Rentier capitalism

Usage by Marxists

Although the combination of words "rentier capitalism" was never used by Karl Marx himself, it is compatible with the Marxist idea of surplus value extraction. In his early works, Karl Marx juxtaposes the terms "rentier" and "capitalist" to argue that a rentier tends to exhaust his profits, whereas a capitalist must perforce re-invest most of the surplus value in order to survive competition. He wrote, "Therefore, the means of the extravagant rentier diminish daily in inverse proportion to the growing possibilities and temptations of pleasure. He must, therefore, either consume his capital himself, and in doing so bring about his own ruin, or become an industrial capitalist".

Later in life, including in the manuscript later published as Das Capital, Vol. 3 Marx further segments so-called rentiers into interest-bearing (finance) capitalists and a separate class of landowners, arguing that the interest from invested capital and rent from private land are economically different. He does however in various places, including a letter to Friedrich Engels, acknowledge that at some point finance capital might come to own all land and in doing so eliminate the separate landlord class. It is a matter of ongoing debate as to whether or not this has come to pass.

Vladimir Lenin asserts that the growth of a stratum of idle rentiers under capitalism is inevitable and accelerated due to imperialism:

Hence the extraordinary growth of a class, or rather, of a stratum of rentiers, i.e., people who live by 'clipping coupons' [in the sense of collecting interest payments on bonds], who take no part in any enterprise whatever, whose profession is idleness. The export of capital, one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism, still more completely isolates the rentiers from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by exploiting the labour of several overseas countries and colonies.