Metayage
“Serf-labour (just as slave-labour) has this in common with wage-labour, in respect of rent, that the latter is paid in labour not in products, still less in money.” (p 401)
In other words, neither the slave nor the serf, nor the wage labourer own means of production. It is only if, as in the case of a peasant or artisan, you own means of production, and directly appropriate the product of your labour, that you can hand over this product, or at least a part of it, as rent. It is only if you appropriate your own product that you can sell it as a commodity, and thereby use the money received for it to pay a money rent. The slave or serf must provide surplus labour directly to the lord or master, and the same is true with the wage labourer. The wage labourer does not produce a surplus product, which they hand to the capitalist, nor do they sell the product of their labour for money, a part of which they pay to the capitalist to form their profit. The capitalist immediately appropriates all of the labour of the wage labourer, as they consume the commodity, labour-power, which they have bought from the wage labourer. All of that labour is embodied in the product, which is appropriated by the capitalist. It is then the capitalist who sells that product, and hands back to the worker a portion of the new value they have created, retaining the surplus value for themselves.
Marx gives a number of quotes from Jones concerning metayer rents, ryot rents, cottier rents, the contents of which have already been covered by Marx in his own discussion of precapitalist rent, in Capital III.
He quotes Jones' conclusion that,
““All the forms” (serf, ryot, metayer, cottier, etc., in short, peasant rents) prevent “the full development of the productive powers of the earth” [p. 157].
“… the difference which exists in the productiveness of the industry” [depends] “first, on the quantity of contrivance used in applying manual labour: secondly, on the extent to which the mere physical exertions […] are assisted by the accumulated results of past labour: in other words, on the different quantities of skill, knowledge, and capital, brought to the task of production….” [pp. 157-58].
“Small Numbers of the Non-Agricultural Classes. It is obvious, that the relative numbers of those persons who can be maintained without agricultural labour, must be measured wholly by the productive powers of the cultivators” (Chapter VI [pp. 159-60]).
“In England, the tenants who on the disuse of the labour of the serf tenantry, took charge of the cultivation of the domains of the proprietors, were found on the land; they were yeomen” (op. cit. [p. 166]).” (p 401)
Having covered the history of rent, Jones then arrives at farmer's rents, or capitalist rent.
“It is here that Jones’s superiority is most striking, for he shows that what Ricardo and others regard as the eternal form of landed property, is its bourgeois form, which, after all, only develops, firstly, when landed property has ceased to be the dominant relation in production and, consequently, in society; secondly, when agriculture itself is carried on in a capitalist way, which presupposes the development of large-scale industry (at least of manufacture) in the towns. Jones shows that rent in the Ricardian sense only exists in a society the basis of which is the capitalist mode of production.” (p 401-2)
The reason for this is that, for Ricardo, rent is surplus profit, and this surplus profit presumes that a) there is some general rate of profit (above which profit is surplus), b) it is the necessity to obtain, at least, this average rate of profit that dictates the allocation of capital, and c) capital now forms the dominant factor in production.
There can be no surplus profit unless it is a profit in excess of some normal or general rate of profit. This general rate of profit is only established as a result of capitalist production and competition. It arises because capital naturally flows towards those spheres of production where the annual rate of profit is highest, i.e. where the organic composition of capital is lowest, and rate of turnover of capital is highest. It is this, which makes The Law of The Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, as the organic composition of capital rises, the most important law for political economy, because it is that which determines the allocation of capital, in the economy (including the global economy), to the different spheres of production.
It thereby increases the capital accumulated in higher than average profit spheres, and vice versa. By so doing, it increases the supply of commodities from the former spheres, reducing their market prices, and thereby the annual rate of profit, in those spheres, and vice versa. By this means, capital invades one sphere of production after another, each time it discovers some new sphere of production from which it can obtain a higher than average rate of profit, until they all fall under its control. But, this process never ends, because, as Marx describes, in The Grundrisse, discussing the Civilising Mission of Capital, it continually develops new types of commodities, new use values, to satisfy newly created needs. Moreover, as it finds the rate of profit squeezed in one part of the global economy, it increasingly finds new reserves of labour elsewhere in the global economy, which it can convert into wage-labour, either by that wage-labour moving to where capital requires it, or else by moving capital to these new sources of wage labour, which, in turn, develops these previously undeveloped economies, raising their living standards, and thereby also creating new markets for the commodities it produces, and drawing them also into the growing, and more integrated global economy.
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