— AI translation — Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic)

Part Two — A Leninist critique of statistical categories · Chapter 7

7 The concealment of rent in the nomenclatures

The previous chapter showed how the imputed-rent convention passes a toll off as a production. That was only the most visible piece of a larger apparatus. For rent, in the housing accounts, is not only disguised: it is dispersed. Scattered among headings that all wear the costume of production, investment or taxation, it never appears as a whole, nor, for that matter, as a rent.

7.1 A word that never appears

The Compte du logement, the French housing account, describes a considerable expenditure: 611.7 billion euros in 2023, or 21.7 % of gross domestic product.¹ One finds in it rents, works, energy, investment, taxes, fees, interest — everything but one word: in the report’s eighty-eight pages, the term rent (“ground rent”, “rentier”) does not appear a single time.²

This absence is not a gap: it is a result. For rent, as has been established (chapters 1 and 4), forms a major part of what is paid in order to gain access to a space. If it can be read nowhere, it is because it has been distributed everywhere. Chapter 6 showed the first of its lodgings: the rental share of the tribute, filed under the label “production of housing services”. The others remain to be traced: investment, land, fees, interest.

7.2 The rentier’s three masks: producer, investor, taxpayer

Producer, first. As we have seen: rents, actual (91 billion) and imputed (209 billion), constitute the “production of housing services”. The rentier there is a producer, and his net income has no name of its own in the accounts: it is operating surplus. The international standard is unambiguous here (“the only value added of the imputed rents […] is the operating surplus”): the tribute, rebaptised as the producer’s surplus.³

Investor, next. Capitalised rent (the price of land) is filed, for its part, under “investment”. And the accounts here contradict themselves in the most instructive way, for they know that land is not produced, and write it in so many words: “Land, being a non-reproducible asset, cannot constitute fixed capital formation”.⁴ Land is shown out of production by the door, and its acquisition comes back in through the window: “investment in land” figures for 18.6 billion in the expenditure, and the value of the land changing hands in sales of existing dwellings (of the order of several tens of billions) passes through transactions, where it nets out as a mere transfer.⁵ Acquiring a title to a tribute is not forming capital; but calling it “investment” makes the rentier an investor, and the purchase of a right of toll a contribution to wealth. The very costs of the transaction (registration duties, land-registration tax, fees), pure costs of the market, without the least production, are themselves counted as investment.

Taxpayer, finally. The rest takes refuge in taxation. The property tax (28.4 billion) and transfer duties (13.0 billion) appear as “levies”.⁶ As for the cost of financing the tribute (loan interest), it is quite simply taken out of the aggregate, treated as an “intermediate consumption of the producer”.⁷

7.3 Minimisation by nomenclature: Lenin’s lesson

This scattering is no clumsiness: it is a nomenclature, and a nomenclature is a choice of grouping that carries a point of view. Lenin demonstrated it once and for all on the American agricultural census. Depending on whether farms are classified by acreage or by income, reality is inverted: “the relation between small and large farms proves diametrically opposite according to whether one takes total income or acreage as the criterion”.⁸ The choice of criterion, far from describing reality, decides what will be seen of it: to group “by acreage” is to make capitalist concentration disappear; and the average, its favourite instrument, “effaces the two extreme groups” and “shows reality as better than it is”.⁹

The housing accounts proceed in exactly this way. By grouping the flows by technical function (a service here, capital there, a tax elsewhere, a financial service further on), they disperse the tribute and efface at once its amount and its concentration. There is no “rent” line because there is no grouping by economic relation: nothing distinguishes what pays for a production from what pays a toll. It is this operation that this book names, transposing Lenin, minimisation by nomenclature: not a lie (the figures are public and accurate), but a carving-up such that rent is never seen in one piece.¹⁰ And like every choice of carving-up, it takes a side: the very one recognised in chapter 6, the point of view of the society that produces its own accounts.

The remedy, too, is Leninist: take up the published figures and reclassify them, no longer by technical function, but by the real relation: on one side what pays for a production (construction, maintenance, energy); on the other what pays only for a condition (the location share of rents, the price of land). Then the tribute, which the nomenclature had dispersed, lets itself be totalled once more. That is the operation Part III will conduct, with the caution that dispersion demands, for splitting the tribute across nested lines is the surest way to invite double counting.

The balance sheet

Dispersed among the “service”, the “operating surplus”, “investment”, “land”, “fees”, “interest” and “levies”, rent remains the great unnamed of the national accounts: never totalled, never named — and the owner appears there by turns as producer, investor and taxpayer. There is no fraud in this: only a nomenclature, a carving-up that espouses the point of view from which it issues, and which minimises, by its very architecture, what ought to be seen.

It remains, then, to see it. Once the convention is undone (chapter 6) and the dispersion brought to light (this chapter), the question becomes quantitative: how much, in euros, once real production has been deducted? Part III draws up the inventory, reclassifying the flows by the relation they cover, and guarding against the double counting that the nomenclature lays as a trap. But first, one must confront those who defend rent no longer by hiding it, but by justifying it: the theorists who make of it the legitimate remuneration of a factor or of a risk. That is the object of the next chapter.