Marx’s rent theory revisited? Landed property, nature and value

Abstract

Drawing upon recent interpretation of Marx’s newly published papers, a debate published in the journal 40 years ago over Marx’s theory of rent is revisited, for reassessment as such and to consider its relevance for the analysis of contemporary issues.

Keywords:

• Marx’s rent theory
• ecosocialism
• Marx’s value theory
• housing
• financialization

ORCID

Ben Fine http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4301-0730

Ben Fine is Emeritus Professor of Economics at SOAS, and Visiting Professor, Wits School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand.

Notes

1 See also Ball (1980); Fine (1980a, 1980b); Catephores (1980).

2 Significantly, the contributions on rent are reproduced with a sheaf of other contributions around value theory, as originally published in Economy and Society (Fine, 1986).

3 As representative, see Ball et al. (1985) with my own contribution addressing landownership and the British coal industry, as discussed below.

4 For an interesting location of the new publications in the context of reinterpreting Marx’s political economy in the wake of his two hundredth anniversary, see the collection edited by Faccarello and Kurz (2018).

5 Much of my earlier contribution on Marx’s rent theory is dedicated both to specifying this normal in terms of determination of (surplus) value in light of accumulation and how it is modified by the intervention of landed property. But the details are not reproduced here.

6 This is of relevance for all, not just agricultural landed property, and is mediated by the ways in which accumulation and restructuring of capital are realised, with (monopolized) distribution of output being decisive historically in the cases of diamonds and oil – by de Beers and Standard Oil, respectively (see Fine, 1994).

7 Of course, this argument depends upon a clear understanding of the distinction between value and organic compositions of capital (and their relationship to the increasing technical composition). These distinctions tend not only to be ignored but conflated with one another.

8 In general, treatments of the transformation problem use the term ‘organic composition’, as does Marx, but in fact rely substantively upon the value composition. See Fine (2017) for a recent discussion.

9 In passing, it is worth noting that this argument is made purely in the context of the OCC, so that it would not necessarily be verified empirically by traditionally conceived and measured capital-labour ratios, since it is possible (although unlikely) that the value of the raw materials worked by agriculture (seed, pesticides, fertilizer, etc.; quite apart from depreciation on machinery) might themselves be of high value and so would also be the value worked by agriculture. Marx’s argument is simply about the increasing quantum of raw materials being worked, as measured by the OCC, not the greater or lesser value of those raw materials themselves. I am grateful to Shehryar Qazi for pointing this out explicitly, although he sees it as a source of inconsistency in my approach, conflating two levels of competition as opposed to seeing them as integral in case of land. Note that, in my original exposition, I used the device of asking what is the normal land and what is the normal level of capital in use in defining value in agriculture. In practice, as critically observed by Ball (1980) in response, rent of all sorts is just something that is paid as an amalgam whether it be DR1, DR2, AR or even something else such as MR. This is indicative of how the processes of competition are integrated with one another in gaining access to land, but it remains worthwhile disentangling the separate structures and processes involved in rent creation even if a single rent combining them together is paid in practice.

10 See Fine (1979) and Fine and Saad-Filho (2016). Fratini (2018) draws the conclusion that Marx’s AR is distinctive from DR1 and 2 and MR but takes this little further; see also Tagenaka (2018).

11 And not to be conflated with value composition; see note 7, above.

12 And he adds (Benton, 2019, p. 88):

Some more ‘orthodox’ Marxists read my work as a critique of Marx, rather than a critique of some readings of Marx, and an attempt to develop a largely unexplored ecological dimension to his work.

13 ‘New’ might involve change of crop or use, for example.

14 That this is in part due to land-banking by construction companies, as opposed to restrictive land-use planning, is highlighted by Christophers’ study (2018) of the privatization of half of state-owned land in the United Kingdom in the recent neoliberal period. For a comparative study of housing in light of financialization, see Robertson (2016).

15 Whilst this might be thought to reflect Harvey’s notion (1985) of the shift to the tertiary sector, and even Aalbers’ quaternary sector (2016), these are relatively ad hoc conceptualizations, and such shifts are contingent on the much more general incentives and capacities for financialized accumulation, not least in energy, food, new technologies and so on, as opposed to the tertiary and quaternary, however tightly specified.