Mother of capital: a history of rent, resistance, and critique

Abstract

Contemporary economic theory primes economists to identify rents for elimination. Paradoxically, economic theory sees rents everywhere but insists they are extrinsic to capitalism. There is, however, a materialist tradition that resolves this contradiction. It conceives the history and theory of rent in terms of social-property relations (‘SPRs’), or what Marx and Engels called the ‘relations of production’. Working in the SPRs tradition, I argue the rent-relation is not only integral to capitalism but gave birth to it. Critiquing existing SPRs scholarship, I develop and defend a model of historical change I call ‘endogenous transformation’: I posit that SPRs are transformed through their reproduction. I apply this model to show how the dynamics of the medieval rent-relation—particularly its English variant—produced an endogenous crisis that transformed rent into a proletarianizing relation. This mutated rent-relation, I argue, forced English peasants off the land and into wage labour, and barred their return. Rent thereby gave birth to capital and became its ongoing precondition. This study also seeks to excavate a neglected corpus of critical rent theory, centuries older than political economy. Whereas political economy adopts a statist perspective, critical social theory, I argue, was grounded in peasant and proletarian resistance. In centring the capital-relation, Marx has made earlier critics’ of rent appear anachronistic. I argue, however, that they were in fact forgotten pioneers of SPRs analysis. Like this study, they too theorised rent as a proletarianizing relation and as the mother of capital. Rent theory, I argue, led critical theorists further still, to analyses of capitalist domination, exploitation, ideology, post-capitalist society, and social transformation. Finally, I claim, if rent indeed gave birth to capital, then we can hypothesise, as did Marx and his critical predecessors, that capital too will prove pregnant with its own successor.