Share the Wealth: How to End Rentier Capitalism. Philippe Askenazy. Verso £16.99. Translated by Gregory Elliott.
As the subtitle suggests, this focuses on one kind of capitalism, the rentier variety, based on the receipt of rents. Askenazy adopts a broad definition: ‘rents are advantages that can be extracted on an ongoing basis by certain economic actors … via economic, political or legal mechanisms potentially open to influence by them.’ The list contained in the ellipsis in our quotation contains not just capitalists but also wage-earners, so it is clearly a very broad definition. The original French edition had the title Tous rentiers!, suggesting that everyone is a rentier.
As an initial example, pharmacists in France are paid about three times as much as their UK counterparts, since the French government has very strict regulations about where new pharmacies can open, and disallows pharmacy chains such as Boots. So the extra income derived from the lack of competition in France is an instance of rent. For a case more in keeping with the profits of companies, consider the cost of medicines, some of which are a thousand times more expensive in the US than in France, owing to the power of US pharmaceutical companies in enforcing patent and property rights there. More generally, in the US the top one percent’s share of national income is now back to the level at the start of the last century.
Real estate prices in London and Hong Kong far outstrip other cities, even New York and Tokyo. This is an example of propertarianism, whereby income derives from two kinds of property: land and real estate, and knowledge (the latter being exemplified by the medical patents mentioned earlier). This is part of the ‘new phase’ of capitalism that Askenazy claims to have identified: rents from property rights and rents from the labour of the ‘unproductive’. But it is not entirely clear what is meant by this last point (other than how low many people’s wages are), though the author does argue that employment is being increasingly divided into low-wage and relatively high-wage types, with medium-wage jobs being cut and people with degrees more and more finding themselves in low-paid jobs; this is known as job polarisation.
In addition, it has to be asked to what extent rentier capitalism is really a new development, and whether it is truly a different kind of capitalism. The book sometimes seems to imply that ‘ordinary’ exploitation by the extraction of surplus value no longer exists or has had its scope much reduced. But after all, capitalists have always benefitted from ‘economic, political or legal mechanisms’ to enforce and increase their profits. And Askenazy offers no real ideas on how to end capitalism, rentier or otherwise, beyond strengthening trade unions, which may help workers defend their wages and conditions but cannot transform the system.
Paul Bennett
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