The Capitalism, Rent and Democracy

By inertia, which derives from Adam Smith, modern capitalism is described as a free-market competition. This historical model has worked while the market expands and the availability of resources increases. It provided the opportunity to maintain the political order of the welfare state as a form of non-economic egalitarian distribution of resources, which mitigates inequality and class antagonisms generated by market. However, once capitalism has engulfed the whole world, it is more prone to crises: competition intensifies, markets of demand and market outlets do not expand, technological progress creates a growing structural unemployment, economic growth due to the completion of the global village-city transition stagnates, the resources of all the peripheries are almost exhausted. As a result, nationalism and protectionism arise, the polarization between the global center and the periphery increases, and there comes the image of undemocratic and non-egalitarian labor less society on the horizon of the future, with the precariat and the unemployed growing in numbers and demanding large amounts of rent to maintain their livelihoods. Due to this, the market model of capitalism is gradually transforming into a rental one, where the pursuit of profit, the main motivational factor intrinsic to the market, is removed by the pursuit of rent and the redistribution of markets by non-economic ways. In this context, the state becomes the key economic actor, which distributes resources by extra-market means within the hierarchy of rental groups that form the framework of a new structure of the political community.