Impotent Capital – Developing Economics

It is an uncontroversial observation that the history of capitalist development in South America is characterised by its subsumption to global capital accumulation through the production and export of agricultural and mining commodities for the world market. From this common starting point, however, there emerge divergent ways to account for the reproduction, and development limits, of this mode of insertion into the global economy. For many working in Latin American traditions of political economy it is almost common sense to assume, depending on one’s political and theoretical tastes, that a combination of centre-periphery power relations such as imperialism, monopoly capital, declining terms of trade and/or super-exploitation are the conceptual tools to understand, analyse, and strategize the overcoming of so-called ‘commodity dependence’ and embark on genuine development. It is noteworthy that in this new book – Quantifying the Historical Development of the Valorization of Capital in South America, edited by Javiera Rojas Cifuentes, Gabriel Rivas Castro, Mauricio Fuentes Salvo, and Juan Kornblihtt, not only are these concepts eschewed but their underlying trade premise – the transfer of ‘surplus’ from periphery to the centre through mechanisms such as ‘unequal exchange’ – is turned on its head. As opposed to structural power relations operating as the barrier to development, this collection opens an internal window onto the impotence of capital to develop the productive forces and, in doing so, offers distinctive strategic implications for the centralised organisation of working-class political action across the region.

The book builds on work that has been developed under the auspices of the Centre for Research as Practical Criticism (CICP) in Buenos Aires, following the original contributions of Argentine scholar Juan Iñigo-Carrera to the Marxian critique of political economy. It is Iñigo-Carrera’s opening chapter that frames the distinguishing features of this Marxian scholarship and the original critique of structuralist and dependency theories of Latin American development. Rather than the pitfalls of international exchange determined by direct power relations between geo-spatial containers, the cause of uneven development in South America is predicated on the valorisation of capital through its position in the international division of labour through production relations. This bears emphasis because, for all the authors, capital is not an asymmetric relation between countries, a factor of production, a social group, or a firm wielding monopoly power but an objectified general social relation of private and independent production (i.e., capitalism), subsumed under the movement of formation of the general rate of profit. Indeed, the antagonistic formation of the general rate profit is the concrete form in which capital organises and reproduces itself as a social relation behind the backs of states, capitalists, labour, and landlords. The crucial category here, and what all the chapters demonstrate, is the extent to which capital valorises in South America, as an aliquot part of the international division of labour of global capitalism, through the appropriation of ground rent.

The specificity of ground rent in South America

The category of ‘rent’ has recently gained traction across the social sciences with the emergence of interest in so-called ‘rentier capitalism.’ However, as can be detected in the enthusiastic outgrowth of this literature, ground rent, and its roots in the Marxian critique of political economy, is still poorly understood and haphazardly applied. Arguably, this is the most important and original contribution of the collection: to centre the quantitative and qualitative modality of ground rent in the Marxian critique of political economy in general and South America in particular. Without claiming to offer a singular characterisation, the collection draws out how ground rent articulates the shared specificity of capital accumulation in six South America countries: Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay. The thread between the chapters can be read along two axes: first, original quantitative estimates of ground rent; second, an identification of the mechanisms through which ground rent is appropriated by social subjects beyond landowners. In what follows, I will proceed by tying these two axes together, pointing readers briefly to the main contributions of each chapter before rounding up with some reflections on how the method and politics of this collective intellectual labour stands apart from the recent revival radical development thinking in Latin America.

Before this, however, when navigating the category of ground rent, readers should keep three principles in mind. First, ground rent is a “false social value” as it encapsulates the payment for the use of a commodity (land) that is not the product of human labour power. Society must pay this false social value because, in mining and agriculture, the market price is regulated by the least favourable conditions that are brought into production to satisfy solvent demand. This gives to a quantitative divergence between the individual magnitude of value of primary commodities produced on non-marginal, i.e., more productive, lands and average regulating prices in the sector. Second, and going against the grain of so-called unequal exchange, the lion’s share of this “false social value” – the payment of ground rent in its differential form – is the transfer of surplus value from the economies that purchase primary commodities to those that produce them. Third, ground rent embodies an insoluble contradiction, because landlords are useless social parasites from the perspective of capital accumulation the state can confiscate a portion of these extraordinary profits and transfer them to other social subjects, but only as long as it does not call into question capitalist social relations rooted in private property.

Along the first axis, all the authors provide original quantitative estimates of the magnitude of ground-rent drawing on the methodology originally formulated by Iñigo Carrera (2007), with each chapter providing methodological appendices detailing the calculations. To oversimplify somewhat, the method derives from the comparison between the rate of profit – calculated as the relationship between surplus value appropriated and total capital advanced – in the rent-bearing sector (e.g., agriculture, oil, gas, and mining) with industrial, or economy wide, profit rates. The latter provides the proxy for normal or average profitability within the national space and a higher sectoral rate of profit in the former indicates the existence of surplus profits.

This brings into focus the second axis, the mechanisms through which social subjects other than landlords valorise capital in the domestic market through the appropriation of ground rent. Among these ‘other’ social subjects are industrial capital of domestic and foreign origin who open and close their valorisation cycle in domestic markets and benefit from states policies which capture and transfer ground rent such as: overvalued exchange rates, export and import taxes, and domestic regulation of staple food and raw material prices. The most pervasive, and least confrontational, is the overvaluation of the currency which functions as an indirect ‘tax’ on landlords by skimming ground-rent from the export of rent-bearing commodities. While the exploitation of domestic working class forms the quantitative bulk of surplus value appropriated by capital, it is inflows of extraordinary profits paid by capital and workers consuming raw materials in the form of ground rent which is the foundation for the specific qualitative modality taken by the valorisation of capital in South America. An important upshot of this insight is that labour does not need to operate at the world average levels of productivity. The transfer of ground rent from the rent-bearing sector, via state policies, permits the ‘normal’ valorisation of capital at the world average market rate of profit in the otherwise backward spaces of the national economy. As a result, capital does not follow its world historical necessity to develop the forces of production while still valorising at the average rate of profit through the appropriation of ground rent. This is the tragedy of capitalism and development in South America which renders capital impotent, restricting valorisation to the small scale of internal markets and negating the historical potential of the South American working class.

The case studies: agriculture, oil, gas, and mining

Taking aim at ongoing controversies in Agrarian Marxism, chapter 2 by Caligaris, Fitzsimons, Guevara, and Starosta examines the non-resolution of the ‘agrarian question.’ Using the case of Argentina, the authors unpack how agrarian production in the Argentine Pampas is dominated by ‘small capitals’, a type of producer internalising the roles of capital, wage-labour, and landowner. The crucial characteristic of ‘small capitals’ is that their reproduction, as a concrete outcome of the unfolding of the ‘law of value’, does not rely on valorising at the average rate of profit thereby freeing up ground rent as the basis of intersectoral flows of value between agriculture and industry. Between 1993 and 2019 the authors calculate that landowners have appropriated just 30% of the total ground rent and capital, through the type of state policies noted above, has recovered the remaining 70%, permitting domestic capital to valorise at the normal rate of profit without putting into action world average levels of labour productivity. Moreover, because these primary commodities have been exported and consumed overseas, ground rent has constituted the international inflow of social wealth as opposed to its outflow due to the process of equalization of the worldwide rate of profit emphasised in Neo-Marxist dependency traditions.

In chapter 3, Gabriel Rivas Castro and Juan Kornblihtt challenge the common assumption that foreign mining capital has been the principal beneficiary of Chile’s economic liberalisation and reprimarisation. Given that the violent imposition of neoliberalism is usually taken as evidence of a rupture in the model of capital accumulation, this is an important account showing empirically that what has changed is not Chile’s national specificity, but the mechanisms of ground rent distribution and appropriation. This is shown to operate in favour of commercial and financial capital in general and the so-called “economic groups” (grupos económicos) in particular. The expansion of imports through economic liberalisation has been sustained by the overvaluation of the exchange rate. This, in turn, has subsidised the apparent rise in real wages which, nevertheless, have fallen in real terms relying on consumer debt and the domestic credit expansion to maintain solvent demand. In a nutshell, what has changed are the mechanisms (debt and currency overvaluation) and recipients (commercial, financial and export orientated capital) of ground rent, not the model itself.

Chapter 4, by Juan Kornblihtt, Mateo Suster y Manuel Casique Herrera offers a detailed quantitative analysis of oil and gas ground rent in Venezuela and Argentina respectively. Not only have both neoclassical and structural approaches tended to underestimate this magnitude, but they also ignore how social subjects other than landowners valorise in the domestic market through the appropriation of ground rent. This chapter brings into focus the crucial role of the state as the mediator of ground rent appropriation by capital in general, operating through its direct ownership of land or through policies such as export taxes, the regulation of prices in the internal market and currency overvaluation. The latter is significant in both countries, especially so in Venezuela where overvaluation and exchange controls mean that the state oil company PDVSA is obliged to sell foreign exchange earned in global markets below the international value of the US dollar, thus losing a fraction of the export price. Curiously, the authors show how the rate of profit of US foreign capital invested in both countries has tended to be above world averages even though the productivity of labour has been significantly lower. The explanation for this chasm, between profit rates and labour productivity, resides in the fact that US capital valorises through the appropriation of ground rent in both countries. Read against ‘Dutch disease’ arguments, this materialist reading of currency overvaluation is the real ‘curse’ of natural resources where the valorisation of capital through the appropriation of ground rent systematically produces portion of the population surplus to the requirements of capital.

In chapter 5, Grinberg presents a quantitative analysis of the valorisation of capital in Brazil between 1950 and 2010 where agrarian and mining rents have been substantial. Offering further clarification vis-à-vis mainstream approaches which seek to measure intersectoral ‘income-flow’, Grinberg shows that the task is to measure the effect of state policies on the appropriation by different social subjects of one specific form of social wealth: the extraordinary profits available in the primary sector due to landowners’ monopoly over non-reproducible means of production. Grinberg shows how policies usually associated with import-substitution industrialisation (ISI) – the overvaluation of the national currency, taxes on primary-commodity exports and state control over their domestic and international trade – have shaped the recovery of a portion of ground-rent during its ‘developmentalist’ and ‘neoliberal’ stages. Indeed, focusing on the quantitative estimation of currency overvaluation, ground rent appropriated by capital in Brazil averaged 12% of total surpluses between 1953 and 2008.

Chapter 6 by Benelli studies the case of Uruguay between 1955 and 2019, showing again how the overvaluation of the currency is a central mechanism through which surplus value in the form of agrarian ground rent, though with up and downs, is appropriated across the economy. Crucially, this compensates capital with low productivity of labour, permitting the cheaper import of foreign technology and the remittance of profits abroad and, overall, negating the planned used of extraordinary profits to develop the forces of production. This should provide pause for thought, Benelli argues, for those accounts still holding to unequal exchange theories of development given that primary commodity specialisation drives inflows of surplus value in the form of ground rent as the very basis of Uruguay’s rentier characteristics.

Finally, in chapter 7, Mussi and Villar study the intensification of social conflict over the appropriation of agrarian ground rent in Paraguay between 2002 and 2017. The authors show how high prices during the commodity boom increased the rate of profit and ground rent for agrarian producers specialised in monoculture for export. With the largest rural population in South America, this chapter highlights an agrarian bifurcation between a majority rural surplus population with small and labour-intensive farms (20 ha) – a type of ‘small capital’, also noted by Caligaris et al, personifying land, labour, geared towards the internal market and self-consumption – and capital in the production of capital-intensive agro export commodities on large scale farms (100 ha). As the principal appropriators of ground-rent, the latter have increasingly displaced the former by taking advantage of the precarious land titling structure that characterizes Paraguayan rural space.

Working class action: beyond unequal exchange and extractivism

Taken together, the chapters show why the limited development potentialities of these national territories is rooted in the global inflow of extraordinarily large masses of social wealth in the form of differential ground rent. This explains why capital has not had to reckon with landed property (as happened in South Korea, for example) as a barrier for its accumulation. Instead, capital has been able to valorise at the average world market rate of profit by appropriating a portion of ground rent and leaving another portion that reproduces the landlords as a class. So, far from simply being a source of cheap raw materials extracted by global capital – where the numerous accounts of neo-extractivism start and finish – these national spaces are determined as sources of ground rent recovery by global industrial capital. Especially when fragments of global industrial capital locate a portion of manufacturing in the domestic market for the valorisation of technologically obsolete capital in world market terms. The extent to which various centre-periphery frameworks have incorporated ground rent in their analysis, as many of the authors show, has been limited in methodological and theoretical terms. Subsumed under nebulous concepts like ‘unequal exchange’ or more recently ‘extractivism’, ground rent is rendered indistinguishable from other forms of ‘economic rent’ extraction through finance, digital platforms, institutional organisation, and the like.

From the perspective of the arguments reviewed here, understanding the limits to development as principally the outcome of unequal power relations between nations and firms is politically and intellectually untenable to inform working class organisation and action. With the return of the national question as a strategic horizon for the contemporary left, these political conclusions may read as counterintuitive, if not outright scandalous – especially for those who maintain that combatting super-exploitation is imperative for national liberation and anti-imperialist strategies. To avoid confusion, the point is not that economic domination as a set of empirically observable power relations does not exist – as any return to the archive will attest – but that these observations can only remain at the level of surface appearance if the problem of development is extrapolated into the realm of political theory. This can be detected in the current revival of national liberation for autonomous development through appeals to the politics of socialist neo-republicanism as the revolutionary basis of leftist projects.

This critical and practical unfolding of the general determinations of capital is based on a commitment to the Marxian critique of political economy. To be clear, this has nothing to do with what Marx did or did not say in Capital but is a political and intellectual project to reproduce the concrete by means of thought from the vantage point of the valorisation of capital in South America. Unequivocally, this requires understanding the accumulation and appropriation of ground rent as the concrete form which reproduces the South American working class.  In other words, this is about method and the necessary relation of theory and practice. Far from a dry mathematical treatise common in the positivist canon of Marxian economics concerned with magnitudes of value, this is a unique dialectical approach which squares the circle between qualitative social form analysis and rigorous quantitative analyses of the formation of the general rate of profit. Indeed, this is a methodologically minded text designed to inform conscious international political action of the working class beyond the confines of leftist national projects restricted to the small scale of domestic markets.

In this sense, it was a shame that the authors did not provide a conclusion to the text drawing the political threads together across the case studies. The collection’s political message is that revolutionary working-class action carries the necessity to “liquidate the material basis of capitalist’s and landlords’ political rights” beyond fragmented national spaces (Cifuentes et al 2023: 19). Yet the overcoming methodological nationalism, as well as capital’s impotence, will surely require a more fleshed out theory of political action geared towards the regional centralization of capital. While each chapter offers future avenues for research, we are left with no further indication of how to think across the individual cases politically. In this sense, a fuller conclusion would have made the edition more than a collection of essays, perhaps linking up with themes such as the unfolding of the ecological crisis, new ‘green’ industrial strategies, and the seeming terminal moments of neoliberalism, all of which point towards national forms of political and economic retrenchment.

References

Cifuentes, Javiera Rojas, Gabriel Rivas Castro, Mauricio Fuentes Salvo, and Juan Kornblihtt (Eds.) 2023, La Cuantificación del Desarrollo Histórico de la Valorización del Capital en América del Sur. Estudios de largo plazo sobre la tasa de ganancia y la renta de la tierra: metodología y resultados. Santiago de Chile: Ariadna Ediciones, CRANN Editores ISBN: 978-956-6095 -67-5

Iñigo Carrera, J. 2007. La formación económica De La Sociedad Argentina, Volumen I, Renta Agraria, Ganancia Industrial Y Deuda Externa 1882–2004. Buenos Aires: Imago Mundi

This post is a review essay of: Javiera Rojas Cifuentes, Gabriel Rivas Castro, Mauricio Fuentes Salvo, and Juan Kornblihtt (Eds.) 2023, Quantifying the Historical Development of the Valorization of Capital in South America: Methodology and Results of Long-Range Studies on the Rate of Profit and Ground Rent [La Cuantificación del Desarrollo Histórico de la Valorización del Capital en América del Sur. Estudios de largo plazo sobre la tasa de ganancia y la renta de la tierra: metodología y resultados]Santiago de Chile: Ariadna Ediciones, CRANN Editores ISBN: 978-956-6095 -67-5

Thomas F. Purcell is Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at the Department of European & International Studies, Kings College London. He tweets at @RedTom90.

Photo: Book cover of Quantifying the Historical Development of the Valorization of Capital in South America