Rent
= income an Owner can earn just by owning an asset
Discussion
Rent is the other side of the Commons
From The Ideology of Free Culture and the Grammar of Sabotage.
Matteo Pasquinelli:
"How does cognitive capitalism make money? Where does a digital economy extract surplus? While digerati and activists are stuck to the glorification of peer production, good managers but also good Marxists are aware of the Profits made on the shoulders of the collective intelligence. For instance the school of post-Operaismo has always carried on a dystopian vision of the general intellect produced by workers and digital multitudes: it is potentially liberating but constantly absorbed before turning into a true social autonomy. The cooperation celebrated by freeculturalists is only the last stage of long process of socialisation of knowledge that is not improving the life conditions of the last digital generations: in the end online "free labour" appears to be more dominant than the "wealth of networks." The theory of rent recently advanced by the post-Operaist school can disclose the digital economy more clearly.
Autonomist Marxism has become renown for shaping a new toolbox of political concepts for the late capitalism (such as multitude, immaterial labour, biopolitical production and cognitive capitalism to name only a few). In an article published in 2007 in Posse Negri and Vercellone make a further step: they establish rent as the nodal mechanism of contemporary economy thus opening a new field of antagonism. Until then Autonomist Marxism has been used to focus more on the transformations of the labour conditions than on the new parasitic modes of surplus extraction. In classical theory rent is distinguished from profit. Rent is the parasitic income an owner can earn just by owning an asset and traditionally is referred to land property. Profit on the contrary is meant to be productive and is referred to the power of capital to generate and extract surplus (from commodity value and workforce). Vercellone criticises the idea of a "good productive capitalism" pointing the becoming rent of profit as the driving force of current economy: below the hype of technological innovation and creative economy, the whole of capitalism is breeding a subterranean parasitic nature. So Vercellone's motto goes "rent is the new profit" in cognitive capitalism. Rent is parasitic because it is orthogonal to the line of the classic profit. Parasite means etymologically "eating at another's table," sucking surplus not directly but in a furtive way. If we produce freely in front of our computers, certainly somebody has his hands in our wallet. Rent is the other side of the commons - once it was over the common land, today over the network commons.
Becoming rent of profit means a transformation of management and cognitive workforce too. The autonomisation of capital has grown in parallel with the autonomisation of cooperation. Today managers are dealing more and more often with financial and speculative tasks, while workers are in charge of a distributed management. In this evolution the cognitariat is split into two tendencies. On one side the high-skilled cognitive workers become "functionaries of the capital rent"29 and are co-opted within the rent system through stock options. On the other side the majority of workers faces a declassing (declassement) of life conditions despite skills get more and more rich in knowledge. It is not a mystery that the New Economy has generated more McJobs. This model can be easily applied to the internet economy and its workforce, where users are in charge of content production and web management but do not share any profit. Big corporations like Google for instance make money over the attention economy of the user-generated content with its services Adsense and Adwords. Google provides just a light infrastructure for web advertisement that infiltrates websites as a subtle and mono- dimensional parasite and extracts profit without producing any content. Part of the value is shared of course with users and the Google coders are paid in stock options to develop more sophisticated algorithms." (http://www.rekombinant.org/docs/Ideology-of-Free-Culture.pdf)