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The Turbulent Circulation of Rent:
Towards a Political Economy of
Property and Ownership in Supply
Chain Capitalism
Mart
ın Arboleda
School of Sociology, Universidad Diego Portales and Millennium Initiative for Energy and Society
(NUMIES), Santiago, Chile, martin.arboleda@udp.cl
Thomas F. Purcell
Department of European and International Studies, King’s College London, London, UK,
thomas.purcell@kcl.ac.uk
Abstract: Although recent years have seen an efflorescence of research on rent, the
emphasis has tended to be placed in the antagonistic relations of distribution that under-
lie this category. The ways in which rent relations also mediate the expansion of global
networks of production and trade, however, are yet to be deciphered. On the other
hand, an emerging scholarly interest in questions of logistics and supply chain capitalism
has lacked a systematic theorisation of how increasing functional integration in the
world economy shapes—and is also shaped by—rent relations. To bridge this gap, this
article explores the complex, convoluted relation between property and the social circu-
lation of capital in and beyond land markets. With this, we place into focus the extent
to which the logistics revolution has elevated the importance of property relations—and
thereby of the rentier class—in the dynamics of accumulation and political conflict
under late-stage capitalism.
Resumen: El rentismo ha pasado a ser uno de los t
opicos m
as ampliamente investiga-
dos en a~
nos recientes. Si bien la literatura existente ha puesto el
enfasis en las relaciones
antag
onicas de distribuci
on que subyacen los procesos de captura de renta, a
un falta
por descifrar de qu
e manera la propiedad tambi
en ejerce un rol de coordinaci
on en la
expansi
on de redes globales de producci
on, infraestructura y comercio. Por otro lado, el
creciente inter
es acad
emico en la llamada “revoluci
on log
ıstica”ha carecido de una teo-
rizaci
on sistem
atica de c
omo la creciente integraci
on funcional en la econom
ıa mundial,
se entrelaza con distintos reg
ımenes de propiedad y pr
acticas rentistas. Para contribuir a
este debate, exploramos la compleja e intrincada relaci
on entre la propiedad y la circu-
laci
on social del capital, tanto dentro como m
as all
a de los mercados de tierras. Con
ello, el art
ıculo pone de relieve hasta qu
e punto la revoluci
on log
ıstica ha elevado la
importancia de las relaciones de propiedad—y por ende de la clase rentista—en las
din
amicas de acumulaci
on y conflicto que son propias del capitalismo tard
ıo.
Keywords: rentier capitalism, logistics revolution, circulation of capital, global value
chains, global production networks
Introduction
In her acclaimed book The Value of Everything, the neo-Keynesian economist Mari-
ana Mazzucato (2018) claims that recent dynamics of wealth creation in the
Antipode Vol. 0 No. 0 2021 ISSN 0066-4812, pp. 1–20 doi: 10.1111/anti.12737
ª2021 The Authors. Antipode ª2021 Antipode Foundation Ltd.
A Radical Journal
of Geography
world economy have morphed (and become degraded) as a result of the increas-
ing predominance of value extraction vis-
a-vis value production. In a wide-ranging
conversation with the history of economic thought, Mazzucato takes inspiration
from David Ricardo’s19
th
century critique of the unproductive landlord class to
identify modern day value extraction—in the hands of physical and financial asset
holders—as rent. This transformation, for many others, is increasingly captured by
the emergence of so-called “rentier capitalism”—understood as a socioeconomic
system where income derives mainly from the ownership, possession or control of
scarce assets (Christophers 2019; Piketty 2014; Standing 2016). In fact, the
increasing notoriety of the purportedly extractive features of 21
st
century capital-
ism has led some scholars to argue for an “expanded conception of extractivism”
(Gago and Mezzadra 2017; see also Ye et al. 2020). Although the concept of ex-
tractivism originated in the context of territorial struggles against large-scale min-
ing and oil production in Latin America, it has been deployed to illuminate new
configurations of profit-making that are more directly contingent on extra-
economic force, monopoly power, and rent appropriation.
At the same time, a leap forward in technologies for logistical connectivity,
intermodal transport, and inter-firm coordination, has triggered a lively debate on
supply chains and the logistics revolution, understood as both a motive force and
intrinsic feature of the global capitalist economy (see Chua et al. 2018; Coe and
Yeung 2015; Cowen 2014; Tsing 2009). The logistics revolution, according to
Danyluk (2018), has ushered in a new phase of time-space compression that has
increased the speed, cost-efficiency, flexibility, and reliability of global commodity
flows. This has not only blurred the boundaries between transport and other
forms of productive work; crucially, it has also enlarged and politicised the sphere
of circulation to such an extent that it has upended hitherto existing power rela-
tions between those who make commodities and those who move them—as well
as between the production and realisation of value broadly considered. An emerg-
ing scholarly interest on the political and contested nature of logistics and of
value chains, however, has lacked a systematic theorisation of how increasing
functional integration in the world economy shapes—and is also shaped by—rent
relations.
Generally speaking, tropes of extractivism and those of logistical circulation
would seem to point towards two substantially different, even mutually excluding
tendencies: encroaching sociospatial fragmentation through practices of rentier-
ship and extra-economic force, on the one hand, and advanced material integra-
tion under thick webs of logistics and connectivity infrastructure, on the other. In
this article, we intend to bridge the existing analytical gap between the bodies of
literature that study these seemingly disparate tendencies. To do this, we develop
a dialogue between critical theorisations of the circulation of capital (see Arboleda
2019, 2020a; Arthur and Reuten 1998; Banoub and Martin 2020; Harvey 2013),
and recent efforts to rethink rent beyond land and beyond the usual emphasis on
relations of distribution (see Birch 2019; Christophers 2019; Greco and Apos-
tolopoulou 2020; Purcell and Mart
ınez 2018; Roy 2017; Ward and Aalbers 2016).
In suggesting that the circulation of rent is intrinsically “turbulent”, this article is
also inspired by Chua et al.’s (2018) invitation to interrogate the seams,
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disruptions, and crisis tendencies of logistical systems that on the surface seem
unified and coherent.
Specifically, we build upon Marx’s theorisation of circuits of capital—as devel-
oped in Volume II of Capital—to show how variegated regimes of property medi-
ate the cycle of accumulation across its three different phases or forms: productive
capital,commodity capital, and money capital. We consider regimes of property to
be the juridical-institutional mechanisms designed to harness rent relations for the
disciplinary organisation of labour (and the concomitant production of labouring
subjects) through a Lockean ideology of technological-organisational improve-
ment. Developing new ways of seeing rent and property relations is a relevant
intellectual project insofar as wealth appropriation through the control of scarce
and/or non-reproducible assets has extended beyond land rights to also encom-
pass stocks, shares, bonds, patents, licences, and copyrights, among others. In
this sense, an analytic of circuits of capital is insightful as a methodological device
to render visible the intrinsic mobility and mutability of property regimes, and the
way they shape the movement of commodities across global networks of trade,
finance, infrastructure, and struggle.
One of the main consequences of the international centralisation of capital and
the emergence of new formations of monopoly power, according to Mazen Lab-
ban (2019), is that it leads to the wasteful allocation of ever-increasing economic
surpluses towards infrastructures, the credit system, and the built environment. In
this sense, the great paradox that underlies the radical acceleration of commodity
flows made possible by the logistics revolution, is the fact that it has been pre-
mised upon a debt-driven spatial fix of planetary proportions (Danyluk 2018). The
crisis of overaccumulation that followed the demise of the Bretton Woods system
in the 1970s, Danyluk (2018) explains, diverted idle capital towards investment in
new infrastructures for transport and commodity circulation (port terminals, ware-
houses, railways, airports, free trade zones, container ships, etc.). Lands and built
environments across the world surged as sinks for capital investment garnered to
boost the movement of international trade and to irrigate the arteries of “lean
production”. In this way, one of the major contradictions of the logistics revolu-
tion is that, in enabling a more advanced phase of the annihilation of space by
time, it has simultaneously placed assets and landed property—and therefore ren-
tiers—at the forefront of new varieties of class and intra-class conflict.
Insofar as this article proposes to shift the gaze from markets towards institu-
tional regimes of property, it is in line with recent efforts to develop what might
be termed a political economy of property and ownership (see for example Bhandar
2018; Davies 2012; Langley 2021; Nichols 2020; Pistor 2019). Despite their inter-
nal nuances, these approaches have pointed towards the fact that capital accu-
mulation is just as much a product of legal frameworks and regulatory
institutions, as it is of markets and commodity production. In anchoring our argu-
ment to a materialist theory of circulation, however, our approach differs from
and contributes to these literatures by stressing the continued relevance of labour
exploitation and commodity production for contemporary capitalism. Against
neo-Ricardian and neo-Schumpeterian approaches that deem rent either in nega-
tive (i.e. value-extraction) or positive (i.e. value-adding) terms respectively (see
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Andreucci et al. 2017; Birch 2019; Coe and Yeung 2015; Mazzucato 2018), we
posit rent as a contradictory form that makes possible the dynamics of fixity and
motion that lie at the heart of late-stage capitalism.
The paper is thus structured across four sections as follows. We begin by
unpacking the complex, convoluted relationship that exists between rent and the
circulation of capital. As representations of a contradictory and yet unitary cycle
of accumulation, we suggest that circuits of capital offer a fruitful basis for under-
standing how property relations extend beyond production to also shape the
movement of knowledge, infrastructure, and commodities across transnational
value chains. In the three sections that follow, the article goes on to lay out each
of the three circuits and the regimes of property that make them possible: first, a
circuit of productive capital; second, a circuit of commodity capital; third, a circuit of
money capital. In this sense, the analytical framework of circuits of capital offers a
methodological device to dissect how rent and property relations mediate differ-
ent moments of capital’s socioecological metabolism beyond land markets. It is
precisely by looking at the circulation of wealth in these terms that we can con-
clude that the global unfolding of rent relations is not anathema to functional
economic integration under supply chain capitalism; it is actually one of its neces-
sary preconditions.
Rent and the Circulation of Capital
Adding to the path-breaking analysis of the internal relationship between rent
and the circulation of interest-bearing capital first developed in The Limits to Capi-
tal (Harvey 1982), David Harvey’s engagement with rent theory was further
unfolded in his 1985 book The Urbanisation of Capital. By situating the appropria-
tion of rent as a moment within the circulation of revenues (wages, profit, interest,
taxes, etc.) Harvey pushes Marx’s rent theory beyond the confines of the circula-
tion of capital in production. This analytical manoeuvre established a fertile terrain
for the examination of rent in the functioning of land markets and forms of sec-
ondary exploitation therein. Harvey’s conceptualisation of rent, however,
remained circumscribed to payments to raw land, thereby leaving open the possi-
bility of further interrogating the ways in which property regimes also shape other
elements of the circuit—i.e. commodities, fixed capital, knowledge, transport sys-
tems, and debt instruments, among others. Although Harvey’s (2013) more
recent cross reading of Marx in Volumes II and III of Capital has made important
inroads for the development of a materialist theory of circulation, it has lacked a
specific exploration of the role that property—and its phenomenal manifestation
in the capitalist form of rent—performs in the movement of the circuit of capital.
Specifically, it is in Volume II of Capital where Marx reflects on the circulation
(turnover) and reproduction of capital through the standpoint of three contradic-
tory and yet interdependent circuits (i.e. a circuit of productive capital, a circuit of
commodity capital, and a circuit of money capital). Rather than being indepen-
dent varieties of capital, Marx emphasises that these circuits are functional forms
of a single metabolic cycle that goes through successive metamorphoses in order
to grow and achieve maturity—just like the butterfly goes through the successive
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stages of being larva, chrysalis and moth (Marx 1992:133). Here, the discussion
of rent in the sphere of circulation is notable by its absence. In Volume III, there-
fore, Marx explains that in his preliminary theory of circulation, “surplus-value was
not yet developed in its forms of revenue—profit(profit of enterprise plus interest)
and rent—and hence could not be dealt with in these forms”(Marx 1991:975).
Therefore, it is only when production, circulation, and distribution are approached
in their necessary unity that concrete forms of revenue, such as rent, are dealt
with as components of the general circuit within a framework of expanded repro-
duction. The total social capital, whose scale becomes enlarged with each turn-
over cycle, was first theorised in Volume II (see Marx 1992: Chapter 18), and laid
the basis for the more systematic interrogation of the relation between rent and
circulation to be later developed in Volume III (see Marx 1991).
In positing the process of capitalist reproduction at the level of abstraction of
the global total social capital, Marx offers a blueprint for dissecting the transfers of
value that take place not only between individual capitals—from lower to higher
degrees of organic composition—but between nation-states as aliquot parts of a
unitary, yet polarised capitalist world-system (Marx 1992: Part 3). These transfers
of value, as several accounts have pointed out, become determined in terms of
rent as one of the necessary forms through which the equalisation of the general
rate of profit asserts itself (see I~
nigo Carrera 2017; Roy 2017; Starosta 2010). After
being a relatively sidelined dimension of his mature work for decades, Marx’s
reading of circulation (and of circuits of capital) has been garnering increasing
scholarly interest in recent years (Arthur and Reuten 1998; Harvey 2013), espe-
cially within critical studies of logistics (Arboleda 2019, 2020a; Banoub and Martin
2020; Cowen 2014; Danyluk 2018). The Marxian analytic of circulation is of par-
ticular relevance for this article insofar as it enables the analytical dissection of
how property regimes both constrain and make possible the movement of the cir-
cuit in each of its three moments, which roughly coincide with the interlocking
motive forces of supply chain capitalism: production,commodity circulation, and
finance.
The critical theorisation of circulation that we propose is thereby intended to
shift the gaze from markets (i.e. from a shallow understanding of circulation as ex-
change) towards institutional regimes of property—and their personification in
rentiers, state officials, debtors, money lenders, and labouring subjects, among
others—across the entire circuit of capital.
1
Building upon recent discussions in
critical legal studies and political economy, we consider regimes of property to be
the legal-institutional mechanisms (i.e. a political technology) for the disciplinary
organisation of labour and for the production of gendered, classed, and racialised
subjects on the basis of scientific standards of calculation, and of a pervasive ide-
ology of technological improvement (see Bhandar 2018; Davies 2012; Nichols
2020; Pistor 2019). The emphasis on technological improvement as the basis of
legitimate land tenure, as Ellen Meiksins Wood’s (2002) pioneering study on the
agrarian origins of capitalism shows, was a critical move in modern theorisations
of property. This view, according to Wood, originates in John Locke’sSecond Trea-
tise of Government, which deems as wasteful any system of property that does not
increase the productivity of the land. The “will to improve”, as recent studies have
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shown, continues to be a crucial feature of contemporary property forms in and
beyond landed assets (see Bhandar 2018; Li 2014; Pistor 2019).
In this sense, a materialist understanding of circuits of capital purport a more
expansive conceptualisation of property based on the recognition that irrespective
of its origin (geographical/sectoral), rent is always a concrete form of surplus
value—surplus profit over prices of production—commanded by monopolies that
can be land and non-land based. On this basis, the contemporary form taken by
ownership and property monopolies should not be read as antithetical to compe-
tition, a point which reaffirms the analytical purpose of Marx’s differential rent
(I, II), absolute rent, and monopoly rent as categories to uncover the ways in
which monopoly forms are “economically realised”(Marx 1991:752–756).
2
This
dialectical understanding of rent as a category that entails both relations of distri-
bution and of production is fundamentally at odds with the emerging neo-
Ricardian consensus which reduces rent to a mere category of distribution. Mari-
ana Mazzucato’s (2018) depiction of the world economy as sharply polarised
between (industrious) makers and (unproductive) takers paradigmatically encapsu-
lates this prevailing mind-set that informs understandings of the rentier character
of 21
st
century capitalism.
Absent from these readings of rentier capitalism is the fact that the encroaching
concentration of economic and monopoly power—enabled by the extended cir-
culation of new and ever more variegated regimes of property—has advanced
alongside a process of material integration and market expansion whose extent is
entirely without precedent in history (see for example Cowen 2014; Tsing 2009).
When looked at from the standpoint of the circulation of capital, however, these
two processes no longer seem to be antithetical or mutually excluding. A critical
theorisation of the circulation of capital is thereby intended as a methodological
device to grasp the simultaneously fragmenting and dynamic nature of rent rela-
tions; it is thus intended to investigate the mechanisms by which regimes of prop-
erty combine the commodity form of ownership and the political form of
dispossession into a unitary logic. In this sense, the Marxian analytic of circuits of
capital is also warranted by the pivotal role that he ascribes to the circuit of
money capital in the historical unfolding of the commodity status of property. It
is when trade in land becomes “reduced to a special branch of the circulation of
interest-bearing capital”, David Harvey (1982:347) reminds us that “landowner-
ship has achieved its true capitalistic form”.
To extend our analytical gaze beyond landed property and beyond capital in
production to also encompass other moments in the lifecycle of capital (i.e.
money capital and commodity capital), we also develop a dialogue with
approaches that have aimed at shedding light onto the ways in which the rent
relation also mediates the circulation of digital platform technology (Langley and
Leyshon 2017), financial instruments (Christophers 2019), techno-scientific arte-
facts (Birch 2019; Zeller 2007), trade in raw materials (I~
nigo Carrera 2007),
energy infrastructure (Purcell and Mart
ınez 2018), and supply chains (Roy 2017;
Starosta 2010), among others. Crucially, the emphasis on circuits of capital
enables us to offer a counterpoint not only to the neo-Ricardian consensus that
deems rent in negative terms, but also to neo-Schumpeterian understandings of
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this concept as intrinsically positive for innovation and for capital accumulation
(see for example Birch 2019; Coe and Yeung 2015). A value-theoretical examina-
tion of this category necessarily puts into question one-sided readings of what is a
much more intricate social relation. In Derek Kerr’s (1996:85) words:
... rent cannot be either positive or negative to the reproduction of capital as it is a
continuously posited, contradictory precondition of this reproduction ... It is a neces-
sary form through which capital appropriates and commands space while at the same
time enforcing labour’s exclusion from that space, thereby reproducing the commod-
ity status of labour-power.
In foregrounding how the circulation of property systems—via the rent mecha-
nism—accelerates the turnover time of capital and boosts processes of market-
making and of labour degradation, the analytic of circuits of capital offers new
tools for critical studies of logistics and Global Value Chains (GVCs) / Global Pro-
duction Networks (GPNs) (see Chua et al. 2018; Coe and Yeung 2015; Cowen
2014; Tsing 2009). Broadly put, these intellectual traditions have placed the
emergence of logistics—as both a science and an industry of circulation—at the
heart of a global mutation of profit-making strategies towards the imperatives of
speed, homeostasis, and flow. Some of these approaches suggest that this bur-
geoning shift in the speed, dexterity, and extent of commodity flows has also
been premised upon large-scale investments in fixed capital (i.e. land, ware-
houses, buildings, railways, roads, port infrastructure, etc.) (see Banoub and Mar-
tin 2020; Danyluk 2018; Gregson et al. 2017). They have also revealed that the
logistics revolution has led a systematic assault on labour, degrading the material
conditions of frontline workers in the global economy and intensifying conflict
between classes and fractions of classes. The foundations of these transformations
in rent relations—and in the institutionalisation of property regimes—however,
are yet to be deciphered.
In general terms, and despite its evident relevance, critical studies of logistics
have bypassed the question of rent tout court. The traditions of GVC/GPN analy-
sis, however, have considered “economic rents”to be an important element of
how the governance composition of global value chains is structured and repro-
duced. The understanding of rent that tends to prevail in these traditions, how-
ever, is deeply informed by Schumpeterian tropes of “value-adding”and
“innovation”(for a critique, see Baglioni et al. 2020; Selwyn 2015). According
to Coe and Yeung (2015), firms in global production networks can “generate”
rents from the particular talents of its workforce, from asymmetric access to
technology and resources, from particular organisational skills, or from establish-
ing brand-name prominence. These one-sided understandings of value, it has
been argued, tend to obfuscate the actual mechanisms of causation, distribu-
tion, and value extraction between classes and fractions of classes, which lie at
the heart of commodity chains (see Dunaway 2014; Roy 2017; Werner 2019).
In the section that follows, we explore the dynamics of value production
through the analysis of the first circuit in our analytic: the circuit of productive
capital.
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The Circuit of Productive Capital
The circuit of productive capital, Marx (1992:144) argues in Volume II of Capital,
“signifies the periodically repeated function of the productive capital, i.e. repro-
duction”. As such, Marx represents it through the formula of P ... C’–M’–C... P.
3
By suggesting that this circuit does not merely involve production—the creation
of commodities through the combination of human exertion and instruments of
production—but the periodic reproduction of surplus value, Marx is hinting at the
fact that circulation itself cannot be reduced to mere exchange, but is itself part
of production. In the Grundrisse, he claims that “a precondition of production
based on capital is therefore the production of a constantly widening sphere of circu-
lation, whether the sphere itself is directly expanded or whether more points within
it are created as points of production”(Marx 1973:407). The portion of fixed capi-
tal deployed in production appears as a central moment or motive force of this
contradiction. As Harvey (2013:111) accords in his discussion of Volume II, the
functional imbrication of the circuits demands that an important part of the capi-
tal has to remain locked in place so that the rest can stay in motion.
It is precisely insofar as this particular circuit mediates the process of circulation
that the revolution in movement enabled by the logistics revolution of recent dec-
ades has been said to be underpinned by a spatial fix of unprecedented scale.
The logistics revolution, according to Danyluk (2018), has helped to redraw the
world map of surplus value production by systematically stimulating large-scale
investments in land, instruments of production, and infrastructure, thereby
enabling the globalisation of manufacturing and of raw materials production. In
world-historical terms, this “logistical fix”(Danyluk 2018) then emerged as a
means to circumvent the chronic problem of overaccumulation that followed the
demise of the Bretton-Woods System in the 1970s. Idle capitals scoured the world
for cheap and docile labour-power, channelling money flows towards “underde-
veloped”and “laggard”world regions, a development that reverberated in the
gravitational shift of large-scale industry (understood as encompassing both man-
ufacturing and capital-intensive agriculture) towards the East and the South—a
phenomenon that the specialised literature has termed the New International
Division of Labour (NIDL) (for recent readings of the NIDL, see Charnock and
Starosta 2016).
The NIDL, it has been argued, has evolved alongside declining rates of labour
productivity and mass deindustrialisation in the Anglo-European world, on the
one hand, and increasing industrialisation through mass manufacturing and the
deployment of just-in-time (JIT), “maquila”, and, more recently, modular produc-
tion networks in the global South, on the other. The correlate of this process of
industrial upgrading in resource-rich economies, has been a longstanding com-
modity supercycle that has seen an unrelenting expansion of the frontier of
resource extraction and of agroindustrialisation. The high point of this commodity
supercycle, it should be noted, took place in the aftermath of the 2008 subprime
crisis. As the asset-backed security market for mortgages imploded, land and nat-
ural resources emerged as key sites for speculative investment. This, in turn,
spurred one of the most dynamic land rushes in modern history (for an overview,
see Li 2014), alongside an extended burgeoning “infrastructure scramble”
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deployed to increase connectivity and reduce turnover times of commodity pro-
duction (see Schindler and Kanai 2018). That this infrastructure scramble has
been suffused with tropes of territorial competitiveness and productivity is indica-
tive of the Lockean ideology of improvement that, according to Bhandar (2018),
is so central to modern regimes of property.
This global rush or “scramble”for investments in land and infrastructure has
also been underpinned by a process of regulatory restructuring led by institutions
as diverse as multilateral institutions, NGOs, and states. New protocols, regula-
tions and governance instruments regarding property rights have been issued so
as to stimulate flows of FDI that can improve the “competitiveness”of national or
subnational economies by making land more productive. Arguments about land
regulation, land zoning, and property rights, as Derek Hall (2013:84) notes,
“often refer to what needs to be done to make a country ‘modern’or “globally
competitive’or ‘sustainable’, and to ensure compliance with putative ‘global best
practices’”. Land titling or land formalisation programs have been at the forefront
of institution-building efforts by states to transform putatively “vacant land”into
private property, thereby giving rise to a whole new gamut of property owners,
asset-holders, and rentiers. Land, as historical experience shows, is rarely (if ever)
“vacant”. These interrelated processes have therefore led to the emergence of a
landscape of accumulation that is increasingly contingent on distributional (i.e.
rentier or extractivist) conflicts over the control of scarce assets, yet deeply imbri-
cated within an increasingly interdependent mosaic of supply chains and inter-
modal transport infrastructure.
As Gregson et al. (2017) aptly put it, if the global South has been transformed
into a metaphorical global factory, then this development has been clearly
enabled by a corresponding “global warehouse”. Moreover, these authors sug-
gest that it is precisely in these global seams—warehouses, ports, and fixed capital
in the form of landed property—where much of the value produced is captured.
Perhaps hinting at the role that rent—and rentiers—play in this extended global
warehouse, Gregson et al. (2017) conclude that the analysis of logistical power
through moments of friction, fixity, and interruption, is essential for the develop-
ment of the field. According to Banoub and Martin (2020), in Volume II of Capital
Marx frames storage as a crucial “circulation cost”; even though storage does not
add value to commodities as such, it is absolutely necessary for the transformation
of commodities (C) into surplus value (M’), perhaps in ways that are analogous to
the interplay between land and food production in agriculture. Hinting at the
implications of this problem for rent theory, Banoub and Martin (2020) highlight
that circulation costs of this sort constitute necessary deductions from surplus value.
The contemporary forms taken by the aforementioned processes of valorisation
can be traced through analysis of the circulation of what Juan I~
nigo Carrera
(2007) has termed rent-bearing commodities. Originally, the category has been
used to analyse how state policies (currency, interest rates, taxes, etc.) intervene
into the rotation cycle of primary commodities to the world market and, in doing
so, divert a portion of surplus profits from the pockets of landowners. Rent-
bearing commodities are those produced under specific, and monopolisable prop-
erty conditions that reduce their individual value below market prices, thereby
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releasing surplus profits that can be captured as rents in the sphere of circulation.
On the basis of its systematic deviation of value and price owing to property con-
ditions not available to all capitals (only to large, concentrated ones), a rent-
bearing commodity is one that is represented in circulation as a quantity of value
greater than its own value content (I~
nigo Carrera 2017:175). The concept of
rent-bearing commodity provides a critique of forms of capital accumulation that
operate through the appropriation of ground-rent from the export of primary
commodities. This approach has so far only pertained to resource-based accumu-
lation in Latin America (Caligaris 2014). However, it is our argument that the con-
cept of rent-bearing commodities—in light of their imbrication in transnational
commodity flows—is also helpful to understand the way new regimes of monopo-
lisable property are predicated on the capture of surplus profits in the sphere of
circulation.
Viewing the movement of rent-bearing commodities across space shows how
rent appropriation is not restricted to the private owners of non-reproducible
resources from production—i.e. the traditional landlord figure—but also includes
the extent to which other social subjects can appropriate rent from the sphere of
circulation (I~
nigo Carrera 2007). In a similar vein, Christophers (2019) has consid-
ered rent-bearing assets to be those which are characterised by monopoly power
not just in ownership, but also in terms of its commercialisation. As we will argue
in the sections that follow, given the proliferation of property regimes, new rent-
bearing commodities traverse the crosscurrents between the circulation of capital
and the circulation of revenues. Crucially, this chimes with how capital accumula-
tion is not limited to the ownership and direct control over assets as such, but as
Ye et al. (2020:163) point out, has increasingly shifted towards control-over-flows.
The significance of market power for processes of rent appropriation, as we will
see in the next section, is most starkly manifested in the circuit of commodity
capital.
The Circuit of Commodity Capital
The circuit of commodity capital circumvents the gap that separates the produc-
tion of value from its realisation; it includes all the physical, social and digital
infrastructures that enable commodities to reach the market in order to be
exchanged and become realised as money. If value is not periodically realised in
the sphere of circulation, capital becomes devalued and destroyed, as it follows
from the general formula for this circuit according to Marx (1992:167): C’–M’–C
... P... C’. The implications of this process for rent relations are fundamental,
because as Christophers (2019:6) suggests, “monopoly control of an asset is for
nothing economically if the owner lacks the power to monetise that asset in mar-
ket exchange”. The increasing presence of landlords, asset-holders, and rentiers
drawing profits from market relations, in other words, helps to explain why the
logistics revolution has rendered the sphere of circulation a crucial site for class
and intra-class conflict (Andreucci et al. 2017) as well as for new modes of labour
insurgency and subjectivity (Langley and Leyshon 2017; Srnicek 2017). To
approach the circuit of commodity capital as a sphere of rent extraction, then,
10 Antipode
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involves thinking through the points of contact between the circulation of capital
and revenues in the accumulation of capital.
Here the analytical bridge between the appropriation of rent from production
and circulation resides in the omnipresence of regimes of property commanded
by capitals that dominate the buying, selling and circulation of commodity capi-
tal. As Marx (1973:408) highlights, as the sphere of circulation grows and
expands—commanded by the expansion of production—“it already appears as a
moment of production itself”(emphasis added). Commerce, Marx continues, no
longer seems to be a mere function taking place between economic actors for
the exchange of their excess; rather, it emerges “as an essentially all-embracing
presupposition and moment of production itself”(ibid.). For example, it is well
known that the market power—based on the monopoly over supply chain, tech-
nology patents, or branding, etc.—of large firms in producer and buyer driven
value chains force down the margins for smaller firms that act as suppliers of
intermediate industrial inputs, clothing or foodstuffs within complex commodity
chains across industry and agriculture. Going against the grain of the monopoly
capital and unequal exchange theories that frame much of the critical literature,
alternative approaches have underscored the differential valorisation capacities of
small capitals—firms or owner producers in the global South—to understand the
transfers of surplus value and rent within commodity chains (Purcell 2018; Roy
2017; Starosta 2010).
The category of “small capital”was introduced by Marx (1991: Chapter 47) in
his chapter on the genesis of capitalist ground rent to understand the reproduc-
tion of agrarian producers that valorise below the average rate of profit. Extend-
ing this insight to supply chain capitalism reveals how small industrial capitals,
competing through the depression wages costs, provide inputs for large buyers
below prices of production (I~
nigo Carrera 2017; Roy 2017). In this way, we see
the reproduction of small capitals with higher costs but lower rate of profit; and
when they act as suppliers then the buying capitals benefit from “a permanent
flow of extra surplus value derived from the purchase of inputs at prices below
their normal price of production (i.e. at a ‘pseudo’price of production)”(Starosta
2010:447). Moreover, when competition in supply chains is mediated by access
to and use of patented machinery, a privilege held by large firms, then the circu-
lation of industrial inputs function as rent-bearing commodities which are con-
cealed in the formation of market prices (Roy 2017).
In the same way that property regimes enforce competition and discipline small
capitals in commodity chains, another manifestation of the circulation of property
systems via the rent mechanism has revolved around independent producers and
self-employed workers in the so-called gig economy who contend with the prop-
erty barriers of platform capitalism. Digital platform technologies have configured
new relations of competition among “self-employed”labouring subjects within
the production of consumer services and the circulation of commodities. Take for
example a gig economy worker where the means of production is perhaps a bike
for food deliveries or a car for taxi rides and the condition of production is access
to a digital platform. In these conditions the valorisation of their own labour
power—the “gig”—is contingent on access to the digital platform that confronts
The Turbulent Circulation of Rent 11
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labour as a non-landed property barrier. As a direct charge for access the digital
landlord siphons off revenues from every rent-bearing commodity whose circula-
tion the lean platform facilitates (see for example Sadowski 2020). Indeed, the
transfer of value in and through gig economy labour has traces of the class rela-
tions confronted by peasant owners-producers, where “petty commodity produc-
tion”, often providing inputs into global value chains, relies on self-exploitation to
survive market competition (Bernstein 2010).
The mining of data behind private property barriers has sparked historical paral-
lels in the evocative notion of “data colonialism”where new frontiers of data have
engendered processes of value extraction from circulation by means of digital
platform technology (Thatcher et al. 2016). As the crucial commodity to be
bought, sold and circulated (Sadowski 2020), the capture of data through digital
platforms—akin to traditional landed property—permits the extraction of rents
from circulation, a process that hints at the generalised dematerialisation of
wealth that for Pistor (2019) is indicative of neoliberal regimes of property. More
specifically, and much like land, data has no value since no socially necessary
labour time went into its production, thus property regimes are essential to keep
data artificially scarce in order to justify their exchange value. Thus, a price on
data can best be understood as a form of “monopoly rent (tribute)”(Rigi and
Prey 2015:398). Indeed, the emergence of concentrated monopolies in digital
space has created “rentiers of the network”skimming rent from the myriad eco-
nomic transactions taking place within the digital landscapes made possible by
platform technology (O’Dwyer 2015; Van Doorn and Badger 2020). Yet, as we
have been arguing throughout this article, monopoly and competition are not
anathema to each other, but rather two sides of the same coin.
This point comes to the fore in two recent reports from UNCTAD (2017, 2019)
highlighting new forms of “rentier capitalism”within GVCs and global digital
platforms, where the concentrated market power of sellers of crucial services per-
mit the extraction of monopoly rents. An emblematic case is the way in which
digital platforms, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), extract “cloud rents”by link-
ing production processes more closely to the realisation process (UNCTAD
2019:94).
4
AWS was the first major cloud platform to become an essential infras-
tructure for numerous modern-day businesses (Srnicek 2017). By renting out this
basic means of production, AWS is essential to the commodity circuit of capital
and the way in which some of the world’s biggest companies increase the speed
in which manufactured goods reach supermarket shelves (e.g. Unilever), analyse
pipeline data for efficient oil and gas delivery (GE Oil & Gas), and make available
over seven million homes to global rental marketplace (Airbnb). The latter has
been crucial for Airbnb’s“lean”platform model providing/sharing rents with
absentee landlords, driving rent gaps and expanding the frontiers of neighbour-
hood gentrification in cityscapes across the globe.
As recent work emerging from research into logistics, GVCs and digital plat-
forms have shown, flows of commodity capital are mediated by the proprietary
software systems that underpin the power of logistical capital to displace dynam-
ics of value capture across the seams and conduits of global trade infrastructure
(Gregson et al. 2017). Also, this perspective attests to the extent to which primary
12 Antipode
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commodity production, for example, is no longer only about the control over
and access to the land, but extends to the advanced management of transna-
tional supply chains that have attained a deeper degree of integration with the
credit system, as well as with the port and shipping industries (Arboleda 2019,
2020b; Baglioni and Campling 2017). In this context, novel arrangements of
macro-regional planning frameworks and logistics corridors in the global South
aim at increasing “economic competitiveness through enhanced connectivity to
transnational value chains”(Kanai and Schindler 2019:303). In these intensified
competitive conditions of economic circulation, large firms located in the global
South are articulated as nodes of calculation and accumulation in diffused webs
of rent production and value extraction (Ouma et al. 2019). This, in turn, illus-
trates how the circulation of value through the material infrastructures of logistics
and storage facilities actively enable and constrain capital accumulation. Acting as
the pivot of the productive circuit and the commodity circuit, as we will see in
the next section, is the circuit of money capital.
The Circuit of Money Capital
Insofar as the money circuit accelerates the turnover time of capital by providing
the liquidity required for production and investment, it assumes a pivotal role in
Marx’s theorisation of circulation (see Campbell 1998; Harvey 2013: Chapters 5–
7). Key to understanding the ways in which the credit system mediates both pro-
duction and circulation, is the analytical distinction between rent and interest.
When Marx relaxes his broad reading of money and finance in Volume II—money
used simply for buying and selling under the M–C... P... C’–M’formula (see
Marx 1992:109)—and passes into his interpretation of money as capital in Volume
III, then financial instruments assume a much more dynamic commodity form
(see Marx 1991: Part 5; see also Harvey 2013:171). However, like land, money
capital has no value and its price is assigned by the credit system in the form of
interest. The relentless pursuit of interest by owners of money capital has ren-
dered a new type of financialised subject: the financial rentier or financial asset-
holder that draws revenue streams from money capital—be it in the form of
bonds, stocks, derivatives, securitised mortgages, microcredit, or even pension
savings. Standing outside of the production process proper, the interest owed to
this particular class fraction stems from its ownership of a sum of money that can
be loaned out as capital. It is precisely in this sense that Brett Christophers
(2019:2) has recently suggested that the financial sector is the foremost rentier
sector, and financialisation the leading edge of rentierisation.
As financial rentiers increasingly seek to draw profits from debt instruments and
other financial assets, the credit system appears to take on a certain autonomy
from the vicissitudes and laws of motion of surplus-value production. When
money is spatially and temporally separated from the circulation and performance
of the capital it represents it takes the form of fictitious capital. However, one of
Marx’s fundamental findings in his theorisation of the credit system consists of
having unearthed the fact that the autonomy of the money circuit of capital is
only apparent, and fictitious capital is very much a real form of capital—money
The Turbulent Circulation of Rent 13
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which has become a commodity with a price. Therefore, fictitious capital, when
circulating in the form of interest-bearing capital, becomes subordinate to the
laws of inter-capitalist competition and expanded reproduction. In his words,
“interest-bearing capital is capital as property as against capital as function”(Marx,
cited in Harvey 2013:196).
In this sense, a convoluted relation between the credit system and the mone-
tary basis emerges whereby the continued circulation of interest-bearing capital
becomes dependent on the capacity of the latter to expand material production
and to command living labour, thereby rendering visible the ways in which prop-
erty regimes make possible the disciplinary organisation of labour (see for exam-
ple Bhandar 2018). To be able to exert property claims on future revenues,
fictitious capital has increasingly been deployed by financial rentiers to expand
the frontiers of investment towards an increasingly wider array of assets—lands,
natural resources, food, logistical infrastructure, human bodies, microorganisms,
and even the attention span (see for example Fields 2018; Ouma et al. 2018;
Ward and Swyngedouw 2018; Zeller 2007). From this optic, rent extraction in
the circuit of money capital exposes the way in which competition to commodify
things as financial assets is predicated on the property form assumed by fictitious
capital in the extraction of rent as well as interest.
That rent gaps have extended beyond the metropolis to become planetary in
scope is evident in the assemblage of distant land, natural resources and infras-
tructure as investment sites for multifarious varieties of financial investors. As
recent accounts of the global land rush have pointed out, the assembling of land
as resource has pivoted on representations of the so-called “yield gap”, the future
value potential of investing capital and labour in the land (Hall 2013; Li 2014).
Much of what explains the frenzy of speculative investment that triggered the
global land rush and the infrastructure scramble of the post-crash world order,
was precisely that lands at the peripheries of the world economy were construed
as “idle”terrain waiting to become productive through the allocation of proper
technology, connectivity infrastructure and (wage) labour (Li 2014; Schindler and
Kanai 2018). This highlights the ways in which mechanisms of legibility and rep-
resentation—such as maps, statistical tools, land registries, etc.—render extra-
human natures amenable to appropriation through institutional regimes of prop-
erty (Bhandar 2018).
In other words, statistical and geospatial artefacts designed to assess and mea-
sure yield gaps have been central to making both property (land price apprecia-
tion) and commodity relations (crop production or flows of goods) amenable to
the circulation of interest-bearing capital in search of rents (see Harvey 1982). In
Fairbairn’s (2014:779) words, farmland is “a productive asset that moonlights as
afinancial asset”, a distinction used to highlight that rent (payments to the land)
and interest (payments to holders of money capital) remain analytically distinct,
yet nonetheless intermingled with the circuit of capital. This, we believe, attests to
the significance of the way in which interest and rent bleed into each other as
streams of revenue within the money circuit, a point that warrants closer empiri-
cal scrutiny of the rent-bearing commodities that underpin this contradictory
mode of circulation.
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Indeed, “financialisation”across the entire food system (Clapp 2014) has seen
extended capital accumulation alongside the growth of rentier capitalist interests
—from agro-food corporations, to landowners, logistics companies, and financial
asset holders. The financialisation of food, agriculture and land grabbing literature
increasingly makes tentative, and largely unexplored, suggestions that income
derived from these practices should be seen as rent (Kish and Fairbairn 2018;
Ouma et al. 2018). Income streams based on property titles, involve complex and
heterogeneous rent relations from assets as capitalised property. Recent studies of
intellectual property monopolies, for example, illustrate how the reification of
knowledge and its subsequent transformation into assets (via patents, licences,
free trade agreements, and copyrights) has been at the forefront of the financial
sector’s valuation of the biotech, the port, the pharmaceutical, and the logistics
industries (Birch 2019; Gregson et al. 2017; Zeller 2007). Moreover, the increas-
ing predominance of institutional investors such as hedge funds, investment
banks, venture capital firms, as well as activist shareholders (as yet another
paradigmatic subjective figure of rentier capitalism) seeking short-term returns on
their investment has put tremendous pressure on physical producers to multiply
their intellectual property titles and to expand their scale of operation.
The circuit of money capital, in short, crystallises a new set of property relations
that enable financiers to claim a “circulation rent”as the very condition of eco-
nomic exchange (Robertson 2017:202). Although rent extraction is usually associ-
ated with practices of corporate governance, it should be noted that the mode of
operation of this circuit has recently evolved by including households more
directly into the credit system’s calculative imperatives: mortgage payments,
steady rental, pension savings, and even household utility bills, have been pooled
and securitised as income streams to be bought and sold (see Aalbers 2008; Allen
and Pryke 2013; Garc
ıa-Lamarca and Kaika 2016). A particular feature of these
evolving regimes of property is not only that the household itself becomes trans-
formed into a revenue stream; as Christophers (2019) points out, some house-
holds have also emerged as active rentier participants, namely as owners of
financial and residential property assets respectively. This, in turn, has given rise
to a new type of calculative subject that seeks to draw income from the recurrent
allocation and reallocation of its financial assets in the most profitable investment
funds, pension funds, and/or investment portfolios.
As a result, finance is no longer confined to its intermediary function in the cir-
cuit of capital and has assumed a more dominant role in its search for, and source
of, rent extraction opportunities. The way in which the savings and mortgage
payments of middle class households have been pooled and actively harnessed by
pension funds and hedge funds in order to provide liquidity to the deployment
and modernisation of infrastructure, for example, has been documented in the lit-
erature (Arboleda 2020a; Purcell et al. 2020; Tsing 2005: Chapter 2). The extent
to which these varieties of pooled assets from households have been channelled
towards the development of logistical infrastructure specifically (ports, ware-
houses, container ships, digital infrastructure), has been hinted at by Bunker and
Ciccantell’s (2003) world-historical account of primary commodity production,
The Turbulent Circulation of Rent 15
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yet warrants further empirical and theoretical exploration within the broader con-
text of the logistics revolution.
Conclusions
Recent scholarly discussions on the nature of the post-globalisation, post-crash
world order have pointed towards what are usually deemed two of its hallmark
features: encroaching sociospatial fragmentation and concentration of wealth
through practices of rent extraction, on the one hand, and unprecedented mate-
rial integration in transnational supply chains as a result of a leap forward in digi-
tal and logistical technologies, on the other. This marks a departure from the
liberal cosmopolitanism that underlined the project of Globalisation 1.0, and sig-
nals the emergence of a stranger, unrulier landscape of power and accumulation,
aptly described by Labban (2017:268) in terms of “a fragmented yet integrated
global plantation system”. Therefore, rethinking the existing relation between the
circulation and distribution of value—as developed in Volumes II and III of Capital,
respectively—can shed light on the dynamics of fixity and motion that animate
the rhythms of uneven development and of class conflict under late-stage capital-
ism. Also, we have suggested that a methodological emphasis on rent is useful
insofar as it enables a shift from market relations to institutional regimes of property
as a privileged window onto recent processes of global neoliberal restructuring.
The Marxian theorisation of circulation, we have argued, offers a formidable
methodological device for understanding the existing relations between regimes
of property (and their concrete economic manifestation in rent relations) and cap-
ital accumulation through expanded reproduction. Specifically, this methodologi-
cal approach can advance recent discussions on rent theory insofar as it
foregrounds the extent to which rent extends beyond land markets to also shape
the global circulation and capture of value across trade and logistics infrastruc-
ture. As legal-institutional mechanisms for the disciplinary organisation of labour
and territory, regimes of property act as both barriers and preconditions for the
renewal and unfolding of the circuit of capital. They provide methods of legal
codification and scientific standards of measurement that make things—knowl-
edge, objects, lands, ecosystems—amenable to appropriation. Moreover, we have
also hinted at the ways in which regimes of property are deeply intertwined with
the constitution of social subjects—asset holders, financial rentiers, gendered and
racialised gig workers, debtors, and so forth—whose antagonistic interests and
rights are redrawing the map of sociopolitical conflict. In sum, this article is a first
attempt at building bridges between new directions in rent theory and critical
studies of logistics, two broad fields of radical scholarship that have so far devel-
oped in isolation from each other, but whose research agendas are closely com-
plementary.
Acknowledgements
A preliminary version of this article was presented at Duke University’s Institute for Critical
Theory in February of 2021. The paper has also greatly benefitted by the thoughtful
16 Antipode
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editorial work of Stefan Ouma, as well as by the comments and constructive criticism of
three anonymous reviewers. Research for this paper has been funded by the Interdisci-
plinary Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies (CIIR), FONDAP Number 11140083,
by the Millennium Science Initiative of the Ministry of Economy, Development, and Tour-
ism, as well as by Chile’s National Agency for Research and Development, ANID (grant
11180099).
Endnotes
1
The argument that a properly materialist understanding of circulation needs to shift from
a shallow understanding of circulation qua exchange of commodities (or simple circulation,
as framed by Marx in Volume I), to a deeper conceptualisation of the social circulation of
capital, was first developed by Arthur and Reuten’s (1998) pioneering Marxiological study
of Volume II. According to Arthur and Reuten (1998:4), this deeper understanding of the
circulation process posits it as “the bearer of the part of the capital circuit, whose move-
ment subsumes that of money and commodities under the drive for valorisation”.
2
In short order, the categories denote: the skimming surplus profits from capitals compet-
ing to invest on lands of unequal fertility/location (differential rent I) and/or different mag-
nitudes of capital invested on lands of equal quality (differential rent II); the demand for
payment for land use/access which prevents the inflow of capital and the equalisation of
the rate of profit (absolute rent); and the unique conditions of commodity production that
impairs/prohibits competition (monopoly rents).
3
The circuit of productive capital, as laid out by Marx (1992) in Volume II, begins with
the production (P) of commodities (C’) whose value is realised in the market as profits
(M’), which later set the basis for a new cycle of production (P), and so on.
4
High margin from extracting increasing “could rents”, for example, between 2013 and
2018, AWS operating income surged from $0.7 billion to more than $7 billion (see https://
www.contino.io/insights/whos-using-aws).
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