Crises of seniors’ care in countries like the UK and Canada, further highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, have been connected to processes of privatization and financialization. In this paper I argue that rent theory is important for disaggregating mechanisms, including of accumulation by dispossession, the devaluation of labour, and assetization, that underpin the process of financialization in the sector. Work on rents often divides between critical approaches, especially to land rent, and mainstream institutionalist and public choice approaches to rent-seeking. Critical rent theory is evolving beyond this divide to understand a broader range of types of rent. Yet, despite attention to the increasing importance of economic rents and forms of rentierism, labour and social reproduction are often excluded from the analysis of how rent relations arise. This paper demonstrates the problems with these exclusions. The argument is illustrated through an analysis of the restructuring of eldercare in British Columbia, Canada, in the last two decades, and employs a feminist political economy approach to examine the social production of rent relations.

英国和加拿大等国家的老年人护理危机与私有化和金融化进程有关，COVID-19 大流行进一步凸显了这一危机。在本文中，我认为租金理论对于分解机制很重要，包括剥夺积累、劳动力贬值和资产化，这些机制支撑了该部门的金融化进程。关于租金的研究通常分为批判性方法（尤其是土地租金）和主流制度主义和公共选择寻租方法。批判租金理论正在超越这一鸿沟，以理解更广泛的租金类型。然而，尽管人们关注经济租金和食利主义形式的重要性日益增加，但劳动和社会再生产往往被排除在对租金关系如何产生的分析之外。本文演示了这些排除的问题。该论点通过对加拿大不列颠哥伦比亚省过去二十年的老年护理重组的分析来阐述，并采用女权主义政治经济学的方法来考察租金关系的社会生产。