13 Property Rights
Fix
For Marx, interest is about inter-capitalist competition. Interest payments, Marx argued, transfer to the ‘money-capitalist’ some of the profits received by the ‘industrial capitalist’.
This approach implies that we can cleanly divide between ‘industrial’ and ‘money’ capitalists. And by extension, Marx’s view implies that profit is earned from ‘productive’ activities, whereas interest stems from the unproductive ownership of money.
Faced with this Marxist division, capital-as-power theorists Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler think that it misses the point. Looking at capital, they argue that all of it is unproductive. That’s because capital is nothing but the quantification of property rights. And property rights, in turn, are inherently negative; they are an institutional act of exclusion. So in that sense, profit and interest both stem from enforced exclusion — what Nitzan and Bichler call strategic sabotage.