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SEMINAR
The Rent Relation and Struggles over Distribution in the 21st Century
May 25 2022 8-10:30 am EST / 1-3:30pm GMT / 2-4:30pm SAST / 5:30pm-8:00pm IST
Zoom Registration Link: Seminar on Rent
Rent shapes the millennial geography of struggles over land and its more than human affordances. Rent emerges as an attribute of private property entitlements that are pivotal to capital. Appropriated in the moment of distribution, rent is nevertheless fundamental to coordinating the flows of value through the moments of production, circulation and consumption. Assetization of land and its affordances enables the appropriation of rent through wide-ranging investments in real estate, infrastructure, agriculture and extractive industry, in turn impacting access to housing, livelihoods, food security and multispecies life. State agencies across the world are instrumental to facilitating these investments through direct consolidation of land, or through enabling legal frameworks. How do we understand the growing role of rent in millennial capitalist accumulation? Is there a fundamental contradiction between the moment of production and the moment of distribution that the rent relation engenders and must contain for ongoing accumulation? Are rentier appropriations new, or how are they specific to this historical conjuncture of accumulation? How do they unleash speculative spirals, financial crises, ghost cities and failed infrastructure projects across variegated contexts? What is their role in reinforcing inequalities (or enabling contingent solidarities) along race, caste, class, gender, ethnicity and other power differences? What lessons do contemporary struggles against dispossession, over land, housing, livelihoods, food security and multi-species life hold, for understanding the geography of rent? This seminar addresses some preliminary questions around the millennial geography of rent and accumulation.
Speakers
Erik Swyngedouw (University of Manchester), Moderator
“The Shitty Business of Rent”: An introduction
The Marxist and post-marxist analysis of the rent question has plagued political-economic and political-ecological analysis for a long time. No wonder Marx referred to it as ‘the shitty business of rent’. In this introduction, I will chart the contours of the rent problematic, the central place it takes in contemporary political-economic and political-ecological relations, and focus on the social struggles that unfold around the rent nexus. I will then introduce the speakers in the seminar.
Manuel Aalbers (KU Leuven)
Land rent and wealth-driven housing dynamics
Land rent drives inequality. This has always been the case, but in this presentation I will look into one new and one not so new way in which this is the case. The new way is that short-term rentals, enabled through digital platforms such as airbnb, drive up rents and tenant displacement. This is enabled through ‘tourism rent’, which mixes elements of the classical forms of rent. The not so new way is that the finance-driven house price increases have led to wealth-driven home and buy-to-let purchases. Of course, wealth has always driven house and rental prices, but the exact way in which this happens in the (post-)debt period has shifted.
Callum Ward (London School of Economics; with Frances Brill, University of Cambridge)
How to Make a City into a Firetrap: Relations of Land and Property in the UK’s Cladding Scandal
In the aftermath of the 2017 Grenfell fire it was found that buildings across the UK were covered in flammable cladding and had other structural safety issues. Assumed liable for remedial costs that in many cases have not been assessed, many leaseholders have found themselves stuck in uninsurable, and therefore unsellable, potentially fire-prone units. In this paper, we analyse how the property relations between leaseholder and freeholder within a neoliberal context dominated by extractive rentiers has created this situation. We trace the relationship between the structure of landed property, financialised value-extraction, and socio-materialities of the built environment to understand how Britain’s system of housing provision has turned sections of the UK property market into literal fire-traps. In doing so, we point to a need to understand the institutionalised chain of rent-seekers ‘value grabbing’ if we are to understand social murder through unsafe housing conditions.
Preeti Sampat (Ambedkar University Delhi)
The Caste of Rent
Rent is often discussed as a secular distribution relation in the accumulation cycle. As an attribute of propertized land however, it is fundamentally tied to historical social relations of colonialism, race, ethnicity, gender, religion and in the case of India, caste. These relations mediate the ownership of land and its affordances, including real estate and rent. With an ethnographic vignette from the upcoming ‘greenfield’ Dholera smart city in Gujarat, India, I discuss the caste relations of rent through propertized land. Dholera indexes the contradictions of accumulation in India’s economic growth at several registers; and fosters contingent solidarities across historical inequalities among those resisting the project.
Kai Bosworth (Virginia Commonwealth University)
Comparative and differential rents in agriculture and oil transportation: Revisiting the spatial contradictions of capital
The extraction of rents is a comparative and differential exercise. The contradiction in space that can be found in the oil industry, Mazan Labban (2008) has influentially argued, stems from the difference in access and control faced by landed and circulating capital. Though this contradiction could be emblematic of broader trends in the relationship between finance, extraction, and logistics/infrastructure (Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, Arboleda 2020), this talk focuses on a smaller but no less emblematic dimension: the comparative exercise that agricultural landowners undertake when evaluating pipeline easements. Landowners' understandings of the profit they can extract from space is mediated by rent, but evaluation of rent enfolds a complicated material ecology: winter wheat, ground heat, insect hatching times, clay byproducts, and topsoil layers. As a mediating force, rent can thus either exacerbate or resolve this spatial contradiction, albeit only temporarily.
Alex Loftus (King's College London)
Value-rent-finance in the financialization of water infrastructure
Building on Purcell et al (2020), I will explore the internal relations between value, rent, and finance as a way of interpreting the process often referred to as financialization. Crucially, by viewing value, rent, and finance as internally related, it becomes possible to develop conversations between Marxist critiques of capitalism and the environment, and more recent work on the financialization of nature. I will then go on to apply this framework to an interpretation of financialized water provision in London, and the construction of major new infrastructure projects on the River Thames.