Capital III, Chapter 48 - Part 6

“Secondly. In the formula: capital — interest, land — ground-rent, labour — wages, capital, land and labour appear respectively as sources of interest (instead of profit), ground-rent and wages, as their products, or fruits; the former are the basis, the latter the consequence, the former are the cause, the latter the effect; and indeed, in such a manner that each individual source is related to its product as to that which is ejected and produced by it. All the proceeds, interest (instead of profit), rent, and wages, are three components of the value of the products, i.e., generally speaking, components of value or expressed in money, certain money components, price components.” (p 816)

But, it is impossible for land to create value, because value is labour, indeed a socially defined quantity of socially necessary labour.

““Land, e.g., takes part as an agent of production in creating a use-value, a material product, wheat. But it has nothing to do with the production of the value of wheat. In so far as value is represented by wheat, the latter is merely considered as a definite quantity of materialised social labour, regardless of the particular substance in which this labour is manifested or of the particular use-value of this substance.” (p 816) 

This is not changed by the differences in fertility of the soil. That only means that labour is more productive where it operates under one set of conditions as opposed to another, that it produces more use values in one set of conditions than it does in another, during a given period of time, that a given amount of value is represented in more or less use values.

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