Capitalism, Rents and the Transformation of Violence

Hannes Warnecke-Berger

doi:10.1177/0020881720912898

Abstract

Violence seems on the rise. After centuries of declining homicide rates in the Global North, violence has been transforming since the 1960s and even increased in some parts. In the Global South, in contrast, levels of violence have remained constantly high. The article questions both the liberal peace theory lately highlighted by Steven Pinker as well as Marxist accounts on the relationship between capitalism and increasing violence, lately dubbed accumulation by dispossession. This article elaborates a heterodox Keynesian model of capitalist growth in which growth ultimately depends on rising real wages. Following this Kaleckian model of capitalism, money plays a pivotal role regarding the low propensity for violence in capitalist societies: capitalist credit money tends to alter the matter of dispute from non-divisible to divisible and thus functions as a general denominator for social conflicts. Conflicts in capitalism are about ‘more or less’ instead of ‘either/or’. In the Global South, in contrast, capitalism is too weak to structure the economic sphere as economic rents predominate. Rents tend to favour social closure and social verticalization. They are particularly prone to violence. Inasmuch as economic rents penetrate capitalist societies, violence will be increasing in the Global North as well.

Highlights

Luxemburg (1913), in contrast, argued that maintaining capitalism requires integrating ever-enlarging outlet markets in the non-capitalist world due to the capitalists’ power to repress real wage growth based on their capabilities to exert violence
This article argues that the low propensity for violence in capitalism is rooted in the function of capitalist credit money
In distinguishing rent from profit and rent-based from capitalist modes of production, this article analysed different settings in which violence becomes a possible means of waging social conflicts

Summary

Introduction

Luxemburg (1913), in contrast, argued that maintaining capitalism requires integrating ever-enlarging outlet markets in the non-capitalist world due to the capitalists’ power to repress real wage growth based on their capabilities to exert violence. In the economies of the Global South, these post-Keynesian basic requirements for capitalist growth are absent, because of the excessive supply of labour, structural heterogeneity (Amin, 1976; Nohlen & Sturm, 1982) and, the dominance of rents and political structures that favour political interventions in the economic process.

Results

Conclusion