Rentier Capitalism
The United Kingdom of Rentierism In this landmark book, the author of the acclaimed The New Enclosure provides a forensic examination of capitalism as it increasingly exists today in the 'advanced' economies of the Global North. Dominated by institutions and individuals profiting from the control of scarce, revenue-generating assets, Brett Christophers styles this contemporary socioeconomic system 'rentier capitalism', and he critically dissects its emergence, forms and implications. The empirical focus of Rentier Capitalism's critique is the United Kingdom, a country and political economy that today bear all the hallmarks of rentier ascendancy: immense concentration of resources, constrained competition, vast inequalities of income and wealth, and growing economic stagnation. From finance to land, intellectual property to infrastructure and natural resources to digital platforms, Christophers identifies the key types of assets that scaffold UK rentier capitalism, the key actors that control and profit from them and the key consequences for everyone else. With profound lessons for other countries subject to rentier dominance or its growing spectre, Christophers' examination of the UK case is indispensable to those wanting not just to understand rentierism but supplant it. Frequently invoked but never previously analysed and illuminated in all its depth and variety, rentier capitalism is here laid bare for the first time.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
3people
2021–2026years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Don't forget the people who voted for "Get the Government off the [rich] people's back". Ronald Reagan and every subsequent government since. Neoliberalism. The rest of the Anglosphere followed suit.
It (Neoliberalism) was supposed to re-energize American Capitalism. Instead it gave birth to Rentier-Capitalism. See Brett Christophers for a more detailed analysis.
- https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
This is a huge collection of charted data which shows that there may indeed be something going on that is a little harder to explain away than the average conspiracy theory.
The study of how wealth accumulates to capital holders has been reinvigorated by Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century".
Since then, a huge amount of research has been done on the driving forces behind wealth inequality. Skimming the surface, I'll throw out https://angrynomics.com/ and https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rentier-Capitalism-Owns-Economy-Pay....
- Evgeny Morozov wrote a very interesting, but also quite long, critique of the "technofeudalism" concept from a Marxist perspective in the New Left Review back in 2022:
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii133/articles/evgeny-moroz...
> In the case of well-known figures like Varoufakis and Mazzucato, tantalizing their audiences with invocations of feudal glamour may provide a media-friendly way to recycle arguments they have made before. In Varoufakis’s case, techno-feudalism seems to be mostly about the perverse macroeconomic effects of quantitative easing. For Mazzucato, ‘digital feudalism’ refers to the unearned income generated by tech platforms. Neo-feudalism is often proposed as a way to bring conceptual clarity to the most advanced sectors of the digital economy, where the left’s brightest minds still find themselves very much in the dark. Are Google and Amazon capitalists? Are they rentiers, as Brett Christophers’s Rentier Capitalism suggests? What about Uber? Is it just an intermediary, a rent-taking platform that has inserted itself between drivers and passengers? Or is it producing and selling a transportation service? These questions are not without consequences for how we think about contemporary capitalism itself, heavily dominated by technology companies.
> The idea that feudalism is making a comeback also coheres with left critiques condemning capitalism as extractivist. If today’s capitalists are mere lazy rentiers who contribute nothing to the production process, don’t they deserve to be downgraded to the status of feudal landlords? This embrace of feudal imagery by media- and meme-friendly figures of the left intelligentsia shows no signs of ceasing. Ultimately, though, the popularity of feudal-speak is a testament to intellectual weakness, rather than media savviness. It is as if the left’s theoretical framework can no longer make sense of capitalism without mobilizing the moral language of corruption and perversion. In what follows I delve into some landmark debates on the distinguishing features that differentiate capitalism from earlier economic forms—and those that define political-economic operations in the new digital economy—in hope that a critique of techno-feudal reason may throw fresh light on the world we’re in.
