisms which largely operate outside the firm and beyond the traditional constraints of managerial and organizational control. The remainder of the chapter is organized as follows. In the next section we lay out the theoretical framework and discuss factor payments from a Marxian viewpoint, paying particular attention to the flexible boundaries between profit and rent. Insights from the third volume of Capital – on the becoming-rent of profit – and from the Grundrisse – on the General Intellect – will serve as a fun- damental reference. Thereafter we apply the theory and overview the transforma- tions of the capital/labour and profit-rent relation in the transition from industrial to cognitive capitalism. This will allow us to remark upon the re-emergence of rent and upon the blurring between profit and rent, or, more precisely, upon what we call the ‘becoming-rent' of profit. Finally, we conclude.