Capital is the stock of tools available for production. The return to Capital is called Interest, this is the portion of the productive output retained by owners of capital, their share for allowing this capital to be used in production. Yet, capital, which can be produced, can therefore have it’s price reduced to it’s own reproduction cost. This means that Capital can not capture any more than it’s own reproduction cost. This means there can be no Capitalist class. Capitalism can not exist within a free market. For Capital to have a return above its own costs, the capitalists must drive its price up by withholding the means of production from labour. By way of introducing scarcity and thereby including Rent in the price, Capital farms profit. This is done largely by way of State granted exclusivity, such as patents and copyrights, banking charters, and other legel priviledge. Preventing new suppliers of Capital from existing is the means by which the Capitalist class is sustained.

The classical theory of value, the labour theory, focuses on the objective cost of sustaining productive flows rather than the subjective price of stocks of products, and holds that labour, as the only factor with agency, is the ultimate source of exchange value. From early on, socialists used this logic to argue that the entire price of any product therefore should be retained by the workers themselves, and that therefore the profits of employers where exploitation, even in the rare case when the employer previously contributed labour to form the capital being used, they where entitled to nothing more than the replacement value of the capital. Proponents of Capitalism, who thus far had promoted the labour theory in so far as it served their arguments with the landed gentry with regard to rent driving up rices and wages, needed to abandon it in reaction to socialist arguments. Thus, neoclassical economics had to switch the focus of value theory away from an objective source of value and retreat to a circular position that the source of exchange value is, well, the actual price as determined by the subjective desires of the consumer, therefor the price is always fair. Not only does this sidestep the issue of the source of value, it avoids the issue of exploitation. If the legitimate price of anything is whatever you can get for it, then the value of labour is what it will sell for as a commodity on the market, which in practice is its subsistence and nothing more; that which is required to pay for the basic necesseties to live according to the standards of your community and class. In other words your employer needs to keep you alive and comfortable enough to maintain social order and by doing so can appropriate the product and capture its entire value as Interest. Whatever portion of the value of the product is not lost to rent and interest is called wages, and the level of wages, as a percentage of total income is the primary measure of exploitation.

‘cuz my money is spent. On the god damn Rent, neither party is mine, not the jackass or the elephant. That lyrick by Chuck D says it all. Political power is an extension of economic power. As a result, rent collectors have political power, rent payers don’t. Why? Because Land is the only factor of production that has a fixed supply. There are two competing price theories. both are correct if applied correctly, the difference between them is a difference of ideological framing. An emphasis on stocks or flows . If the the current distribution of the means of production and circulation is taken as a given, you want to focus on the subjective price of stocks. If distribution of productive assets is challenged, the focus falls on the objective cost of sustaining flows. The price of any stock is always subjective. It’s price is whatever consumers will pay for it, which itself depends on how much these consumers want or need it compared to how much supply is available. However, stocks can diminish and increase. When stocks of any given good fetch a high price, new suppliers are attracted, stocks increase, prices fall. When prices fall bellow production costs, flows reduce, stocks diminish, prices rise. So while at any item moment the price of any good is subjective, competition from new suppliers drives price toward cost. This means that any productive factor that can increase in supply can not sustain a price above its own reproduction cost. This is true of both Labour and Capital. However Land, in the economic sense, can not have it’s supply increased. The natural world is a fixed stock. So is the artificial universe of intellectual property, and the all other politically granted priviledge. No matter how high the price, new suppliers can not enter the market, thus the cost of production is irrelevant. Only how much the consumer wants or needs the goods matters. In the case of residential or productive land, medicines, key patents, and other essentials, that price is basically every cent you have, beyond your own subsistance costs. Rent collectors take it all. Rent is passed in in all prices. And those who accumulate it rule us.