In a hyperfocus spree, I've just written In Defense of Capitalism, arguing that we live under a system that is more feudal (rent extracting) than capitalist (extracting value from production labor), so calling it capitalism is a misnomer intended to confuse us. But what if I was wrong?

The classical explanation of rent, IIUC David Ricardo and IIRC what I got from Karl Marx longer ago, goes somewhat like this: crops grown in more productive soil sell for as much as crops grown in less productive soil. As long as less productive soil is needed to meet demand, it commands the market price, and those lucky to use more productive soil could enjoy larger profits if they own the land. If they don't, the land owner can charge as much as those extra profits would be as rent, and it makes as much economic sense for the farmer to accept this arrangement as it would to grow crops on less productive land without this extra rent charge.

IIUC, even the extra profits that a land-owning farmer could command, out of selling produce that cost less to grow, is called rent, even though it's not paid out to anyone else. See, it's not what most people think of as rent. Economists may refer to it as economic rent, or, more specifically, differential rent.

Roughly speaking, IIUC, it's an extra someone may get out of efficiency gains in production, compared with what's socially necessary to meet demand. When it comes to land, as long as less productive land is necessary to meet demand, the owner of more productive land should be able to command rent. Marx, unlike Ricardo, even considers such rent as surplus value.

What I'm having trouble figuring out is why other gains of efficiency out of means of production aren't equally considered rent. For example, those that capitalists must permanently pursue in order to extract surplus value from workers' labor, that the capitalist takes with such as excuses as ownership of the means of production that enable those gains of efficiency, taking risks, whatever. I don't see why they aren't just called (differential) rent extracted by the owner of the means of production.

Just like land in industrial farming can be made more productive by various means, at some expense, industrial production processes may also require expenses to become more efficient. And once the more efficient lands or processes become sufficient to meet demand, they no longer amount to a productive advantage that could command rent: they become the baseline that determines the market price, and differential rent goes down to zero. What if they aren't distinct, after all, but just a different manifestation of the same underlying economic truth?

It would follow that, since its inception, capitalists' pursuit for more efficient production to extract value from labor has always been rent. The distinction between capitalist and feudal systems, as I grasped from Varoufakis, would evaporate, and the point I tried to make In Defense of Capitalism would be nonsense.

Varoufakis' Technofeudalism theory, and the existence of Rentier Capitalism, that I've just come across, seem to suggest that there is an economic difference in kind between land rents and labor surplus value, even if to this layman they seem to generalize to the same. Help?

So blong,