Notwithstanding the cyclical downturns and occasional depressions, it is customary to speak of capitalist development as a dynamic of self-expanding growth. Since the 1970s, however, stagnation has set in on a global scale amid falling profitability in the sphere of commodity production. The relocation of the world’s manufacturing base to low-wage economies has failed to offset this process—on the contrary, late industrializers have compressed the productivity gains of their predecessors into ever-shorter growth cycles, recreating their problems in an accelerated fashion. In the meantime, capital has turned to speculative ventures, promising better returns. The result has been a pattern of weak growth sustained by financial bubbles, leaving a trail of destructive crashes and jobless recoveries in the build-up to the Great Recession. In the decade since 2009, the central banks of the rich world have blanketed their anaemic economies with money, but to no avail. As growth fails to pick up, the wealthy are abdicating their investment duties, parking their capital in government bonds regardless of negative interest rates—the owners of capital are now literally paying states to take their money.

Though the story of secular stagnation is by now familiar, considerable debates continue to surround it. First, there are competing ways of conceptualizing the present stage of capitalist development. Conceptual trends have varied over the decades: late capitalism, post-Fordism, cognitive capitalism. However, the term that has risen to dominance over the last fifteen years or so is ‘financialization’—a concept that highlights the growing salience of finance, insurance and real estate in the world economy at the expense of manufacturing.footnote¹ Second, the underlying causes of the rise of ‘financialized capitalism’ are a matter of dispute. Some see stagnation as a consequence of neoliberal restructuring in the wake of the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. According to this view, neoliberalism empowered short-sighted financiers with their speculative interests, stunting capitalism’s productive dynamism in the process. Others argue that capitalism peaked with the ‘golden age’ of the postwar boom, as intense international competition gave way to thinning profitability and secular stagnation, leading to an outgrowth of excess capital in the form of finance.

There is a third debate lurking beneath the surface, one that has not yet begun in earnest but that is drawing increasing attention: the question of whether we are witnessing a transition out of capitalism. Immanuel Wallerstein saw financialization as the twilight of the capitalist world-system, with the Great Recession signalling its irreversible demise. At the time, he prophesied that ‘we can be certain that we will not be living in the capitalist world-system in 30 years’—‘the new social system that will come out of this crisis will be substantially different’. What it might be, however, was ‘a political question and thus open-ended’.footnote² Most theorists are, for good reason, less confident in making predictions with such astronomical precision, but this has not prevented a growing number of voices from raising the possibility that capitalism as we know it may be warping into something else.

For classical political economists, capitalism was defined by a pattern of self-sustaining growth driven by market competition. Competition compels producers to maximise the cost-efficiency of their operations, typically with labour-saving means, resulting in a systematic expansion of output that cheapens the price of commodities—this is what Marxists have long called ‘the law of value’. If such a dynamic is what distinguishes capitalism from other modes of production, then we need to confront the fact that the capitalist world economy appears to be transforming into the mirror image of this. With growth slowing down to a trickle and productivity stagnating, it appears that accumulation is now less about making anything and more about simply owning something. Profit-making is increasingly about cornering scarce assets in order to drive up their price—a practice that the classics called ‘rent’ and which they identified not with capitalists, but with landlords. As rentierism takes over, it appears that capitalism’s distinct forms of surplus extraction, organized around the impersonal pressures of the world market, are giving way to juridico-political forms of exploitation—fees, leases, politically-sustained capital gains. From the late David Graeber to Robert Brenner, authoritative theorists of capitalism with opposing ideas of its origins and development are now converging on the view that contemporary patterns of class domination look, increasingly, non-capitalist.footnote³ For McKenzie Wark, this warrants the provocative question: is it something worse?footnote⁴

In a masterful study, Brett Christophers casts light on contemporary capitalist dynamics by reformulating the concept of ‘rentierism’. Rentier Capitalism defines rent as ‘payment to an economic actor (the rentier) . . . purely by virtue of controlling something valuable’. Rent-bearing assets can be physical, like enclosed natural resources or a piece of the built environment, or they can be purely legal entities, like intellectual property. The point is to secure ‘income derived from the ownership, possession or control of scarce assets under conditions of limited or no competition’.footnote⁵ Christophers describes this as a synthesis of the views of classical political economists, who saw rent as monopoly profits derived from the objective scarcity of an asset, with those of orthodox economists, who describe as ‘rent’ all excess profits made from stunted competition, such as through regulatory capture. This contradistinction is somewhat of a caricature: was Marx, for example, truly unaware that ground-rent arises out of enclosure, and not just out of the sheer scarcity of land? Yet, Christophers’s redefinition of rent injects a remarkable dose of clarity into an otherwise obscure and intricate topic, one until recently confined to critical geography, the author’s disciplinary home.

For Christophers, capitalism in its current stage is not just dominated by rent and rentiers; it is also, ‘in a much more profound sense, substantially scaffolded by and organized around the assets that generate those rents and sustain those rentiers’. In other words, we are living in a fully-fledged rentier capitalism: ‘a mode of economic organization in which success is based principally on what you control, not what you do—the balance sheet is the be-all and the end-all’. The days of creative destruction are long gone. This variant of capitalism is structured around ‘having’ rather than ‘making’; it is ‘pervaded by a proprietorial rather than entrepreneurial ethos’, in which the pace of societal reproduction is no longer set by fierce competition in the sphere of commodity production, but by ‘securing, protecting and sweating scarce assets’. This carries inherently monopolistic tendencies which are ‘generally inimical to dynamism and innovation’, as the safety of rentierism disincentivizes productivity-enhancing investments. For Christophers, the term ‘rentierization’ captures better the stagnant state of contemporary capitalism than ‘financialization’, which focuses on the redirection of economic activities towards financial channels. The latter ‘privileges one strand of a broader structural transformation and ignores all of the others—several of which, data suggest, have been just as materially significant as the expansion of finance, if not more so’.footnote⁶ As Christophers taxonomizes in the book, contemporary rentierism is a highly complex and multi-faceted phenomenon. If the rentier of the nineteenth century was predominantly a financier or a landlord, the rentiers of today also derive income streams from digital platforms, natural-resource reserves, intellectual property, service contracts or infrastructure.

The empirical focus of the book is on neoliberal Britain—the rentier economy par excellence. Across seven chapters brimming with useful data, Christophers explores the role of different types of rentier that have flourished since the 1970s, charting their weight in the economy as well as the institutional transformations underpinning their activities. Thatcher’s massive privatization of public assets—state-owned companies, buildings, land—birthed infrastructure rentiers and swelled the ranks of land rentiers, while the spread of public contracts due to outsourcing gave rise to service-contract rentiers. The liberalization of finance and falling interest rates enabled a surge in interest-bearing household, corporate and sovereign debt that boosted the power of financial rentiers. The exploitation of oil reserves in the North Sea and the invention of digital-platform technologies expanded the pool of natural-resource and digital rents. In turn, the fortification of property rights buttressed rentierism as a whole, as did the long-term neutralization of competition law and a growing leniency towards monopoly practices. Fiscal policy was also key, particularly the weakening of capital-gains tax, which released fiscal pressure on the gains occurring upon asset disposal, allowing asset-price increases to grow unchecked. As such, neoliberalism did not just support the incomes of rentiers, but also the value of rentier assets themselves. The exorbitant monopoly profits afforded by rentierism redirected capital towards low-productivity sectors, resulting in a stagnant economy that, due to the disarticulation of working-class organizations, is also marked by growing inequality. Underpinning this social formation is a tacit class alliance between large corporations and petty rentiers: homeowners anxious about house-price increases and comfortable Telegraph-reading retirees relying on pension-fund income.