What is the rent strike?

Abstract:

Are rent strikes more like labor strikes or consumer boycotts? This paper uses Marxian political economy to analyze and compare these three types of collective action. Marx’s theory of surplus value makes clear the power of labor strikes over capitalists: their profits are simply workers’ surplus value, so withholding labor blocks profit at its original source. In contrast, commercial profits, according to Marx, originate not from consumers but from industrial capitalists and their workers, because consumers merely realize value that has already been produced. But Marx did not analyze the profits that residential landlords take in, that is, from rent. Only at the end of Capital, Volume 3 does he even introduce the third major class of the capitalist mode of production, landlords, and only those who rent out to agricultural capitalists.

This paper extends Marx’s theory of rent to the context of residential tenants and deepens his analysis of a specific type of rent, monopoly rent. Using the resulting framework, I show that tenants’ rent payments are the original source of landlords’ profits, in the same sense that the value produced by workers is the source of capitalists’ profits, while consumers are not the original source of commercial profits. Tracing the flows of value that lead to profits for capitalists, landlords, and merchants thus reveals a disanalogy between rent strikes and consumer boycotts and strengthens an analogy between rent strikes and labor strikes.

http://doi.org/10.54825/JYMV5675