{ 2007 01 17 }

Rent (not the musical)

Source: LENIN’S TOMB: The Rentiers.
Lenin (the risen one) has an angry, informative post today about the monstrous dominance of finance captial in the world today, and especially about the disastrous effect that neo-liberalism and the new capitalism has had on life in London, and in Britain generally. He points out that the income of the richest 1,000 Brits has tripled under Tony Blair. Those people own everything, and through their ownership power control everything, and they are no longer living the same lives (or even living in the same country) as the hundreds of millions who are affected by their greed.

…the biggest owners in the entire country paid some extremely exclusive companies with fingers in every pie in the world to manage their assets (money or land) for them. These companies in turn secured for them the largest possible share of the surplus generated by people doing actual productive work (that still happens, you know). In other words, the funds are transferred to them through rent paid on ownership, either as massive shareholders or as landowners. Obviously, this is an ideal-type - there is no pure ‘rentier class’, since these guys will also have involvements in industrial capital, chairmanships, non-executive positions and so on. But you could say that this class of people favours policies that are likely to enhance all forms of rent, and are in a far better position than most to ensure they can achieve it. The financialisation of the world economy under the rubric of neoliberalism has brought some increased risk, but principally it has sped up and amplified the transfer of wealth to the richest.

Pure or not, there is now, in the US as well as in Britain, a rentier class. They are not the people who appear on talk shows, or whom talk show hosts pontificate about. If we see them at all, we see them on the Society page of our more cosmopolitan newspapers, and we know nothing about them but their names and the fact that their tuxedos are immaculately tailored. But it’s clear from Lenin’s post that those people are the enemy; they mean us no good at all.
Keynes warned about the rapacity of the rentiers, particularly the enormous turmoil they were prepared to put societies through to obtain their loot, and he at one point suggested the socialisation of investment, in a Board of National Investment whose role would be to manage aggregate demand and sustain full employment by channeling investment into useful, long-term development.
Keynes rejected the solution that his logic had driven him towards; it would be too revolutionary. I think it’s time to re-consider revolution as an option.

Posted by richard on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007, at 7:58 am, and filed under think about a revolution.

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