Rent, mining and British imperialism

This paper argues that the Marxist conception of rent is fundamental to analysing the role of multinational corporations in the extractive industries, specifically their ability to capture super-profits. The capacity of corporations to capture rents from natural resources depends on military-political power relations. Historically, Britain has benefited from super-profits drawn from the Gulf region and southern Africa. The paper will theorise the current investment boom by mining corporations in the Andean region, and its counterpart movement of mining corporations re-establishing their position alongside oil corporations, the banks and finance corporations at the core of the British ruling class. Finally, the paper reconsiders Lenin‘s conception of imperialist countries as rent societies, concluding that Britain‘s domestic as well as international relations are underpinned by parasitic, monopoly forms of rent extraction.