Chapter XLVII. Genesis of Capitalist Ground Rent
We must clarify in our minds wherein lies the real difficulty in analysing ground rent from the viewpoint of modern economics, as the theoretical expression of the capitalist mode of production. Even many of the more modern writers have not as yet grasped this, as evi-denced by each renewed attempt to "newly" explain ground rent. The novelty almost invariably consists in a relapse into long out-of-date views. The difficulty is not to explain the surplus product produced by agricultural capital and its corresponding surplus value in general. This question is solved in the analysis of the surplus value produced by all productive capital, in whatever sphere it may be invested. The difficulty consists rather in showing the source of the excess of surplus value paid the landlord by capital invested in land in the form of ground rent, after equalisation of the surplus value to the average profit among the various capitals, after the various capitals have shared in the total surplus value produced by the social capital in all spheres of production in proportion to their relative size; in other words, the source subsequent to this equalisation and the apparently already completed distribution of all surplus value which, in general, is to be distributed. Quite apart from the practical motives, which prodded modern economists as spokesmen of industrial capital against landed property to investigate this question — motives which we shall point out more clearly in the chapter on history of ground rent — the question was of paramount interest to them as theorists. To admit that the appearance of rent for capital invested in agriculture is due to some particular effect produced by the sphere of investment itself, due to singular qualities of the earth's crust itself, is tantamount to giving up the conception of value as such, thus tantamount to abandoning all attempts at a scientific understanding of this field. Even the simple observation that rent is paid out of the price of agricultural produce — which takes place even where rent is paid in kind if the farmer is to recover his price of production — showed the absurdity of attempting to explain the excess of this price over the ordinary price of production; in other words, to explain the relative dearness of agricultural products on the basis of the excess of natural productivity of agricultural production over the productivity of other lines of production. For the reverse is true: the more productive labour is, the cheaper is every aliquot part of its product, because so much greater is the mass of use values incorporating the same quantity of labour, i.e., the same value.
The whole difficulty in analysing rent, therefore, consists in explaining the excess of agricultural profit over the average profit, not the surplus value, but the excess of surplus value characteristic of this sphere of production; in other words, not the "net product", but the excess of this net product over the net product of other branches of industry. The average profit itself is a product formed under very definite historical production relations by the movement of social processes, a product which, as we have seen, requires very complex adjustment. To be able to speak at all of an excess over the average profit, this average profit itself must already be established as a standard and as a regulator of production in general as is the case under capitalist production. For this reason in social formations where it is not capital which performs the function of enforcing all surplus labour and appropriating directly all surplus value and where therefore capital has not yet completely, or only sporadically, brought social labour under its control there can be no talk of rent in the modern sense, a rent consisting of a surplus over the average profit, i. e., over and above the proportional share of each individual capital in the surplus value produced by the total social capital. It reflects naïveté, e. g., of a person like Passy (see below), when he speaks of rent in primitive society as an excess over profit(1) — a historically defined social form of surplus value, but which, according to Passy, might almost as well exist without any society.
For the older economists, who in general merely begin analysing the capitalist mode of production, still undeveloped in their day, the analysis of rent offers either no difficulty at all, or only a difficulty of a completely different kind. Petty, Cantillon, and in general those writers who are closer to feudal times, assume ground rent to be the normal form of surplus value in general," whereas profit to them is still amorphously combined with wages, or at best appears to be a portion of surplus value extorted by the capitalist from the landlord. These writers thus take as their point of departure a situation where, in the first place, the agricultural population still constitutes the overwhelming majority of the nation, and, secondly, the landlord still appears as the person appropriating at first hand the surplus labour of the direct producers by virtue of his monopoly of landed property, where landed property, therefore, still appears as the main condition of production. For these writers the question could not yet be posed, which, inversely, seeks to investigate from the viewpoint of capitalist production how landed property manages to wrest back again from capital a portion of the surplus value produced by it (that is, filched by it from the direct producers) and already appropriated directly.
The physiocrats are troubled by difficulties of another nature. As the actually first systematic spokesmen of capital, they attempt to analyse the nature of surplus value in general. For them, this analysis coincides with the analysis of rent, the only form of surplus value which they recognise. Therefore, they consider rent-yielding, or agricultural, capital to be the only capital producing surplus value, and the agricultural labour set in motion by it, the only labour producing surplus value, which from a capitalist viewpoint is quite properly considered the only productive labour. They are quite right in considering the creation of surplus value as decisive. Apart from other merits to be set forth in Book IV,(2) they deserve credit primarily for going back from merchant's capital, which functions solely in the sphere of circulation, to productive capital, in opposition to the mercantile system, which, with its crude realism, constitutes the actual vulgar economy of that period, pushing into the background in favour of its own practical interests the beginnings of scientific analysis made by Petty and his successors. In this critique of the mercantile system, incidentally, only its conceptions of capital and surplus value are dealt with. It has already been indicated previously that the monetary system correctly pro-claims production for the world market and the transformation of the output into commodities, and thus into money, as the prerequisite and condition of capitalist production." In this system's further development into the mercantile system, it is no longer the transformation of commodity value into money, but the creation of surplus value which is decisive — but from the meaningless viewpoint of the circulation sphere and, at the same time, in such manner that this surplus value is represented as surplus money, as the balance of trade surplus. At the same time, however, the characteristic feature of the interested merchants and manufacturers ofthat period, which is in keeping with the stage of capitalist development represented by them, is that the transformation of feudal agricultural societies into industrial ones and the corresponding industrial struggle of nations on the world market depends on an accelerated development of capital, which is not to be arrived at along the so-called natural path, but rather by means of coercive measures. It makes a tremendous difference whether national capital is gradually and slowly transformed into industrial capital, or whether this development is accelerated by means of a tax which they impose through protective duties mainly upon landowners, middle and small peasants, and handicraftsmen, by way of accelerated expropriation of the independent direct producers, and through the violently accelerated accumulation and concentration of capital, in short by means of the accelerated establishment of conditions of capitalist production. It simultaneously makes an enormous difference in the capitalist and industrial exploitation of the natural national productive power. Hence the national character of the mercantile system is not merely a phrase on the lips of its spokesmen. Under the pretext of concern solely for the wealth of the nation and the resources of the state, they, in fact, pronounce the interests of the capitalist class and the amassing of riches in general to be the ultimate aim of the state, and thus proclaim bourgeois society in place of the old divine state. But at the same time they are consciously aware that the development of the interests of capital and of the capitalist class, of capitalist production, forms the foundation of national power and national ascendancy in modern society.
The physiocrats, furthermore, are correct in stating that in fact all production of surplus value, and thus all development of capital, has for its natural basis the productivity of agricultural labour. If man were not capable of producing in one working day more means of subsistence, which signifies in the strictest sense more agricultural products than every labourer needs for his own reproduction, if the daily expenditure of his entire labour power sufficed merely to produce the means of subsistence indispensable for his own individual requirements, then one could not speak at all either of surplus product or surplus value. An agricultural labour productivity exceeding the individual requirements of the labourer is the basis of all societies, and is above all the basis of capitalist production, which disengages a constantly increasing portion of society from the production of basic foodstuffs and transforms them into "FREE HANDS", as Steuart(3) has it, making them available for exploitation in other spheres.
But what can be said of more recent writers on economics, such as Daire, Passy, etc., who parrot the most primitive conceptions concerning the natural conditions of surplus labour and thereby surplus value in general, in the twilight of classical economy, indeed on its very death-bed, and who imagine that they are thus propounding something new and striking on ground rentb long after this ground rent has been investigated as a special form and become a specific portion of surplus value? It is particularly characteristic of vulgar economy that it echoes what was new, original, profound and justified during a specific outgrown stage of development, in a period when it has turned platitudinous, stale, and false. It thus confesses its complete ignorance of the problems which concerned classical economy. It confounds them with questions that could only have been posed on a lower level of development of bourgeois society. The same holds true of its incessant and self-complacent rumination of the physiocratic phrases concerning free trade. These phrases have long since lost all theoretical interest, no matter how much they may engage the practical attention of this or that state.
In natural economy proper, when no part of the agricultural product, or but a very insignificant portion, enters into the process of circulation, and then only a relatively small portion of that part of the product which represents the landlord's revenue, as, e.g., in many Roman latifundia, or upon the villas of Charlemagne, [85] or more or less during the entire Middle Ages (see Vinçard, Histoire du travail), the product and surplus product of the large estates consists by no means purely of products of agricultural labour. It encompasses equally well the products of industrial labour. Domestic handicrafts and manufacturing labour, as secondary occupations of agriculture, which forms the basis, are the prerequisite ofthat mode of production upon which natural economy rests — in European antiquity and the Middle Ages as well as in the present-day Indian community, in which the traditional organisation has not yet been destroyed. The capitalist mode of production completely abolishes this relationship; a process which may be studied on a large scale particularly in England during the last third of the 18th century. Thinkers like Her-renschwand, who had grown up in more or less semi-feudal societies, still consider, e. g., as late as the close of the 18th century, this separation of manufacture from agriculture as a foolhardy social adventure, as an unthinkably risky mode of existence. And even in the agricultural economies of antiquity showing the greatest analogy to capitalist agriculture, namely Carthage and Rome, the similarity to a plantation economy is greater than to a form corresponding to the really capitalist mode of exploitation. 42a) A formal analogy, which, simultaneously, however, turns out to be completely illusory in all essential points to a person familiar with the capitalist mode of production, who does not, like Herr Mommsen,43) discover a capitalist mode of production in every monetary economy, is not to be found at all in continental Italy during antiquity, but at best only in Sicily, since this island served Rome as an agricultural tributary so that its agriculture was aimed chiefly at export. Farmers in the modern sense existed there.
Endnotes
[85] The reference is to the economic organisation, established in about 800 A. D. on the vast estates owned by Charlemagne. Special attention was given to more effective control over the fulfilment of numerous obligations imposed on the peasants working on such estates, as well as to the preservation of the estates themselves and of profits received from them.— 772