Under feudalism, land is handed down from generation to generation, but, as soon as capitalist rent arises, the potential for putting a price on land, itself arises. The price is not a price for the land as land/use value, which has no value, but is a price for the ability of the land to produce rent, just as the price of capital (the rate of interest) is the price of its use value to produce the average industrial rate of profit. Land, then becomes a commodity that is bought and sold, its price being determined by the capitalised value of the rent. This hastens the dissolution of the old feudal landed property.
“Rent is possible only from the moment when the development of urban industry, and the social organization resulting therefrom, force the landowner to aim solely at cash profits, at the monetary relation of his agricultural products – in fact to look upon his landed property only as a machine for coining money. Rent has so completely divorced the landed proprietor from the soil, from nature, that he has no need even to know his estates, as is to be seen in England.” (p 147-8)
The same is true of the owner of fictitious-capital in the era of imperialism, especially where, in search of speculative capital gains, the shares, bonds and other such assets are bought and sold many times in seconds on global stock and bond markets. The Dukes of Devonshire had their stately home at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, whilst the Duke of Sutherland lived, here, in Stoke at Trentham, where the family mausoleum resides, whilst the Duke's statue looks down from atop the hill over the new commercial activities conducted in the grounds of his Trentham estate, comprising retail outlets and monkey park. As Dickens described, in Bleak House, in addition to these country piles, resorted to in the Summer, the aristocrats also spent much of their time in city mansions, and homes in sunnier climes in Europe too.
“As for the farmer, the industrial capitalist and the agricultural worker, they are no more bound to the land they exploit than are the employer and the worker in the factories to the cotton and wool they manufacture; they feel an attachment only for the price of their production, the monetary product. Hence the jeremiads of the reactionary parties, who offer up all their prayers for the return of feudalism, of the good old patriarchal life, of the simple manners and the fine virtues of our forefathers.” (p 148)
As Marx and Engels set out, in The Communist Manifesto, capitalism freed millions from that idiocy of rural life. Reactionaries sought, and, in various guises, still seek, to hold back or reverse that capitalist progress, as Lenin also described, in his polemics against the “anti-capitalism” of the petty-bourgeois, moral socialists.
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