New Economic Developments In Peasant Life - Part 1

New Economic Developments In Peasant Life 

In Capital III, Marx, in his analysis of rent, and his discussion of the development of capitalist landed property, and ground-rent, sets out the basis upon which a differentiation of the peasantry arises. 

Feudal rent has its basis in the division of the working-day into necessary and surplus labour. The feudal lords are able to levy rents and taxes, because of their rank and status. These levies have their origin in occasional tribute paid to warrior chiefs or religious leaders that become formalised and regularised. However, the limit of them is determined by the amount of surplus that the peasant producers can create. 

Initially, the rent takes the form of Labour Rent. Peasants work three days of the week on their own land, producing to meet their own needs, and work three days on the land of the feudal lord. Later, instead of this labour on the Lord's land, the peasant simply works on their own land, but hands over half their produce as rent. Finally, instead of handing over produce, the peasant hands over an amount of money of equal value. This is the final form of feudal rent, and facilitates the transition to capitalist rent. 

The landlords came to want money rents, because, with money, they can buy anything, including the increasing range of exotic commodities that expanding global trade brings with it. Peasant producers had always engaged in domestic industry alongside agricultural production. As towns developed, and a range of commodities are produced by artisans in these towns, so this creates the conditions for capitalist production in the towns. Landlords spend their money rents on these commodities, as well as on imported commodities being sold by a growing merchant class, also based in the towns. 

Usury acts to dissolve the power of the landlord class as it borrows money to expand its lavish consumption, but it also destroys some of the artisan production too. In doing so, it frees both their means of production and their labour. It enables those with money (capitalists) to buy up, centralise and concentrate these means of production, and to employ the artisans as wage labourers. As it brings together these means of production, it encourages a division of labour, which, in turn, encourages a development of machines. This capitalist production, in the towns, begins to undercut the domestic industry undertaken by peasant producers, even though the towns sell commodities to the rural areas at huge profit margins. This provides a basis for further capital accumulation. As Marx says, Sismondi saw this as a frightful development, whereas, in fact, it creates the conditions for a huge leap forward by humanity. 

As industrial production in the towns expands, those peasants in the weakest position, and dependent on their own industrial production, are the worst affected. It means it is amongst this group that the first to succumb to the Putting Out System are found. But, increasingly, they can no longer subsist. They must either become agricultural day labourers, or move to the town themselves, to become industrial workers. 

As the landed aristocracy itself disintegrates, land itself, which had been preserved by primogeniture, becomes a commodity, bought and sold on the market. On the one hand, those peasant families that had the benefit of more fertile land that had been able to accumulate additional animals and means of production, were able to accumulate profits after payment of rents. They were now able to also buy additional land. On the other, merchant capitalists and money-capitalists from the towns were able to buy land, as it became available, not to farm themselves, but purely in order to derive rent from its use. They became “rent farmers” for whom the landed property was capital in the same way that their ownership of bonds or shares was capital. 

Together, these different groups transform the nature of land ownership and agricultural production. It means that agricultural production becomes capitalist production, undertaken by capitalist farmers who employ agricultural labour as wage labour.

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