Absolute Rent Research Articles

Vanished in gaps, vanquished in rifts: the social ecology of urban spatial change in a working class residential area, Peykan-Shahr, Tehran, Iran

The article aims to understand the forms and processes of socio-ecological changes following sociogeographical dislocation of workers in a working-class neighborhood (Peykan-Shahr) in Iran. The article integrates theories of gentrification and metabolic rift. Existing studies on urbanization in Iran refute the possibility of gentrification. This study, in contrast, by drawing attention to peculiarities of the capitalist economy in Iran, adapts the basic economic mechanisms of gentrification such as the rent/value gap and the concept of absolute rent, concluding that Peykan-Shahr is indeed in a process of gentrification. The theory of metabolic rift adds theoretical dimensions and complexity to the analysis and provides a richer understanding of the case. Grounded in Marx's labor theory of value, the analysis shows that by mediating the exploitation of labor/nature by capital through displacing workers from their houses, gentrification in Peykan-Shahr has caused a socio-ecological metabolic rift in terms of labor reproduction and deterioration of labor power.Key words: Socio-ecological metabolic rift, gentrification, absolute rent, Marxism, labor reproduction, political economy of Iran.

What Capital has Joined Together, Let Not Marx Rent Asunder: Mark I

In this paper I introduce readers to some basic Marxist ideas to help you understand Marx’s thinking on rent and its applicability to the taxation of economic rent, specifically resource rents. I argue that because of the high levels of capital investment in the mining industry, Marx’s concept of absolute rent does not apply but that what he describes as monopoly rent, and differential rent I and II are components of resource rents. The process of taxing resource rents involves a battle between the state as landlord and mining capital as both a new landlord and exploiter of the minerals. That battle is over the split up of the resource monopoly rent inhered in the land but also between the state and mining capital over a share of the monopoly rent mining capital extracts in the process of production from other capital. The taxation of this latter aspect of resource rents acts as an imperfect substitute for competition by lowering the super profits the specific monopolists and oligopolists receive and thus helping to equalize profit rates. Company tax cuts redistribute the monopoly rents obtained during the production process to the other sectors of capital from whom the rent has in their eyes been monopolized.

Status rent in new developing economy

The status rent and conditions of its appearance are characterized in new developing economy by the position of new political economy. The bases of the general theory of rent were laid by classicists of political economy (F. Cene, A. Smith, J. Anderson, J. Mill, T. Maltus, D. Ricardo, K. Marx). They differentiated the rare rent (natural), absolute rent and differential land rent. Neoclassicists widened the definition of rent understanding it as income from any productive factor not only from land. Mostly, investigators of rent keep to two main postulates. Firstly, it is over profit, the income of special kind connected with using of exclusive, limited or rare goods for some time. Secondly, the rent is owned by the owners of these goods. These statements belonging to the natural rent can be used for the analysis of others, unnatural kinds of rent. The status rent belongs here. Let us analyze the status rent from the position of new political economy. As old political economy the new one also has its object - economic relations in the society and it call for the opening of deep, important processes of economic life. But by contrast with old political economy the new one, firstly, is based on other methodology (institutional economy, the theory of social choice, system approach); secondly, it studies economic relations not as static (the position of different classes), but as dynamic in economic behavior; thirdly, it is not confrontational: economic relations are understood not as antagonistic with non-avoidance of social cataclysm but as conflict-compromising; fourthly, it operates not only with social aggregates (class, country, social group), but it is also directed to a person, his/her freedom of choice in economic behavior; and, finally, fifthly, it overcomes the past careful marking out of other sciences, and, on the contrary, strives for an interdisciplinary approach in the stream of modern institutionalism including the problems of sociology, law, psychology within the space of its interests. Therefore it is to formulate the hypothesis that the research of social-economic conditions and institutional factors of forming status rent will allow to define the ways it damages the society. In the given article, the special attention is paid to the analysis of the combination of institutional preconditions and contradictions in the system of economic interests. The problems of the restriction of negative consequences of the status rent in Russian economy are also considered in the article.

Marx's Theory of Ground Rent: A Critical Assessment

This critical essay provides the reader with an up-to-date assessment of Marx's relatively neglected theory of absolute ground rent by bringing together in a coherent manner his scattered observations and arguments contained primarily in Capital, Vol. III and Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. II. It also reviews the extant secondary literature which suggests that within Marx's theory of rent is an embryonic theory of monopoly from which scholars can draw important insights into the history of economic thought and the workings of mature capitalism. The paper is organized as follows. After an introductory section, Section II provides the reader with an overview of Marx's theory of differential rent and compares it to that of Ricardo, particularly Marx's discussion of differential rent II and whether nature is productive of exchange value. Section III discusses Marx's theory of absolute rent in light of recent criticisms by prominent scholars and suggests that what determines whether rent is paid on the marginal land is not technical backwardness or lower productivity of labor per se, but a social relation, viz., the monopoly created by the private ownership of land. The last section summarizes the main arguments and suggests some avenues for future research.

On Minimum Rents: Part 1, Marx and Absolute Rent

Marx suggests that land would not be rented to a tenant at less than some minimum rent which he calls absolute rent. This concept and Marx's arguments are analysed in this paper. It has been argued by some that absolute rent in Marxian economics derives from the fact that investment in agriculture is lower so that the organic composition of capital is lower. It is argued here that the low organic composition of capital in the Marxian schema is rather a consequence of the existence of absolute rent, and this in turn results from the landlord-tenant relationship. Marx himself stressed that if land were owner-occupied absolute rent would not exist—that it is a consequence of the system of land tenure—but provides no explanation as to why it should have this consequence. In an associated paper, modern economic analysis is used to explain why minimum rents will occur.

Marx, Jones, Rodbertus and the Theory of Absolute Rent

As is well-known, Karl Marx distinguished three types of rent. In addition to two categories of differential rent, closely related to the Ricardian extensive and intensive margins, he argued (against David Ricardo) that rent was paid on the least fertile land. For Marx this so-called “absolute rent” resulted from the barrier posed by landed property to the free movement of capital into agricultural production. Since the organic composition of capital was relatively low in agriculture, the prices of production of farm products were lower than their labor values. The existence of private property in land prevented the reduction of agricultural prices to these prices of production, and allowed the payment of rent even on what could be described, in Ricardian terms, as marginal land. There exists a sizeable literature on Marx's theory of absolute rent,1but there is no systematic account of its gestation and development. In this paper we explain how Marx's critique of Ricardian rent theory evolved between his first doubts early in 1851 and the articulation of a distinctive alternative analysis in the manuscripts of 1862–63. We also assess the influence exerted on Marx by Richard Jones and Johann Karl Rodbertus, and briefly discuss the significance of Marx's theory of absolute rent for his political economy as a whole.

On Marx's theory of agricultural rent∗

This paper shows that Marx's theory of agricultural rent is not an adjunct to his theory of capital at the level of distribution but is inseparably developed from it. The forms of differential and absolute rent are shown to correspond to the formation of market value and price of production in the agricultural sector respectively, these in turn depending upon the barriers posed by landed property to intensive and extensive cultivation. In appendices, Marx' critique of Ricardo's theory of rent, differential rent on the worst land, a critique of other interpretations of Marx, and the ‘historical transformation problem’ are each considered briefly.

Surprofits et rentes foncières dans la ville capitaliste

In the capitalist city, ground rents reflect for capital the image of its own development and uneven growth, by imposing upon each particular capital the laws of capital as a whole. Therefore, landed property and rent are neither the regulators of urbanization, nor the source of urban contradictions. Capitalist relations of production imply in themselves the autonomy of private poles of accumulation and deny the possibility of a real social control over the formation of the useful effects of agglomeration. These effects thus necessarily constitute for particular capitals non‐reproducible or unevenly preconstituted conditions, and consequently so is the basis of surplus profits which can be transformed into ground rents. The existence of strictly non‐reproducible conditions is the foundation of the transformation of branch surplus profits into absolute rent, the unevenly preconstituted conditions inducing differential surplus profits transformable into differential rent. It is the non‐reproducibility of the commodity itself which is at the basis of surplus profits and monopoly rents. The transformation of these surplus profits into rents in no way implies the existence of a class of landowners, but only relations of production in which landed property is not only autonomous from capital, but also includes a social content which as such can put up an effective resistance to it. The basis of this resistance can as well be capitalist landed property as various forms of non‐capitalist landed property.

Some Problems in Measuring Differential Rent under Socialism

Under the conditions of the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, the nationalization of land means the transfer of it as the object of ownership and the object of management to the government. In economic terms this meant the abolition of the monopoly of private ownership of land and its economic expression - absolute rent - and the transfer to the government of the right to appropriate differential rent, to dispose over the land, and to determine the principles of land relations. The character of land relations changed radically. The latter no longer form between private owners, landowners, capitalist lessees, and hired workers but between the government as the owner of the land and socialist production collectives (collective and state farms) that receive land from the government for their exclusive use for farming. Socialist land relations are the relations between the government and production collectives with respect to the use of the land, which is the basic means of product...

Absolute Rent and the Structuring of Space By Governmental and Financial Institutions

Absolute Rent and the Structuring of Space By Governmental and Financial Institutions

Differential Ground Rent Under Socialism

In capitalist society the surplus value distributed among the ruling classes is divided in the main into the entrepreneur's profit and ground rent. Since in socialist society these parasitic classes have been abolished, they no longer share in the distribution of the surplus product. Its totality remains in the hands of the new society of working people and, moreover, it stands to reason that the former class divisions which distinguished ground rent from the entrepreneur's profit vanish. As private ownership is abolished, absolute ground rent disappears altogether, while under the new conditions in which the law of value operates, profitability undergoes substantial changes.