Marx then makes a number of observations on Jones' comments on rent. Jones correctly observes that, under capitalism, rent depends entirely on profit. Rent is surplus profit. The concept of surplus profit itself only has meaning on the basis of the existence of an average rate of profit. The development of an average rate of profit depends on a free and frictionless movement of capital and labour, so that surplus profits are competed away. Surplus profits, resulting in rent, occur when no such free movement of capital and labour is possible.
“In reality friction takes place (at the expense of the working class) between the one-sided character which the division of labour and machinery impose on labour-power on the one hand, while on the other hand, it confronts capital [which is thereby differentiated from its undeveloped form in craft-build industry] merely as the living potentiality of any type of labour in general, which is given this or that direction according to the profit that can be made in this or that sphere of production, so that different masses of labour are transferable from one sphere to another.” (p 444)
An example of this friction, at the expense of the working class, which results in surplus profits, and rent, can be seen with Brexit, or with the imposition of tariffs by Trump in the US etc. The surplus profits also come with higher costs of production (as for example the higher cost of food and raw materials that the Corn Laws imposed) and thereby a limitation on capital accumulation, economic growth, slower productivity, and lower living standards.
Marx quotes Jones' comparison of this freedom of mobility of capital and labour under capitalism, and the monopoly and rigidity of previous modes of production, where peasant producers were stuck in their own localities, and methods of production did not change for centuries. Such conditions, as Jones described, still existed in much of Asia. As Marx himself wrote, elsewhere, it was British colonialism that actually brought the only social revolution that had ever happened in India.
When Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto about capitalism rescuing millions from “the idiocy of rural life”, he was referring to the fact that this unchanging condition for century after century, with methods, ideas and culture simply being handed down from one generation to the next, had an actual dulling effect on the wits of those subjected to those conditions.
“On the other hand, the capitalist mode of production, whose characteristic features are mobility of capital and labour and continual revolutions in the methods of production, and therefore in the relations of production and commerce and the way of life, leads to great mobility in the habits, modes of thinking, etc., of the people.” (p 444)
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