In Capital III, and Theories of Surplus Value, Marx, also, explains the economic basis of this latter. The landowner is only able to obtain Absolute Rent, because the average rate of profit in agriculture/primary production, is greater than the average industrial rate of profit. It is this surplus profit that is the basis of rent – I referred to this recently in relation to house prices. Capitalists will only produce on the land if they can make, at least the average industrial rate of profit, otherwise, they employ their capital, elsewhere. So, given that landowners will always seek to obtain rent, it requires that market prices for the commodities produced on it – be they vegetables, coal, or houses – be high enough to ensure that the capitalist makes the average profit, plus the rent. Supply of these commodities is always constrained, therefore, compared to what it would otherwise be.
But, not all land is able to produce rent, because of its lack of fertility. In some cases, the landowner uses the land themselves for production, accepting only the average industrial rate of profit. That was, often the case with landowners who established mines on their land. In other cases, landlords can continue to extract “rent” from peasant tenant farmers, who, unlike capitalist farmers, must continue to cultivate the land, in order to live. In this case, what the landlord extracts is not actually rent, in the economic sense, but is an appropriation of a part of the peasant's own surplus value, or even, their means of subsistence. But, what makes Absolute Rent possible is that landlords that have land that would not produce rent, do not, thereby, have to try to rent it to capitalists, which would undermine Absolute Rent, overall. The landlord can simply sit on the land, or, as with using it as grounds for deer-hunting, grouse shooting, and so on, they keep this land out of supply, keeping rents raised, whilst obtaining revenues from those prepared to pay to engage in these other activities. The Green Belt plays a similar role.
Duhring's assertion, therefore, was false, and yet he goes on from it to say.
“It goes without saying that all other types of distributive wealth must be explained historically in a similar way!” (p 228)
Ad Engels notes, not only was this assumption false, and its extension, thereby, false, but it removed any requirement for Duhring to provide any specifics, for example, in relation to how capital comes into existence, particularly as capital, the form of property of the bourgeoisie arises in opposition to the existing feudal relations and forms of property, i.e. in opposition to the existing feudal ruling class. As noted previously, Duhring deals with this as is also presented in the account given by Michael Roberts and others, by positing the bourgeoisie as the protégé of the feudal aristocracy. In other words, rather than a historical dynamic, driven by changing material conditions, and resulting in antagonistic property forms, we are given a morality play, in which good v evil, and the evil exploiters are really all the same actors, who just change their costumes for each act of the play.
In fact, as Marx sets out in The Poverty of Philosophy, it is always what Proudhon called “the bad” side of any phenomenon that is the progressive element of historical development. The serfs represented “the bad” side of the master-serf relation of feudalism, but, it is the release of the serfs from the land, their consequent lack of any means of subsistence that drives them into the towns of the Middle Ages, where that condition leads them to become small-scale, independent, commodity producers and traders, which makes them into the material out of which is formed the bourgeoisie!
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