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‘Imperialist rent’ in practice and theory
Globalizations, February 2014 Vol.11 No.1 (2014): 23-33
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Abstract
The article highlights that a notable characteristic of British capitalism is the
concentration on oil and mining corporations alongside the banks. The predominance of
extractive industries needs to be explained historically and theoretically.
Marx’s concept of price of production is developed to include additional profits. The
theme is explored through Marx’s own analysis of Ireland exemplifying a distinct path of
capitalist underdevelopment, draws on the idea of labour super-exploitation pioneered by
Marini, and Amin’s ‘mining rent’. Imperialist rent is derived from extra surplus value.
Low paid workers in the South are no less productive of value than their counterparts in
the North, but the value they create is less rewarded. The conclusion is that effective
solidarity requires a reorientation of workers in the North to support class struggles
centred in the South fighting imperialist rent and all forms of exploitation.
Key Words: imperialism, rent, surplus labour, extractive industry, super-exploitation
Contact: a.higginbottom@kingston.ac.uk
Introduction
This article builds on the work of Samir Amin and the concept of ‘imperialist rent’ and its
related concept of ‘globalized value’ as strategically vital, and required to explore the
basis of international workers solidarity.
Imperialist rent refers to the above average or extra profits realised as a result of the
inequality between North and South in the global capitalist system. Imperialist rent is a
case of above average super-profits or monopoly profits. Since normal profits derive
from surplus value and the exploitation of workers, the presence of super-profits indicates
intensified or additional mechanisms of exploitation. From the outset then it is important
to stress that imperialist rent arises not only in the realm of distribution of profits, nor in
the circulation of commodities, but that it includes and derives from distinctive social
relations in the production of surplus-value. This raises the issue of low wages and a
harsher degree of exploitation,
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or the super-exploitation, of workers in the global South as a core mechanism of
increasing surplus-value.
The article starts by outlining some of the features of imperialist rent in practice, it then
moves to discussing the theoretical and political challenges that these phenomena
represent for international workers solidarity.
Imperialist Rent in Practice
To give an example of ‘imperialist rent’, Latin America loses over $100 billion per
annum, about 4 per cent of its annual production (as quantified imperfectly as GDP), in
the form of property income transfers to Europe and North America (ECLAC 2011).
Most of the outflow are profits on foreign direct investment, with a large proportion in
the extractive sectors, dominated by hydrocarbons (oil and gas), and mining. In 2008
from an outlay of $15.3 billion invested in Latin America, UK based investments
received US $3.6 billion, a rate of profit of 23.7 per cent, around three times average
industrial profit (ONS, 2009) http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/fdi1209.pdf
The corollary of such continental scale exodus of surplus value is the centrality of
multinational corporations in the extractive industries alongside the banks at the very
heart of imperial economic and political power. Within the global system, the UK’s
political economy is especially shaped by large extractive corporations (the former
dominions Australia, Canada and South Africa have similar characteristics). In recent
years there has been a marked concentration of extractive industry multinationals at the
top end of the London Stock Exchange, reflecting the boom in commodity prices that
these corporations have positioned themselves to take advantage of. Just three oil and gas
corporations (BP, Shell and British Gas) account for over 33 per cent of the market
capitalisation of the top 20 corporations, or about 15 per cent of the entire stock
exchange. Mining corporations are similarly represented at the top end, with five
corporations accounting for nearly 23 per cent of the capitalisation of the UK top 20. As
this article is being finished, two mining corporations, Xstrata and Glencore, have
announced their plans to merge at a projected capitalization of £36 billion (The Financial
Times, 9 February 2012), an example of what Marx terms the ‘centralisation of capital’
which he situates as part of the general law of accumulation of capital (Marx, 1976: 777).
Again, the mining sector is highly concentrated. Between them, these eight (soon to be
seven) oil, gas and mining mega-corporations reported £56.9 billion in profits during the
financial year ending in 2011 (ADVN, 2012 http://uk.advfn.com/world/uk )
Three aspects of the extractive mega-corporations fill out the characteristics of imperialist
rent. Firstly, the mega-corporations’ rate of profit, as measured in this instance by net
profits over market capitalisation, has been extraordinarily high compared to average
profit rates of industrial companies. In 2005 pre-tax profit rates of the UK oil, gas and
mining corporations averaged over 16 per cent (The Observer 27 August 2006). Mining
corporations were reporting returns on capital employed of 22 and 23 per cent at the
height of the boom in 2006 and 2007 (PCW 2008:7
http://www.pwc.co.za/en_ZA/za/assets/pdf/pwc-mining-survey-08.pdf ). No wonder the
industry investor survey was subtitled ‘Mine - as good as it gets?’. Fortune 500 data on
the US reports a similar pattern of high profitability in the oil and mining sectors at this
time (CNN, 2008
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2008/performers/industries/profits/ )
On these figures Lenin’s preferred term ‘super-profits’ is justified empirically. At rates of
return approaching 23 per cent, were profits retained exclusively for accumulation then
corporations could double their capital within four years. In practice a proportion of the
profits is distributed as dividends to shareholders, socialising the surplus value through
pension funds and taxation. It can be claimed on their behalf that extractive corporations
operate at high risk in demanding areas and produce for volatile markets, and in this
sense ‘deserve’ higher than average profits
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in the good times to offset performance in leaner years (the argument an economist
colleague who has to remain anonymous put to me). But such super-profits have not only
been reaped during the commodities boom of the last decade, they are typical of sectors
of British and other imperial capitals for the last century or more. They are part of what
makes capitalism imperialist in a structural way. A fuller survey would have to
investigate the long term pattern of these exceptional profits in detail, and whether capital
movements tend to equalize them or whether differentials with other sectors persist.
The second characteristic is that the super-profits are remarkable when measured over the
number of the corporations’ employees. Working from company reports, the top three oil
and gas corporations averaged £205,138 pre-tax profits per employee (The Observer 27
August 2006). The bald figures are open to a range of interpretations, amongst them: that
through sub-contracting mechanisms the corporations actually command more labour-
power than they formally report as employees which can change quite quickly (Anglo-
American was an outlier in this regard, it has since reduced its number of permanent
employees, down from to 195 thousand down to 107 thousand between 2005 and 2011);
that the extractive mega-corporations deploy especially advanced techniques that render
their workforce highly productive; that they pay their employees especially low rates (this
runs counter to the corporations’ tendency to only directly employ well paid technical
and managerial staff) ; that they are successful in securing investment projects in high
yield locations, that is where the costs of production of the extracted commodities are
significantly lower than their selling prices. While all of these factors pertain, what the
corporations have in common is that they all relate to capturing and retaining surplus
value in the particular circumstances of raw material extraction mostly from under-
developed countries, which leads us to the issues of territorial control and sovereignty.
Thirdly, then, the pre-eminence of oil and mining corporations is part and parcel of
modern British imperialism alongside, it must be repeated, the overall domination of
finance. As one financial journalist aptly notes, the City of London offers corporations
‘the desired combination of UK governance and attractive overseas assets’ (The
Financial Times 17 February 2012). Except these advantages did not fall as benign gifts,
they have been constructed through active programmatic intervention to shape the world
so. Most of the biggest mining corporations have strong connections with South Africa,
from whence they relocated their headquarters at the end of the 1990s in order to take
advantage of London’s financial markets and its position as a platform for world-wide
operations. Having retained their capital through the negotiated transition from apartheid,
the major beneficiaries of a century of racial wage-slavery re-positioned themselves
through their UK connections. In this sense apartheid was never fully defeated, it just
went global. There is a similar colonial-capitalist genesis to the two oil giants BP and
Shell, primarily through the Persian Gulf and links with Dutch colonialism in east Asia
(Sampson, 1975; Mitchell, 2011). For the extractive mega-corporations, territorial
possession remains an essential, necessary condition of their extraordinary profitability
and a tendential pressure to military occupation in one form or another. This impulse to
territorial control of extraction enclaves is not only true of Britain of course, although
perhaps especially so, rather a characteristic of the global system that is unevenly
distributed and a source of tension between the major powers, as continues to be the case
concerning Iraq (Muttitt, 2011).
The problem of the politics and theory of imperialist rent
Why is the concept of imperialist rent politically important for solidarity between
workers in the global North and South? This question is usually simply ignored.
Contemporary academic
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literature has mostly focussed the notion of ‘rentier states’ on the South, as a corrupting
syndrome in the producer countries, see (Logan and McNeish, 2012). In my view it is
essential to revisit Lenin’s broad framing of the powerful countries as parasitic ‘rentier
states’ (Lenin, 1916a http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-
hsc/ch10.htm). Imperialist rent is part of a nexus of value transfers that underpin not only
the states but social relations in the rich countries of the global North, what Mitchell
(2011) goes so far as to designate ‘carbon democracies’. If anything the rentier element
became more pronounced during the post WW2 boom, the material basis of a lasting
social pact, which is coming to an end. Amin argues that this later extension of the rentier
relation went even further than the buying off of an upper stratum of workers, a ‘labour
aristocracy’ that Lenin identified as crucial as one side of the split in the working class
(Lenin, 1916b http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm ).
Amin, like Lenin, sees imperialist rent as not only a narrowly economic concept, but one
with deep social and political ramifications. He contrasts the contours of class alignments
in the periphery and centre nations, where ‘this entanglement is inseparable from the
imperialist rent and its effects on the whole society (and not only on the volume of
capital’s profits). In the peripheries it gives the objective of national independence new
scope.’ (2011:164) What is being referred to here is, in the periphery, popular movements
against the interests of multinational corporations for sovereignty over natural resources,
which in many parts of the world is the contemporary form of the struggle for national
self-determination. The question becomes, what social forces in the North will align
themselves against their ‘own’ multinationals and make common cause with popular
struggles in the global South?
Amin takes the idea of social consequences one step further, and claims ‘the growth of
the new middle class at the centre of the system is associated with imperialist rent’ (2011:
175). These phenomena need to be integrated with an internal class analysis of particular
forms in different countries that considers gender, race and other oppressions in the
segmentation of labour markets; nonetheless, there is also a general pattern or condition
that as imperialism goes through phases of accumulation, one can detect relative
movements in the intermediate strata. Moreover, the strata that are waged but not
proletarian express their interests through control of official labour movements and, in
the last few decades, NGOs.
There is an absolute condition of inequality within labour structurally related to the
division of the world by imperialism that must be taken into account even as the system
as a whole goes into crisis. That there is a real asymmetry with regard to value extraction
does not render international workers solidarity impossible, but it does need to be brought
into the analysis of a) why there has been little solidarity from workers in the global
North b) the terms of that solidarity and c) the conditions under which this can change.
The Theory of Imperialist Rent
In the contemporary literature, few other Marxist writers use the concept of imperialist
rent and so the debate as to its content is quite undeveloped. Confusion reigns as to what
place rent might have in a systemic theory of imperialism that is also consistent with the
labour theory of value. Logan and McNeish comment on the state of affairs, that
‘when critiques move away from the labour theory of value (which occupied
Ricardo throughout his life) and prioritise the theory of rent, they appear to strike
a limited bargain with the tenets of neoclassical economics. In this sense it may be
argued that the application of rentier theory risks producing a self-fulfilling
prophecy for the global south by wrenching the theory of rent from its
counterpart, the labour theory of value, the latter being an integral concept that
shaped development in the global north.’ (2012: 5-6)
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One can attest various reasons for this separation, starting with the immediate difficulty
of relating the surging prices of raw material commodities with their significantly lower
costs of production. The orthodox neo-liberal labelling as ‘rent seekers’ of all actors
constituting what is seen as obstacles to perfect markets adds another layer of confusion.
Most critical work on this complex subject fails to go beyond a left-wing version of the
Ricardian view of agricultural rent based on declining fertility, and marginal lands being
brought into use at zero rents. Of the few scholarly works, (Fine, 1979) seriously
endeavours to recover Marx’s theory of rent, and (Murray,1978) tackles issues of rent
and the expansion of capitalism. The most significant sector works informed by Marx are
(Nwoke,1987) on mining rent and (Bina, 1985) and (Mommer, 2002) on oil. Yet all of
these works suffer from the weakness of not keeping in clear view that rent is a form of
surplus labour.
The intellectual materials to solve the problem posed by Logan and McNeish do exist.
The labour theory of value does not only apply to workers in the global North, it applies
to and is modified by the value creation of workers in the global South. The merit of
Amin’s oeuvre is the underlying intent to synthesise the law of value with imperialism as
experienced from the perspective of the popular classes in the global South. There is a
movement of focus from debate over unequal exchange (Amin, 1974) to the other
mechanisms of value transfer derived from property income, especially the imperialism
of mining and other extractive industry investments (Amin, 1978). Both aspects, value
transfers through unequal exchange and as property revenues, are required in a critical
theory of the international political economy. Amin writes:
‘My major contribution concerns the passage from the law of value to the law of
globalized value, based on the hierarchical structuring—itself globalized—of the
prices of labor-power around its value. Linked to the management practices
governing access to natural resources, this globalization of value constitutes the
basis for imperialist rent.’ (2010: 11)
Amin identifies the departure of global prices from the value of commodities as a
medium of 'unequal exchange', commodities from the global South being sold at prices
below their value. Marx had already posited the departure of price from value due to
commodities being the product of capitals each with a proportionate claim to the total
surplus value, and thus commodities produced in economic sectors with higher than
average organic composition would sell at prices of production above their value, while
conversely commodities in sectors with lower than average organic composition would
sell at prices of production below their value (1981: Ch 9). Thus, Marx argued the
mechanism for the formation of a general rate of profit is through the transformation of
commodity values into prices of production, where the price of production is cost-price
plus average rate of profit times the cost–price.
One explanation for international transfers of value is then simply that more technically
advanced sectors are located in the global North and less technically advanced sectors are
located in the global South (Mandel, 1975). With welcome exceptions, this productivity
led approach is still the default position that northern Marxism has settled on, but it fails
not only to bring in the factor of rent that Marx himself considered as a modification
(1981: 897); more seriously, the approach understates the degree to which imperialism
modifies the totality of social relations of capitalism.
The transformation of value into price is governed by an internal contradiction in
capitalism, the contradiction between value of commodities as the product of labour, and
profit as the ‘product’ of capital. Marx discovered in price of production the essential
‘inner connection’ that mediates this contradiction (1981: 268). But with the qualitative
leap to imperialism as the systemic stage of capitalism, Marx’s simplifying assumptions
of a general rate of surplus
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-value and the equality of capitals as aliquot parts of total social capital do not hold. That
is, value is systematically produced in one part of the world, and realised in another;
where surplus-value is produced in one part of the world and realised as profits
elsewhere. This comprises a whole series of new contradictions, including for example
the currency in which the commodity’s price is expressed; the question of monopoly and
the movement of capital. That is to say the transformation problem rather than being a
narrow, technical problem to be forever ‘solved’, or ‘re-solved’, has grown in complexity
and is a massive unsolved problem. The issue is to restate the transformation problem in
the context of imperialism, the transformation problem has itself to be transformed.
Marx himself saw the need for a further step in the transformation of value to price of
production, to include capital invested in agriculture as a sector, or branch, of production,
as well the industrial sectors, see Higginbottom (2008). There are three further transitions
needed for the transformation from commodity values to price under conditions of
globalised imperialism:
a) the transformation of value into price of production has to be amended to take
into account differential rates of surplus value corresponding to super-
exploitation, that is differences in the cost-price of commodities due to more
oppressive social relations;
b) there is a further transition from the price of production towards market price
which includes different rates of profit, corresponding to various forms of
monopoly, super-profits including rent and financial domination over industry;
c) the movement from market price in one currency to market price in another.
Commodities have to be sold, exchanged for money, but money is itself expressed
in different currencies that are not fixed but subject to capital movements.
Amin identifies the second and third of these transitions (2010: 28-29; 83-86). His
argument would be more firmly anchored by including the first of these transitions, the
concept of super-exploitation as posited by Marini (1974), as the necessary underpinning
of a theory of globalised value.
Three moments in the passage of capitalism to modern imperialism
Ireland: Prototype of Capitalist Underdevelopment
Marx’s critique of British rule in Ireland embedded at various points in Capital, that can
be interpreted as a formative theory of imperialist rent, although given the concrete case
it is better termed colonial rent. In the introduction to ground rent in Capital Volume 3,
Marx states that his substantive analysis will be of ‘countries of developed capitalist
production’ (1981: 764), principally England, where the tenant farmer operates as a
capitalist, not of the situation in Ireland where the tenant was at this time still typically a
small farmer working the land. For Marx, conditions in Ireland exemplified the situation
where ‘ground-rent, the mode of landed property corresponding to the capitalist mode of
production, has a formal existence even though the capitalist mode of production itself
does not exist, the tenant himself is not an industrial capitalist, and the manner of his
farming is not a capitalist one’ (ibid: 763). Nonetheless, Marx reveals the relation as one
where the small farmer pays to the (English) landlord a rent that
‘often absorbs not only a portion of his profit, i.e. his own surplus labour, which
he has a right to as the owner of his own instruments of labour, but also a portion
of his normal wage, which he would receive for the same amount of labour under
other conditions. The landlord, moreover, who does
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nothing at all here to improve the soil, expropriates from him the small capital
which he incorporates into the soil for the most part through his own labour, just
as a usurer would do in similar conditions’ (Marx, 1981: 763)
Note that this form of rent stems from the appropriation of surplus labour in a situation of
national oppression, or as Marx straightforwardly calls it ‘continuing robbery’ (ibid:
763). The colonial extraction of revenue from the Irish small farmers prevented them
from becoming capitalists. Exorbitant rents gave rise to mass agitation for tenant rights,
the Land League and decades of class struggle. We have seen that Marx portrayed this
form of rent as existing ‘without the existence of the capitalist mode of production itself’,
that is without specifically industrial capitalist methods of production. Yet in a broader
sense, rather than being outside the capitalist mode of production, what occurred in
Ireland in the decades immediately after the Great Famine is better conceived as the early
stage of a different experience within the capitalist mode of production as broadly
conceived. At this stage, colonial capitalism concentrated the wealth of the absentee
English landlords by retarding capital accumulation in rural Ireland, thus ensuring a later
and different path to the genesis of the capitalist farmer than had already taken place in
England. In Ireland, then, a distinct 'underdeveloped capitalism' was beginning to emerge
alongside, dominated by and dependent on ‘developed capitalism’ in a mutually inter-
related system.
For the Marx of Capital ‘developed capitalist production’ is one where modern industry
has seized hold the levers of production, where capital has revolutionized the labour
process, the machine dominates the labourer and capital accumulation is driven by
relative surplus -value, the era of real subsumption of labour to capital. Yet the issue of
colonial plunder is also present, albeit as a minor motif; it appears in the chapter on the
general law of capital accumulation in Volume 1, where Marx writes:
‘England, a pre-eminently industrial country with fully developed capitalist
production, and, would have bled to death under such a population drain as
Ireland has suffered. But Ireland is at present merely an agricultural district of
England which happens to be divided by a wide stretch of water from the country
for which it provides corn, wool, cattle, industrial and military recruits’ (1976:
860)
Ireland, without developed factory production, was nonetheless yielding agricultural
commodities and labour-power to feed the production boom of industrial England.
Despite Ireland’s proximity, ‘merely an agricultural district of England’, there is a
colonial relation and a qualitative difference in class relations because of colonialism.
Capitalism was generating a ‘relative surplus population’ in both countries but, as Marx
goes on to show, the complex internal movements of the reserve army of labour between
town and country, industry and agriculture, were quite different. Precisely because its
agricultural social productive base was being devastated by market relations, Ireland
appeared to confirm the Malthusian warning of absolute over-population. From the Great
Famine on, colonial capitalism depopulated Ireland dramatically, and the English land
magnates were urging ever more emigration to make way for more profitable uses of the
land. Marx concludes, ‘the accumulation of the Irish in America keeps pace with the
accumulation of rents in Ireland’ (Ibid: 870), and with that the rebel Fenian brotherhood,
that Marx saw as a source of hope. Indeed, the Fenian rebellion broke out the very year
that Capital was first published. That colonial oppression had called forth a
revolutionary agency distinct from but alongside the working class was the very point
that Lenin later generalised politically in his strategic approach to national liberation
movements.
What we would underline is the structural relation that also extends beyond the particular
case of Ireland. By the third quarter of the nineteenth century processes of
impoverishment were
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already set in motion in Ireland that would be later recognised as characteristics of
capitalist underdevelopment. The colonial rents, destitute surplus population and cheaply
produced commodities were all phenomena of a systemic plunder that Marx includes as
elements within the overall framing concept of the general law of capital accumulation.
This suggests that a distinct, combined geographical and historical singularity is to be
recognised: although capitalist production relations did not yet obtain in Irish agriculture,
the impoverishment of Ireland directly fuelled capital accumulation in England. In this
sense Ireland was no longer a pre-capitalist country; rather it had been set on a distinct
path, it was already an early phase of capitalist underdevelopment.
Super-exploitation: Marini’s Crucial Contribution
In parallel with Amin’s engagement in the debate registering the response of liberation
forces in Africa and Asia to colonialism and imperialism, important theoretical
breakthroughs were being made in Latin America. As Latimer (2012) points out, the
contribution of Marini deserves special attention. Marini’s theory of unequal exchange
posits the super-exploitation of labour as the essential factor in capitalist
underdevelopment. Marini draws attention to an analytically distinct relation. The full
development of capitalism in England was based on cheap food imports allowing full
specialization on industry. Means of subsistence supplied in large part from Latin
America allowed the industrial countries to become world producers of manufactures
(Marini, 1974). This international relation provides the unnoticed basis, Marini argues,
for the transition of capitalism in England to production dominated by large scale
industry. This theory combines the genesis of the export-oriented capitalism at the
periphery with the development of industrial capitalism at the centre. Marini argues that
the international market price of raw materials and foodstuff commodities was below
their value, and that to compensate for this squeeze on the their profits, Latin American
landowner-turned-capitalist producers suppressed the wage levels of their workers. This
process cannot be reduced to an extension of the capitalist market at the expense of pre-
capitalist societies, rather it was again the generation of a different type of capitalism
within the developing capitalist mode of production as a whole. The unequal exchange
that emerged within an apparently free trade relation was not due to the export of capital,
it was an emerging capitalist class tied to exports as the principle type of commodity
production. International trade in turn induced the capital wage-labour relation under
particular conditions in the post-colonial periphery.
Marini approaches Latin America’s condition of dependency dialectically, as a particular
moment of the whole. The Latin American economy presents peculiarities or
deformations when measured against a ‘pure capitalism’. It is therefore not accidental
that some studies conceive of it as being pre-capitalist, but what needs to be understood is
that capitalism in Latin America ‘will never be able to develop in the same way as it has
developed in the capitalist economies that are called advanced’ (1974:14). The challenge
then is to study and explain ‘the particular form that dependent Latin American
capitalism ended up adopting’ (1974:15). The key for Marini is the super-exploitation of
labour, that he characterises as:
‘the intensification of work, the extension of the working day and the
expropriation of part of the necessary labour for the labourer to replace his labor
power— configure a way of production founded exclusively in the greater
exploitation of the worker, and not in the development of his productive capacity’
(1974: 36)
By the expropriation of part of the necessary labour, Marini refers to depressed wages:
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‘In capitalist terms, these mechanisms … signify that the labour [power] is paid
under its value, and they correspond, therefore, to a super-exploitation of labour.’
(1974: 42)
Marini places the necessity of super-exploitation of labour in the mid nineteenth century,
that is before the appearance of modern imperialism as a world system as portrayed by
Lenin. The transition in England from production dominated by methods of absolute
surplus to relative surplus-value depended on cheap imports as well as greater
productivity. Marini makes the point theoretically as well as historically:
‘Beyond facilitating quantitative growth, the participation of Latin America in the
world market would contribute to the axis of accumulation of the industrial
economy displacing from the production of absolute surplus value to relative
surplus-value, that is to say, that the accumulation depended more on the increase
in productivity of the worker rather than simply their exploitation. Nevertheless,
the development of Latin American production, that allowed the region to aid this
qualitative change in the central countries, and is due fundamentally to a greater
exploitation of the [Latin American] worker. It is this contradictary character of
Latin American dependency, that determines the relations of production in the
overall capitalist system…’ (1974: 23)
Marini’s argument illuminates and builds on Marx’s theory of capitalism as a system, but
it also contradicts one of its key assumptions. To grasp how profoundly this perspective
challenges inherited Marxist wisdom we need to recall the discussion in Chapter 16 of
Capital Volume 1 entitled ‘Absolute and Relative Surplus Value’ where Marx assumes
that ‘Once the capitalist mode of production is established and become general … labour-
power is paid for at its value [and] … wages are not to fall below the value of labour-
power’ (1976: 646)
Marini provides evidence that Marx’s assumption does not hold. The commodity labour-
power is not a direct product of capital, rather it is the product of social reproduction
through class society, involving in particular the unrecognised contribution of women.
What of labour-powers reproduced in significantly different class societies, rather than
any given society, and brought into comparison through the international exchange of
commodities? It is exactly this possibility, operating at the same level of abstraction as
absolute surplus value and relative surplus value within the established capitalist mode
of production, that Marini’s treatment obliges us to confront.
The Export of Capital and Imperialist Rent
To the two distinct moments of colonial rent drawn from small farmers and unequal
exchange based on super-exploitation, we add a third case – imperialist rent appropriated
by directly exported capital. The substantive basis of this form of imperialist rent
becomes marked in the first phase of modern imperialism, towards the end of the
nineteenth century, and a leading feature of the renewed expansion of extractivism today,
is the extra surplus-value that capital acquires through the extraction of raw materials, or
‘mining rent’ as Amin correctly refers. This form of imperialist rent combines elements
of both the previous forms. On the one hand Marx’s theory of ground rent applies to
mining and extractive industries as well as agriculture, and on the other hand the labour
that was applied was heavily oppressed and exploited. The super-exploitation of African
labourers in South Africa as pivotal to the birth of modern imperialism is analysed in
Higginbottom (2011) and so not repeated here. South Africa is an extreme but not
atypical case. The first decade of the twentieth century witnessed a generalisation of
mining, plantations, oil extraction to fuel industrial production of the western powers.
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Later developments, the emergence of rent-capturing multinational corporations based in
countries such as Brazil and South Africa, are part of a process that Marini (1972)
identified as ‘sub-imperialism’, and will be addressed in a further study.
Conclusion
‘Imperialist rent’ is crucial to the world system in general, and especially for the specific
character of British capitalism. Two of the three most important sectors on the London
Stock Exchange are mining and oil (the third is banking).
Providing a substantive and systematic explanation for imperialist rent presents a
theoretical challenge. This chapter addresses the concept of imperialist rent as a particular
form of surplus-value, an extra surplus-value that generates extraordinary profits. The
oligopolistic organisation of capital is insufficient to explain the phenomena of super-
profits. That employees of major multinationals apparently generate profits of over
£200,000 per year per head is misleading, and is explained by the unacknowledged value
creation that is taking place in the mines and oil fields elsewhere. The multinationals
capture surplus-profits in much the same way as landlords used to capture rent.
We have revisited Marx, bringing in the crucial variable of wages depressed below the
value of labour-power, or labour super-exploitation. Marini’s work shows that Marx was
not correct on every point, even in his own time. Nonetheless Marx provided the
necessary starting point, the production of surplus-value, from which to theorise the basis
for international workers solidarity. There cannot be an adequate theory of monopoly
capitalism without a foundation sensitive to different forms of surplus-value extraction.
The expansion of capitalism incorporating into itself extra surplus-value is both the
presupposition and the result of capital accumulation in the stage of modern imperialism.
Fundamentally, this theoretical approach recognises different relationships to the world
market for workers in the global South and North. Workers in the South are no less
productive of value, but they are more oppressed, more exploited, the value they create is
less rewarded. A fuller, less northcentric, idea of the working class and where it is located
follows from these observations. The world’s working class is centred in the global
South. Echoing Marx on Ireland, if the working class in the North is to accomplish
anything it has to recognise this new reality, and reorient itself to support and ally with
workers and popular classes of the global South in fighting imperialist rent and all forms
of exploitation.
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