4. Property or Rent
As with all such categories, it is necessary to analyse them in the specific forms they take in different modes of production. Communal property is not the same as private property, feudal property is not the same as bourgeois property, and so on, just as rent in its bourgeois economic sense is specific to capitalist production, and the formation of an average industrial rate of profit.
“M. Proudhon, while seeming to speak of property in general, deals only with landed property, with ground rent.
“The origin of rent, as property, is, so to speak, extra-economic: it rests in psychological and moral considerations which are only very distantly connected with the production of wealth.”” (p 142)
Proudhon's admission that he cannot fathom the origin of rent and property is, of itself, damning of his claim to have presented a scientific analysis of economic categories. He further talks about there being something mystical or mysterious about the origin of property.
Marx quotes Proudhon's statement.
“... that at the seventh epoch of economic evolution – credit – when fiction had caused reality to vanish, and human activity threatened to lose itself in empty space, it had become necessary to bind man more closely to nature. Now, rent was the price of this new contract.” (p 142)
Nearly everything by Proudhon, here, is back to front. As Marx says,
“In the world of real production, where landed property always precedes credit, M. Proudhon’s horror vacui [horror of a vacuum] could not exist.” (p 143)
Marx gives a lengthy quote from Proudhon setting out his interpretation of Ricardo's theory of rent. In fact, Proudhon's account itself is wrong. For Ricardo, rent is surplus profit, i.e. profit above the average industrial rate of profit. Because Ricardo denies the existence of Absolute Rent, this surplus profit is produced only on the more fertile lands, where production costs are lower. But, Proudhon goes beyond this, claiming that the rent is the difference between the market price and cost of production, not including the average profit.
Now, for the feudal rent, which amounts to a tribute paid by peasants to the feudal lord, this is correct. These kinds of pre-capitalist rents are the means by which surplus labour is pumped out of the producers. But, that is not at all the case with bourgeois rent. The individual peasant producer, under feudalism, must produce to live, and anything above what is required to reproduce their labour-power is a surplus product. As Marx sets out, in Capital III, whether this surplus takes the form of corvee, or labour rent, rent in kind, or money rent, the basis is the same, though the last is the form, in which the feudal rent is dissolved, and bourgeois rent appears in its place.
Bourgeois rent is different, because the landlord is confronted not by an individual peasant producer, but by a capitalist farmer. The capitalist farmer does not need to farm to live, and does not need to apply their capital to the land. They will do so, only if they can make, at least, the average industrial rate of profit. If not, they will employ their capital elsewhere. So, now, the landlord can only levy rent to the extent of any surplus profit that capital obtains from this production, as against the average industrial rate of profit. It is, now, the capitalist farmer who appropriates the surplus labour of the agricultural labourer, not the landlord. The farmer obtains profit, and, out of that profit, only pays to the landlord any surplus profit, as rent.
Proudhon explains property by first positing the existence of the landlord, but with no explanation of how the landlord came into existence, and having assumed the existence of the landlord, as the recipient of rent, he posits this as the explanation of rent.
“Let us note also that in determining rent by the difference in fertility of the soil, M. Proudhon assigns a new origin to it, since land, before being assessed according to different degrees of fertility, “was not,” in his view, “an exchange value, but was common.” What, then, has happened to the fiction about rent having come into being through the necessity of bringing back to the land man who was about to lose himself in the infinity of empty space?” (p 144)
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