Anti-Duhring, Part II, Political Economy, IX Natural Laws of Economics. Ground-Rent - Part 8 of 8

The real relation is obscured for Duhring, because he limits his world view to what he saw in Prussia, where the landowners did engage in capitalist farming, and employed managers. But, even in Prussia, there were capitalist farmers who paid ground-rent. What Duhring can provide no objective, scientific explanation of, therefore, is what determines the amount of this ground-rent, in these cases. He can only see it in terms of the original relation, of the appropriation of the total surplus labour by the landlord. Instead of rent being a deduction from profit, equal to surplus profit, Duhring sees the profit being a deduction from the landlord's rent. But, he has no basis for determining what that deduction from rent should be.

“What does Herr Dühring do? He pretends that he does not have the slightest inkling of the division of the surplus-product of agriculture into farmer’s profit and ground-rent, and therefore of the whole theory of rent of classical political economy; that the question of what farmer’s profit really is has never yet been raised “with this precision”, in the whole of political economy and that he is dealing with an entirely unexplored subject about which there is no knowledge but only illusion and uncertainty.” (p 289)

Had Duhing had to apply his theory to England, it would have collapsed immediately, because, there, the landlords had long since ceased to have a social function in production and capitalist farming predominated. But, even in Prussia, his theory cannot explain the relations between rent and profit, when it comes to the capitalist farmers. Assume that, as he says, the full surplus takes the form of rent, and that the landlord, then, hands back (in reality reduces the rent by an amount) to the farmer, a portion of it for having applied their capital. In effect this reduces profit to nothing more than interest. It is as though the capitalist farmer lends capital to the landlord, and the landlord pays interest to the capitalist farmer. Except the capital is not loaned. The farmer owns the capital – though they may have, themselves, borrowed to acquire it, and pay interest to the lender – and expects to obtain the average rate of profit for employing it. So, if the amount the landowner “hands back” to the farmer is not equal to the average profit that could be obtained, there would be no basis for the farmer having advanced the capital in the first place!

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