Christophers: Class, Assets, and Work in Rentier Capitalism
While Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and mainstream Western economics agree on little, one clear commonality is their view on rent. For all three, rent represents a marginal, residual, or ephemeral phenomenon within capitalism. Marx, of course, emphasized rentierism in the form of land, and thus viewed the rentier as a remnant of feudalism. What puzzled Marx was that in the industrial capitalist societies of the 19th century, landed rentiers had not disappeared; on the contrary, they remained capable of extracting a portion of the surplus value created by workers in production. Keynes, meanwhile, focused on rentierism in its financial form. Unlike Marx’s attitude toward landed rentierism, Keynes did not view financial rentierism as an anachronistic relic of a bygone era that ought to vanish. Rather, he believed that financial rentierism would only disappear under appropriate conditions. His argument was that a further abundance of capital—which he affirmed highly—would lead to the "euthanasia" of the financial rentier. At the same time, mainstream Western economics views rent as an anomaly of idealized norms, a marginal phenomenon both historically and theoretically. The entirety of mainstream economics is constructed around the expectation that competition in the market system will usually prevail in the end. Except in a few special industries where monopoly is seen as necessary or even functional, rentierism—understood in this tradition as the extraction of superprofits—will inevitably be eroded.
However, the reality of the early 21st century clearly does not conform to the views of Marx, Keynes, or mainstream economics. Ground rent has not disappeared, financial rent has not disappeared, and contrary to the mainstream view, general rent has not disappeared either. Rentierism has proven to be extremely stubborn. As demonstrated by a vast body of research over the past decade—represented by Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century—the importance of rent to contemporary capitalism far exceeds what Marx or Keynes imagined, and far exceeds the scope allowed by mainstream economics. In countries like the United Kingdom, the dominance of rent and rentiers has reached a depth and breadth unprecedented since the late 19th century; thus, it is no exaggeration to say that we live in an era of rentier capitalism.
If commentators generally accept the claim that rentierism has experienced a resurgence, they also generally acknowledge that the intensification of capitalism’s rentier characteristics requires us to rethink long-standing concepts of class and inequality. However, there is little consensus on how to think about this or to what extent. It is within this specific scholarly context that this article is published, primarily pursuing three objectives corresponding to its three main sections. The first part will review influential recent arguments regarding rent, class, and inequality. I contend that these arguments, while enlightening, overlook one of the most fundamental features of rentier capitalism: the majority of rent-generating assets in society are not owned by individuals or households, but by corporations. The second part examines how this corporate ownership shapes the relationship between class, assets, and work, hypothesizing that a key feature of contemporary class positions and patterns of inequality is that capitalist society hierarchically structures labor around different relations to the assets the employers themselves own and from which they generate income. The third part examines the potential implications of these ideas for Marxist theory.
Before proceeding with the discussion, it is necessary to clarify the definition of "rent." The concept of "rent" has been endowed with different meanings across different periods and schools of thought. As mentioned earlier, in mainstream economics, rent represents superprofits—specifically, superprofits resulting from a lack of market competition; the less competitive the market, the higher the rent. In Marx, rent takes on an entirely different meaning: the income obtained by a landowner for leasing their property is ground rent. In the following text, rent is understood as income obtained through the ownership, possession, or control of scarce assets under conditions of limited or no competition. This understanding extends Marx's theory of rent in two senses. First, it expands the types of assets: rent-earning assets are not necessarily land; they may also be intellectual property (such as pharmaceutical patents), digital platforms, or the interest-bearing loan capital proposed by Keynes. Second, this understanding of extended rent incorporates a recognition of the importance of the market conditions required to realize such income.
I. From Employment to Assets?
Traditionally, social theories regarding class stratification, including Marxist theory, have been closely tied to employment. Within these, income inequality reflects underlying, absolute inequalities in occupational status and, more fundamentally, reflects the different relations of various occupational statuses to what are commonly called the means of production—namely, raw materials, factory facilities, machinery, tools, and so on. For example, in the influential work of Erik Olin Wright, the primary axis of class division is the relationship between owners and workers. Workers are then categorized based on their relationship to scarce skills—are they experts, skilled workers, or unskilled workers? They are further categorized by their relationship to power—are they managers, supervisors, or neither? In terms of class, unskilled workers without power are furthest from the owners; expert managers are closest to the owners. Little consideration is given to the ownership of assets other than the means of production—such as land, financial assets, intellectual property, or infrastructure assets—nor to the wealth carried by such assets and the income they generate.
When this article uses the term "asset," it refers to these types of assets. While traditional class theories acknowledge these other assets, values, and incomes, they tend to subsume them under the employment relationship. For example, early 20th-century Marxists certainly recognized the existence of a class in countries like the UK for whom land ownership was far more important than the ownership of factories or machinery, and even more important than employment income, but this recognition was never truly integrated into the Marxist concept of class.
Only recently have assets and asset ownership begun to occupy a more prominent position in the conceptualization of class and inequality. In this regard, Piketty’s work is of undoubted significance. Published in 2014, Capital in the Twenty-First Century is not usually regarded as a work on class, but as Piketty himself noted in response to various critiques, it is indeed a book about class. Furthermore, this work not only describes how inequalities in individual and household asset ownership and inequalities in employment income shape class; it also, at least to some extent, pays greater attention to the critical position of assets and asset ownership in the concepts of class and inequality, focusing its analysis on the intensification of wealth inequality in recent decades caused by income growth rates falling below the rate of return on existing assets.
Following closely after Piketty is Guy Standing, whose 2016 book The Corruption of Capitalism is another important work regarding class, inequality, and the increasing role played by individual or household assets. Standing proposes a new method of class division—namely, dividing not only by occupational status but also by whether one owns assets.
Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper, and Martijn Konings have further developed these arguments. They are concerned with the "impact of asset inflation on the structure of inequality," particularly in major Western cities (using Sydney as a case study to examine this changing world). They argue that new patterns of asset ownership, the rapid inflation of asset prices, and stagnant wage levels have created "new and complex dynamics" for class stratification that cannot be harmoniously reconciled with the view of "continuing to use employment as the primary determinant of class." They ask rhetorically: how can a work-based class model adapt to a situation where a mid-sized residence in a major Western city often appreciates in value over a single year by far more than a middle-class wage earner's ability to save? Their answer is that the old model cannot adapt to this new situation, and they thus propose a class analysis framework. This framework emphasizes asset ownership rather than attributing it to theoretical models still based on labor and occupational status as the structural foundation.
All these discussions—by Piketty, Standing, Adkins, and others—have made important contributions. However, the latter two perhaps overstate the importance of individual and household asset ownership. While Adkins, Cooper, and Konings emphasize the importance of asset ownership, they still maintain the continued importance of the employment relationship, which makes their deprecation of occupational status appear particularly hasty. The relationship between asset ownership and one's position in the division of labor becomes a key issue. Adkins, Cooper, and Konings make the strong claim that "position in the hierarchy of asset ownership over-determines the wage relationship." However, without acknowledging the profound impact of employment income on asset ownership, it is difficult to explain the close link between the two. Employment may indeed not be a sufficient condition for obtaining homeownership, but it is typically a necessary one.
There is also the question of the specificity and representativeness of the theory proposed by Adkins, Cooper, and Konings based on the local experience of Sydney. However, these are not the primary focus of this article. This article intends to explore not only the analysis of Adkins, Cooper, and Konings but also that of Piketty and Standing. As we have seen, these analyses all attempt to rethink class and inequality because assets other than the means of production have been largely ignored by traditional class theory, yet these assets appear to be increasingly important for wealth holdings and income flows. In this process, they pay particular attention to residential real estate assets. However, there are other valuable assets in contemporary capitalism and, crucially, these assets are rarely owned primarily by individuals or households; rather, they are held primarily by corporations. How, then, does corporate ownership and exploitation of income-generating assets shape patterns of class and inequality? Faced with assets outside the scope of work that are held not by individuals but by the corporations for which they work, how should we view class and inequality? These are the questions we shall now discuss.
II. Class, Assets, and Work in Rentier Capitalism
In contemporary Western capitalist societies, there are primarily seven categories of assets that can generate income (rent) for the rentiers who own them. The first category is real estate assets, which we have already mentioned and can summarize as land and its appurtenances, including residential and commercial buildings. The second category is financial assets. The third is intellectual property assets, including patents, trademarks, designs, and copyrights. The fourth is natural resources, such as hydrocarbons and precious metals. The fifth is platform assets, particularly digital platforms, whose primary value derives from the intermediary role of controlling transactions between buyers and sellers. The sixth category consists of long-term service contracts. The seventh and final category is infrastructure providing telecommunications, energy, transport, and similar services. In the land and finance categories, individual or household ownership accounts for a large proportion. Obviously, in many Western countries, land and buildings—especially housing—are widely held by individuals, as are financial assets (though not entirely), primarily held in the form of individual pensions. However, large-scale property and financial assets are not held by households. In other words, corporations can also be rentiers. This is not to say that all of a corporation's income must take the form of rent. A corporate rentier refers to a company whose income, if not entirely, consists to a large extent of rent.
None of the three studies mentioned in the previous section examined corporate assets. Since these studies focus on how asset ownership and exploitation shape patterns of class and inequality, they ought to consider such issues. The situation regarding the financial industry helps illustrate the relevant point. This is because, in Western countries, many high-income earners are workers in the financial sector. One must also consider the fact that the recent growth in the income of these workers is a major component of the more general phenomenon of intensifying income inequality.
Is class and inequality ultimately a story about assets (and rents), or a story about work? Figures such as Piketty, Standing, and Adkins argue the answer is work. According to their research frameworks, this has nothing to do with assets; the relevant income is compensation for work performed while employed by financial capitalists, rather than rents from financial assets they personally own. Of course, in reality, this is a story about work, assets, and rents alike. The lesson from the financial industry example is that individuals can derive enormous benefits from the control of assets—thereby achieving upward class mobility [5]—even if they do not control those assets themselves. Rents flow first to their employers and then to them in the form of wages and bonuses.
Starting from this specific scenario, the hypothesis of this article is that in capitalist economies increasingly constructed around the seven categories of income-generating assets mentioned above, the ability of employees to share in the rents generated by corporate assets is just as important to their class position as their status—or lack thereof—as independent asset owners and income generators. If, as Standing argues, a wage laborer who owns financial or residential assets enjoys a higher class status than one who does not, then their class status also depends on the extent of their participation in the income generation of corporate capital.
This article tentatively proposes a way to think structurally about this participation. I argue that what is particularly important in this regard is the nature of the relationship between an employee’s work and the corporate assets. In Wright’s class schema, this work-relationship with income-generating assets and its impact on class status can be seen as a corollary to the relationship between assets and scarce skills. Here, "skill" refers to the ability to perform work that possesses a certain perceived value relative to the asset.
In short, how valuable is a worker’s labor when applied to or in relation to an asset? If this relationship affects the degree to which different categories of workers are able to participate in the firm’s rent-seeking activities, then it is a key factor in determining a worker’s class status within evolving patterns of inequality. The following sections identify four general roles for workers relative to corporate assets, each of which appears to generate class privilege; the article will then briefly explore the spheres of work for those who lack such privilege.
It must be emphasized that in all cases, these roles and their presumed significance regarding class and inequality relations are, to a large extent, merely speculative hypotheses requiring further empirical and conceptual research. There is a key issue here involving the nature of two relationships: one between work and assets, and the other between remuneration and class status. The fact that a certain role (such as a specific skill) is perceived as particularly valuable does not mean it is necessarily always valuable in practice. Certainly, even in a social vacuum, perceptions of value do not translate automatically into material status. Much depends on the relative bargaining power of different groups.
Nonetheless, if there is merit to the argument proposed here, it means that class remains largely related to the division of labor. The difference is simply that in rentier capitalism, the division of labor among workers increasingly depends on their respective relationships to income-generating assets, rather than to the means of production.
(1) Asset Creation
It is an indisputable fact that firms whose business is to earn rents using proprietary assets—that is, rentier companies—need to own those assets to make money. However, although this is an indisputable fact, it is also critically important: asset creation is the lifeblood of the rentier. For without assets, there are no rents, and ultimately, no rentiers. Therefore, in rentier firms, those who contribute to the creation of assets—and thus to the earning of rents—are, without exception, among the highest earners; they sit at the top of the labor hierarchy. Another instructive example is land. How are a company’s land assets “created”? Land must be bought (or received as a gift); therefore, real estate companies reward particularly generously those employees who make significant contributions to the expansion of the land reserve. Contemporary rentier capitalism is less about striving to do something valuable than it is about striving to own something valuable (an asset), and it rewards "acquisition-creation of assets" accordingly. In the neoliberal period, as the outsourcing of non-core functions has evolved into an axiomatic strategic wisdom, long-term service contracts signed by private and public sector staff have become a significant source of rent. The companies that bid for and execute such contracts represent a specific type of enterprise.
(2) Realizing Asset Value
Capitalism is fundamentally future-oriented. Investors provide funds to companies primarily not because of what those companies have achieved in the past, or even what they are doing now. They invest in the future development of these companies—for bond investors, to earn enough profit to pay interest and repay the principal; for equity investors, to earn enough profit to pay dividends and attract other investors with higher share prices. What makes investors believe the future will meet these rosy expectations?
This is, of course, partly related to market conditions. Is there a sufficiently strong demand for the products or services offered by the company? Is the competitive environment relatively favorable or unfavorable? What is the political environment like? However, more important is the company itself. Does it possess the necessary conditions for success? In this regard, assets are a crucial factor. To give investors the confidence to invest, one needs to provide evidence, or something as close to evidence as possible, to prove that the assets owned by the company can generate income. In short, investors need to see evidence that the company’s assets have value, where "value" refers to the capacity to generate future rents. In sum, investors require companies to provide evidence that the assets on the books—which, by dictionary definition, are "valuable items owned"—are indeed assets.
This promise of asset value—or "performance," as it is in fact always a kind of performance—plays a fundamental role in capitalism, and particularly in rentier capitalism. It underpins all investment in the institutions of rentier capitalism. Since accountants must not only certify the existence of assets but also assign them a monetary value, they play an important, even arguably undervalued, role in rentier capitalist society. After all, for an investor, an asset only exists and has value if an accountant says it exists and has value. Therefore, the certifiers of an asset's existence and value are perhaps just as important as the people who originally created the asset.
(3) Protecting Assets
David Graeber argued that among the working population of the United Kingdom, it is not only the proportion of accountants that is excessively high, but also the proportion of lawyers. In terms of the development of rentier capitalism, this is also perfectly understandable. Creating income-generating assets and imbuing them with value is all well and good, but if these assets are subsequently impaired in some way (for example, a sovereign state that authorized BP or Shell to extract hydrocarbons might renege on the original agreement), then the value—and even the existence—of these assets is called into question. Throughout the economic life cycle of an asset, lawyers are necessary to protect and safeguard the asset and its value. Consequently, they are among the highest-paid personnel in rentier firms.
The example of intellectual property (IP) assets is particularly instructive. Take patents, for instance, which grant a company or an individual ownership over a product or process they have invented. Undoubtedly, the inventor of the product or process is a key figure. However, unless the product or process can be protected in some way from being copied by competitors, the company's ability to profit from producing that product or using that process is likely to be compromised. Intellectual property law exists to grant private property rights to these intellectual creations—in the case of patents, by asserting that a product or process belongs to a specific entity. One could say that those who successfully secure strong patent protection for a company's products or processes—namely, lawyers—are no less important to the company’s wealth than the people who originally created the asset. Their remuneration and class status reflect this importance.
The IP law practice of corporate lawyers is also not merely about securing and strengthening asset protection during the economic life of the asset; where possible, it is also about extending the life of patent protection. The term commonly used to describe such extension is "evergreening," especially in the pharmaceutical industry. Sandeep Rathod defines evergreening as a strategy by which IP owners "keep their products protected from competition for longer than the law normally allows." Specifically in the medicinal field, evergreening refers to strategies where "pharmaceutical patent holders protect product sales/royalties beyond the original patent of the active drug." Evergreening protects rents by extending the duration of asset protection.
There are, of course, other methods used to protect assets and their value. As many scholars of assets and rentierism have pointed out, the key quality that allows an asset to yield returns is arguably scarcity; it must be limited in certain fundamental respects. Law is one way to maintain scarcity, but it is not the only way.
(4) Maximizing Asset Rents
In addition to creating, realizing the value of, and protecting assets, there is another category of important work-relationships relative to corporate assets that also tends to guarantee high levels of wages and class status. We can identify this category through deduction. If an asset already exists and is well-protected, avoiding market competition and ensuring its continued scarcity, what else (if anything) might deprive its corporate owner of commercial success? The answer is obvious: any form of restriction from outside the market that affects the income the company can create and retain through the commercial exploitation of the asset.
Rent control in the housing sector is a prime example. Various forms of rent control—whereby the amount of rent a landlord can charge is subject to some form of limit—have existed or do exist in many countries and regions. These rent control decisions are sometimes made by politicians and sometimes by voters, but they are usually made against a backdrop of active lobbying by the primary owners of the rental stock. Lobbyists are key figures in rentier institutions. In the case of rent control, if they can help persuade decision-makers to relax existing regulations or refrain from introducing more stringent management measures, their lobbying work is deemed valuable.
Perhaps taxation is the most important general external restriction on the ability of rentiers to use their assets to create and retain income. Regardless of how substantial the asset-based rents are at the point of generation, if a large portion must be surrendered to the tax authorities, those rents become insignificant to the company. Therefore, employees who successfully prevent the company's rents from falling into the hands of tax authorities are highly valued by their employers and are likewise handsomely rewarded. Lobbyists play a key role here, often more or less "capturing" the government agencies responsible for setting the tax regimes of specific industries.
However, if lobbyists play a major role in enabling rentier institutions to avoid tax and are well-remunerated for it, the role of tax lawyers and tax accountants in tax avoidance is arguably even more significant. Numerous cases show that prominent multinational corporations with substantial assets distribute reported income, costs, and taxable profits among countries with different tax rates to minimize their overall effective tax burden. Businesses that operate in the digital world and own digital assets have much more room to "shift" profits in this way than many companies operating in the "real" world.
(5) Sweating the Assets [6]
In most rentier, asset-intensive firms, the individual roles we have explored—creating assets, realizing their value, protecting them, and resisting external attempts to limit rent-generation and rent-retention—account for only a small fraction of the total workforce, despite their substantial earnings. From the perspective of their employers, the majority of employees perform tasks that are relatively less demanding or even more mundane. Specifically, their working relationship with assets is markedly different; their job is to ensure the completion of daily tasks that allow the firm's assets to continuously generate cash. In short, the work of most employees is to contribute their "sweat equity" to assets that were created, cultivated, and honed by others. Their compensation usually amounts to only a fraction of those holding more esteemed positions, and their class status is far removed from them.
As is well known, this is a broad category of employment, essentially including everyone besides those engaged in the aforementioned tasks. These individuals perform important, even essential, work tasks. However, while they labor industriously for their employer's assets, their working relationship with these assets is fundamentally different from that of the aforementioned colleagues, and the degree to which the employer values them is far lower. Between those who "merely" provide industrious labor for corporate assets and those who have a privileged working relationship with these assets, there exists a chasm in wages and class status that is strikingly evident in compensation data.
If, as Piketty, Standing, Adkins, Cooper, and Konings assert, contemporary issues of class and inequality are closely linked to asset ownership, then rent-generating assets owned by corporations rather than individuals are clearly a vital component of this complex situation. In practice, the relative position of an individual’s occupation to these assets largely determines their wages and life chances.
III. Class, Assets, and Work in Marx
How did Marx view the types of work we have been considering—namely, work performed for rentier firms on assets other than the means of production? He would certainly recognize that landowners and banks—the two primary forms of corporate rentiers in his era—employ workers to enable land and interest-bearing capital to "earn" income. But Marx considered this a very specific type of labor, namely, unproductive labor, which does not create value or surplus value.
On the contrary, only labor power consumed by capitalists who own the means of production and produce goods or services for market exchange is considered productive. If landowners and banks participate in the surplus value created by productive workers (the landowner in the form of ground rent and the bank in the form of interest), it is purely by virtue of their control over land and financial assets, and this portion should be subtracted from the aforementioned capitalists' profits. Workers for landowners and banks, whether involved in creating, protecting, or extracting the assets in question, do not contribute to the creation of the values those asset owners manage to extract. As Marx pointed out, unproductive labor "is labor which is not exchanged with capital, but directly with revenue, that is, with wages or profits (including of course the various categories of those who share in the capitalist's profit, such as interest and rent)."
To avoid misunderstanding, two points need clarification here. The first concerns a point already established: that the income of corporate rentiers often derives both from the control of a certain asset (such as a pharmaceutical patent) and from the work performed in the process of providing the products or services (such as patented medicines) guaranteed by that asset. In such cases, according to Marx, at least a portion of the labor employed by the rentier is productive. Only labor exchanged with rent (the remuneration the lessor receives for controlling the asset) and applied to the asset itself is unproductive.
Secondly, not all labor that Marx calls unproductive is related to rent; the unproductive labor employed by rentiers is merely a subset of Marx’s broader category. Perhaps most notable is what Marx calls "commercial wage-workers," who take products created by productive labor and sell them on the market. Marx mentions in Capital that commercial labor, like productive labor, is exchanged with capital, but like labor exchanged with rent, it is unproductive because it does not create value but realizes it, transforming value from one form (commodity) to another (money) in the sphere of circulation rather than the sphere of production.
Nonetheless, if we remain faithful to Marx's categorization, we must inevitably conclude that in the context of contemporary rentier capitalism, much—and even most—work is clearly intended to generate income (i.e., rents) from assets other than the means of production; in Marx's terms, most work is unproductive.
Recognizing this raises at least two sets of important questions related to Marx's arguments. The first set involves basic questions of economic vitality and viability. If productive labor is required to create value and thereby ensure economic reproduction, then, ceteris paribus, the expansion of unproductive labor at the relative expense of productive labor jeopardizes the vitality of the economic cycle. Therefore, the coincidence of sustained economic growth on the one hand and the substantial expansion of rent-seeking activities and labor applied to rent-generating assets on the other might lead one to doubt whether the latter can still be called unproductive labor. To put it bluntly: do classical Marxist concepts regarding value and different forms of productive and unproductive labor apply to rentier capitalism—a capitalism centered on rent rather than as an adjunct to industrialization?
If we are considering the economy of a specific country, the apparent paradox that "more or less harmonious economic reproduction" and "intensified rentierism" can coexist remains relatively easy to resolve within a Marxist framework. However, explaining the flourishing of rentier capitalism within Marx's framework of productive and unproductive labor will face considerable challenges.
The second set of questions raised by Marx's classification of labor exchanged with rent as unproductive is more relevant to the present context, as it relates to Marx’s theory of class. Empirically and on the surface, this theory is extremely simple: the bourgeoisie owns the means of production, the working class lacks this ownership, and thus sells its labor power to the capitalist in exchange for wages. However, the reason Marx's theory is groundbreaking and powerful—both politically and theoretically—is that it links the position of the working class with exploitation. Under capitalism, to be a worker means to be exploited.
It is at this point that Marx's understanding of productive labor takes on significant meaning and creates a meaningful distinction from that of Adam Smith. As Marx says, Smith believes that productive labor—creating value—is something sublime. However, Marx disdained Smith's "tenderness and illusions regarding the productive laborer." Marx insisted that being a productive laborer is not a privilege but a misfortune. For it is precisely through the appropriation of surplus labor and surplus value that capitalism exploits productive laborers. "A productive laborer is one who not only reproduces for the capitalist the full value of the means of subsistence contained in his wages, but reproduces this value for him 'along with profit.'" If Marx's class theory is a theory of exploitation, then the productive laborer is the concrete subject of this theory.
What, then, of the unproductive worker? If a worker does not produce value or surplus value, does it mean that the worker is not exploited (and does not belong to the working class)? Considerable ink has been spilled in academic circles around this question. As Ian Gough pointed out half a century ago, among those who continue to root the concept of class in Marx's value analysis, there are two main opposing positions. One position holds that unproductive workers are not only not exploited, but their interests are more aligned with those of the capitalist exploiters. One can cite Marx himself here, who wrote mockingly: "It is a further consolation to the workers that, through the increase in the net product, more spheres are opened up for unproductive labor, which are maintained by the workers' product, and whose interests in the exploitation of the workers coincide more or less with the interests of the classes directly engaged in exploitation."
The opposite position rejects the narrow identification of the working class with productive workers. We note that this narrow equivalence contradicts the objective reality that under capitalism, among various types of workers ("productive" or otherwise), there is a large number of workers living in wretched conditions, subsisting on wages. The commercial laborers working in retail mentioned above are an example supporting this argument. As Gough points out, advocates of this position note that (in Gough's words) "the mass of low-paid commercial wage laborers" can also find theoretical support in Marx.
Marx's class theory did not specifically discuss the situation of workers for rentier capitalists, whose labor allows corporate assets to generate rent. But similar questions and potential positions for comparison are perhaps available for discussion. One might say—perhaps considering our earlier examples of individuals who create assets, protect them from competition, or "perform" their value—that these workers are distinct from the working class, and their interests even align with what Marx called the "interests of the classes directly engaged in exploitation." Or, we could argue that such workers, like commercial laborers, in many cases appear to be exploited no less than "productive" laborers.
However, there is a problem here. As Gough points out, if those who oppose the strict identification of the working class with productive labor can find support in Marx for the position of commercial wage laborers, then their position clearly falls apart when considering workers who serve rentier capitalists. As Gough explains, Marx's view that commercial labor is exploited (despite its unproductive status) is more "authoritative." Gough illustrates this:
This labor is bought with the merchant’s variable capital, not with money spent as revenue; it is therefore not bought for the purpose of personal service, but for the purpose of expanding the value of the capital advanced for it... Whatever [the commercial worker’s] wages, as a wage-laborer, he works part of his time for nothing... Although [the shop assistant’s] unpaid labor does not create surplus value, it enables [the merchant capitalist] to appropriate surplus value.
In short, because commercial wage laborers, like productive workers, exchange their labor for capital, they are likewise engaged in surplus labor.
In contrast, most of the labor workers provide to rentier capitalists is not exchanged for capital, but for revenue in the form of rent. Regarding this type of work, there is no obvious text showing that Marx believed the workers in question could be regarded as exploited, and thus that their interests might align more with those of productive workers than with those of the exploiting class. Given the actually existing reality of rentier capitalism today—where a vast cohort of employees sweats at low wages to create assets capable of generating rent—we can conclude that such workers pose a challenge to Marx's class theory, at least to the extent that this theory relies on Marx's writings on productive and unproductive labor. In any case, this challenge is greater than what Gough called the challenge of commercial workers.
A more general question is whether and to what extent Marx's theory of capitalism, and particularly his capitalist class theory, can withstand the impact of continuous structural changes in the capitalist political economy. This question is a long-standing and recurring one. For example, it was raised during the transition from manufacturing to the service industry. Now it needs to be raised again regarding the expansion of rent and rentierism.
IV. Conclusion
The purpose of this article is to delineate certain evident trends in rent generation and its consequences for social stratification, as well as to propose some of the challenges these developments may pose to Marxist analysis, provided they indeed represent substantive developments that have been accurately described. Clearly, a significant amount of work remains to be done, both empirically and theoretically, in order to depict a more complete and reliable picture of corporate rentierism and the consequent socio-economic inequalities in reality, as well as to further explore and interpret the world of rentier capitalism and the world of Marxist analysis theoretically.
Many important aspects of contemporary capitalism are clearly about who owns what and who is doing what; therefore, the understanding of class must pay closer attention to where different types of assets are located, by whom they are owned, and how these assets are mobilized to create income for different groups. It is insufficient to limit our understanding solely to assets owned by individuals and households rather than those owned by corporations (as is the case in the model proposed by Adkins, Cooper, and Konings [11]). However, the same might be said for an understanding of class in which the only corporate-owned assets deemed truly important—having direct material significance for value creation and, in turn, relating to the relationship between the exploited and the exploiter, and the creator and appropriator of surplus value—are those considered means of production.
For example, in Marx’s view, the working class includes those individuals who do not own the means of production and who exchange their labor power for productive capital in return for wages. Today, one might more meaningfully conceptualize this class in terms of two aspects: do they own housing or other valuable assets? And what is their labor relationship with the rent-generating assets owned by their employers (such as land, natural resource reserves, or intellectual property)? Is it a relationship of "sweat" (physical exertion) [12] or a relationship of creation or protection? It can be argued that as capital morphs, mutates, and takes on increasingly complex forms, the concepts used to understand the social life congealed by capital must change accordingly.
(About the author: Brett Christophers, Department of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University, Sweden; Translators: Ye Jiabin, Institute of Marxist Philosophy and Chinese Modernization and Department of Philosophy, Sun Yat-sen University; Shen Fang, Department of Philosophy, Sun Yat-sen University)
Web Editor: Tongxin Source: Foreign Theoretical Trends (Guowai Lilun Dongtai), Issue 6, 2023; originally published in Historical Materialism, Volume 29, Issue 2, 2021.