Chapter 37: Introduction

Our own reason for considering the modern form of landed property is simply that we need to consider all the specific relationships of production and exchange that arise from the investment of capital on the land. Without this, our analysis of capital would not be complete. We therefore confine ourselves exclusively to the investment of capital in agriculture proper, i.e. in the production of the main plant crops on which a population lives. We can take wheat, since this is the major means of sustenance for modern, capitalistically developed nations. (Instead of agriculture, we might equally well have taken mining, since the laws are the same.)

It is one of Adam Smith’s great services that he showed how the ground-rent for capital applied to the production of other agricultural products, e.g. of flax, of dye-stuffs, in independent stock-raising, etc., is determined by the ground-rent yielded by capital invested in the production of the staple crop.* In fact, no further progress has been made in this connection since his time. What we should have to keep in mind as a restriction or addition belongs to the independent treatment of landed property, and not here. We shall therefore deliberately not deal with landed property in so far as this is not related to land set aside for wheat production, but simply refer to this here and there for the purpose of illustration.

For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that what we understand here by land also includes water, etc. in so far as this has an owner and appears as an accessory to the land.

Landed property presupposes that certain persons enjoy the monopoly of disposing of particular portions of the globe as exclusive spheres of their private will to the exclusion of all others.²⁶ Once this is given, it is a question of developing the economic value of this monopoly, i.e. valorizing it, on the basis of capitalist production. Nothing is settled with the legal power of these persons to use and misuse certain portions of the globe. The use of this power depends entirely on economic conditions, which are independent of their wills. The legal conception itself means nothing more than that the landowner can behave in relation to the land just as any commodity owner can with his commodities; and this idea – the legal notion of free private landed property – arises in the ancient world only at the time of the dissolution of the organic social order, and arises in the modern world only with the development of capitalist production. In Asia, it has simply been imported here and there by the Europeans. In the section on ‘Primitive Accumulation’ (Volume 1, Part 8) we saw how this mode of production presupposes on the one hand that the direct producers are freed from the position of a mere appendage of the soil (in the form of bondsmen, serfs, slaves, etc.) and on the other hand the expropriation of the mass of the people from the land. To that extent, the monopoly of landed property is a historical precondition for the capitalist mode of production and remains its permanent foundation, as with all previous modes of production based on the exploitation of the masses in one form or the other. But the form in which the capitalist mode of production finds landed property at its beginnings does not correspond to this mode. The form that does correspond to it is only created by it itself, with the subjection of agriculture to capital; and in this way feudal landed property, clan property or small peasant property with the mark * community is transformed into the economic form corresponding to this mode of production, however diverse the legal forms of this may be. It is one of the great results of the capitalist mode of production that on the one hand it transforms agriculture from a merely empirical set of procedures, mechanically handed down and practised by the most undeveloped portion of society, into a conscious scientific application of agronomy, in so far as this is at all possible within the conditions of private property;²⁷ that on the one hand it detaches landed property completely from relations of lordship and servitude, while on the other hand it completely separates the land as a condition of labour from landed property and the landlord, for whom moreover this land represents nothing but a certain monetary tax that his monopoly permits him to extract from the industrial capitalist, the farmer. It undoes the connection to such an extent that the landed proprietor can spend his entire life in Constantinople, while his landed property remains in Scotland. Landed property thus receives its purely economic form by the stripping away of all its former political and social embellishments and admixtures, in short all those traditional accoutrements that are denounced as uselessly and absurdly superfluous by the industrial capitalists themselves, and by their theoretical spokesmen, in their passionate struggle with landed property, as we shall see later. The rationalization of agriculture, which enables this to be pursued for the first time on a social scale, and the reduction of landed property to an absurdity – these are the great services of the capitalist mode of production. Just like its other historical advances, it purchased these too, first of all, by the complete impoverishment of the immediate producers.

Before we come on to our subject itself, a few preliminary observations are still needed, to guard against any misunderstandings.

The presuppositions for the capitalist mode of production are thus as follows: the actual cultivators are wage-labourers, employed by a capitalist, the farmer, who pursues agriculture simply as a particular field of exploitation of capital, as an investment of his capital in a particular sphere of production. At certain specified dates, e.g. annually, this farmer-capitalist pays the landowner, the proprietor of the land he exploits, a contractually fixed sum of money (just like the interest fixed for the borrower of money capital), for the permission to employ his capital in this particular field of production. This sum of money is known as ground-rent, irrespective of whether it is paid for agricultural land, building land, mines, fisheries, forests, etc. It is paid for the entire period for which the landowner has contractually rented the land to the farmer. Ground-rent is thus the form in which landed property is economically realized, valorized. We have together here, moreover, and confronting one another, all three classes that make up the framework of modern society – wage-labourer, industrial capitalist, landowner.

Capital may be fixed in the earth, incorporated into it, both in a more transient way, as is the case with improvements of a chemical kind, application of fertilizer, etc., and more permanently, as with drainage ditches, the provision of irrigation, levelling of land, farm buildings, etc. I have elsewhere used the expression ‘la terre-capital ’ to denote capital incorporated into the earth in this way.28 This is one of the categories of fixed capital. Interest on the capital incorporated into the earth and the improvements that are thereby made to the soil as an instrument of production may form a portion of the rent that is paid by the farmer to the landowner,²⁹ but it does not constitute ground-rent proper, which is paid for the use of the soil as such, whether this is in a state of nature or is cultivated. In a systematic treatment of landed property, which lies beyond our present scope, this portion of the landowner’s income would be presented in detail. Here a few words on the subject must be sufficient. The more temporary capital investments that are involved in the ordinary production process in agriculture are all made without exception by the farmer himself. These investments, and even simple cultivation if it is conducted in any kind of rational way – i.e. if it cannot just be reduced to brutal exhaustion of the soil, as is the case for instance in the former slave states of North America, against which however the landowning gentlemen insure themselves in the contract – improve the soil,³⁰ increase its product and transform the earth from a mere raw material into earth-capital. A cultivated field is worth more than an uncultivated one of the same natural quality. Even the more permanent fixed capital incorporated into the earth, which is used up over a longer time, is in large measure the work of the farmer and in certain spheres often exclusively so. But as soon as the lease stipulated in the contract has expired – and this is one of the reasons why the landowner seeks to shorten the term of the lease to a minimum, as capitalist production develops – the improvements made to the land fall to the landowner as his property, as an inseparable accident of the substance, the land. When the new lease contract is concluded, the landowner adds interest on the capital incorporated into the earth to the ground-rent proper, whether he leases the land again to the farmer who made the improvements or to another farmer. His rent thus swells; or, if he plans to sell the land – and we shall go on to see how its price is determined – its value has now risen. He does not sell just the land, but rather the improved land, the capital incorporated into the earth, which has cost him nothing. This is one of the secrets – quite apart from the movement of ground-rent as such – of the increasing enrichment of the landowners, the constant inflation of their rents and the growing money value of their estates as economic development progresses. Thus they put away in their own private purses the result of a social development achieved without their participation – they axefruges consumere nati.* But this is equally one of the greatest obstacles to a rational agriculture, since the farmer avoids all improvements and outlays which are not expected to give their full return during the duration of his lease; and we find this denounced as such an obstacle time and again, both in the last century by James Anderson, the true discoverer of the modern theory of rent,^† who was also a practising farmer and for his time a significant agronomist, and in our own day by the opponents of the present arrangement of landed property in England.

A. A. Walton,* History of the Landed Tenures of Great Britain and Ireland, London, 1865, says on this subject (pp. 96–7): ‘All the efforts of the numerous agricultural associations throughout the country must fail to produce any very extensive or really appreciable results in the real advancement of agricultural improvement, so long as such improvements mean in a far higher degree increased value to the estate and rent-roll of the landlord, than bettering the condition of the tenant farmer or the labourer. The farmers, generally, are as well aware as either the landlord or his agent, or even the president of the Agricultural Association, that good drainage, plenty of manure, and good management, combined with the increased employment of labour, to thoroughly cleanse and work the land, will produce wonderful results both in improvement and production. To do all this, however, considerable outlay is required, and the farmers are also aware, that however much they may improve the land or enhance its value, the landlords will, in the long run, reap the principal benefit, in higher rents and the increased value of their estates… They are shrewd enough to observe what those orators’ (landowners and their agents speaking at agricultural festivities), ‘by some singular inadvertence, omit to tell them – namely, that the lion’s share of any improvements they may make is sure to go into the pockets of the landlords in the long run… However much the former tenant may have improved the farm, his successor will find that the landlord will always increase the rent in proportion to the increased value of the land from former improvements.’

This process still does not appear so clearly in agriculture proper as in the use of land for building. The overwhelming portion of the land used for building in England that is not sold as freehold is leased by the landlords for ninety-nine years, or for a shorter time if possible. When this period has expired, the buildings fall to the landlord, together with the land itself. ‘They’ (the tenants) ‘are bound to deliver up the house at the expiration of the lease, in good tenantable condition, to the great landlord, after having paid an exorbitant ground-rent up to the expiration of the lease. No sooner is the lease expired, than the agent or surveyor will come and examine your house, and see that you put it into good repair, and then take possession of it, and annex it to his lord’s domains … The fact is, if this system is permitted to be in full operation for any considerable period longer, the whole of the house property in the kingdom will be in the hands of the great landlords, as well as the land. The whole of the West End of London, north and south from Temple Bar, may be said to belong to about half a dozen great landlords, all let at enormous rents, and where the leases have not quite expired they are fast falling due. The same may be said either more or less of every town in the kingdom. Nor does this grasping system of exclusion and monopoly stop even here. Nearly the whole of the dock accommodation in our seaport towns is by the same process of usurpation in the hands of the great leviathans of the land’ (ibid., p. 93).

Under these conditions it is clear that, when the 1861 Census for England and Wales gave the number of house-owners as 36,032, out of a population of 20,066,224, the ratio of owners to the number of houses and the population would look quite different if the big proprietors were separated off from the small ones.

The example of property in buildings is important: (1) because it shows clearly the distinction between the ground-rent proper and the interest on the fixed capital incorporated into the land, which can form an addition to ground-rent. The interest on the buildings, as on the capital that the farmer incorporates into the soil in the case of agriculture, accrues to the industrial capitalist, the building speculator or farmer, for the duration of the lease, and has in and of itself nothing to do with the ground-rent that has to be paid each year on specified dates for the use of the land; (2) because it shows how, in the case of land, the capital of others incorporated into it ultimately falls to the share of the landlord, and the interest on this swells his rent.

Some writers, partly as spokesmen for landed property against the attacks of the bourgeois economists and partly in an effort to transform the capitalist system of production into a system of ‘harmonies’ instead of antitheses, as for example Carey, have sought to present ground-rent, the specific economic expression of landed property, as identical with interest. In this way, the opposition between landowners and capitalists would be abolished. The converse method was applied at the inception of capitalist production. At that time, landed property still passed in the popular mind as the original and respectable form of private property, whereas interest on capital was denounced as usury. Dudley North, Locke, etc. therefore presented interest on capital as a form analogous to ground-rent, just as Turgot * derived a justification of interest from the existence of ground-rent. The more recent writers forget – quite apart from the fact that ground-rent can and does exist without the addition of any interest on the capital incorporated into the soil – that the landowner not only receives interest on other people’s capital in this way, without it costing him anything, but gets the capital itself for nothing into the bargain. The justification for landed property, as that for all other forms of property of a particular mode of production, is that the mode of production itself possesses a transitory historical necessity, and so too therefore do the relations of production and exchange that arise from it. As we shall see later on, however, landed property is distinguished from the other forms of property by the fact that at a certain level of development it appears superfluous and harmful even from the standpoint of the capitalist mode of production.

Ground-rent may also be confused with interest in another form, and its specific character thus misconstrued. Ground-rent presents the appearance of a certain sum of money that the landowner draws each year from leasing out a piece of the earth. We have already seen how any particular money income can be capitalized, i.e. can be considered as the interest on an imaginary capital. If the average interest is 5 per cent, for example, an annual ground-rent of £200 may be viewed as the interest on a capital of £4,000. It is the ground-rent as capitalized in this way that forms the purchase price or value of the land, a category that is prima facie irrational, in the same way that the price of labour is irrational, since the earth is not the product of labour, and thus does not have a value. On the other hand, however, this irrational form conceals a genuine relation of production. If a capitalist pays £4,000 for land that yields an annual rent of £200, he draws the average annual interest of 5 per cent on the £4,000 in just the same way as if he had invested this capital in interest-bearing securities or had lent it out directly at 5 per cent interest. There is a valorization of a capital of £4,000 at 5 per cent. On this assumption, in twenty years he would have replaced the purchase price of his property by the receipts from it. In England, therefore, the purchase price of landed estates is reckoned at so and so many ‘years’ purchase’, which is simply another expression for the capitalization of the ground-rent. It is in actual fact not the purchase price of the land, but rather of the ground-rent that it yields, reckoned according to the prevailing rate of interest. This capitalization of the rent, however, presupposes the rent itself, whereas the rent cannot be conversely derived and explained from its own capitalization. Its existence, independent of the sale, is rather the presupposition proceeded from.

It follows from this that, taking the ground-rent as a constant magnitude, the price of land will rise or fall in inverse ratio to the rate of interest. If the standard rate of interest should fall from 5 per cent to 4, an annual ground-rent of £200 would represent the annual valorization of a capital of £5,000 instead of one of £4,000 and so the price of the same piece of land would rise from £4,000 to £5,000, or from twenty years’ purchase to twenty-five. In the opposite case, vice versa. This movement in the price of land is governed simply by the rate of interest and is independent of the movement of ground-rent itself. But since we have seen that the rate of profit has a tendency to fall as social development proceeds, and so too therefore does the rate of interest, in as much as this is governed by the profit rate; since we have also seen that even leaving aside the rate of profit, the interest rate has a tendency to fall as a result of the growth of money capital for loan, it follows therefore that the price of land has a tendency to rise, even independently of the movement of ground-rent and the price of the products of the soil, of which rent is one part.

The confusion between ground-rent itself and the form of interest that it assumes for the purchaser of the land – a confusion that is based on complete ignorance as to the nature of ground-rent – cannot but lead to the most peculiar and incorrect conclusions. Since landed property is seen in all older countries as a particularly superior form of property, and the purchase of land moreover as a particularly secure capital investment, so the rate of interest at which ground-rent is bought generally stands somewhat lower than is the case with other long-term capital investments, so that the buyer of land may receive, say, only 4 per cent of his purchase price, while he would otherwise receive 5 per cent for the same capital; or, what comes to the same thing, he pays more capital for the ground-rent than he would for the same annual money income in other investments. M. Thiers,* in his generally abysmal book La Propriété (it is the printed text of the speech he delivered against Proudhon in the French National Assembly of 1848), concludes from this that ground-rent is low, whereas all that this shows is the high level of its purchase price.

The fact that the capitalized ground-rent presents the appearance of the price or value of land, so that the earth is bought or sold just like any other commodity, provides some apologists with a justification for landed property; the buyer has paid an equivalent for it, as with any other commodity, and the greater part of landed property has changed hands in this way. The same justification would then apply also to slavery, since for the slaveowner who has paid cash for his slaves, the product of their labour simply represents the interest on the capital invested in their purchase. To derive a justification for the existence of ground-rent from its purchase and sale is nothing more than justifying its existence in terms of its existence.

Important as it is for the scientific analysis of ground-rent – i.e. the autonomous, specific economic form of landed property on the basis of the capitalist mode of production – to consider it in pure form and free from all adulterations and blurring admixtures, it is just as important for understanding the practical effects of landed property, and even for theoretical insight into a mass of facts that contradict the concept and nature of ground-rent and yet appear as its modes of existence, to know the elements from which these obscurities in the theory arise.

In practice, everything that the farmer pays the landowner in the form of the lease-price for permission to cultivate the soil appears as ground-rent. Whatever the components out of which this tribute has been put together, and whatever the sources from which it might derive, it has in common with ground-rent proper that the monopoly to a piece of the earth enables the so-called landowner to exact a tribute, to put a price on it. What this has in common with ground-rent proper is that it determines the price of land, which, as shown above, is nothing but the capitalized revenue from the lease of the land.

We have already seen how interest on capital incorporated into the soil may form a foreign component of the ground-rent of this kind, a component that must form an ever-growing addition to the total rental of a country, as economic development proceeds. But, leaving aside this interest, it is possible for the lease-price to include either partly, or in certain cases entirely (i.e. when ground-rent proper is completely absent and the land thus actually valueless), a deduction from average profit, normal wages, or both together. This part, whether of profit or of wages, appears here in the form of ground-rent because instead of accruing to the industrial capitalist or the wage-labourer, which would be normal, it is paid to the landowner in the form of the lease-price. Economically speaking, neither part forms ground-rent; but in practice it forms income for the landowner, an economic valorization of his monopoly, just as much as genuine ground-rent does, and it has the same effect in determining the price of land.

We are not referring here to the conditions in which ground-rent, the mode of landed property corresponding to the capitalist mode of production, has a formal existence even though the capitalist mode of production itself does not exist, the tenant himself is not an industrial capitalist, and his manner of farming is not a capitalist one. This is how it is in Ireland, for example. Here the tenant is generally a small peasant. What he pays the landowner for his lease often absorbs not only a portion of his profit, i.e. his own surplus labour, which he has a right to as the owner of his own instruments of labour, but also a portion of the normal wage, which he would receive for the same amount of labour under other conditions. The landowner, moreover, who does nothing at all here to improve the soil, expropriates from him the small capital which he incorporates into the soil for the most part by his own labour, just as a usurer would do in similar conditions. Only the usurer would at least risk his own capital in the operation. It is this continuing robbery that forms the object of the dispute over Irish land legislation; what is demanded in this case is essentially that the landowner who gives a farmer notice to quit should be forced to compensate the tenant for the improvements he has made to the land or the capital he has incorporated into it. Palmerston’s cynical response to this was: ‘The House of Commons is a house of landed proprietors.’ *

We say nothing of the exceptional conditions in which, even in countries of capitalist production, the landowner can extort a high rental that bears no relation to the product of the soil, as for example with the leasing of small plots of land to factory workers, in the English industrial districts, either for small gardens or for amateur cultivation in their spare time. (Reports of the Inspectors of Factories.)

What we are talking about here is agricultural rent in countries of developed capitalist production. Among English farmers, for example, there are a number of small capitalists who are destined and compelled to apply their capital in agriculture as farmers, by dint of their upbringing, training, tradition, competition and other circumstances. They are forced to be content with a smaller than average profit and to part with a portion of this to the landowner in the form of rent. This is the only condition on which they are permitted to invest their capital on the land, in agriculture. Since landowners everywhere exert a major influence on legislation, and in England even a predominant one, this influence can be exploited to cheat the entire class of farmers. The Corn Laws of 1815, for instance – a tax on bread explicitly imposed on the country in order to ensure the idle landowners the continuance of a rental that had grown abnormally during the Anti-Jacobin War – had the effect, apart from a few exceptionally fruitful years, of keeping the prices of agricultural products above the level to which they would have fallen under a system of free corn import. But they did not have the result of keeping prices at the levels decreed as normal by the legislating landowners, in the sense that these prices formed the legal limit for the import of foreign corn. Leasehold contracts were none the less concluded under the impression that these would be the normal prices. As soon as the illusion was destroyed, a new law was passed with new normal prices, which were as much the impotent expression of landed property’s greedy fantasies as the old ones had been. The farmers were cheated in this way from 1815 to the 1830s. Hence during this whole era the constant theme of ‘agricultural distress’. Hence during this period the expropriation and ruin of an entire generation of farmers and their replacement by a new class of capitalists.31

A far more general and important fact, however, is the reduction of wages for agricultural labourers in particular below their normal average, so that a part of the worker’s wage is deducted from him, to form a component of the lease-price and thus accrue to the landowner instead of the worker under the guise of ground-rent. This is the general rule in England and Scotland, for example, with the exception of a few favourably situated counties. The proceedings of the Parliamentary committees of inquiry which studied the level of wages paid in England before the introduction of the Corn Laws ^† – up till now the most valuable contribution to the history of wages in the nineteenth century, and almost un-exploited, besides being at the same time a pillory which the English aristocracy and bourgeoisie erected for themselves – proved convincingly and beyond all doubt that the high rents and corresponding rise in land prices during the Anti-Jacobin War were due in part to a deduction from wages and their suppression even below the physical minimum; i.e. to the handing-over to the landowner of a part of the normal wage. Various circumstances had made these operations possible, including the depreciation of money, the manipulation of the Poor Laws in the agricultural districts, ^‡ etc., while at the same time the incomes of the farmers rose enormously and the landowners fabulously enriched themselves. Indeed, one of the principal arguments for the introduction of the corn duties, from the farmers as well as the landowners, was that it would be physically impossible to lower the wages of the agricultural labourers any further. This situation has not fundamentally altered, and in England, as in all the European countries, a part of the normal wage still goes into ground-rent just as before. When the Earl of Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, a philanthropic aristocrat, was so extraordinarily moved by the condition of the English factory workers and threw himself into the Ten Hours agitation as their parliamentary spokesman, the representatives of the industrialists published in revenge some statistics about the wages of agricultural labourers in his own villages (see Volume 1, Chapter 25, 5, e: ‘The British Agricultural Proletariat’ [pp. 831–2]), which clearly showed how a portion of this philanthropist’s ground-rent consisted simply of the plunder that his tenants extracted for him from the wages of the agricultural labourers. These articles are also interesting in as much as the facts they contain may boldly take their place alongside the worst that the committees of 1814 and 1815 revealed. Whenever circumstances compel a temporary rise in the wages of agricultural labourers, the cry resounds from the farmers that the raising of wages to their normal level, such as obtains in other branches of industry, is impossible and would inevitably ruin them without a simultaneous reduction in ground-rent. It is thereby admitted that in the name of ground-rent the farmers make a deduction from wages and hand this over to the landowner. Between 1849 and 1859, for instance, agricultural wages rose in England in consequence of a combination of overwhelming circumstances, such as the exodus from Ireland, which cut off the supply of agricultural labourers from there; the exceptional absorption of the agricultural population by manufacturing industry; the wartime demand for soldiers; an exceptional emigration to Australia and the United States (California); and other reasons that we cannot go into any further here. At the same time, with the exception of the bad harvests of 1854–6, average cereal prices fell by more than 16 per cent during this period. The farmers clamoured for a reduction in rents. In some cases they did obtain this. By and large, however, their demand did not meet with success. They took refuge in a reduction of production costs, including the massive introduction of steam-engines and new machinery, which partly replaced horses and drove these out of economic use, while it also released agricultural labourers and thus brought about an artificial over-population and a fresh fall in wages. And all this happened despite an overall relative decline in the agricultural population during this decade, compared with the growth in the total population, and even an absolute decline in the agricultural population in some purely agricultural districts.32 Fawcett, at that time Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge (who died in 1884 when Postmaster-General – F.E.), spoke in the same terms to the Social Science Congress on 12 October 1865: ‘The labourers were beginning to emigrate, and the farmers were already beginning to complain that they would not be able to pay such high rents as they have been accustomed to pay, because labour was becoming dearer in consequence of emigration.’ Here a high rent of land is thus directly identified with low wages. And in so far as the high level of land prices is conditioned by this factor that increases rents, a rise in the value of land is identical with a devaluation of labour, and a high price of land with a low price of labour.

The same holds good for France.

‘The lease-price rises because the price of bread, wine, meat, vegetables and fruit rises, while the price of labour remains the same. If elderly people go through their fathers’ accounts, which takes us back approximately 100 years, they will find that at that time the price of a working day in rural France was exactly the same as it is today. The price of meat, however, has tripled since then… Who is the victim of this revolution? Is it the rich man, the owner of the farm, or the poor man who works it?… The rise in rents is the sign of a public disaster’ (Du mécanisme de la société en France et en Angleterre, M. Rubichon, 2nd edn, Paris, 1836, p. 101).

Examples of rent as a result of a deduction from average profit on the one hand and from average wages on the other.

The above-quoted Morton,^* land agent and agricultural engineer, says it has been noticed in many districts that the rent for large farms is less than for smaller ones, since ‘the competition is usually greater for the latter than for the former, and as few small farmers are able to turn their attention to any other business than that of farming, their anxiety to get a suitable occupation leads them in many instances to give more rent than their judgement can approve of (John L. Morton, The Resources of Estates, London, 1858, p. 116).

This distinction, however, is said to be gradually diminishing in England, and in his opinion emigration, precisely among the class of small farmers, has a lot to do with it. The same Morton gives an example where the ground-rent evidently includes a deduction from the wage of the farmer himself and hence still more certainly of the people he employs. This is the case with farms of under 70–80 acres, which cannot maintain a two-horse plough. ‘Unless the tenant works with his own hands as laboriously as any labourer, his farm will not keep him. If he entrusts the performance of his work to workmen while he continues merely to observe them, the chances are, that at no distant period, he will find he is unable to pay his rent’ (ibid., p. 118).

Morton concludes from this that unless the farmers in the district are very poor, the farms should not be less than 70 acres, so that the farmer can keep two or three horses.

The extraordinary wisdom of Monsieur Léonce de Lavergne, Membre de I’Institut et de la Société Centrale d’Agriculture: in his Économie rurale de l’ Angleterre (quoted from the English translation, London, 1855), he makes the following comparison of the annual benefits derived from cattle, which labour in France but not in England, where they are replaced by horses (p. 42):

But the higher product in this case is simply because, as he himself points out, milk in England is as dear again as in France, while he assumes the same price for meat in both countries (p. 35); the English milk product would thus be reduced to £8 million, and the total product to £28 million, as in France. It is a bit much for Monsieur Lavergne to take into account at the same time both the quantities produced and the differences in price, so that, if England produces certain articles at greater cost than France, which means at most a bigger profit for farmers and landowners, this appears as a superiority of English agriculture.

M. Lavergne shows on p. 48 that he is not only acquainted with the economic successes of English agriculture, but also shares the prejudices of English farmers and landowners: ‘One great drawback attends cereals generally… they exhaust the soil which bears them.’

M. Lavergne not only believes that other crops do not do this; he believes that fodder and root crops enrich the soil: ‘Forage plants derive from the atmosphere the principal elements of their growth, while they give to the soil more than they take from it; thus both directly and by their conversion into animal manure contributing in two ways to repair the mischief done by cereals and exhausting crops generally; one principle, therefore, is that they should at least alternate with these crops; in this consists the Norfolk rotation’ (pp. 50, 51).

No wonder then that M. Lavergne, believing these fairy stories about English rural conditions, should also believe that the wages of English rural labourers have lost their former abnormal character since the abolition of the Corn Laws. See what we already said on this subject in Volume 1, Chapter 25, 5, e. We may also listen to what Mr John Bright had to say in his speech in Birmingham on 13 December 1866.* After speaking of the five million families who are not represented at all in Parliament, he continued:

‘There is among them one million, or rather more than one million, in the United Kingdom who are classed in the unfortunate list of paupers. There is another million just above pauperism, but always in peril lest they should become paupers. Their condition and prospects are not more favourable than that. Now look at the ignorant and lower strata of this portion of the community. Look to their abject condition, to their poverty, to their suffering, to their utter hopelessness of any good. Why, in the United States – even in the Southern States during the reign of slavery – every Negro had an idea that there was a day of jubilee for him. But to these people – to this class of the lowest strata in this country – I am here to state that there is neither the belief of anything better nor scarcely an aspiration after it. Have you read a paragraph which lately appeared in the newspapers about John Cross, a Dorsetshire labourer? He worked six days in the week, had an excellent character from his employer for whom he had worked twenty-four years at the rate of eight shillings per week. John Cross had a family of seven children to provide for out of these wages in his hovel – for a feeble wife and an infant child. He took –legally, I believe he stole – a wooden hurdle of the value of sixpence. For this offence he was tried before the magistrates and sentenced to fourteen or twenty days’ imprisonment… I can tell you that many thousands of cases like that of John Cross are to be found throughout the country, and especially in the south, and that their condition is such that hitherto the most anxious investigator has been unable to solve the mystery as to how they keep body and soul together. Now cast your eye over the country and look at these five million of families and the desperate condition of this strata of them. Is it not true that the unenfranchised nation may be said to toil and toil, knowing almost no rest? Compare it with the ruling class – but if I do I shall be charged with communism… But compare this great toiling and unenfranchised nation with the section who may be considered the governing classes. Look at its wealth; look at its ostentation – look at its luxury. Behold its weariness – for there is weariness amongst them, but it is the weariness of satiety – and see how they rush from place to place, as it were, to discover some new pleasure’ (Morning Star, 14 December 1865).

We shall go on to show how surplus labour and hence surplus product in general are confused with ground-rent, a portion of the surplus product that is both quantitatively and qualitatively specific, at least on the basis of the capitalist mode of production. The indigenous basis of surplus labour in general, i.e. a natural condition without which this is impossible, is that nature provides the necessary means of subsistence – whether in products of the land, animal or vegetable, or in fisheries, etc. – with the application of an amount of labour-time that does not swallow up the entire working day. This indigenous productivity of agricultural labour (and here we include simple gathering, hunting, fishing, stock-raising) is the basis of all surplus-value; just as all labour is originally first directed towards the appropriation and production of food. (Animals also provide pelts for warmth in cold climates; also cave-dwellings, etc.)

The same confusion between surplus product and ground-rent is expressed in a different way by Mr Dove.* Originally, agricultural labour and industrial labour are not separate; the second is an appendage of the first. The surplus labour and surplus product of the agricultural clan, the common household or the family, comprises both agricultural and industrial labour. The two go hand in hand. Hunting, fishing and agriculture are impossible without appropriate instruments. Weaving, spinning, etc. are first of all conducted as agricultural sidelines.

We have already shown how, just as the labour of the individual worker breaks down into necessary and surplus labour, so the total labour of the working class can be divided in such a way that the part that produces the entire means of subsistence needed by the working class (including the means of production these require) performs the necessary labour for the entire society. The labour performed by the whole remaining part of the working class can be considered as surplus labour. But the necessary labour in no way includes just agricultural labour; it also includes the labour that produces all other products that necessarily enter the worker’s average consumption. Some, moreover, perform only necessary labour, from a social point of view, because others perform only surplus labour, and vice versa. This is simply a division of labour between them. It is the same with the division of labour between agricultural and industrial workers in general. The purely industrial character of one section’s labour is matched by the purely agricultural character of the other’s. This purely agricultural labour is in no way of natural and spontaneous origin but is rather itself a product of social development, and a very recent one at that, which has by no means been everywhere attained; it corresponds to a quite specific stage of production. Just as a part of agricultural labour is objectified in products that either serve simply for luxury or form industrial raw materials but in no way go into foodstuffs, at least not foodstuffs for the masses, so on the other hand a part of industrial labour is objectified in products that serve as necessary means of consumption for agricultural and non-agricultural workers alike. It is wrong to conceive this industrial labour – from the social standpoint – as surplus labour. It is in part just as much necessary labour as the necessary portion of agricultural work is. It is also simply the autonomized form of a part of the industrial labour which was formerly linked indigenously with agricultural labour, a necessary reciprocal supplement to the purely agricultural labour that has now become separate from this. (Considering just the material aspect, 500 mechanized weavers for example produce a far higher degree of surplus cloth than one, i.e. much more than is required for their own clothing.)

In considering the forms of appearance of ground-rent, i.e. the lease-price that is paid to the landowner under this heading for the use of the soil, whether for productive purposes or those of consumption, we must keep in mind, finally, that the prices of things that have no value in and of themselves – either not being the product of labour, like land, or which at least cannot be reproduced by labour, such as antiques, works of art by certain masters, etc. – may be determined by quite fortuitous combinations of circumstances. For a thing to be sold, it simply has to be capable of being monopolized and alienated.

(1) The confusion between the various forms of rent that correspond to different levels of development of the social production process.

Whatever the specific form of rent may be, what all its types have in common is the fact that the appropriation of rent is the economic form in which landed property is realized and that ground-rent in turn presupposes landed property, the ownership of particular bits of the globe by certain individuals – whether the owner is a person representing the community, as in Asia, Egypt, etc.; whether this landed property is simply an accidental accompaniment of the property that certain persons have in the persons of the immediate producers, as in the systems of serfdom and slavery; whether it is pure private property that non-producers have in nature, a simple ownership title to land; or finally, whether it is a relationship to the land which, as with colonists and small peasant proprietors, appears as directly implied, given their isolated and not socially developed labour, in the appropriation and production of the products of particular bits of land by the direct producers.

This common character of the different forms of rent – as the economic realization of landed property, the legal fiction by virtue of which various individuals have exclusive possession of particular parts of the globe – leads people to overlook the distinctions.

(2) All ground-rent is surplus-value, the product of surplus labour. In its more undeveloped form, rent in kind, it is still a direct surplus product. Hence the error that the rent corresponding to the capitalist mode of production, which is always an excess over and above profit, i.e. over and above a portion of commodity value that itself consists of surplus-value (surplus labour) – that this particular and specific component of surplus-value can be explained simply by explaining the general conditions of existence for surplus-value and profit. These conditions are, first, that the direct producers must work for more time than is required to reproduce their own labour-power, i.e. to reproduce themselves. They must perform some kind of surplus labour. This is the subjective condition. But the objective condition is that they also can perform surplus labour: that natural conditions are such that a part of their available labour-time is sufficient to reproduce and maintain them as producers; that the production of their necessary means of subsistence does not consume their entire labour-time. Natural fertility sets one limit here, as a point of departure or basis. The development of the social productivity of their labour sets the other limit. Looked at more closely, since the production of foodstuffs is the very first condition of their life and of any production at all, the labour employed in this production, i.e. agricultural labour in the broadest economic sense, must be sufficiently fruitful to prevent the entire available labour-time from being absorbed in the production of foodstuffs for the immediate producers, so that agricultural surplus labour and hence an agricultural surplus product is possible. To take this further, the total agricultural labour – necessary and surplus – of one section of society must be sufficient to produce the necessary foodstuffs for the entire society, i.e. also for the non-agricultural workers; this great division of labour between agriculturalists and industrialists must be possible, and similarly that between those agriculturalists who produce foodstuffs and those who produce raw materials. Even though the labour of the direct producers of foodstuffs, taken by itself, breaks down into necessary and surplus labour, in relation to society it thus represents the necessary labour required simply for the production of foodstuffs. The same thing is the case, incidentally, with any division of labour within society as a whole, as distinct from the division of labour within the individual workshop. It is the labour necessary for the production of particular articles – for the satisfaction of a particular social need for particular articles. If this division is in due proportion, products of various types will be sold at their values (at a further stage of development, at their prices of production), or at least at prices which are modifications of these values or production prices as determined by general laws. This is in fact the law of value as it makes itself felt, not in relation to the individual commodities or articles, but rather to the total products at a given time of particular spheres of social production autonomized by the division of labour; so that not only is no more labour-time devoted to each individual commodity than necessary, but out of the total social labour-time only the proportionate quantity needed is devoted to the various types of commodity. Use-value still remains a condition. But if in the case of the individual commodity this use-value depends on its satisfying in and of itself a social need, in the case of the mass social product it depends on its adequacy to the quantitatively specific social need for each particular kind of product and therefore on the proportional division of the labour between these various spheres of production in accordance with these social needs, which are quantitatively circumscribed. (This point should be introduced in connection with the distribution of capital between the various spheres of production.) The social need, i.e. the use-value on the social scale, here appears decisive for the quota of total social labour-time that falls to the share of the various particular spheres of production. But this is simply the same law that is already exhibited by the individual commodity, i.e. that its use-value is the precondition of its exchange-value and hence of its value. It is a point that bears on the relation between necessary and surplus labour only in as much as an imbalance in this proportion means that the commodity value, and therefore also the surplus-value contained in it, cannot be realized. For example, the proportion of cotton goods produced may be too high even though the labour-time realized in this total product is simply that needed under the given conditions. But too much of society’s overall labour has been spent on this particular branch, and so a portion of the product is useless. The total product is therefore sold as if only the necessary proportion had been produced. This quantitative barrier to the quotas of social labour-time devoted to the various particular spheres of production is simply a further developed expression of the law of value in general; even though necessary labour-time takes on a different meaning here. Only such-and-such a quantity of this is required in order to satisfy the social need. The limit in this case emerges through the use-value. Under the given conditions of production, society can spend only so much of its total labour-time on one particular kind of product. But the subjective and objective conditions of surplus labour and surplus-value in general have nothing to do with the particular form, whether this is profit, or whether it is rent. They apply to surplus-value as such, whatever particular form this may assume. They therefore do not explain ground-rent.

(3) A particular peculiarity that arises with the economic valorization of landed property, that is the development of ground-rent, is that its amount is in no way determined by the action of its recipient, but rather by a development of social labour that is independent of him and in which he plays no part. This is why something that is common to all branches of production and their products on the basis of commodity production, and to capitalist production in particular, which is commodity production in its entirety, is easily conceived as a peculiar property of rent (and of the product of agriculture in general).

The level of ground-rent (and with it the value of land) rises in the course of social development, as a result of the overall social labour. Not only does the market and the demand for agricultural products grow, but the demand for the land itself also grows directly, since it is a condition of production competed for by all possible branches of business, including non-agricultural ones. Rent, moreover, and with it the value of land (confining ourselves simply to agricultural rent proper), develops along with the market for the product of land and hence with the growth in the non-agricultural population; it increases with their needs and their demand both for foodstuffs and for raw materials. It lies in the nature of the capitalist mode of production that it constantly reduces the agricultural population in relation to the non-agricultural, because in industry (in the narrow sense) the growth of constant capital in relation to variable is linked with an absolute growth in variable capital (even if a relative decline in relation to constant); while in agriculture the variable capital required for the cultivation of a particular piece of land declines absolutely and can therefore grow only in so far as new land is cultivated, which however presupposes in turn a still greater growth in the non-agricultural population.

In actual fact, what we have here is not a phenomenon peculiar to agriculture and its products. The same applies rather to all other branches of production and products, on the basis of commodity production and its absolute form, capitalist production.

These products are commodities, use-values which possess an exchange-value, and particularly one that can be realized, converted into money, only to the extent to which other commodities form an equivalent for them and other products confront them as commodities and as values; to the extent, therefore, to which they are not produced as direct means of subsistence for their producers themselves, but as commodities, as products which only become use-values by being transformed into exchange-value (money), by being alienated. The market for these commodities develops by way of the social division of labour; the separation between different productive labours transforms their respective products reciprocally into commodities, into equivalents for one another, making them serve one another reciprocally as markets. This is in no way something peculiar to the products of agriculture.

Rent can develop as money-rent only on the basis of commodity production, and particularly of capitalist production, and it develops to the same extent to which agricultural production becomes commodity production, i.e. the extent to which non-agricultural production undergoes an independent development in relation to it; for it is to this extent that the product of agriculture becomes a commodity, an exchange-value and a value. To the same extent that commodity production and hence the production of value develops with capitalist production, so too there develops the production of surplus-value and surplus product. But in the same measure as the latter develops, there develops in landed property the ability to capture a growing portion of this surplus-value by way of its monopoly of the earth and hence to raise the value of its rent and the price of the land itself. It is still the capitalist who has the active function in the development of this surplus-value and surplus product. The landowner has only to seize a portion of surplus product and surplus-value that increases without any effort on his part. This is the peculiarity of his position, not the fact that the value of the agricultural products, and hence of the land itself, is constantly growing as the market for these expands, demand increases and with it the world of commodities that confronts the products of agriculture – in other words the number of non-agricultural commodity producers and the scale of non-agricultural commodity production. Since this happens without his assistance, it appears to the landowner as something unique that the mass of value, the mass of surplus-value, and the transformation of a portion of this surplus-value into ground-rent depends on the social production process, on the development of commodity production in general. That is why Dove, for example, tries to explain rent in general on this basis.* He says that rent does not depend on the size of the agricultural product but rather on its value; this however depends on the size and productivity of the non-agricultural population. But it is also true to say for any other product that it only develops as a commodity with the volume and diversity of the series of other commodities that form equivalents for it. We have already shown this in our general presentation of value. On the one hand, the exchangeability of a product depends entirely on the number of different commodities that exist outside it. On the other hand, the quantity in which it can itself be produced as a commodity depends in particular on this exchangeability.

No producer considered in isolation produces a value or commodity, neither the industrialist nor the agriculturalist. His product becomes a value and a commodity only in a specific social context. Firstly, in so far as it appears as an expression of social labour, and therefore his own labour-time appears as part of the general social labour-time; secondly, where this social character of his labour appears as a social character impressed on his product, in its money character and its general exchangeability as determined by its price.

Thus if on the one hand, instead of explaining rent, it is simply surplus-value or in a still narrower conception only surplus product in general that is explained, on the other hand the mistake is committed of ascribing a character that accrues to all products as commodities and values exclusively to the products of agriculture. This is rendered even more superficial when a withdrawal is made from the general determination of value to the realization of a particular commodity value. Any commodity can realize its value only in the process of circulation, and whether and to what extent it does realize this depends on the market conditions of the time.

Thus it is not peculiar to ground-rent that agricultural products develop into values and as values, i.e. that they confront other commodities as commodities themselves and that the non-agricultural products confront them as commodities, nor that they develop as particular expressions of social labour. What is peculiar is that with the conditions in which the agricultural products develop as values (commodities), and with the conditions of realization of their values, landed property also develops the power to appropriate a growing part of these values created without its assistance, and a growing part of the surplus-value is transformed into ground-rent.

FRANCE		ENGLAND
Milk	£4 million	Milk	£16 million
Meat	£16 million	Meat	£20 million
Labour	£8 million	Labour	—
	£28 million		£36 million

Part Six

The Transformation
of Surplus Profit
into Ground-Rent