Common problems or different questions: A critique of ‘assetisation’ Thomas F. Purcell King’s College London, UK Abstract This commentary provides the contours of a Marxian critique of ‘assetisation’. In doing so, the paper iden- tifies a subjective approach to valuation and value which ties together Birch’s and Ward’s appeal to the- oretical pluralism. The argument highlights how a focus on future-orientated valuation practices elide the question of class and production and, therefore, the very basis of rent and value. A call is made for geographers to better interrogate the relationship between rent and interest in the flurry of research around rentiership. Keywords value, rent, interest, production, class, rentiership, assetisation Introduction Efforts to draw together social constructivist and materialist political economy are now part of critical human geography’s toolkit to make sense of late capitalism’s rentier turn (Christophers, 2014; Weber, 2021). Hailing from constructivist and Marxian traditions respectively, Kean Birch and Callum Ward are well positioned to contribute to this project in light of their individual and co-authored projects around ‘rentiership’. In offer- ing up ‘assetisation’ as an overarching concept to bridge theoretical dialogue and empirical enquiry between these traditions, there is much to learn here from the clarification of how geographers might navigate the fundamental tensions between different conceptualisations of value and valuation. This is likely to provide further succour to scholars looking to grapple with ‘value in its various guises’ (Bigger and Robertson, 2017: 74) and to those expanding and risking value theory in arguments that capitalist value relations are being actively con- stituted by the work of nature (Kay and Kenney-Lazar, 2017) and finance (Christophers, 2018). The paper provides a valuable resource, as is their stated intention, for scholarship on assets and financialisation—especially how we might analytic- ally parse the former from the latter in our research across spatial scales. That said, I am not convinced that assetisation, as a ‘middle ground concept cutting across approaches’ (Birch and Ward, 2022: 2), can contain the epistemological differences Corresponding author: Thomas F. Purcell, Department of European and International Studies, King’ s College London, 10 Winchester Place, First Ground Floor Flat, London N6 5HJ, UK Email: thomas.purcell@kcl.ac.uk Commentary Dialogues in Human Geography 1–4 © The Author(s) 2023 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/20438206231157885 journals.sagepub.com/home/dhg