Differential and Absolute Ground Rent - Theoretical Significance

Theoretical Significance

This theory is the least known part of Marx's economic writings, and among the more difficult ones, because earnings from farm work can be affected by many different variables, even at a highly abstract level. However the theory became very important to neo-Marxists such as Ernest Mandel who interpreted late capitalism as a form of increasingly parasitic rentier capitalism in which surplus profits are obtained by capitalists from monopolising the access to resources, assets and technologies under conditions of imperfect competition. Marxist writers such as Cyrus Bina have extended the concept of rents to oil rents .