Theories of Surplus Value, Part III, Chapter 24 - Part 1

Richard Jones

1. Reverend Richard Jones, “An Essay on the Distribution of Wealth, and on the Sources of Taxation,” London, 1831, Part I, Rent [Elements of a Historical Interpretation of Rent. Jones’s Superiority over Ricardo in particular Questions of the Theory of Rent and His Mistakes in This Field] 

Jones represents an advance over all the economists since Sir James Steuart, in that he does not see capital or capitalism as eternal. In other words, he has a sense of the historical development of different modes of production. 

In his work on rent, Jones notes that for the economists after Ricardo, rent is defined as surplus profit. This definition itself assumes the existence of capitalism, and that farming itself had been subjected to capitalist production. 

“In short, landed property is conceived only in its modern bourgeois form, that is, in the modified form which it has been given by capital, the dominant relation of production in society. Jones by no means shares the illusion that capital has been in existence since the beginning of the world.” (p 399) 

Jones analyses the history of different forms of rent along similar lines to that provided by Marx, in Capital III, Chapter 47. Marx quotes from Jones extensively to indicate his analysis of these different historical forms of rent. What distinguishes all of these precapitalist forms of rent is that the rent itself is the primary means by which surplus labour is extracted. The fundamental basis and requirement for that is that such labour must be able to produce a surplus product from the land, i.e. it must be able to produce a greater physical product than required for its own physical reproduction. 

““The power of the earth to yield, even to the rudest labours of mankind, more than is necessary for the subsistence of the cultivator himself, enables him to pay […] a tribute: hence the origin of rent” ([Richard Jones, An Essay on the Distribution of Wealth,] p. 4). 

“… rent has usually originated in the appropriation of the soil, at a time when the bulk of the people must cultivate it on such terms as they can obtain, or starve; and when their scanty capital of implements, seeds, etc., being utterly insufficient to secure their maintenance in any other occupation than that of agriculture, is chained with themselves to the land by an overpowering necessity” (op. cit., p. 11). (p 399) 

Jones, as with Marx's analysis of the history of rent, in Capital III, examines different forms of rent from labour rents, as produced by slave and serf labour, to produce rent, or rent in kind, to metayer rents, and ryot rents, through to money rents, and the development of capitalist rent. 

“He finds that everywhere a specific form of rent, i.e., of landed property, corresponds to a definite form of labour and of the conditions of labour.” (p 400) 

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