1 – Link – A certain narrowness of vision on agrarian and national questions culminates in denying the historical importance of the movements of peasant proprietors and of the subject nationalities.

2 – A nice easy formula for shepherds and their flocks – It is said that Marx’s critique of capitalism and the path to implementing the communist programme based on the clash between the forces of industrial capitalists and factory wage workers – inasmuch as this form was, with overwhelming momentum, engulfing all other forms of social production – the innovator Lenin would have carried forward the clash of forces between the small peasant and the landowner, as the predominant form in the dynamics of the revolution. The shameless falsehood is that Lenin made the revolution with peasant forces. For the philistine, Leninism is the discovery of how to fool the peasants into carrying out the workers’ revolution.
In all his historic and powerful polemics on agrarian questions, Lenin fought against the boundless stupidity of pseudo-Marxists concerning issues neglected by Marx and on the correction of his errors. It is Lenin who reiterates that Marx dealt with the agrarian question in an original and comprehensive manner, writing, together with Engels, twice as many pages on it as on the industrial question.

3 – Lenin and the ‘textbooks’ – Lenin, against Bulgakov, demonstrates the validity, in agriculture, of the law on the falling rate of profit, thanks to improvements in the organic composition of capital (more constant capital, less variable capital; i.e. more machinery and raw materials, less human labour). Lenin defends Kautsky for having identified the distinguishing features between feudal economy and capitalist economy and for having clarified the characteristics of that transition.

4 – Rural economy and history – Research on the changes in the forms of agricultural production and economy, which, one may say, until recently have been the predominant part of the entire social economy, must be extended to the entire historical cycle of humanity. Marxism makes a firm critique, on a solely scientific basis, of the molecular partition of the land, which is a cause of stagnation and endless misery. In this regard, it is important to establish the primacy of the historical method in order to clarify the social one. The factors of the limitation of the land and of the so-called diminishing fertility are relevant. Among the Germans, for example, there is a prevalence of land held for civic use and state property, whereas among the Latins, there is the complete development of the allodial system (private ownership). The Germans, few in number over vast lands, use the centuries-old and millenary three-field system: of three equal plots of land, alternating, one is cultivated with wheat, the most nutritious cereal, one with rye, barley, or oats, less nutritious cereals, and one is left fallow (fallow land). For a long time, it is not land but livestock, which grazes on land common to all, that is the object of value and trade. Pecunia (money) derives from pecus (livestock). Private property derives both from the division of collective land among families and from violence, slavery, and conquest. Among the Germanic peoples, communal cultivation disappears very late, whereas in Italy, individual division is pre-Roman (the God Terminus makes land ownership sacred and inviolable) owing to the very ancient knowledge of crops (vines, olive trees, fruit trees, irrigation) superior to that of cereals. In Italy, feudal forms have very little influence and disappear rapidly between the fall of the Byzantine Empire and the era of the Communes, when agriculture was highly intensive (vegetable gardens and orchards) and even fully capitalist.

5 – Exit from feudalism – In the feudal relation, the serf rendered to the lord a rent in kind or in labour by working days in his lord’s garden and with shares of the produce from his own little plot; hence, we are in a natural economy. The modern lord of the land, the landed proprietor, on the other hand, enjoys a rent in money. At the same time, land ownership, once inviolable, becomes alienable; just as the agricultural labourer, once bound to the land, becomes free. Initially, this process is not determined solely by the unstoppable need to give free rein to the manufacturing productive forces, but is also accompanied by an equal enhancement of the agricultural productive forces. Kautsky: ‘In the feudal epoch, there was no agriculture other than small-scale cultivation, and the lands of the nobility were tilled with the same tools used by the small peasants. Capitalism for the first time has created the possibility of large-scale agriculture, technically more rational than small-scale cultivation’. Lenin clearly establishes that in Marxism, present-day agriculture becomes capitalist in its internal economic structure because its form changes from natural to mercantile. The feudal agrarian economy, characterised, among other things, by the overlapping of agricultural labour with minimal domestic industry, keeps rural production away from the market. The capitalist economy draws the small peasant farm into the mercantile whirlpool. The supposed independence of the very small farm leads to an immensely greater burden of work for the owner of that scrap of land. But, within capitalist limits, one cannot count on the disappearance of small-scale production in agriculture. ‘Small farmers’ co-operatives are naturally a link in economic progress, but they express a transition towards capitalism and not, by any means, towards collectivism, as is often so thought and claimed’ (Kautsky). The Marxist cornerstones for evaluating the transition between agrarian modes of production are the essential elements for judging the foolish popular opinion around the world of Lenin as a distributor of land to small peasants.

6 – Art and nature – In the doctrines of agrarian economics, one emphasises natural forces, and hence the land, while another emphasises the labour of the farmer, and therefore man. The controversy arises over the sources of wealth. The last feudalists and the first bourgeois considered nature and the land to be the only sources of wealth, whereas for the classical capitalist school, labour is the source of all wealth. According to Marx’s theory, ground rent is not a gift of nature to the proprietor, connected to his occupation of a quantum of the soil, but only a fraction of the surplus value, i.e. of the labour rendered by the farmers but not paid for in their monetary remuneration, or wage. If a field, without ploughing or other operations, were to cyclically produce bread, like the famous tropical tree, then we would have a rent from nature. But Lenin gets angry with these fairy tales, for no one has ever eaten without someone having worked. The debate over whether agrarian wealth comes from labour or natural forces, whether it belongs to the landed class or to the abstract nation, is limited to deciphering the economics of private distribution and exploitation. And central to this, is the thesis that everything comes from the appropriation, by one class, of the labour of another, whether in feudal or capitalist production.     There is no Rent for a single individual that is not stolen from the labour of man. That is the whole theory of ground rent: let us deny to the thieves the alibi of economic science.

1 – Agriculture without money – In small family farming on an almost delimited plot, all members of the family who are able to work do so, and agricultural products are accumulated in specific cycles for consumption by all. Such an economy lives on a perfectly closed island. In the economic sense, no wealth or value enters or leaves; in the physical sense, no product of labour leaves. Only thermal energy from solar radiation enters, suitable to be transformed into the chemistry of the soil, into the strength of animal and human muscles, and into collective organisational knowledge.

Let us suppose that a watertight compartment, a permanent equilibrium is established on the island, a steady-state regime between humans and animals and the extent of the land, without the latter exhausting its fertility. Then the give-and-take of the soil, in its cyclical chemistry, will be in perfect balance: the soil will have donated nothing to the living community. All the energy incorporated, in its successive forms, must, at one stage of the cycle, take the form of human and organic muscle energy (the brain). Already from this distant case, the controversy arises: are values generated by Land or by Labour?

2 – Natural economies – In the natural economy, there is no exchange or money, only the movement of material products. If property has already appeared, surplus value may already exist and the division among the members of society into workers and non-workers may already have emerged. Smith defines Ground Rent as a part of the product (main concept) and, for the capitalist mercantile mode, its money-price (historically contingent concept). On the famous island, both slave owners, who reap without sowing, and slaves who work can live. Everyone eats the products of the same land, but the slave labourer, through his muscular processes, transforms 4,000 calories arriving from the solar power station and consumes only 2,000. This is nothing other than surplus value measured in units of energy (in man-horsepower or in calories) by Marxists; whereas for economists, the value of the worker’s labour is the market price of the subsistence necessary to keep the worker alive. Hence, they theorise on behalf of those who reap where others have sown. In the machinery of feudal society, the market exists, but the relationship between the two fundamental classes, the workers of the land and the nobles, is not regulated in mercantile terms, and the same is true of the priestly order. In the later Middle Ages, the mercantile fabric comes to be woven ever more densely, yet the bulk of agricultural production functions without having to resort to it.

3 – Modern commercial agriculture – Capitalism gives agriculture its market form after removing both the freed worker and the feudal baron from the land, abolishing the inalienability of the fief. From this immense process have arisen various forms of agricultural production that still exist today and accompany the powerful modern industrialisation in the production of manufactures and various services. The economic study Property and Capital highlights, instead of the criterion of property, which is purely legal, the quite different criterion of the enterprise. In order to develop the genesis of rent, the agricultural enterprise is anatomised and not property. The struggle in Italy over the division of ground rent concerns 2.5% of national income; that of the barons, 0.5%.

4 – Company balance sheet – The question of small or large-scale farming should be considered in relation to the size of the enterprise and not to the size of the property; for Lenin, to the monopoly of the enterprise and not to the monopoly of land ownership. Abolishing private ownership of land and assigning it to the state is a bourgeois programme. Abolishing the enterprise, whether agricultural or industrial, is a revolutionary and communist task. The fragmentation of the latifundia (very large properties and small farms) affects neither the legal or organisational monopoly; it is neither a socialist nor an advanced bourgeois programme: it is a swindle fit for speculators and vote-fishers. Quantitatively, the Rent yielded by an estate is equal to the income received by its owner. In Marxist economics, Constant Capital includes Circulating Capital and the portion of Fixed Capital that has depreciated. For the economist, the wages of farm labourers and agricultural workers are an expense item; for Marxists, they are Variable Capital. In the Profit of the enterprise, the remuneration for the intellectual labour of the manager has no place, it goes to wages and salaries: after this deduction has been made, what remains is the pure Profit of the enterprise. In the case of agricultural land, there is an Income accruing to the legal owner, his Net Ground Rent.

5 – Dramatis personae – In mixed forms, the purely legal aspect of entitlement stifles the reality of the economic and class relation. The tenant-worker is legally obliged to pay rent to the landlord, who is guaranteed the total gross product. But the net income can be deeply eroded in its profit portion and may even fall below the wage, without the tenant-worker being able to claim compensation from anyone. The owner-worker should accumulate rent, profit, and wages; but if taxes and interest on debts suffocate him, it may happen that, without recourse, his income falls and, with the disappearance of the portions of rent and profit, he works below the average wage, slaving away for the state, the bank, the loan shark, or the professional consultant. In agriculture, from an accounting point of view, mixed forms are the most miserable and the best suited to require labour efforts exceeding their remuneration. It is not Marxist to campaign for an increase in the number of small-owners, tenant-farmers, and sharecroppers and prevent their proletarianisation, turning them into beggars far more exploited than the wage worker, but thus avoiding turning them into revolutionaries.

6 – Lexical parenthesis – Research into ground rent leads to the general doctrine of Surplus Value, as can be seen step by step in Marx. Real estate rent, corporate profit, and financial interest correspond to the owner’s capital assets, land, factories with machinery, and cash. In the agricultural enterprise, land capital, technical capital, and money capital all contribute. Marx likens Capital to a mass of commodities, products of human labour. It is divided into Constant Capital, Variable Capital, and Surplus Value. In the agricultural enterprise, Surplus Value is divided into Interest, Business Profit, and Net Ground Rent. While all the value of production in kind is, for the bourgeois, Gross Ground Rent, for us it is Total Capital. In the industrial enterprise, the sum of the products of a given cycle is, for us, Capital, while for economists it is turnover, gross income, operating assets. The market value of the company does not depend on a sum of its inventory values, but on its gross production capacity with a certain margin of net profit. The bourgeoisie relate Surplus Value to the value of the plant; we relate it to the living value in transformation. Therefore, the law of the falling rates of rent, interest, profit, and surplus value does not detract from the fact that Surplus Value is becoming increasingly gigantic, both absolutely and relatively.

7 – Interest and rent – The economists of advanced capitalism were struck by the historical aspects of Ground Rent and Interest, which at the time was openly called usurious. This is the path Marx takes to understand capitalism, at the end of which capital will be content with a lower rate of profit and will tolerate a higher standard of living for the worker; but, nevertheless, the looming threat of revolutionary catastrophe will be proven. For the early economists, it was elementary that Rent comes from land ownership, since it bears fruit; while it was difficult to understand that a sum of money lent bears interest. In both cases, the explanation lies in establishing the origin of values in human labour. In 1679, Petty finds that the Value (for him, the natural price) of a commodity lies in the amount of average Labour it contains. He then addresses the problem of Surplus Value, i.e. the income of those who do not render labour. For the French Physiocrats, Ground Rent is the only source of Surplus Value; for Petty, Interest is also a source. For Marx, Rent is a simple surplus of employed labour over necessary labour. To express Rent in money, the fruit, Petty uses the example of a wage-labouring miner who receives from the extracted ore the minimum necessary to live; he thus equates Rent with the entire Surplus Value, including Profit. Petty then wants to find the commercial Value of land given by a certain number of annual Rents; that is, how much a buyer is willing to advance in money. On the basis of 22 and 21 years between a 50-year-old grandfather, a 28-year-old father, and a 7-year-old son, Petty sets the value of the land at 21 years of rent, let us say 20, which corresponds to the 5% annual capitalisation rate of economists. The buyer of the land calculates that in 20 years it will yield as much as the money spent on the purchase put at 5% annual interest. Petty, starting from Rent as the mother form of Surplus Value, could have deduced Rent as a derivative of the form of Interest. From 1679 to 1954, 275 years passed. The difference between grandfather, father, and son is no longer 20 years, but 30 because the generational lifespans have lengthened. In those nearly three centuries, the rate of profit fell from 5% to 3%. Marx objects to Petty that, after the 20 rents are consumed, the market value of the land is normally still there for another 20 years and for another sale at the same amount; and so on. One therefore goes beyond the limits of generations. In other words, the value of land cannot be attributed to a certain number of rents. That twenty-year recurrence of rents is expressed by the law through the inheritance of land without generational limits. To refute Petty, an integral calculation formula is needed.

8 – The maid and integral calculus – How much must be allocated to equalise the sum of the present values of future Rents, all equal, but increasingly distant from today? How many years? All the years until the end of capitalism. For the bourgeois economist, the rent is perpetual and the years to be taken into account are infinite. The problem is solved by applying integral calculus and providing the necessary data for the interest rate. By integrating infinite constant future Rents discounted at a 5% rate, one obtains a capital equal to 20 times the rent. The capital is found by dividing the Rent by the Interest Rate: 1/0.05 = 20.

1 – Fruits and exploitation – Interest and Profit are historical moments and aspects of Labour extracted from men by other men, that is, of Surplus Labour; modern Marxist critique demonstrates that they are parts into which Surplus Value is subdivided. Marxism is the Theory of Surplus Value, of Surplus Labour if extended to all past and present eras. Even future ones, of the service of surplus labour for the whole of human society in the communist programme. With the historical method, one avoids the misunderstanding of considering that our system derives from a moral condemnation of the exploitation of man by man. Communism does not abolish surplus labour; it will organise it so that its extraction is not carried out for a single individual or for one part of society. Marx illustrates the attempts of economists to explain the phenomena of Rent, Interest, and Profit before fitting their explanation into the communist doctrine of Surplus Labour, interspersing it with brilliant explanations of our interpretation of all forms of surplus labour and powerful insights into the revolutionary programme and the communist social form.

2 – Harvest or plunder? – The most ancient concept of Rent is that of the yield of cultivated soil. Its early theorists failed to see that yield always derives from human labour. Interest on money is the second issue; and the third, historically, is Business Profit. One lira per year at 5% interest represents 20 lire; with continuous interest, 21 lire. Perhaps this is why Petty calculates his explanation of capitalised ground rent in 21 years? Ground Rent takes the form of fruits and foodstuffs. Pecuniary Interest, ab initio usurious interest, uses the word frutto [fruit], which, as a metaphor, gives rise to the overused term sfruttamento [exploitation]. Better than land, a mineral deposit is exploited. Good cultivation of agricultural land makes it bear fruit; that is, it does not fundamentally undermine or destroy its future fertility, something which, by reducing its Rent, greatly diminishes its value ‘in common commerce’. The Italian word sfruttamento, in modern times applied to the Profit of the entrepreneur to the detriment of the wage-earners, shows that every theory of surplus labour starts from the solution of the problem of Ground Rent. The French and German words plot and Beute (prey, booty) hint at the notion that the first accumulators of wealth appropriated and plundered the products of others’ labour, however they had come into the others’ possession.

3 – The nurturing earth? – The Physiocrats establish the source of wealth in nature: only the earth gives life to the species. Turgot and Quesnay consider the human labour of agricultural farmers alone to be the source of value. Their analysis includes all the elements of the function of capital. The classical economists will also attribute the power to generate value to manufacturing and industrial labour, but they will do so in order to develop the praise of Capital and justify Profit. Marx adopts their initial thesis, but sympathises with the Physiocratic thesis, which shows the ‘parasitism’ of industrial capital. Locke recognises two forms of Surplus Value: Ground Rent and Interest, the source of which is Labour, performed by others, which given individuals appropriate themselves inasmuch they possess the soil and capital, i.e. the conditions of labour; these must be understood as indispensable data, i.e. the necessary conditions without which one cannot work: the premises, the raw materials, the installations, and the machinery. The modern wage-earner is separated from these material and physical elements as if by an insurmountable barrier. Their opposition to labour is not symbolic, but is expressed by state and legal coercion, by the relations of public power that sanction and protect those prohibitions. Locke judges the separation between labour and its indispensable conditions to be inhuman and to be forbidden.

4 – Rent and usury – Locke judges money in itself to be sterile and unproductive. However, due to the unequal distribution of land, he considers money and interest as the means for the purchase of land by those who are without it, in order to be able to work. At the dawn of capitalism, there is a struggle between money-capital and landed property. Seeing the parallel between the average rent of land and the average rate of interest on money loans, the lords of the land fought to curb usurious interests; as the rate fell (which it did significantly at the time), the land, with Rent remaining the same, increased in its value. However, with the advent of industrial and commercial capital, they allied with landed property, and all fought against the usurious form. Hume goes beyond Locke because he takes Profit into consideration, even if only commercial. He already fully develops two theories: that of Value (in exchange there is no creation of new value) and that of the fall in the Rate. Steuart (1805) analyses industrial profit, which he makes arise from a competitive play, causing only variations in the level of the value of the commodity that contains more than the cost of raw materials and wages.

5 – The beams of light – The Physiocrats are the first to arrive at an analysis of capital with its modern relations, but they do so by devaluing industry and placing agriculture at the forefront. The centre of Marxist analysis, regarding the dynamics of the wage system, consists in establishing the radical difference between the wage, or price of labour power, and the part of value that labour power introduces into the commodity produced. For the Physiocrat, the factory worker adds only the wage he has received to the Value of the manufactured product, because this weighs the same before and after, whereas in agriculture one grain yields a hundred. In agricultural production, the Physiocrats are the first to describe the witchlike fabrication of Surplus Value. Historical materialists do not evaluate a commodity according to the matter it contains, but according to the social relations between the people who produce it and, better still, who are called upon to reproduce it. The economist takes the commodity in hand, offers it to the right and to the left, then judges it within its meagre material content and constructs its price on trivial little formulas of desirability and rarity. Marx says: ‘The difference between the value of labour-power and the value created by it (...) appears most palpably, (...) in agriculture’. Since in industry this is not evident, one comes to perceive this difference by making a general analysis of value and discovering its nature. The Physiocrats saw it in agriculture, denied it for industry: they called agricultural labour productive labour, agricultural workers the productive class, and factory workers the sterile class.

6 – Subsistence and procreation – Marx says: ‘The minimum of wages therefore correctly forms the pivotal point of Physiocratic theory’. To prove the existence of surplus value, and also its growth in mass and rate, it is not necessary for wages to remain at that ‘minimum’ to which no ‘iron law’ binds them. Wages lie between that minimum and a maximum, which would be the total added value to the finished product. It just can’t go below the minimum; under penalty of the exhaustion of labour power. The minimum value of the wage ensures the maintenance of the worker’s labour power and its alimentary reproduction; and also sexual, whose sphere is reduced to the economic fact as a necessary part of the material basis of every society. Since everything is considered on a social scale, this concerns the vital process not of the isolated worker, but of the working class. The Physiocrats were at the forefront in deciphering the agricultural production process, and were the first to give the three correct terms of value: Constant Capital, Wage Capital, Surplus Value: all incorporated into the Value of the product.

7 – Distribution and production – It is to the credit of the Physiocrats that they established the origin of the accumulation of value in production, and not in trade as the mercantilists did. In the doctrine of the monetary system and the mercantile system, the only source of relative enrichment is the Money that the merchant uses, which is invested in circulating goods and from which he derives an increased income. A parthenogenesis of Money that begets itself. In Physiocratic doctrine, there is a combination of Land and Money: the remuneration of the two factors arises in production and from human agricultural labour, which is now bourgeois and generates Surplus Labour that is transformed entirely into Ground Rent. From this, Interest is taken for money lenders and a kind of salary for industry leaders, who have invested money to change only the external form of their products. In the field of land cultivation, the commodity of labour-power is revealed, which, when bought and used, has the magical ability to have a use value far superior to its exchange value, i.e., to wages. The serene ménage of Land and Money of the Physiocrats unleashes the diabolical third element of Industrial Capital, hungry for surplus labour, which will absorb so much that it will leave only scraps for ground rent and interest for money savers. At the dawn of capitalism, it becomes clear that the social movement consists of the Production of Surplus Value, which, for the Physiocrats, comes entirely from Ground Rent, from which quotas are detached for industrialists and bankers. Starting with Smith, Interest and Ground Rent will be simple varieties of industrial Profit. Ground Rent is a levy on social Surplus Labour as compensation for the monopoly of land by its owners. At the beginning of the capitalist cycle, landowners claim to place themselves at the head of society; at its end, after being subordinated, they may even be eliminated without the capitalist and wage mode of production coming to an end.

1 – Taking stock – Before arriving at the burning political problem of the revolutionary function of the rural masses, it is necessary to present the economic theory, which cannot be developed without some figures. Without figures, there can be no politics, let alone revolution. Marx gives us an almost brutal definition of the small peasant owner and worker: ‘small landed property creates a class of barbarians standing halfway outside of society’; he lashes out equally at large landed property and large capitalist industry: in the end, ‘they join hands’ in exploiting Labour and Land to the point of exhaustion. Can’t the workers’ revolution launch those barbarians, companions in exploitation and subjugation, against the civilisation of capital? The answer will be given later.

2 – Striking the same old chord – In reconstructing the ‘agrarian policy’ historically followed by Marxist parties, Lenin, in the particularly complex Russian problem, always and firmly reaffirmed Marx’s orthodox doctrine on the matter.

3 – A hand from Friedrich – For Marx, the difficulty of the problem of Ground Rent lies in seeing where this certain surplus of Profit from the agricultural enterprise over the average profit of businesses in general comes from, which goes to pay the monopoly right of the landowner.

4 – Those who make an era – For Marx, Rent is a specific part of the total Surplus Value. Quesnay, on the other hand, sees Surplus Value and Surplus Labour only in the agricultural enterprise. Engels comments that, according to Dühring, ‘higher economics begins only with the wretched abortions brought into existence by bourgeois science after the close of its classical period’.

5 – Rent and capitalism – The historical sequence is as follows: Feudalism – Agrarian Capitalism – State Manufacturing Capitalism – Private Industrialism. This order cuts across various layers of oblique faces. When the modern problem of Ground Rent arises, we are already in a fully capitalist economy. The product and the conditions of agricultural labour are already entirely separated from the productive labourer. Quesnay’s total national product, the five billion foodstuffs sold, belongs to the tenant-farmers and therefore to the capitalists. All products have therefore passed through the market; none are consumed by the direct producer. Even agricultural labourers purchase their means of subsistence with money. That is: 1) All Product is Commodity; 2) All Surplus Product is Surplus Labour (agricultural labourers produce 5, but consume 2); 3) All Profit belongs to the tenant-farmers or agrarian capitalists, who must pay 2/3 of it to the landowners: their Rent. There is no subtraction of Surplus Labour from non-agricultural labourers because agriculture dominates over industry. But in the Physiocratic hypothesis, all agriculture is no longer feudal; the three-class society divides the net product between Wages to the workers, Profit to the capitalists (tenant-farmers or industrialists) and Rent to the property owners. Surplus Value is given by Profit plus Rent.

6 – Expressive steps – Rent must be explained as part of the price paid on the market for the commodity-foodstuff. From this sum of money must come: the reconstruction of the operating capital for the tenant-entrepreneur – the payment of wages to agricultural labourers – the tenant’s earnings (business profit) – the rent to the owner. Capitalism is born agrarian, and its first revolutionary doctrine is that of the Physiocrats, the embryo of classical economics. The monetary system ‘does not arrive at the concept of Surplus Value; however, it proclaims production for the world market and the transformation of the output into commodities, and thus into money, as the prerequisite and condition of capitalist production’ (Marx). The mercantilists argue that ‘in the transformation of feudal agricultural societies into industrial ones (bourgeois agricultural enterprises) and the corresponding industrial struggle of nations on the world market depends on an accelerated development of capital, which is not to be arrived at along the so-called natural path, but rather by means of coercive measures. The transformation is hastened by taxes and protective duties, which weigh heavily on landowners, middle and small peasants, and handicraftsmen’. The process repeats itself, two centuries later, in Europe-Russia-China.

7 – Labour-Foodstuffs-Money – With free and tradable land, but with little industry, there already exists Surplus Value and Marxist capitalist Ground Rent. Before this, there is no Rent in money and Surplus Value, which only exists when the entire product is transformed into money and becomes a portion of this money-value. In the Rent in labour of the social forms of medieval and Asiatic serfdom, we have the first germ of the future Surplus Value. In Rent in kind, the worker, bound to the land, is a serf within a fully personal feudal relation of a natural economy, in which all Surplus Labour becomes Rent. In Rent in money, which presupposes a certain technical development and a change in the conditions and relations of labour, the capitalist tenant arises with the expropriation and expulsion of the peasant, who becomes the wage-earner without land or means of labour. At this point, Surplus Labour is divided into Profit and Ground Rent. At this point, the capitalist revolution in the mode of production is complete.

8 – Philosophy at last! – In rural production, if there is enjoyment by non-working classes, all this surplus is drawn from labour and not from a gift of nature that costs no human effort. Everything derives from the total Labour that creates the total Product, which is reduced to the net Product after deducting reserves for the new year. Part of this is consumed by the immediate worker; the other part (the Surplus Product and therefore the Surplus Labour) is consumed by the class of non-workers. In the natural economy, Surplus Labour is entirely Rent that the feudal lord takes from the serf in labour or in kind. The transitional form (free worker – Rent paid in money or in kind – still fragmented farms) is followed by the capitalist agrarian economy, in which small plots of land are brought together in the enterprise of the entrepreneurial tenant-farmer, who commands the operating capital and reduces the workers dispossessed of land to wage-earners. Marx demolishes the false belief that the Physiocrats are reactionary defenders of the old regime against new revolutionary forms. They discovered Surplus Value, but only in the form of a difference between pure use values relating to the produce that is grown and consumed. For them, Surplus Value is an excess over the monetary wage, without understanding that wherever there is a sale of labour power, Surplus Value occurs and Capital accumulates. But in effect, they accompanied the transformation of the feudal landowner into a bourgeois capitalist when they defended the freedom of action of capitalist enterprise.

9 – Bourgeois pre-consciousness – For Marx, the contradictions of the Physiocrats are those ‘of capitalist production as it works its way out of feudal society, and interprets feudal society itself only in a bourgeois way, but has not yet discovered its own peculiar form’. The example of the Physiocrats, and the incompleteness of their vision, is nevertheless advanced and ingenious for those times. The legislators of the Revolution attempted to go as far as the confiscation of landed property by the bourgeois state, something already fully theorised by Ricardo, exponent of the pre-eminence of the industrial capitalist over the landowner.

1 – Surplus labour and classes – The Physiocrats were the first to define, albeit only in relation to land, the difference between what a wage labourer receives and the greater amount that his work contributes as an increase of product and therefore of value: this constitutes the Surplus Product, Surplus Labour, Surplus Value, which accrues to other social elements. Limiting itself to the use of physical, material products to satisfy human needs, the Physiocratic theory is only a theory of use value, not of exchange value, as was later the case for the classical English economists, the standard-bearers of capitalism. But the second and more important aspect of the Physiocratic system is that, for the first time, comparison is studied on a national scale as a relationship between social classes, of which an embryonic theory is given. Furthermore, Wages, Profit, and Rent are studied as social masses. Thus, surplus value is calculated socially and, when referred to a given economic act, is of interest as a social average and not as an occasional and individual share.

2 – Power and wealth – From then on, economic science became a theory of social surplus labour, rather than a vague and literary explanation of wealth and its movements, of the causes and effects of the fact that there are rich and poor. Thus, Marx composes the ‘History of the Theories of Surplus Labour’. For Hobbes: Wealth is synonymous with power; for Smith, it is the disposal over the labour of others. That it can be formed by one’s own labour is a naive hypothesis of bourgeois mercantile economists. Marx explains to Ricardo that it is a question of the command over social labour; as when he speaks of ‘my’ labour, he remarks to him: ‘but my labour is also social labour’. Before the general market was formed, which is above all a market for labour power, the identity between wealth and power was more palpable. Dependence was not yet social, from class to class, but personal. The genius of the Physiocrats establishes, even assuming the liberation of all workers, the shift of a volume of Surplus Labour, no longer from serf to master as individuals, but from class to class: justifying as a zero-sum game the earnings of land or rural entrepreneurs, while highlighting how the Rent of landowners arises parasitically from surplus labour. It is a magnificent achievement to have related economic dynamics no longer to the individual element, but to the social complex of class.

3 – Use of models – Quesnay’s Tableau describes a model-type society imagined in the abstract and then assimilated into a schema. Marx’s task was to provide a schema-type of modern industrial capitalist society. Quesnay holds that his schematic model will characterise post-feudal society as the ‘blueprint for the best possible society’ and as a design for the stable future society founded on personal ‘freedom’. Marx constructs the schema of capitalist society as it historically emerged after feudalism in order to show that its structure is unstable and historically transitory, and that its mechanism leads not to a dynamic ‘equilibrium’ but to a certain imbalance, to a series of crises and to a final explosion. For polemical purposes, he does not consider the actual, impure capitalist society, but rather the hypothetical pure society extolled by bourgeois and economists as being in perfect and eternal equilibrium. The economists who followed the classical school immediately fell back into purely registrative and descriptive statistics, declaring the schemata mere and vain doctrinal exercises, both the apologetic one of Quesnay, with its utopian flavour, and, above all, the dynamic and revolutionary one of Marx. Quesnay’s merit lies in having declared possible the scientific construction of a schema of the living economy, anticipating Marx’s historical materialism.

4 – Balance of Quesnay’s Tableau – Quesnay’s ‘Tableau’ considers movements of products and money only between classes, on the scale of society as a whole. The classes are three: Proprietary (sovereign and tithe collectors), Productive (capitalist tenants and agricultural wage-earners) and Sterile (manufacturers and workers). For Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, the three classes are: landowners, capitalists, and wage workers. Smith and Ricardo, less profound than Quesnay, regard Surplus Value as Surplus Labour, but they relate it to the value of the entire product obtained, and not to the value of variable capital (wages) alone, whereas Constant Capital is an advance that returns at par. Hence, they confuse the concepts of Surplus Value and Profit, and keep the rate of surplus value far too low. Quesnay proceeds differently.

5 – Quesnay was no fool – Let’s re-read the balance sheets in Marx’s language. The value of the annual Product is broken down: by Quesnay into 2 parts (Wages and Rent); by Smith and Ricardo into 3 parts (Wages, Rent, and Profit); by Marx into 4 parts (Constant Capital, Variable Capital, Rent, and Profit). Profit, in turn, is divided into business profit and finance capital interest. Constant Capital, which replenishes itself at the end of the cycle, is not revenue (i.e. economic income) of any class.

Chap. V, Para. 5 QUESNAY’S TABLEAU REINTERPRETED IN THE LANGUAGE OF MARX b = billions in money. * C = Constant Capital. V = Variable Capital. S = Surplus Value.
*	P PROPRIETARY CLASS Landed		F PRODUCTIVE CLASS Capitalist Tenants + Agricultural Wage-Earners		S STERILE CLASS Manufactures + Manufacturing Workers
C					Manufactures sold to F Raw Materials purchased from F	+1b -1b
V			Foodstuffs produced Foodstuffs consumed	+2b -2b	Manufactures sold to P Foodstuffs purchased from F	+1b -1b
S	Rent from F Foodstuffs purchased from F Manufactures purchased from S	+2b -1b -1b	Surplus Value Rent to P Profit, to S, for purchased manufactures	+3b -2b -1b
		+2b -2b		+5b -5b		+2b -2b
The value of the annual Product is broken down as follows: by Quesnay into 2 parts (Wages and Rent); by Smith and Ricardo into 3 parts (Wages, Rent, and Profit); by Marx into 4 parts (Constant Capital, Variable Capital, Rent, and Profit). 1 billion (a small part as C) of Manufactures purchased from Class S is used to renew Tools and Machinery. In agriculture, Raw Materials are not processed. The 2 billion of foodstuffs produced and consumed by agricultural Wage-Earners equals 2/5 of the Gross Product. Rent equals 2/5 of the Gross Product. We denote the ‘Rate of Rent’ as 2/5 or 40% and the ‘Rate of Profit’ as 1/5 or 20%. Their sum is 3/5 of the Gross Product. The 3 billion in Surplus Value is thus distributed: 2 in Rent to Class P + 1 in Profit for entrepreneurs and interest on business capital to the Capitalist Tenants, equal to 1/5 of the Gross Product. The theory of Surplus Labour emerges in embryo. Agricultural Wage-Earners produce 5, but consume 2. If they work 10 hours a day and are paid for 4 hours, the Surplus Labour is 6 hours. For the Sterile Class, the mass of Profit is zero; and therefore, both the ‘Rate of Surplus Value’ and the ‘Rate of Profit’ are zero. In effect, of the 1 billion of V in Foodstuffs by the Manufacturing Workers, a minimal part is the Manufacturers’ Surplus Value, which is considered a salary because, for Quesnay, the Surplus Value of sector S is zero.

6 – And the moderns? – The modern economist’s reading of Quesnay’s ‘Tableau’ highlights its shortcomings and its reference to an underdeveloped capitalism, with excessively high rates of income compared to extremely low wages; but it also highlights, for the first time, the enormous difference between the mechanism of capitalist accounting and that of Marxist scientific calculation. For the economist, Capital is the owner’s assets; for us, it is a mass of commodities produced for consumption or instrumental reinvestment; it is a mass of living social labour condemned to the company prison. Ricardo relates Surplus Value to all Capital, including constant capital or (worse) to the asset value of the production company; and not to Wage Capital alone as part of the value of the product.

Chap. V, Para. 6-7 THE DISTORTED TABLEAU OF THE MODERN ECONOMY All figures are in billions.
	PROPRIETARY CLASS Landed P	PRODUCTIVE CLASS Capitalist Tenants + Agricultural Wage-Earners F	STERILE CLASS Manufacturers + Manufacturing Workers S
National Assets 23.5	National Landed Property 11.5	Capital invested in agriculture 10	Capital invested in industry 2
National Income 7	Gross weekly rent 2 Net rent (10% of 11.5) 1.15	Agricultural wages 2 Business profit, at a net rate of 10% 1	Wages in industry 2
Necessary circulating 2;   Annual product 5.
Agricultural products are sold with a 10% margin over the cost of production, which includes the rent payment.      The market prices of manufactured products do not include a premium over the price of production.      We have incorporated, as best as we could, into Quesnay’s Tableau the items of the modern economist, which, in their statements, represent the negation of the Tableau itself. The Classes have disappeared: in their place appears the Nation. Capital is no longer a mass of living social labour, but the owner’s Assets. Circulation between classes is reduced to circulation between companies or, worse, between hominem oeconomici. National Income is reduced to the sum of all personal incomes of citizens, in which the supposed law of equivalence of values in billions of molecular transactions of a debt and credit nature triumphs. The result is an enormous difference between the mechanism of capitalist accounting and Marxist scientific calculation.

7 – Methods of economic science – Circulation between classes miserably degenerates into circulation between company and company, and, worse still, between homo oeconomicus and homo oeconomicus. The national Income of the classes is trivially reduced to the sum of all the personal incomes of citizens, in which the supposed law of the equivalence of values triumphs in billions of molecular transactions of a credit, debt and... swindling nature. Quesnay does not realise that he is an expression of new times, not only of capitalist landed property as opposed to feudal property, but also of the further forms of industrial capitalism itself, whose laws he found and wrote down without seeing them. The achievements of theory come in waves, and those of certain critical periods are fundamental.

8 – Class politics (pour la bonne bouche) – In the Physiocrats, there is the establishment of a theory of Surplus Labour; there is the division of society into classes and the study of economic movement from class to class, no longer from individual to individual or from company to company. But above all, there is the groundwork of the first lines of a social critique of liberal and democratic institutions, which Marxism will develop to become the basis of the politics of the wage-earning class. The Physiocrats make no attempt at an explanation of Ground Rent that would mitigate its character as the extortion of labour from another class, whereas classical economics legitimises as fair and free the relationship between capitalist and proletarian according to the wage, and as oppressive only those previous relationships of servile dependence. Starting from the schematisation of ‘agrarian capitalist’ society, we have arrived at the heart of the problem of proletarian political strategy. In the period from Quesnay to Marx, the proletariat cannot but fight in the bourgeois revolutions which, in addition to defeating the feudal machine of power, pave the way not only for the liberation of productive forces arising from the abolition of serfdom and land constraints, but also for the other liberation deriving from the concentration of manufacturing and urban labour into increasingly powerful units.

1 – From 1884 to 1847 – The theory of agrarian economics took shape as soon as the revolutionary doctrine formed a distinct and sharply outlined bloc, that is, a few years before the publication of ‘The Manifesto of the Communist Party’ of 1848. This proves that there has never been any change in the Marxist method in general and in Marx’s studies in particular.

2 – Economy, morality, logic – Marx liquidates Proudhon’s verbose economics, according to which ‘the origin of Rent, like that of property, is, so to speak, extra-economic: it lies in considerations of psychology and morality’. We stand on opposite sides of the abyss. We wield the solid key of materialism and explain, through economic data, psychological manifestations and the countless systems of morality. Proudhon’s recourse to psychology, morality, and the order of ideas, his curious examination of the good and bad sides of every economic process, is a centuries-old expedient. Nothing different can be heard in any of today’s presentations by economists, whether amateurs or professionals.

3 – Down with free will, that idiot clown! – In establishing the distinction between the use value and exchange value of every object, Proudhon overlooks two essential points: the genesis and historical development of exchange across different epochs; the social and not individual character of the relation. And thus he loses his way and gets stuck. As a point of comparison, he resorts to free will. Modern economists are not a whit better. They fabricate formulas for determining prices based on the forces in motion in the market: marginal utility, velocity of circulation, volume of currency in circulation, quantity of consumer goods, etc. Let us bundle them all together and bury them under this lapidary phrase: knights of free will, in the ancestral chapel of the Proudhon family.

4 – A doctor, a banker, a professor – The essential reason why Quesnay, so far a predecessor of the economists of capitalism, is held in such high regard is that he is far ahead of the molecular exchange and childish personification of economic forces. Not the selling man and the buying man, but the circulation of wealth between the productive class, the rentier class and the (in his view sterile) class of industry. Compared to the leading exponents of the economic schools, Quesnay has an enormous advantage over Ricardo in his discovery of the protagonists – classes. As for Proudhon, he attempted a socialist system, but only founded a theory for the petty bourgeois, which still plagues us today.

5 – Mercantile egalitarianism – This form of socialist system, widespread like weeds and deeply rooted in the minds of almost all those who call themselves Marxists, is a hybrid offspring of a Ricardian bourgeois economics and of a humanitarian, Encyclopaedist philosophy. Engels: ‘The (...) application of the Ricardian theory that the entire social product belongs to the workers as their product, because they are the sole real producers, leads directly to communism. But, as Marx indeed indicates (...), it is incorrect in formal economic terms, for it is simply an application of morality to economics. Marx, therefore, never based his communist demands upon this, but upon the inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is daily taking place before our eyes to an ever-growing degree’. In developing the critique of Proudhon’s version of this limited socialism, Marx makes some highly interesting points, upon which it will be good to pause again, with the primary aim of clarifying the radical distinction between those early demands and ours, and of establishing that the formulation which overcomes and leaves behind all such ‘economism’ is certainly not new, but even primordial in its irreducible orthodoxy: a goal to which not enough time has ever been devoted, so easy is it to lose this compass amid the difficult seas of current events and activity.

6 – Recipe: a few ‘pills’ – Marx demonstrates to Proudhon that, historically, the measure of the Value of commodities by Labour defines the capitalist economy and entails the formation of a Surplus Value. It ‘is inevitably the formula for the modern slavery of the worker’.

 The Marxist theory of Surplus Value is indispensable to us for the anatomy of capitalist society; but our programmatic demand is not: abolition of Surplus Value. Every mode of production, including the capitalist mode, precisely because it is the best producer of Surplus Labour, has kept the famous wheel of history turning forward. Capitalist production is founded on ‘the antagonism of accumulated labour with immediate labour’ (Marx); that is, of Capital with the labour of wage labourers. From this springs the lapidary formula of the communist demand: to abolish the dependence of immediate labour on accumulated labour. It is not true, as Proudhon claims, that the most useful and necessary things have a lower price. ‘The price of food has almost continuously risen, while the price of manufactured and luxury goods has almost continuously fallen’ (Marx). In the Middle Ages, agricultural products were relatively cheaper than manufactured products.

7 – Whence the misery – Marx again against Proudhon: ‘in a society founded on poverty, the poorest products have the fatal prerogative of being used by the greatest number’. And again: ‘Labour time, serving as the measure of marketable value, becomes in this way the law of the continual depreciation of labour’. The capitalist economy was right to arise, and it is right that it still arises (Russia, China, etc.). We deny that, under that same key law, it constitutes a proletarian economy. Regarding the great variety of products that Proudhon’s formula would have magically brought about, a final blow: ‘monopoly in all its monotony (...) invades the world of products, just as to everybody’s knowledge monopoly invades the world of the instruments of production’ (Marx). And thus monopoly, the dictatorship over the consumption of the most idiotic goods and services, has been etched for a century in Marxist prediction. For us, the two battles are inseparable: the catastrophic destiny of capitalism – revolutionary social programme of communism. In capitalist production, there is not and will never be proportionality – after the medieval equilibrium in which ‘[p]roduction followed close on the heels of consumption’ – between the different sectors of consumption invoked by Proudhon and his companions. It is incompatible with market distribution and with the rule of the law of exchange between equivalent values. Marx presses on, reiterating monopoly and imperialism: ‘Large-scale industry, forced by the very instruments at its disposal to produce on an ever-increasing scale, can no longer wait for demand. Production precedes consumption, supply compels demand. In existing society, in industry based on individual exchange, anarchy of production, which is the source of so much misery, is at the same time the source of all progress’. Marx, having demonstrated that the so-called mercantile-labourist ‘socialism’ of Proudhon is nothing more than an apology for bourgeois society, concludes: ‘One sees that the first illusions of the bourgeoisie are also their last’.

8 – Proudhon on Rent – On Rent, a very young Marx defined the problem in the same terms as in his more mature works. Proudhon falls back on the concept of Land as natural wealth that gifts a share of wealth as Rent, not derived from human Labour. His gravest error is claiming that Rent is like Interest paid on capital that never perishes: Land. And that, while commercial interest rates falls, the rate of Ground Rent historically rises. Marx demonstrates that improvements and investments of technical Capital on the Land lead to a decline in Rent, while still finding in investment an adequate margin of Profit, which, like any other industrial investment, tends to decline historically. Marx says: ‘Land, so long as it is not exploited as a means of production, is not Capital’. They are the installations created by human Labour on the Land, or the machines, tools, and stock supporting its cultivation. But the income from all this is the Profit of the tenant-farmer, not the Rent of the landowner. The part of the Land that becomes Fixed Capital is consumed like any other Fixed or Circulating Capital and must be renewed each year by a certain amount, as in non-rural industry. We can speak of Land-Capital in relation to the Profit of the tenant-farmer entrepreneur, but not to the landlord’s Rent. ‘Rent results from the social relations in which the exploitation of the land takes place (...) Rent is a product of society and not of the soil’. It does not arise from the Interest on a Capital, either as Land-Capital or as Capital invested in the land. ‘We understand such economists (...) and others demanding that rent should be handed over to the state to serve in place of taxes’. Property and Ground Rent can be nationalised while remaining under a bourgeois regime. The Russian formula, Land to the Nation, is not socialism.

1 – Hors d’oeuvre – Following the rise of bourgeois society and the formation of economic science, the decisive requirement does not concern the accounts of the immediate producer who works and consumes, nor that of the capitalist enterprise that produces and sells, but rather the immense picture of the living population and its nutrition, the study of the complicated machine by which food reaches humans in an increasingly less simple manner since the time of Eve.

2 – Sympathy for stoicism – On Malthus’s part, the critique of capitalism in the year 1815 is possible and correct, but the historical and political stance against it is mistaken.

3 – Mysteries of sublime calculation – Pure mathematics is that science which, using new words and symbols, always says the same thing. What is exponentiation? Multiplication. And multiplication? Addition. And addition? Counting. Everything boils down to counting. But no one has defined counting, nor the fact that one proceeds at the same rate from one to two and from nine to ten. University culture wants to solve the economic puzzle by applying mathematics. We know, on the contrary, that by applying mathematics alone, one has never gotten a spider out of a hole, and instead we use the immediate economic notion that we all possess to understand mathematics. Indeed, it was born after economics, as much as, and even more than, after physics: first it was surveying and then geometry, first bookkeeping and then algebra and calculus. It is trivial to say: I want to deal with economics, but I don’t want to know about mathematics in economics; it is trivial because it was Mother Economics who gave birth to Mathematics, high and low. Ground Rent is differential because it derives from a subtraction operation, from a margin, from a premium. For Ricardo, Rent cannot be absolute, but only differential. For Marx, there is Absolute Rent, i.e. Rent that always arises, and Differential Rent, which results from a margin. The differential may also be absent. The markup on cost is differential: if the proprietor knows all the suppliers’ prices, who do not give discounts, the markup falls to zero.

4 – Brilliant introduction – Marx expounds Ricardo’s theory of ground rent, and then his own, which does not deny Ricardo’s but understands it as one of many possible cases studied. Marx recalls that for the small independent peasant, an immediate producer, legal ownership of the land is one of the conditions of production. In our study, there are only agricultural labourers; no peasant-owners, no sharecroppers, no tenant-farmers (how wonderful!). We therefore have three figures: landowner, rentier capitalist, and wage worker. Marx, as a confident theorist, simplifies further: ‘We therefore confine ourselves exclusively to the investment of capital in agriculture’; and he specifies: ‘We can use wheat for this purpose (...) Or, instead of agriculture, we can use mining because the laws are the same for both’. Smith, who died in 1790, has the great merit of having shown that ground rent deriving from other agricultural productions (flax, dye plants, livestock) is determined by the rent that is formed from the capital invested in the production of the main foodstuff: ‘In fact, no further progress has been made in this regard since then’. Marx lays waste to 80 years of ‘scientific progress’. We add another eighty.

5 – Ricardo’s Rent – Given the fatal blow dealt to the Physiocratic view that Rent was due to the exceptional productivity of agriculture resulting from the special fertility of the soil, there remain four ways of explaining its origin. 1 – With the monopoly of land, landed proprietors monopolise foodstuffs which, when sold above their value, yield a constant margin, or premium, of Rent. 2 – For Ricardo, only Differential Rent exists; and not Absolute Rent. On the worst land, the sale of the product remunerates the Labour and Capital invested with its Profit, without any margin for the landowner. 3 – Rent is the Interest on the capital that has served to purchase the land; for Marx, an untenable theory, because it does not explain Rent that does not derive from invested capitals, as in the case of mines and waterfalls. 4 – For Marx, without destroying the law of value (as in 1), the worst land bears Absolute Rent, to which is added the differential for lands of greater fertility. The difficulty is removed by noting that value, given by the average labour time and realised on the market, in certain cases yields a premium over the price of production, the Differential Rent. Moreover, agricultural products systematically yield a price of production below their value and market price. This difference is Absolute Rent. But it does not cease to be part of Surplus Value and Profit. It corresponds to a Surplus Profit that becomes Rent (it ought to be called Super-Surplus Value). To clarify Marx’s demonstration, it is necessary to establish the concepts clearly and not deviate from them. Marx includes in the price of production not only the cost of raw materials and wages but already the Profit of capital. To make this clear, we must move on to a social dynamic, dealing with the Profit of the capitalist class and, better yet, of social capital; expressed only in part by the national capital of capitalist nations that pour their products onto an internal and external exchange market.

6 – Marx’s framework – The theory of Ground Rent is constructed by first establishing the theory of the average rate of Profit of Capital. For Marx, the price (average over a wide extent and for a certain period of time) of a commodity is given by the average amount of Labour time necessary, under given social conditions, to produce and reproduce it. The magnitude of the price gives us the measure of the exchange value, which, broken down into its various terms, highlights the two categories that the bourgeoisie calls its expenses: Constant Capital and Variable Capital. To settle the account of exchange value, there remains Surplus Value, which in gross terms equals Profit, comprising Business Profit and Interest on borrowed capital. The rate of Profit is the ratio between the profit derived from the average market price and the expenses advanced. Having made this calculation on the basis of general, social, data, Marx calls the sum of the three elements embodied in the commodity the price of production: C + V + Pm (where Pm is the social average profit). A company that obtains more favourable contracts or pays less than the average wage and for raw materials will have a greater difference, which Marx calls Surplus Profit. The offset between surplus profits and minus profits is inevitable. If in a factory, profit turns into a loss, there still remains surplus value and exploitation. Once all the offsetting waste has been eliminated, national (or global) capital is pitted against the proletariat, human and social labour. The study of capitalist production in its purity (when all profit will have become an ‘industrial rent’, it will not take much mathematics to flush out the class camorra) leads to the confrontation, within the social balance sheet, of two antagonistic classes. Knowing all the Constant Capital in society and the total number of proletarians in the population, the average rate of surplus value and of profit allow us to calculate how much wealth passes, in Marx’s framework, from the working class to the capitalist class.

7 – Marx’s solution – Even normal industrial sectors exhibit surplus profits (but only contingent and accidental ones, never systematic), instantly and easily transformed into rent. What else is the capitalist parasitism that Lenin describes as having arisen from trusts and monopolies? How does surplus profit transform, in general, throughout the entire agricultural sector, into Ground Rent, after the Profit of the entrepreneurial tenant-farmer has been paid at the average rate for the whole industry? Marx links the price of production to the value of the product only for industrial products. He observes that, once the average profit, which is part of the price of production, has been deducted from the industrial sector, in special agricultural production, since foodstuffs are always sold at their value and the Profit of the tenant-farmer equals that of the manufacturer, the price of production turns out lower. This means that, for the same product, there is less employment of Capital and Labour than the social average; and thus Labour applied to land is more productive than in industry. The difference between the price of production and the saleable value realised on the market, the Profit remaining unchanged, is to be paid to the landowner, by virtue of the laws and the power of the State. This does not happen with the poorest lands, which yield no Rent; hence, no tenant capital is found willing to invest itself in them. If the land yields only a profit margin equal to the Profit of the enterprise, the tenant, who owes something to the landowner, would invest the Capital below the average profit. In this case, he looks for another piece of land, or invests in industry, or keeps his money in the bank. But Marx has shown that, in general, even on the worst land, Capital (in the form of raw materials and labour) yields more than the average industrial profit. The resulting difference from this is Absolute Ground Rent, which is received by every landowner. On more fertile land, which yields a greater return, the landowner will find a tenant-farmer who, with the same Profit as on barren land, will be able to pay a higher rent, by a difference equal to the market price of the surplus portion of grain. This increase in rent is Differential Rent. For Marx, the worst land yields grain that gives a premium over Business Profit: at the average rate: this is Absolute Rent. The more fertile land add variable amounts of Differential Rent to Absolute Rent.

8 – Land reform, Italian-style – The fascist state in Italy confiscated (with compensation) water and mines; that is, all non-agrarian Absolute Rent. But it did not touch the highest share of profits of extractive and hydroelectric industries. Now they want to expropriate Italy’s agrarian Absolute Rent; that is, the most barren lands, taxed at the minimum rate. Ricardo wanted to confiscate all differential rent, i.e. the best lands, while safeguarding the large capitalist estate, with business profits equal to that of industry. If the lands of the ‘latifundia’ yield a rent, even if low, the reformist Italian State would always get something, but on condition of making itself a rentier, maintaining the already existing agrarian capitalists, who would pay the rent-charge by drawing it from the surplus labour of the peasant labourers. With the disastrous formula of parcelling out land to the peasants, the meagre Absolute Rent is destroyed, dividing among the peasant owners the sentence to work double hours for grain to live on and instalments to pay, only to flee from the plot thereafter. The fat Differential Rents, on the other hand, remain sacrosanct at the disposal of the Capital of Italian speculation. The formula of saving the Differential Rent, with the same honours owed to the Capital of joint-stock companies, and allowing Absolute Rent to perish, warrants the concise apostrophe: Italian State, how stupid you are!

1 – Banquet and earthly guests – Capital is originated from the accumulated Labour of the dead, used to invest and plunder the labour of a mass of living beings. It is a great question to see whether the cycle of exchanges between the natural environment, with its reserves of matter-energy, and the living species tends to achieve a harmony of dynamic equilibrium (theoretically indefinite) or tends to fall into a progressive imbalance and thus become unsustainable in historical time, leading to regression and the end of the species. We recognise the importance of the question of an imaginary dining table, extending across the entire planet, around which sit the swarming guests, and of the relationship between the number of mouths and the dishes set out; and we say that the not-always-easy study of the question of agricultural production in capitalist times, with its reasoned analyses, set out in numerical tables, reduced into algebraic formulas, should not be taken as an intellectual luxury, but as an essential requirement of the ventricle of the species. At the same time, those banal presentations are useful in showing how far the Marxist approach stands out in its simplicity, power, and richness of development. The cycle does not unfold until a turning point when men, struck by revelation or invested with wisdom, set themselves to act so as to not perish at all. For long phases of the cycle, groups against groups of the species, increased in number, learn to destroy, prey upon, and oppress each other: the study of the great stages of these inevitable struggles must determine whether, how, and after what stages the species will arrive at a useful stable balance in its relations with physical nature, such that the only way to obtain food is not war and class servitude. The object of study is the productive forces and their relations; and not their caricatures in the form of administrative admonitions and moralistic sermons.

2 – Capitalism, a terrible sutler – Marx’s fundamental demonstration tends towards the clearly revolutionary thesis that the capitalist mode of production, the greatest driving force behind the absolute and relative growth of the forces of production, an indispensable and decisive stage in this growth, cannot keep pace with the increase in the number and technical power of human communities with the production of food. From this we conclude the calculation of the path that separates us from catastrophe, in which this inevitable contradiction will blow up the capitalist structure. The attentive reader will notice the features of the difficult path on which the goal of the revolutionary clash appears in all its allure. Marx recalls that already the earliest economists noted the contrast between technical progress in agriculture (despite measures to increase land production) and social forms. The mechanism of the capitalist system is such that Capital and human Labour are incessantly driven towards industry, whose incredible speed of transformation is matched by the enormous slowness of evolution in agriculture, where (even in the most developed countries) most of the same agricultural methods used for centuries and millennia are still in use today. Marx relates the reluctance of Capital towards the land to its technical, or organic, composition, which is more favourable in industry. In the mid-19th century, the composition of capital (roughly unchanged today in agriculture) was:

	In industry: 80c + 20v + 10s =110	In agriculture: 60c + 40v + 20s =120
Organic Composition Rate of Surplus Value Rate of Profit Rate of Business Profit Rate of Rent	4 (80/20) 50% (10/20) 10% (10/100) 10% (10/100) 0%	1.5 (60/40) 50% (10/20) 20% (20/100) 10% (10/100) 10% (10/100)

3 – Grain and capitalism – The slow increase in agricultural productivity is an obstacle to the reduction of labour time while maintaining the same level of production and average consumption, which is insurmountable for classes whose consumption is chiefly alimentary. Capital ‘knows’ that it achieves an ever higher mass of profit by following the law of the falling average rate and prefers to produce at a high technological level, with many workers at high wages in order to obtain a very large quantity of products. With steel, it is easy for supply to compel demand, thanks to weapons and wars, which reduce the number of mouths that uselessly demand grain. In a century, the technological level of steel goes from Marx’s 4 to today’s 15-20. The tonnes of grain produced per year by each agricultural worker over the course of a century have probably not increased by 50%, while those of steel have increased tenfold. Every earthling, while eating 270 kg of cereals and potatoes per year, eats only 4 or 5 kg of meat. One must not be fooled by the averages. In the more developed countries, the meat-cereal ratio varies enormously from class to class and from region to region. In Italy, the average per capita slaughter is 14.2 kg, ranging from 27 kg in Emilia to 5.3 kg in Sicily (that is, at the average global level). Capitalism is therefore the era of cereal-based nutrition, just as the higher barbarism (the Trojan War) was exclusively that of meat. This is why Marx is right to calculate the share of Profit that goes to Rent in grain production.

4 – Sections on rent – If all the land available for cultivation has been occupied and because of population growth requires more product (more grain), further investment is made on the same land in the form of fertilisers and various installations for agricultural improvement. This increases the yield (Italy was supposed to go from 79 million quintals of wheat in 1952 to 90 million in 5 years), but inevitably the unit price rises. In other words, with the increase in labour productivity due to capitalism, manufactured products become available at lower prices, but food products reach higher prices. This race culminates in the solution of the revolution that destroys the capitalist mode of production, or, what amounts to the same thing, market distribution: the single necessary factor for constructing Marx’s entire deduction.

5 – Anti-trinity revolution – Marx, in addressing the overall problem of the three sources of economic income and the three classes, thoroughly examines the critique of the trinity formula: capital-interest; land-rent; labour-wages; which are not three actual autonomous sources of three factions into which the produced wealth, the added value in each production cycle, is divided. In the revolutionary critique, the only real factor of value is Labour; it alone adds: there are three who subtract. The right to own land and the appropriation of commodities by Capital are not sources of value, but relations of force between men. Classical economics emphasised that only Labour generates Value. The land-Rent, and above all money-Interest (Capital-Profit), relations are not natural and eternal: they were alien to ancient modes of production (direct production of use goods – slavery and serfdom – the medieval guild system). The great community, which will bring together all ‘earthlings’, will set as its ultimate goal ‘its own reproduction’, without Rent, without Interest and, first and foremost, without Wages. Only in the capitalist mode of production is everything measured by filthy, stinking money, by the calculation of personal income and company balance sheets, by the slavery of human nature to the hands of the factory and office clock.

6 – Exclusion of the impure cases – The entire study on Differential Rent is based on the data of an ideal average, of limiting conditions not found in historical reality. These correspond to the hypothesis that the worker of the land is a wage-earner, that his wage is at the average level for the whole industry, that between him and the legal owner, who, by order of the police, has the ‘key’ to the land, there is everywhere interposed an tenant entrepreneur, whose earnings are at the average social level of the Profit of all industrial entrepreneurs. The desperate defence, with an openly bourgeois party position, by the P.C.I. of the large capitalist tenant against the landowner is pitiful, especially when price and rent controls has made Ground Rent itself less poisonous and the Surplus Profit of agricultural enterprises scandalous. In the historic English struggle between bourgeois landed property (landlords), the agrarian capitalists (farmers), and agricultural labourers, culminating in protective duties on grain, whose prices fell to the relief of the proletariat, the landowners tended to fatten their rents by squeezing profits below the normal profit, and the tenant-farmers reacted by reducing the wages of the rural labourer. Marx gives a rigorous and clear interpretation of this historical and economic phase by adding to Rent, as a political and force-based factor, a fraction of Business Profit and Wages, which artificially augments the real rent proper, the ideal average rent. The transition from pure science to social and political struggle is crucial. Ricardians and vulgar economists counter by demonstrating that, with Rent contained within its theoretical limits and, if necessary, allocated to the state to cover expenditure (i.e. with capitalist enterprise in industry and land freed from taxation), the illusory harmony in the wealth of the nation and in the trinity welfare for all classes is not achieved, but the prospect of revolutionary antagonisms is reaffirmed. Converting the rents of the worst land into interest on government bonds has nothing to do with even bourgeois revolutions. This preserves rentier privilege and worsens the public budget for bogus land improvements, in which agricultural technique becomes stupidity, and state administration open thievery at the hands of triumphant entrepreneurial speculation.

7 – The hydraulic leap – The paper mills in a country are assumed to be powered by steam engines, while others have water power, for which the necessary motive force costs nothing, saving both coal and the stoker’s labour. To simplify matters, let us assume that the technical composition is the same for both types of paper mill, keeping the same ratio of Constant Capital-Variable Capital, and the same proportion of maintenance and depreciation costs. For the privileged paper mills, the cost and price of production are therefore lower. However, the market price of paper must adjust to the higher costs of mills without water power, otherwise no capital would be invested in them. This results in a Surplus Profit in paper mills with water power, generated by the higher labour productivity applied there.

Chap. VIII, Para. 7 THE DIFFERENTIAL RENT 1st Form - The hydraulic leap
			A Factories with steam engines	B Factories equipped with water power
o	Technical Composition (Organic)	o = C/V	4	4
C V K	Constant Capital Variable Capital Advanced Capital = Cost of Production	C V = C/o C + V	80 80/4 = 20 80 + 20 = 100	72 72/4 = 18 72 + 18 = 90
p Pm	Average Social Rate of Profit Average Social Profit	p K × p	15% 100 × 15% = 15	15% 90 × 15% = 13.5
Pp Pr R S	Price of Production Market Price (single) Surplus Profit = Rent Surplus Value = Total Profit	K + Pm Pr Pr – Pp Pm + R	100 + 15 = 115 115 115 – 115 = 0 15 + 0 = 15	90 + 13.5 = 103.5 115 115 – 103.5 = 11.5 13.5 + 11.5 = 25
s Pi	Rate of Surplus Value Profit due to the capitalist	S/V S – R	15/20 = 75% 15 – 0 = 15	25/18 = 139% 25 – 11.5 = 13.5
Water at zero cost provides the necessary motive power to Sector B, saving 8 units of coal, so that C drops from 80 to 72. Assuming the Organic Composition is equal in sectors A and B, the lower expenditure on coal in B corresponds to a saving in stoker wages. In formula form: 72c + 18v = 90; where 18 = 72/4. In sector A: 100 Advanced Capital + 15 Profit (at an average rate of 15%) = 115, which is both the Price of Production and Market Price. In sector B: 90 Advanced Capital + 13.5 Profit (again at an average rate of 15%) = 103.5, which is the Price of Production. But the Market Price is 115, the same as in sector A. If sector B, with an Advanced Capital of 90, sells at 115, it has a margin of 25 (115 – 90), of which 13.5 is Industrial Profit and 11.5 is Differential Rent of the landed type. 13.5 in profit, due to the capitalist in sector B, is equal to 15% of 90. The difference between the Prices of Production of sectors A and B, equal to 115 – 103.5 = 11.5, is Differential Rent and was produced by the labour of the wage-earners in Sector B. In the factories of Sector B, of the 25 Surplus Value, 13.5 is considered normal Surplus Value, with a rate of 75% (13.5s/18v), and 11.5 is exceptional Surplus Labour, which becomes Surplus Profit and Rent, with a Rate of 64% (11.5s/18v).

8 – The people in the field – For Marx, the expression of price or value of a water source or land in general is ‘irrational’. Only commodities, the products of human labour, the capital into which they can be transformed, have value and price. What will be paid for water power is nothing more than capitalised Rent. If the Interest Rate in the vulgar sense (not Profit in the Marxist sense) is 5%, the owner will demand 200 for the lost Rent of 10, and 215 for the Rent of 11.5. Marx never confuses ‘asset’ Capital with ‘expenditure’ Capital. In calculating Total Capital, both constant and variable, Marx never takes into account, for the purposes of calculating the rates of Surplus Value, Profit, and the Technical Composition, the asset value of water power, agricultural land, buildings, or workshops. Only the portion of wear and tear in the production of a stock of produced commodities is taken into account for steam, hydraulic, or other engines. For Marx, Capital invested, advanced, or employed in production is always a part of the product, of the manufactured commodity sold and of the famous turnover of accountants and professors.

1 – Alma parens frugum – The water-powered paper mill produces at a lower cost but sells at the same price as the steam-powered one. The difference, the premium on the price of production, is Rent (First Form of differential rent). Ever since the human species began cultivating the land for food, there have been two fundamental aspects to the problem: 1) the occupation of land, which varies the ratio between uncultivated and cultivated land; 2) the fertility of the land, which varies according to natural conditions and the effects of human labour, i.e. its ability to yield more fruit and require less effort. The questions arise: how much land can still be brought under cultivation? And what minimum fertility determines the clearing of uncultivated land, in relation to balancing labour effort and food consumption? This, since with capitalism all available land is exploited and the species suffers from too much hunger. For us, humans provide food for themselves through their own labour. Land is the mother of every fruit, and Labour is its father.

2 – Natural fertility – For Ricardo, Rent (which is only differential) is always the difference between the products obtained with the use of two equal quantities of Capital and Labour. Marx points out that this is true for surplus profit in general; but when dealing with Ground Rent, a third condition must be added: on the same area of land. The case of equal Capitals is the simplest, but it is rare. If unequal Capitals are employed for unequal products, even on the same surface of land, the proportional income of the various Capitals is compared. If the ratio between income and Capital (rate of Profit) increases, there is Surplus Profit; and therefore Differential Rent. For simplicity’s sake, Marx limits himself to considering ‘natural’ fertility. Among the other factors of fertility, i.e. of utility, Marx pauses for a moment on the effects of location to give one of his usual jabs at the capitalist system, in which lies the essence of all our analyses. Capitalism diminishes the effects of location and exploits even the mountaintop to make money, creating new means of transport and new markets; but then it increases those effects because it separates agriculture from manufacturing, establishes large centres, isolates certain regions.

3 – The four lands – With Marx, we limit the study to the mere natural fertility of four plots of land of equal area, with the same cultivation, the same expenditure on wages, and materials, or wear and tear, but which yield different quantities of produce, from a ‘worst land’ to three progressively ‘better’ lands. The only difficulty lies in the English units of measurement, which would have to be converted into the decimal system. The price of grain is constant at 2 shillings per kilogram. On land A, the worst, 30 kg of grain are obtained, which, sold at the average price, yield a gross return of 60 shillings. The Capital invested in each the four lands is always 50 shillings, with a margin of 10. The normal average Profit on capital is 20%; therefore, the 10 shillings of profit on the 60 shillings of revenue go entirely to capitalist Profit. There is no Surplus Profit: the Rent for the landowner is zero.

4 – Raising the ladder – On Land B, with the same area and expenditure, twice as much is produced; therefore, 60 shillings remain, the first Differential Rent, which the tenant-farmer will pay as rent to the landowner. On Land C, three times as much is produced, and 120 shillings remain as Rent. On Land D, four times as much is produced, and 180 shillings remain as Rent. Rent does not come from selling dear, it does not come from the market and it does not come from price differences; but from a Surplus Product that belongs to the one who holds the key to the gates of the better lands, which are thus barred to Capital and Labour. Rent exists only when Capital-Labour are ‘brought into’ the better lands; that is, money which has bought dead labour and buys living labour.

5 – Current data – It turns out that Rent from a plot of land rises from 0 to 3/4 of the total product, with the remuneration of workers and the company remaining unchanged.

Chap. IX, Para. 5 * in Italian literally ‘Reddito dominicale’, the part of the total income that derives solely from the ownership of land and not from any agricultural activity on it. ITALIAN LAND REGISTRY (year of planting, 1939) Rates for Arable Land Classes
Census Classes	Dominical Income * (Rent)		Agrarian Income (Profit)		Ratio
	LIRE	INDICES	LIRE	INDICES
1	550	100.0	180	100.0	3.1
2	400	72.7	170	94.4	2.4
3	300	54.5	160	88.9	1.9
4	190	34.5	130	72.2	1.5
5	95	17.3	80	44.4	1.2
The land registry taxes the various qualities of Land per hectare. In Italy, agricultural Land amounts to 28 million hectares. Productive uncultivated land, pastures, and permanent meadows amount to 12. Of these, 15.5 remain, of which: 13.0 Arable; 2.5 others. The taxable Dominical Income per hectare determines the tax payable by the landowner. It represents the rent proper. The taxable Agrarian Income is the basis for the tax payable by the manager of the land. It expresses the industrial profit. The rates for Rent and Profit are given in absolute terms and as a percentage relative to 1939. It is observed from the data that: 1. – Rent is higher than profit; slightly higher in the 5th Class; threefold in the 1st. 2. – Profit varies little (2.25 times); Rent varies greatly (5.79 times). 3. – In the best Classes, Profit varies little (+12.5%); Rent varies greatly (+83.3%).

If organic productivity varies, so too does the Capital and Labour to be applied, which is resolved by the Second Form. In an Italian municipality where the worst land is present, and indeed there is ‘latifundium’ undergoing reclamation and division, it can generally be observed that: – 1st observation: Rent is much higher than Profit; slightly higher in the 5th quality, three times higher in the 1st. The Christian Democrat State with its communist tagalongs is really stupid, expropriating where the taxable amount is low and taking, paying well, Rents of 95, leaving the owners to enjoy those of 550 and above.
– 2nd observation: if Profit varies twofold, Rent varies sixfold.
– 3rd observation: in the first 3 classes, Profit varies little (very much in line with Marx’s form I) and Rent varies greatly. From these data, taken from practice, we derive the Table based on four examples of farms in the Po Valley with 50-60 hectares of cultivation plus livestock breeding; whose accounts are not given as an asset balance sheet, but as an annual operation in which the gross product of 100 gives, in the Marxist sense, 33c and 28v (low degree of organic composition at 1.18, with industry in Marx’s time already at 4 and today at 8); Total Advanced Capital 61 (c + v); Capitalist Profit 15; rate of Profit 25% (ratio between Profit of 15 and Capital expended); total margin 39 (64%; of which rate of Profit 25% and Surplus Profit that becomes Rent 39%).

Chap. IX, Para. 5 ITALIAN AGRICULTURE Farms in the Po Valley covering 50-60 hectares, with Crop Farming + Livestock Breeding

BOURGEOIS ANNUAL OPERATION MARXIST QUANTITIES % % % Misc. Expenses 33 } Advanced Capt. 61 { Constant Capital 33 Workforce 28 Variable Capital 28 Interest 7 } Profit 15 } Surplus Value 39 Business Profit 8 Rent 24 Rent 24 Product 100 Product 100 100

Productivity Levels, Rates, and Ratios Technical Composition c / v     =33/28 = 1.8 Rate of Surplus Value s / v     =39/28 = 1.39 Rate of Profit s/(c + v) =39/61 = 0.64 Ratio of Constant Cap. to Advanced Cap. c/(c + v) =33/61 = 0.54   ‘   ‘  Variable   ‘   ‘     ‘     ‘ v/(c + v) =28/61 = 0.46   ‘   ‘      Profit     ‘     ‘     ‘ Pr/(c + v)=15/61 = 0.25   ‘   ‘      Rent       ‘     ‘     ‘ R/(c + v) =24/61 = 0.39 The Technical Composition of industry was on average 4 in Marx’s time and at least 8 in 1954.

The Table below summarises the classes of arable land provided for by the Italian Land Registry: To the three cases B-C-D should be added case A, not given because the tariff provides rent for all lands. We derive it by adding to the constant advanced capital of L.32,000 the profit of 25%, which gives L.8,000, for a total of L.40,000, equivalent to a production of just 5 quintals of grain per hectare on land with a Rent of 0.

For Ricardo, workers and entrepreneurs fight to eliminate the landlord’s 6.25, so that the entrepreneurs’ share rises to 10.25 (4 + 6.25) and that of the agricultural workers remains at 7.4. For a socialist trade unionist, once the baron’s 6.25 and the capitalist’s 4 have been abolished, 17.65 (7.35 + 4 + 6.25) will be available. For the agricultural office of the P.C.I., the rents from the latifundium (land B, 1.5 out of 26.25) are expropriated, which, paid in cash, go to interest on capital to the entrepreneurial class, which rises from 4 to 5.5, while the landowning bourgeois falls from 6.25 to 4.75. The proletarians remain at 7.4. For Marx, the land monopoly and the capitalist monopoly over the product must be abolished. We note that the rent for land B is 1.5q. of grain per ha. (2 for C and 2.75 for D). By 1954, the income of agrarian entrepreneurs grew much more than the Rents of landowners. Furthermore, Rents are proportional to area; unit Profits are not. However, unit output grows with the size of the farm; therefore, the small farmer and sharecropper pay high Rents, pocket little Profit and, if they are a worker, work long hours. As for the market value of the three lands, at a rate of 5%, they are worth 240,000, 320,000, and 440,000 per hectare, i.e. 20 times the Rent. Compared to these asset values, the Capital is only the annual advance payment of the agrarian enterprise; i.e. 32,000. Owners and entrepreneurs complain about the modest profit of 5-6% calculated on the asset value; while in reality, on the Capital Advanced, we have Profits at 25%, Surplus Profits as Rent at 39.1% and Surplus Value at 64.1%.

7 – The machine starts up – In 1954, agricultural workers produce, net of constant capital, 26.25 – 8.60 = 17.65; but consume only 7.4 to live, i.e. 42%. If they were already ‘The Species’, instead of 8 hours, it would take only 3 hours to live (3.35 hours to be precise; i.e. 58% less than today). There are so many people today that it takes 10 units (or millions or billions of tonnes) of grain to feed everyone; so they had to plough and cultivate the A lands (the worst), whose price of production determines the sale and purchase prices of all land (from the worst to the best). Capitalism, the more it ploughs and civilises, the more it builds HUNGER. If Rent were abolished, the price of grain from land A (the worst) would remain at 60. But in B it would fall to 30 because it produces twice as much; in C to 20 (triple production); in D to 15 (quadruple production). Without Rent, the price of production and consumption would fall with the rise of the fertility of the land; prices which capitalism fixes according to the yield of the most fetid land. In the absence of Rent, no one would prohibit others from cultivating, working, and harvesting. If free land existed, production would increase, not the price, provided that land of the same fertility as that already cultivated is found.

8 – History of land clearing – In the Table, we read in descending order, i.e. in historical order, and in ascending order for price trends. At the beginning, the small population is satisfied with the 4 units of land D with a price of production of 60 (50 in expenses + 10 in profit) at a price of 15 per unit. Moving on to progressively worse lands C, B, and A, there is always the formation of Differential Rents. The same thing happens if one moves from Land A to progressively better Lands B, C, and D. Capitalism moves towards an increase in the real price of grain, even if there is an increase in the area under cultivation and an improvement in production per unit area. It is not in capitalism’s interest to invest capital to increase soil fertility because, although it is true that the product grows, the Profit from subsequent investments decreases, a thing which horrifies Capital.

Chap. IX, Para. 8 In Capitalist Society the Price of Food Rises
Population	Required grain units	LAND				Expenses	Surplus Value	Price of Production	Premium	Rent
		D Excellent	C Good	B Mediocre	A Worst	1	2	3 = 1 + 2		units	shillings
Sparse	4	4				50	10	60:4=15
Not very dense	7	4				50	30	80:4=20	33%	1	20
			3			50	10	60:3=20
Dense	9	4				50	70	120:4=30	100%	2	60
			3			50	40	90:3=30	50%	1	30
				2		50	10	60:2=30
Very dense	10	4				50	190	240:4=60	300%	3	180
			3			50	130	180:3=60	200%	2	120
				2		50	70	120:2=60	100%	1	60
					1	50	10	60:1=60

9 – The law of hunger – In agriculture, the market value of a product is always greater than its price of production. In industry, the market price of a social product is theoretically equal to its price of production, i.e. to its value calculated in terms of labour time. The Table, based on fertility differences, shows that the market price of foodstuffs exceeds their price of production by 31%. This inexorable law is fundamental: capitalism equals high prices.

10 – The mercantile cancer – The social value of a product is the labour it costs society, divided by the mass obtained, calculated in average social labour time; provided that no part of it becomes commodity-form or capital-form; in which case one is dealing with a false social value. It is precisely the law of mercantile value, of the equalisation between equivalent exchange values for equal use values, that requires that every unit of grain sells at 60 on the four lands, regardless of whether it is produced at 60, 30, 20, or 15, and thus prevents every unit of grain from selling, on average at 24. It should be noted that Marx does not rail so much against the 10 units of normal Surplus Value of Capital as against the 36 on average Surplus Profits-Rents. All the supposedly free and voluntary choices of the millions of market transactions on which bourgeois economics wants to base itself lead only to the regulation of a society which, even as a whole, is unconscious and powerless. ‘If we suppose the capitalist form of society to be abolished and society organised as a conscious and planned association (...) Society would not then buy this agricultural product at two and a half times the actual labour-time embodied in it and the basis for a class of landowners would thus be destroyed (...) While it is, therefore, true that, by retaining the present mode of production, but assuming that the Differential Rent is paid to the state, prices of agricultural products would, everything else being equal, remain the same’ (Marx).

11 – Socialism is not built: mercantilism is demolished – Capitalism realises the social, and not the individual, value of commodities, in a false manner if it results from personal economic acts; like paying a wage in money for the labour time expended. Average social effort is expressed only through the real data of production done not for the market (i.e. not unconscious and involuntary); because the values determined for the market and by the law of the market do not overcome the unconsciousness, the anarchy, and the impotence of the social organisation. The transition to the communist ‘association’ will only take place when the mercantile comparison is no longer the yardstick of all economic acts. The Marxist theory on Rent contains the essential critique of capitalism. The most monstrous squandering, due to the gap between market prices and values in production, will not disappear by eliminating the beneficiaries, but will arise as long as the beginning of productive acts and the calculations thereof are based on the facts of the sphere of commodity circulation, with the application of the law of value.

1 – The first form – As the population grows, if land is not limited, i.e. monopolised, other land is taken up to obtain more yield; a phenomenon that Marx examines in a capitalist context, that is, under the assumption that the worker does not have individual or collective disposal over the product, but receives a portion from the ‘agrarian enterprise’ in exchange for a certain amount of labour. With the 1st form, capitalist society extends cultivation to new land. Once this possibility is exhausted, the land already cultivated must be made to produce more; and thus one moves to the 2nd form. In the 1st form, with mercantile exchange according to the law of equivalents, with capitalist agricultural production by entrepreneurs or tenant farmers and with peasants only as wage-earners, with all land privately owned, with lands of varying fertility, differential rent is generated, moving from the worst land A to the better lands B, C, and D.

2 – The differential law – What is the relationship between the cause ‘different Fertility’ that generates the effect of ‘different Rent’? Marx’s Table I shows that the four Lands A, B, C, and D give the Product-Fertilities 1, 2, 3, and 4 and Rents 0, 60, 120, and 180. With proportional reasoning (wrong), if Fertility from B to C increases from 2 to 3, i.e. by 50%, then the Rent of 60 for B would also increase by 50%, giving a Rent of 90 (60 + 30) for C. This error underestimates the real progression of Rent, which does not grow in proportion to Fertility but much more. The rule linking Product-Fertility to Rents is instead differential. With differential reasoning, if Fertility 1 of Land A increases to 2 on Land B and to 3 on Land C, the Rents increase from 0 to 60 and to 120, because each increment in Fertility corresponds to 60 in Rent; that is, the difference between two Rents is proportional to the difference between two Fertilities. This is Marx’s law: the differential of Rent is equal to a constant multiplied by the differential of Fertility. On this basis, Marx is able to move on to the 2nd form, in which Capital and the regulating price of production vary, whereas they were constant in the 1st form; and to give the laws of the capitalist economic form, agricultural and otherwise, contemporary to him and future. He unmasks the soubrette competition and gives the exhaustive theory of the tyrannical monopoly; he takes away the speech and employment of every buffoonish corrector, from the birth of capitalism to the advent of communism. Absolute (proportional) figures lead truth-seekers to the high spheres of consciousness and spirit, the sole and imperishable seat of absolute values; while we believe only in differentials and of them alone do we make science. They lead us to observe the deceptions of reality. Referring to the Table (Overview of Agrarian Italy), if it were proportional to fertility, the Rent from C to D would be L.17,700 (16,000 × 7.75:7). With differentials, however: the difference in Fertility between D and A is 2.75 (7.75 – 5), which, at L.8,000 per q., gives for D a Rent of L.22,000, which is L.4,300 higher per year and per hectare for the landowner.

3 – But the ‘fanciful’ policy? – Marx says that ‘[a]ll critique of small landed property resolves itself in the final analysis into a criticism of private ownership as a barrier and hindrance to agriculture (...) and in wrangling over the specific forms of this evil its ultimate cause is forgotten!’ (the evil of property). For Lenin, the ‘grave fault’ (more precisely: the great nonsense) ‘of almost the whole Social-Democratic press on the question of the agrarian programme (...) is that practical considerations prevail over theoretical, and political considerations over economic’. To correct this serious fault-nonsense, ‘an examination of the theoretical aspect of the question (...) is particularly necessary’ (Lenin), disregarding ‘all (...) political considerations’ (Marx).

4 – The second form – The historical character of the transition from the 1st form to the 2nd form of Differential Rent is emphasised, as well as the greater complexity arising from the 2nd form. If Capital doubles, the product may be equal to, less than, or greater than double, depending on the change in productivity. The price of production may be constant, decreasing, or increasing. For each of the three cases, there are three variants due to capital investments according to the changes in productivity. A plot of land less productive than the worst, A, is also assumed. Marx’s thesis is that with the development of capitalism and the investment of more Capital in land, Rent tends to increase, both in total mass and in the average per unit area, often at a higher rate than Capital (and its Profit), rarely at a lower rate.

5 – Hairy fecundity – 50 shillings of Capital (see Table on the 1st form of Rent) are invested in Lands A, B, C, and D, i.e. 200 shillings, with a Profit of 40 and a Surplus Profit-Rent extorted from labour of 360 shillings (which has increased the price of bread by 150% compared to manufactures). This same Surplus Profit would arise, for example, on land D alone, where, in addition to the first 50 shillings, a further 50, 50, and 50 were subsequently invested and yielding 4+3+2+1 = 10 units with decreasing productivity. Finally, at a price of 60 shillings, the product would return 600. The bourgeois theory of Capital considers investment to be a ‘fixed asset’ in land-property, whereas for Marxism, the Capital employed in agricultural production is the annual expenditure on labour, raw materials, and only the wear and tear of fixed equipment. The improvement, which consists not only of more intensive operating expenditure but also of works that remain on the land, must be charged to the owner. If they are borne by the tenant, he must include the amount plus interest in the mass of increasing differential surplus profits. In the full development of the 2nd form, which attracts larger shares of social capital to the same social land in order to enhance the product, the division among small, medium, and large entrepreneurs comes into play. Even in manufacturing, the volume of the enterprise is an element of variation in the rate of profit: the average rate of all capitals corresponds to a certain ‘minimum of business’ with a ‘minimum of capital’. ‘Everything that exceeds this minimum can produce extra Profit: everything that is less than this does not so much as yield the average profit’ (Marx’s theorem which reflects the entire capitalist economic framework). For these reasons, Marx reiterates that ‘[t]he capitalist mode of production spreads in agriculture but slowly and unevenly’. The smallest owner works at a loss and makes up the difference by working extra hours of drudgery. This means that ‘the actual capitalist tenants [are able] to appropriate a portion of Surplus Profit – a fact which would not obtain (...) if the capitalist mode of production were as evenly developed in agriculture as in manufacture’ (Marx). This is not only impossible under capitalism, but the exasperation of industrial production towards its limits and the concentration of accumulated capitals triggers Surplus Profit in all areas of the economy, despite the lowering of the average rate of profit.

6 – The famous units – Engels reworks Marx’s 14 tables (from XI to XXIV) confirming the original theory. He adopts the ‘boisseaux’ as the unit of volume and the ‘arpant’ as the unit of area and reduces the productivity gaps. He sets 10 – 12 – 14 – 16 – 18 units of product at the starting price of 6 shillings. The unit, corresponding to 4.5 litres, i.e. 3.7 kg of grain, is worth 203.5 lire in 1954, i.e. 5,500 lire per quintal. The Base Table of the 2nd form, Marx’s XI, now includes five lands: A – B – C – D – E. The Capital employed in each is 50 shillings, the Profit 10 (at 20%) with a price of production of 60 shillings. On land A, there remains no Surplus Profit or Rent, while on the other lands, the grain produced rises from 10 to 12 – 14 – 16 – 18 boisseaux and from 60 to 72 – 84 – 96 – 108 shillings. The Rent is 0 to 12 – 24 – 36 – 48 shillings. The total Capital is 250, the Profit 50; the price of production 300. The product is 70 boisseaux for 420 shillings (70 × 6). The Rent is 120 shillings.

Now the problem is this: if Industrial Capital pours in to a greater extent into the agrarian enterprise, will it squeeze the Rent? Will it manage to swallow up Surplus Profit? Marx assumes that the Capital invested in all or some of the land is doubled. – 1st Case – The selling price is constant, i.e. the productivity (product/capital invested) of the worst land does not vary.
– – 1^st Variant: productivity is also constant on the non-worst lands. Everything doubles; including Rent. The regulating price of production remains the same. Rent does not decrease if land A is excluded from new investment.
– – 2^nd Variant: productivity decreases. If it falls proportionally by 2/3, land B goes from 12 to 20 (and not to 24) and its Rent drops to 0 (the total is always 120); and so on. Land B will only yield a Rent if productivity decreases less, say by 3/4. With the same Capital, the rent rises to 150.
– – 3^rd Variant: productivity increases. Land B yields 5/4, i.e. 27. Capital rises from 250 to 450; therefore, Rent increases from 120 to 330. If the price of grain does not change, the addition of Capital to the land to increase production never affects the Rent even if productivity decreases; in cases of constancy or growth it increases considerably. Before the invasion of Capital on land, the average Rent was 24. In the 1st variant, it went to 48; in the 2nd, between 24 and 30; in the third, to 66. The landowner never backs down at the arrival of capitalists.

7 – Bread at a better market? – In manufacturing, the cheaper commodity drives out the others. In agriculture, new investments do not reduce either the regulating price of production or the Rent. Under capitalism, the general productivity of labour increases, but in the agricultural sector it causes hunger, because its benefits go to Rent. – In the 2nd case of the 2^nd form, the price of production is supposed to fall, excluding from cultivation Land A, the worst, which keeps it high, and the Capital of B – C – D – E is doubled.

Productivity may remain the same, decrease, or increase.
– – 1^st Variant: productivity is the same. The product will be 24 – 28 – 32 – 36 bushels. Land B, having become the worst, regulates the price: the cost will be 120 shillings; the bushels 24. The unit price drops from 6 to 5 (120:24). The bushels produced are now 120. They yield 600 shillings (120 × 5). The cost is 480, sum of (4 × 100) + (4 × 20); the total Rent 120 shillings (600 – 480).
– – 2^nd Variant: productivity decreases to 3/4 of the first. Land B yields 0 rent, the cost of 120 shillings must yield 21 = 12 + 9 (3/4 of 12) bushels at a unit cost of 5.7 (120:21), less than 6. The total of 105 bushels is worth 600 shillings; the cost is 480; the Rent is 120.
– – 3^rd Variant: productivity increases by 1.5. The price is only 4.8 but the Rent doubles to 240 shillings.

– 3rd case – Large capitals are invested in agriculture; but the population has grown more, so the price of grain has risen from 6 to 8 shillings. First Mode: land A remains the worst. Productivity is constant: the Rent rises as expected to 240 shillings. If productivity falls by half, the price of grain rises to 8 shillings and the total Rent to 240. If productivity increases, which implies a decreasing productivity of the first investment, the price rises to 6.9 and the Rent rises to 240. The same cases are then discussed in a Second Mode, introducing before land A a (small) plot of land that is even less fertile and which regulates the price: if productivity is constant, the base price is 7.5 and the Rent is 450; if productivity falls, the base price is 8 and the Rent is 380; if productivity increases, the price rises to 7.5 and the Rent to 581. Studying the 13 possible cases, it is seen that the Rent has never declined when the Capital doubled. In 5 cases, the Rent has doubled; in 4, it has more than doubled; in 1, it has risen less than double; in 3, where land A is eliminated, it remains fixed at 120, but since there are 4 plots of land and not 5, the Rent per unit area rises from 24 to 30. It should be noted that in all cases the general law of Differential Rent is always respected (as in the 1^st form): the Difference in Product × its Unit Price = the Difference in Rent.

8 – Point of arrival – The clearing of the pampas, the steppes, the virgin lands of the vast continents outside Europe, as well as the formidable power achieved by means of transport, explain the virulence of the landowning class and, at the same time, the fading of this vitality. But thus the large landed property in Europe ‘and small ones on the market’ fall into ruin. The price of imported grain slows down, if not reduces, the European price and triggers the struggle for tariffs among European farmers. The formidable capitalist revolutions in Russia, China, and India re-established the rule of hunger. The demographic composition of the agrarian classes was not important; what mattered was the law of differential rents and the rise in general prices in international society, which was beginning to be woven into a single mercantilism. Russia wants to export manufactures, which is why it has seen its grain exports collapse. The world’s population is growing at an alarming rate and agricultural commodities are being produced at increasingly high prices. The end of the tragedy of differential rents and widespread hunger will not come about through the nationalisation of land or rents. The bourgeois owner of the endless Russian land drenched in capital, the lord of global differential rents, is the Russian capitalist state. Another ten years of technical progress, and it will be looking for somewhere to buy grain. The outcome of all this is international revolution and the destruction of every mechanism of individual, corporate or state buying and selling. In order not to be in vain, the battering ram must strike against the U.S.A.

1 – Tending towards mercantilism – The theory of the agrarian question and ground rent aims to shed light on the fundamental, central, essential questions of communist theory, which is identical to the communist social programme. All resistance against the degenerations of Marxism, which press from all sides, boils down to this. The doctrine of rent leads directly to the condemnation of mercantilism, of distribution according to equivalent exchanges, which alone allows us to grasp that the true and only demand is the single and unified demand of the communist revolution and its class party. It is indispensable for condemning without mitigation the utopian postulates of eliminating social misery through a purification of the equation of exchange, expelling ‘exploitation’ from it by nullifying surplus value; eliminating fraud from the labour-commodity/labour-money relation; leaving the forms on which the condemnation of labour gravitates to alive: commodity-form, money-form; hence, wage-form. To overthrow capitalism means to overthrow mercantilism. The brilliant Marxist study on agrarian rent makes clear the blows dealt to the phantoms of mercantile equilibrium and proportionality; but it also makes unassailable the cornerstone that the essential, unalterable structure of Marxism exists intact and consistent from 1847 to Marx’s death.

2 – Main pillars – The system of ownership over Capital (and ownership over land) cannot be attacked without attacking the principle of ownership over the product. When you have proved to me that in a society land is res nullius (a thing belonging to no one) and industrial capital is res nullius, you have not at all proved to me that it is a socialist society. You must first answer how the product of labour is assigned, appropriated, distributed, is made to circulate and, above all, against whom labour-power is exchanged.

3 – Youthful certainties – Marx’s critique of the Proudhonist theory of ground rent anticipates identically the later constructions amply developed by us. The theory of rent, which makes it possible to establish the formation of the market price of grain (of alimentary subsistence), permits the demonstration that the grand expansion of capitalist production does not lead to the feeding of the human species, no matter how high the level of the productive forces may become. From this derives the prediction of the collapse of capitalism.

4 – The best factory and the worst land – There is a clear antithesis, in terms of the formation of the price of commodities, between industrial manufactures and agricultural products. The capitalist way of obtaining manufactures continually reduces their cost, price, value, and production time through cooperation in large manufacturing complexes, the technical division of labour within the company and the professional division of labour in society. This tremendous increase in the productivity of labour, which was accompanied by the separation of the free worker from his conditions of labour and his transformation into a proletarian, has had a positive social consequence. The labour time of manufactures has greatly reduced and the standard of living of the worker has historically improved, in terms of needs satisfiable with manufactured commodities, thanks also to a certain reduction in average working hours.

Thus, the law of equivalents has triumphed; even if, thanks to it, other free producers have had to fall into wage slavery. In industry, the price that prevails is the lowest price offered by the best factory. But capitalism cannot present itself as the standard-bearer of increased welfare because this is not the case – and even less so with a theoretically unlimited rate of development – in agriculture, for the production of basic foodstuffs, where the market price is regulated by that of the worst productive enterprise, upon which Ricardo based his doctrine of differential rent. Ricardo fought for low prices in foodstuffs, in the interests of industry, where wage costs would thereby be reduced.

5 – C’est la faute au foncier – For Ricardo, the law of the worst land (grain increasingly expensive) is due to ground rent and not to capitalism; therefore, he is in favour of the nationalisation of land. But replacing the landowner with the State changes nothing, even in the case of a fixed rent per unit area, because the Surplus Profit would go to the capitalist tenants and the price of grain would not fall. For Marx, Rent is the class manifestation of the phenomenon, but it is not its cause. In industry, demand depends on price; in agriculture, on the number of mouths to feed. The key to the problem (the cause) lies in the nature of human need, in the character of ‘use values’, which are either natural or artificial. Capitalism is the era of the satisfaction of artificial needs and the dissatisfaction of natural ones. For the former, there are no limits to the quantities offered: all that is needed is to put new factories into operation. For basic foodstuffs, given the limited amount of land, everyone will be reduced to paying the same, i.e. the maximum share. It will be a further task to see how the capitalist world is rushed, in various sectors, towards the saturation of the fields of production from which to draw, and towards monopoly rents and the ‘hunger for everything’.

6 – The differential law prevails – Does the law that the price of grain is determined by the worst land still prevail, given that with modern technical resources we should also have cheap bread? Under feudalism, there existed a certain balance between rural food production and urban production of commodities. The small urban population had little impact on foodstuffs; the much larger rural population fed on its own products and used few manufactured commodities, most of which it produced within the family. The advent of new productive forms broadened needs and the pace of life, which was matched by a real rise in the price of popular consumer goods. The early economic history of unified Italy is a history of struggles by the poor classes against the rising cost of living relative to the recent past. Subsequently, consumption indices, even in backward regions, rose in general, despite crises and wars. It is appropriate to proceed to a contemporary verification of the ‘worst land’ law. According to Ricardo, Rent arises from a Surplus Profit on land cultivated by a capitalist enterprise with wage labourers. The premium of the more fertile soil is a difference (Surplus Profit) that is converted into a higher lease payment, into Rent paid to the landowner. For Marx, this happens because the grain from both plots of land is absorbed by the market at the price of production (which compensates wages, constant capital, normal profit) of the grain from the worst land. On a better plot, the same price of production corresponds to an increased product: this is the Differential Rent. All our tables are based on this criterion.

7 – A little ladder – We have posed the hypothesis that on all land the price is determined by the worst land; such that Rent follows the differential law, whereby the ‘jumps’ in Rent are proportional to those of the products. With the 1^st form, this is true among different types of land. With the 2^nd form, this occurs if more labour and capital are invested on the same land to improve it. If all this is true in the actual agrarian economy, it means that the hypothesis is correct. Let us verify this using the 1939 Italian Agricultural Land Registry rates. To this end, a certain degree of correlation between the theoretical and practical data is sufficient. For a series of lands, we have data on Rents and Profits. But for us, the figure of the product’s value is needed. The tenant-farmer collects the market price and pays the Rent to the owner. He deducts the expenses for the year. What remains is the Business Profit, which the tax authorities assume to be part of his agrarian income. On average, this Profit is a percentage of the Capital invested: 20%. If the Table gives me an income of 1,000, the Capital invested is 5,000, which at 20% gives 1,000 in income. The product sold yielded 4,000 in rent + 5,000 in expenses + 1,000 in profit = 10,000. After paying 4,000 in Rent, the tenant-farmer earned 6,000 (i.e. 6 times the income). Placing the cadastral rents alongside the products in a scale, it can be seen that there is correspondence in the rise and fall of both; a large step in one corresponds to one in the other and vice versa.

8 – Numbers, those crafty things – The findings concern classes of 5 Citrus Orchard and 4 irrigated Arable Land. The Capital is 5 times income (20% rate of surplus value) and the price of production, Capital plus Surplus Value, 6 times. There is a correlation between the jumps in Rent and in Products. The law of Differential Rent is verified, whereas with the proportional system, false Rents emerge, all lower than the actual ones. The two examples based on current economic data demonstrate both the persistence of agrarian Rent revenue under different conditions, and its enhancement when the rental enterprise is also more productive (as confirmation of the differential law of the rise in revenue for landowners and agricultural industrialists). All this confirms the cause (without which the differential law would no longer be possible) of the high price of agricultural foodstuffs paid under the most unfavourable conditions. This burden of food consumption relative to industrial goods weighs most heavily on the poorest budgets, where the food share is highest, while in higher budgets the share of commodities and products not derived from the land is higher.

9 – Resuming the agenda – We have demonstrated the full applicability of the Marxist theory of rent to modern agricultural production as corollary both of the 1^st and 2^nd forms of Differential Rent. At this point, Marx makes further comparisons on the effect of successive placements of Capital on Land B, given that Land A produces less and determines the regulating price of the market. With equal Capital spent in A and B, the greater product of B is Rent. It is worth emphasising the concept and definition of the various prices in order to answer the question: how many new injections of capital can Land B attract, even if the increase in output for each new injection is smaller? But the individual price of production is always lower than the general market price; and therefore there is still rent. The owner can allow many Capital investments on the land and, even if the rule of decreasing productivity of successive investments were always true, the Rent never disappears. If the phenomenon is of mercantile origin and the iron law of equal price for equal commodity prevails, the increased demand for food raises its price (while it falls for industrial manufactures) if the product on the land in use must be increased to feed the population. The fault for all this lies with the market, not with property.

1 – The fishermen of phallus – According to Marx, contrary to Ricardo, there is also an absolute ‘initial’ Rent to which differentials are added. Marx hypothesises the worst Land A, where the product yields a market revenue that only remunerates Wages and Capital with average Profit; in addition, there is an Absolute Rent on that worst land. We have no quarrel with those who wish to throw all the collected works of the wizard of Trier into the waste basket. On the contrary, we are deeply annoyed by all the petty pilferers of the powerful body of Marxist doctrines. If one knows how to proceed with the organic reconstruction of the theory, born not from a small or large brain, but from the material force of history, the unity and harmony of the whole will become evident and indisputable. Once again, the whole is to be taken or left.

2 – Absolutes and differences – Marx explains that there is nothing to change in the law of Differential Rent if one admits and acknowledges that there is Rent even on the worst land (to which subsequent increments are added) if one changes land or invests further Labour and Capital. Not only does the alleged contradiction not exist, but this is the case in all scientific research. Marx, in the theory of absolute and relative Surplus Value, assumes that into the product enter only Wages and zero constant Capital, as every scientist is entitled to do. The conclusions will not change when I ‘allow’ Constant Capital to reappear, as it does in every real case. The owner who buys raw materials and contemplates them does not see his Capital grow by a penny; if he hires workers for 1,000 lire to work them, behold he finds himself with 2,000. In ‘higher’ mathematics, it is said that the differential of a constant quantity is zero.

3 – Karl’s little algebra – We reiterate that the worst Land A regulates the market price and keeps it high; worse still, at the price resulting from Constant Capital expenditure, Wages and the tenant’s Profit, it accomplishes the further feat of adding a nice bonus: Absolute Rent. Marx: ‘Although the general price of agricultural products would in this case be significantly modified, the law of Differential Rent would nevertheless in no way lose its force’. And this is due to the little rule that if the same thing is added to income and expenses, the margin remains the same.

4 – Thus, more hunger – Let us explain with numbers, starting from the Table (Overview of Agrarian Italy), the validity of the Differential Law in the case where the increase in the price of production of grain on the worst land constitutes an Absolute Rent. Surplus profits appear in all sectors of capitalist production. And this is because the market price of all products (for Marxism, the value) contains, in addition to expenses, a Profit which corresponds to the ratio of the total social profit to the total social capital. In individual cases, there are discrepancies; individual companies may have prices of production lower than values. Among the various sectors of manufacturing production, there tends to be a compensation for increases, through technical discoveries, in productivity, while the rate of profit decreases. Agriculture remains backward because the organic composition of its capital includes high Wage costs and low Constant Capital, resulting, in a sense, in ‘two average rates of profit’: a low industrial rate and a high agrarian rate, on the same worst land.

5 – Cardinal point – Ricardo is to Marx as the apology for capitalism is to the doctrine of its destruction. There are four theories that explain rent (see Chapter VII, Paragraph 5). 1^st – Physiocratic theory. The landowners have at their disposal the natural wealth of the land, which is added to the effect of human labour; they therefore set the price of agricultural products at will, as rent for tenant-farmers, given by the reimbursement of the labour expended plus the rent for the land. Surplus Value arises only on land. It is a doctrine neither reactionary nor pro-feudal. It contrasts with the labour-value doctrine, from which stems the declaration of autonomy of the proletarian class; hitherto a passive and ‘sterile’ element in industry. 2^nd – Ricardo’s theory of industrial capitalists. The exchange Value of products (including agricultural products) derives from human Labour. Agrarian Rent derives from the portion of the rural entrepreneurs’ profits extorted from wage-earners, whose labour is applied under conditions of good productivity of land and Capital; this is not the case in the worst rural enterprises. A view that predicts that the real prices for agricultural foodstuffs will fall as they do for manufactures, improving the technical composition of capital so that the standard of living of the increased population rises and the profit of business capital is preserved forever, abolishing only private Ground Rent. 3^rd – Rent derives from the interest on Land-Capital, according to Ricardo’s reactionary opponents, who are in favour of the historical and economic immanence of land privilege. 4^th – Rent, whether differential or absolute, establishes forever the historical limit of capitalism in dissolving the relationship between production and human consumption, whose food needs will never be resolved by the process of Capital accumulation, no matter how much technology, the organic composition of capital, and the mass of products progress. The modern antagonism of social classes corresponds to the formation of Surplus Profits, the emergence of Absolute Rents, anarchy, and waste in social production. The equation capitalism equals hunger is irrevocably established. Marx’s doctrine of rent provides the theoretical weapon for describing the long-foreseen modern monopolism and imperialism. The sphere of food production is fundamental to the dynamics of every society; the Marxist theory of Rent is central to the description of the capitalist mode of production. From a revolutionary and anti-possibilist point of view, it is the decisive part.

6 – He has the last word – Marx says: ‘Landed property hinders such an equalisation among capitals, invested in land, whenever production requires land for either agriculture or extraction of raw materials, and takes hold of a portion of the Surplus Value (...) instead of falling into the lap of the capitalists, who have extracted it from their labourers, it falls to the share of the landlords, who extract it from the capitalists. It is hereby assumed that the agricultural capital sets more labour in motion than an equally large portion of non-agricultural capital. How far the discrepancy goes, or whether it exists at all, depends upon the relative development of agriculture as compared with industry. It is in the nature of the case that this difference must decrease with the progress of agriculture, unless the proportionate decrease of variable as compared with constant capital is still greater in the case of industrial than in the case of agricultural capital; thus, it increases Rent for landowners and hunger for all workers’. And so it was, is, and will be in fact. The inevitable equalisation, by virtue of the eternal laws of competition, was the card on which Ricardo ‘bluffed’. It was Marx who snatched it from his hands. You are late, little theorists of the monopolistic era.

7 – Walking backwards – The entire theory of Ground Rent, thoroughly ca-pi-ta-li-st in both agriculture and industry, was treated, first ‘statically’ and then ‘cinematically’. Rent in the proper sense of the word only arises after the intervention of Capital. All social income, even in the countryside, is reduced to three types: Wages for workers, Profit for capitalists, and Rent for owners. We have shown that this trinity formula of society, which once developed and mature – and perhaps with the State, and not the landowning class, collecting the rents – would have run in full operation without crises or revolutions, must be blown sky-high. Marx bases his sure revolutionary and communist prediction on the hypothesis of integral land industrialism; and then he affirms the historical method and analyses the still-present non-capitalist agrarian forms today of sharecropping and small peasant land ownership.

8 – The last cry! – The entry onto the scene of various and spurious ‘popular’ classes is not a new and modern fact, following the struggles of the pure proletarians of industry and the land against capitalist enterprises. Lenin, if not Marx, would be credited with calling the semi-proletarians to the front lines to ensure the victory of the workers. What emerges is only proof of the enormous confusion between historical and economic approaches and the action of the party; between the defence of class doctrine and intervention in the seismic fractures of history. In situations of double revolution, the workers’ party is for the bourgeois, national, liberal revolution as the point of departure for the further socialist revolution. But where a capitalism characterised, specified, historically free from feudal encumbrances for decades is present, enough of the popular revolution, which historically is now a dirty superfetation and must be replaced by a truly class revolution.

9 – Things in order – The lie of a Lenin who replaces workers with peasants and inaugurates this new tactic must be dispelled without mercy. Lenin is an orthodox follower of Marx on the agrarian question and shares his doctrine on Rent. He knows, as well as Marx, that in studying agrarian classes outside the classic three, no new forms are discovered, but rather the ancient ones are rediscovered. If this certainty is lost, it is pointless to speak of agrarian revolutions, of peasant demands, of their intersection with bourgeois revolutions. To dilute the precise outline of the working-class struggle and its political organ into popular movements means to fall back to positions inferior to those of the great historical polemics and splits. It was ‘popular’ motives that led to the defence of the homeland and the renunciation of the proletarian dictatorship. From ‘truly popular’ to ‘truly patriotic’ there was only one step to take. And it was taken indeed!

10 – Digging deeper – It is certain that if we look around us, whether in Italy and France or in Germany and America, we do not have a solely ‘trinitarian’ spectacle: we do not have it in the countryside, nor even in the cities. There are other social classes and strata, often statistically formidable. Although not excessively so, these strata are also on the move, agitating, tending to defend their interests and advocating new social arrangements to a greater or lesser extent. The problem must be studied scientifically, as must the tactics and policies of the working-class party towards these forces. The communist party, having built its theory and tactics for the countryside on the basis of the relationship between the exploited labourer, the capitalist tenant, and the agrarian bourgeois, will deal thoroughly with the problem of the other rural classes; but it will not approach this problem with the presumption of finding forces even remotely equal, or worse, superior to its own, in extension or intensity. Capitalism has not swept away, as it did with urban craftsmanship, the other rural classes, remnants of a past history, because the fundamental theorem of the doctrine of Rent has established that, for food production, capitalism cannot look down at all on preceding forms of society. Only socialism will strike a blow against the brutal antagonism between town and country. To define the laws governing the surviving economy and social dynamics of small property, small tenancy, and sharecropping, one must look backward to find weights to be moved, not the forces that will draw us further onward; and only then can we identify the distinctive features of the less modern rural forms. Lenin knew that, in order to probe the shifts in this social material, it is the bathyscaphe that is needed for exploring the abyssal depths of history, whose specimens still hide amid the vast distances of the continents that rampant capitalism has not yet managed to subjugate.

1 – Rent, a class fact – The doctrine of rent establishes that the enjoyment of a parasitic class, which consumes and does not work, depends on a privilege over man, not over nature; that is, over the agricultural wage-earner who must leave part of the fruit of his labour to the rentier group. The origin of this phenomenon derives from the domination of class over class, from the conditions and relations of production. If the right to own land is a right of levy upon the labour of men, exploitation and oppression will not cease even if the land becomes the property of every labourer or of the nation-state. ‘Two elements should be considered here: on the one hand, the exploitation of the earth for the purpose of reproduction or extraction; on the other hand, the space required as an element of all production and all human activity’ (Marx). Communism is the revenge of space against height. The development of labour power and of the genius of the species authorises the Moloch of landed power, that is, of the power of class over class, to levy tribute; without the landowners having lifted a finger or activated a nerve cell.

2 – They return the yoke and the whip – There may be the case, of little interest, of a ‘mercantile’ monopoly that creates Rent (a rare wine with a high price, with a surplus profit for the winegrower and Rent for the lucky owner). In the case of grain sold above its price of production, but also above its value, it is Rent that creates the monopoly price due to the barrier that private property imposes on Capital investment in uncultivated land without the payment of Rent. For Marx, the false theory that Rent is enjoyment of products that do not cost unpaid labour is supported by the misconception that the ‘buyer of land’ seems to have bought future products or part of them with money (which, according to the theory of equivalents, is crystallised labour). The leap forward of the productivity of human labour in the historical phase of primitive accumulation was indeed due to the young bourgeoisie’s hunger for power and wealth, but also to its courageous risk-taking and initiative. However, in our doctrine, this was not true forever, for an indefinite duration. Either capitalism, with its own way of creating social Surplus Labour on wage labour en masse, collapses, or it becomes a form of production as parasitic as slavery, feudalism, and ‘landlordism’. Just as the manufacturer’s profits gives rise to a ‘legal’ and ‘ethical’ explanation of the Interest of dormant Capital, which medieval philosophy castigated as usury and crime, so likewise ‘[t]o the [landowner], (...) the rent appears merely as interest on the capital with which he has purchased the land and consequently his title to the rent’ (Marx). It does not derive from the ‘late enjoyment’ of accumulated labour, but from class oppression, from physical violence sanctioned by law and the State.

3 – Wage labour, serf, slave – In treating the rent of land for construction, mines, and soil, Marx once again insists on the powerful determination of the revolutionary programme, which consists in replacing the private organisation and management of production with a collective and social unitary organisation and management. It is wrong to contrast a future social property with the current private property. Property is the existence of owners and non-owners, it is the division into classes, it is the domination of class over class. Therefore, ‘land to the nation’ is not the agrarian formula of communism. It is the Species that will conduct ‘as a good head of the household’ the management of ‘Planet Earth’ to leave improved to its children (Marx paraphrases here a formula found in all modern legislation, copied from Roman law). The Species, defined by a life without death, cultivates, manages, and transmits to itself the organised nature, the equipped crust of the planet, without breaks in time, without recording transfers at the lice-infested registry offices.

4 – Backwards into history – Let it therefore be clear that the small landowner, the small working peasant, classes that have never been protagonists, will not be found on our path if we proceed from the classical and trinitarian capitalist society towards the communist society. The genesis of modern Ground Rent has in Marx roots in the feudal world. In it, agricultural production is of a ‘natural’ character, i.e. not based on market relations, with the immediate link of labour with consumption, enclosed in the circuit of a limited territory over which the lord presides for the sake of security in cultivation. Furthermore, there is no market circulation and no transformation of the product into money. Before that, we have the type of production found in Asiatic lordships, where peasants work in common and pay the lord a tribute in products or gold. The owner is identified with the political State: Rent as tax and tax are the same thing. And thus, Marx demonstrates that, historically, mercantilism is not the only possible connective tissue between production and consumption. The medieval system ensures that production corresponds fairly well to the consumption of the workers and of the lord with his court. It only fails seriously in years of poor harvest and famine or in the event of enemy invasions. The class of agricultural workers is made up of serfs, a social type that has today disappeared. The serf cultivates his own field and has a modest set of tools. He is obliged by ‘rent in labour’ to work the lord’s land at given times, and the lord takes the product for himself. It is the personal servitude of the peasant, who cannot leave his home and the lord’s territory, whose wealth lies in the number of families subject to him in serfdom. The second obligation of the serfs is to deliver a portion of the product of the land they cultivate directly to their lord. This marks the transition from the primitive form of Rent in labour, the corvée, commanded, to the second form of Rent in kind, the tithe, payable to the lord, the State, or the Church.

5 – From serf to independent peasant – In the feudal sphere, the working peasant begins to gain economic independence, but not social independence. He, on a barren land, had to produce a little more than he consumes; that is, a part for himself and the rest for feudal obligations. On a more fertile land, he can set aside a reserve in the form of foodstuffs and then in tools, land, housing, and livestock. Before the revolutionary and political abolition of feudal relations, rich serfs subjugate other lesser serfs. But the exit from the natural economy and the spreading of the mercantile system in both industry and agriculture occurs gradually as Rent in kind gives way to Rent in money. A grand evolution begins which, in its purest form, leads to integral capitalist agriculture with a national and then international market. The class of capitalist tenants forms and, conversely, that of landless and penniless wage-earning peasants. Land becomes a tradable commodity, and with capital accumulated in the cities, new landowners emerge, who either manage the purchased lands or entrust them to tenant-farmers. The relationship between town and country is revolutionised to a greater extent than the replacement of artisan craft by large-scale manufacturing; which is why we define capitalism as an agrarian revolution. The dependency between town and country is reversed, production is no longer subjected to natural consumption, but consumption to artificial production. The decline in the price of manufactures and the rise in the price of food begins. In Italy, more than elsewhere, the countryside had been the tyrant of the city. The liberal revolution comes to politically subjugate lords and peasants and also to starve the urban popular layers, drunk with legal sovereignty. The evolution has indeed produced tenants, wage-earners, and bourgeois landowners; but it has also seen wealthy serfs and small land managers transform themselves into masses of independent working landowners and small peasants, now tributary to the bourgeois landowner.

6 – The partial-share farm – The peasant cultivates land that is not his property by himself and pays Rent to the owner either in money (the small rent) or in kind (the mezzadro, or sharecropper, because historically the harvest was divided in half between the owner and the worker). As the shares have varied over time, it is better to call him ‘partial-share peasant’. Moving from the small-rent peasant to the capitalist tenant who hires labourers, we have modern-day rich partial-share peasants, and by antonomasia sharecroppers. Between sharecropper and landowner there is an antithesis of interests over the amount of rent in kind (landlord’s Rent) as there is between labourer and sharecropper over the level of wages. Over time, the sharecropper breaks away from the peasant and moves closer to the capitalist tenant, resulting in a three-way struggle which sees the following political alignment in pre-war Italy: clerical or liberal landowners; republican sharecroppers (‘yellow’ chambers of labour); socialist labourers (the ‘red’ chambers of labour), and even Catholics (the ‘white’ leagues in Veneto). Let us examine the sharecropper who hoes the land in an economic relation of rural production not purely capitalist. How much the owner withdraws, Marx explains, can constitute both Ground Rent and a part of capital Profit. How much the sharecropper earns can constitute both Wages, but also part of the Business Profit (part of the means of labour are his). Rent, Profit, and Wages are not clearly isolable as they are for the capitalist tenant. But for the partial-share peasant who pays Rent in kind, the ‘removal from circulation of a large part of the value produced’ (Marx) is significant. The capitalist revolution is complete when all the product of labour in commodities and then in money enters an ever-widening single circuit in which production pours and consumption draws. Mercantilism can only be overcome by leveraging the fusion, in this immense magma, of the ancient islands of production and consumption. In sharecropping, the product goes to consumption outside the general circuit of commodities. It thus remains established that the partial-share farm (sharecropping) is a retrograde form, especially for the purposes of the transition to communism, compared to the rural enterprise with wage labour.

7 – Subtractions from the circuit – The formation and expansion of markets is the central fact of the rise of the modern economy; and also of the historical novel of the bourgeoisie, which revolutionarily transformed forms of life and activity everywhere. The capitalist economy becomes a social fact, confined within the limits of the law of exchange value, merely a vehicle for establishing the equilibrium between labour efforts and needs. The centre of the Marxist doctrine and programme demonstrates that the unfolding of capitalism renders inevitable new solutions, in the sense of the abandonment forever of compensations within local circuits, with the result, for the greater yield of general labour, of the convenience of having disposal over all products for all consumption without watertight compartments and without the expedient of monetary equivalence, which furnishes only the illusion of such a result while condemning every island of labour within the limits of its local material productivity. Socialism is the organisation of production in a unitary plan of social needs. The point where every factory or piece of land consumes as much as it produces for its workers must be surpassed; and worse still, where the budgets of nations, provinces, cities, or villages breakeven, in such types of utopian sketches of syndicalisms, communalisms, or corporatisms that change nothing. With industrial capitalism, humanity has made a giant leap forward in the yield of labour effort – excluding however the working class from enjoyment – because for manufactured products, the most powerful and profitable means have replaced the antiquated ones (aside from the well-founded criticism of the process of complication of needs). This has happened everywhere, but with one limitation. Where there naturally is not a Rent, until the ineluctable course of the capitalist cycle artificially generates the rent phenomenon! Hence why there has been no result remotely comparable to that in the sphere of manufactures in the agrarian field; and hence why the capitalist cycle is already regressive on all fronts, even though the volume of production continues to grow enormously. Where there is rent, i.e. monopoly – due to the political force of a class organised in public authorities – the process whereby the more useful productive form drives out the less useful is reversed until the capitalist shell is broken. There, the law prevails that everything is regulated by the worst system, by the most barren soil; there, technology sleeps dreams for five, or ten centuries, in contrast to the feverish desire to change equipment in other fields with very short ‘amortisation’ cycles.

8 – Feeble Arcadia – The stagnation of agricultural progress clashes against the enormous growth of the world population, unknown to the pre-capitalist world, which provided more bread. All the pathology of capitalism, which haunts the large agglomerations, less fiercely infects the countryside, and gives rise there to fewer needs, especially in the sphere of the distorted and morbid ones. And outdoor labour, if it does not deserve the literary apologies with which it was always surrounded, if it has its terrible extremes of misery and human degeneration – and especially where small-scale agriculture, hypocritically admired, has its domain – nevertheless does not present certain inhuman peaks of suffocation of the working man and does not force him, in principle, into ruthless conditions of environment and effort, if not muscular, nervous. Agriculture, with the barrier of Rent, has remained primitive; industry, which is free of it, has amassed too many workers into too many suffocating spaces, bringing, however, everyone to the conditions of the less primitive and more perfected case. The Rent phenomenon rages in the field of urban housing, where the monopoly on building lands drives up construction and usage costs, which have a tenfold impact on the proletarian standard of living, even though countermeasures can be contrived within the limits of capitalism. But it is in the extractive industry that Ground Rent reigns supreme with fierce relevance.

9 – Ribolla, the differential death – 42 workers have died in the Tuscan lignite mine in Ribolla. It was poorly equipped, nearing exhaustion and did not merit the expense of modernising the facilities: it was to be decommissioned, leaving Ribolla, for which it was the only economic resource, with unemployment and hunger. The procedures were those of centuries ago. The solution of leaving it open is worthy of the principles that govern the capitalist system: it is a fact that the dead do not eat. Compared to other countries rich in high-quality minerals, Italy is reduced to lignite and even peat and uses mines of poor fertility, which regulate the international price well and keeps up the price of anthracite, for which we pay dearly to the coal pool, the rentier of European fuel and mineral exploitation, a warm nest for capitalist surplus profit on raw materials for military and civil death. The fuels that are dug out of the bowels of the earth come from the geological digestion of plants, savannahs, and forests. They are more or less rich in carbon and of varying calorific power. Italy’s annual requirement is between 12 and 15 million tonnes, but production is only 2. Mussolini wanted to raise it from 3 in 1939 to 4, equal to 1/3 of the requirement. In 1942, 5 million were reached. The best anthracite reaches 9,000 calories/kg; peat, which must first be dried, 3,000. International prices vary with calorific efficiency at a rate of 2,000 lire per thousand calories. This means that the most worthless mineral, and therefore the least fertile mine, regulates the general market.

10 – Economic policy! – The extraction cost of Sulcis coal, extremely poor quality, is 11,700 net lire per tonne, and it is sold at a loss of 4,000 lire per tonne: a Rent in reverse. In addition to the net expenditure on constant capital and wages, there is the Profit of the operating companies and also an ‘absolute’ Rent, which Pantalone pays: the game costs the State 4 billion a year. Under these absurd conditions, production increases and the company has stockpiles of mountains of this poor-quality coal. The difference between the individual price of production of Cardiff coal at 12,000 lire and the market value, approximately 6,000 to 12,000 lire, constitutes differential rent for those mines. They will pay higher wages, but with better machinery the tonnes per year per unit of labour are much higher. The powerful stupidity, the most idiotic economic demagogy, is not to denounce Rent, Surplus Profit, the Profit of capitalist companies, which are fought only on the terrain of the social and political organisation of the whole of Europe, and not with mercantile and legislative manoeuvres, but to demand that the mines due for decommission remain open, and to ask for the absurdity of equipping them with expensive safety installations, knowing that they are about to be exhausted. This is what the extreme parties ask for in exchange for votes; like the capitalists, happy that the deficit is borne by the State, i.e. by Italian workers. In these foolish movements, the world of profiteers is raking in money by the bucketful. If the logical development of the economic laws of corporate capitalism leads to slaughter, this is not seen as an opportunity to awaken in the proletarian class the possession of the revolutionary class doctrine, but rather to seek ‘responsibility’, the fault of that particular capitalist leader, the scandal, the supreme oxygen of this spineless post-Dongo Italy, which in its wretched work of administration, common to governments and oppositions alike, follows the instructions of the man of Dongo, with results far more idiotic. If Italian capital, a poor subsection of world capital, but rich in experience and expedients thanks to its historical legacy, were to hold a competition for the best way to keep the working class away from returning to a revolutionary potential, the first prize would be won hands down by Italian Stalinism, with the masterpieces of its manoeuvres and its language, on each successive occasion more blatantly, boorishly sycophantic.

1 – Breakdown into factors – Marx’s analysis of agricultural social relations is carried out by comparing it with the pure case of the capitalist land economy with three figures: the owner who receives only Rent; the tenant who receives only Profit by advancing all capital; and the day labourer who receives only Wages. The three pure economic quantities overlap in various ways in practice, but we consider the quantities to be uniform and homogeneous, and the persons, or rather the classes, to be hybridised. Instead of courting the working peasant proprietor, and worse, raising him up as the ideal model of the free and autonomous man, we must dismantle him without hesitation and highlight the organs of the wage-earner, those of the entrepreneur, and those of the owner. Two souls, alas, are within him; indeed, three: herein lies the tragedy.

2 – Nomad and tenant – The tenant-farmer has a social physiology simpler than the peasant proprietor; he is not tied to the land: he is a free man. He detests change; he longs for long leases; the ‘freezing’ of rents, which has prevented rents from rising, did not favour agricultural labour, but agricultural capital; and if he demagogically tickles the sharecropper peasant and tenant-farmer, he does so only because of his bastard entrepreneurial structure, which is essentially what screws him over. The tenant-farmer distances himself from the small landowner because he is not tied to his land but can move anywhere. For both, consumption within the farm of the foodstuffs produced, with withdrawal from the mercantile circuit, prevails. In addition, parcelled property hinders not only the circulation of product-commodities but also that of working men. A ruling class, and above all the capitalist class, holds power and stifles any revolution all the more effectively the less sensitive it is to the movement of the products of labour and of the working people. Finally, the sharecropper has all the defects and negative aspects of early barbarism, incapable of anchoring his nourishment to a stable and permanent organisation: economically, the immediate local consumption within the farm with its poor horizons, the lack of even mercantile relations with the general circuit, is negative. As a worker, he eats what he makes with his own hands; as an entrepreneur, he pays Rent with a portion of the harvest. The peasant proprietor is not better off, paying taxes or interest on debts in money and tied to his place of work, which does not change for entire generations.

3 – The parcelled crown – The worker of the land whom the bourgeois revolution has made into a landowner has no master; even if the parish priest exercises a veritable social and political dictatorship over the small peasants. The bourgeois revolution has destroyed feudal obligations and freed the serf-peasant and has created ‘private security’ for personal property, including real estate. The question is: how much does the private security that has existed until now cost the privileged landowner by way of his 1/48th share, which will be destroyed by communism? For Marxism, land is not a product of labour and, in a mercantile environment, it is not a commodity; it has a price in an improper sense, but it has no ‘value’ and is not subject to the law of value in its transfers, even if the law of competition also plays a (misleading) role in these transfers. No one can say: I will allocate so much money-capital and I make myself so much land. Land is found and not produced: it can be free, it can be paid for with life. The right to secure legal immobility, for life and from father to son, extends across generations and seems to have something in common with the ‘rights of non-workers’ (lords, landowners, industrial entrepreneurs) in that it remains attached to the head of the family, from whom it will be inherited ‘only upon his death’. The revolutionaries of the twentieth century, more pedestrian and faded than the notaries of the nineteenth who drew up deeds of sale for land, celebrate in tricolour and dirty red the transfer of land ownership to rural little families, praising this deceitful lordship of hardship, this crown of beggars. In today’s society, the revolutionary artillery is aimed at the three targets of family, inheritance, and property, which must be destroyed not only when they are in the hands of a few, but above all if they are distributed among the many.

4 – Behind the screen – The social reality behind the display of fake sovereignty of the ‘free’ Cyrenean peasant of production must always be defined by weighing up the economic factors and calculating how much the small landowner pays for the ‘security’ he has gained after the conventional ‘emancipation’. Engels illustrates at length how the Frankish peasant, a former member of a horde and former imperial soldier, paid little to maintain the modest court of Charles; Charles went beyond the prospects of a parcelled agriculture, albeit with a very low population density, and experimented with large state or conventual farms. Much more murky forms remained in Eastern Europe. Marx describes one of them: ‘A portion of the land belongs to the individual peasant and is tilled independently by him. Another portion is tilled in common’. This brings to mind the defective side of the Russian kolkhoz: an economy half-mercantile, even half pre-mercantile. Marx dismisses with a few remarks the systems of collective production in which the landowner retains a margin indistinguishable from that of the entrepreneur. These are not trinitarian but dualistic forms, with the farm labourer, who owns no tools, receiving food or wages in kind and, in return, all the surplus labour undifferentiated between profit and rent. One form is the slave production of the classical world, in which everything appears as rent, a more modern one being that of the ‘plantations’ of America and other continents where rice or coffee are produced for distant markets using local semi-slave labour. A current form is that of the owner who manages in economy, i.e. without a tenant, directly through employed wage labourers. The trinity becomes a duality on the small farm (farmer and owner: binomial labour plus capital versus monomial property) and in direct management (worker and owner: monomial labour versus binomial capital plus property). What remains is the synthesis of the three in one: labour, capital, and property.

5 – Minimal agriculture – Marxism is extremely far removed from any appreciation of the parcelled system. If the capitalist mode of production, even if dominant, is relatively underdeveloped, we have, in fact, entirely negative conditions for the development of the modern class struggle and for socialism. However, the price of grain is lower than that of a fully developed capitalist regime with large landholdings run by industrial entrepreneurs and wage-earning workers. Since little product is sold on the market, it is difficult to speak of a general current price. But Differential Rent does exist. The more fertile land, with the same amount of effort, produces more grain, which it sells at the same price as that of the neighbours who obtain less. It must be kept in mind that Rent is determined first and then, from this ‘capitalised’ amount, the price of the land is derived according to the current rate of interest. But as a rule, in small-scale agriculture where agrarian capitalism is not widespread, there is no Absolute Rent. This will occur when industrial production is generalised within a general market, with the stabilisation of the average rate of profit of enterprises. Then it will be possible to fix the value of products and verify that, due to land monopoly and to the absolute necessity of food consumption, grain has a price higher than its value fixed by a worse soil (wages plus constant capital plus average profit). It follows that in a fully capitalist economy, the lower limit of the price of basic food must cover: Wages, Capital costs, average Profit, and Absolute Rent; while in a pre-capitalist economy, the lower limit of the price falls much lower: it consists purely of Costs plus Wages.

6 – And we vote for industry – In small-scale farming, production takes place with a waste of labour-power and rigid methods that require a great deal of labour for little output, even if consumers pay little for food on the market. In communist society, everyone will gift all their surplus labour to society; but, having achieved maximal labour productivity in manufactures and foodstuffs, society will ‘free everyone from necessary labour’. The small peasantry should be likened to a subjugated people; reduced to the level of the Helots of ancient Greece. In capitalist society, the price of manufactures falls because the transition from small to large enterprises allows new contributions from technology and science, so that a larger mass is produced with less and less labour time. With the proletarian revolution, the immobilisation and decline of agricultural productivity are eliminated; and thus a sufficient social mass of foodstuffs and manufactures will correspond to a short average labour time supplied to the classless society, without incomes divisible into basal trinitarian types and into mixed types derived and affixed by law on person-companies. The price of land is non-capital in nature; the same applies to any purchase of ‘income-bearing rights’. That is Marxism in a nutshell. There is no need to create or abolish small or large owners in their personal titular ownership. The formula that ‘not even society owns the land’ is illuminating. For jurists, a property that becomes perpetual and inalienable does not give rise to a right sicut dominus, as owner, but only to that particular usufruct. But, once again, we know very well where the Pentagon that must be blown up to destroy the double barrier against communism is: it is in the mercantile system and in the law of market price. We find one of these Pentagons wherever we find a State Bank.

7 – Extensio oder Intensio – Capital spent on land is neither investment capital nor operating capital, nor is it ‘capital which someone invests at the Stock Exchange in purchasing stocks or government securities’ (Marx). What ensures the holder the enjoyment of a rent is not capital. Capital is whatever is spent to obtain a product and to enjoy a Profit. Fixed capital for the bourgeois is the purchase value of the entire production plant (machinery, buildings, etc.). Circulating capital is the value of the raw materials to be purchased and the wages to be paid. For Marxism, capital is divided into variable capital, which goes into wages, and constant capital, which includes all other advances necessary for a production cycle; whereas expenditure on raw materials is circulating capital because it is used in its entirety to obtain the given product. Expenditure on a machine enters the fixed part of constant capital only for its share of wear and tear, i.e. depreciation. In the agrarian case, expenditure on wages, seeds, fertilisers, machine wear and tear and so forth is the Advanced Capital, which is included in the value of the grain produced, increased by normal Profit and Rent. The value of the land is never included in this calculation, nor is the construction or appraised value of the factory and mechanical installations of FIAT.

8 – Slave, one step forward – As for the slave owner, the wretched manager of the unfortunate scrap of land needs Labour, and he has it, even within his own family. He needs a bit of real Capital, and sometimes he has it, or else he goes into debt for it at the time of sowing and fertilising. But that is not enough. The father’s plot of land, divided among six or seven families of sons, cannot provide a living, and in general a bit more land must be bought. More debt, more mortgages, more selling of labour power, not unlike that of a slave (the capitalism of the prosperous USA reserves a similar treatment even for the wage-earner, in the form of goods sold on instalment). The monetary price of land yokes capitalism to rancid forms of pre-capitalism, which no industrial country, however advanced, has been able to eradicate. But the monetary price of products alone is enough to establish that the economy in which it prevails is stuck within the limits of capitalism. Agriculture under the present Soviet system is totally enmeshed, no less than in the West, in the family, in hereditary right, and in the associated blessing of the priest.

1 – Final stage – If, in following the Marxist construction of the agrarian question, we have not made any innovations nor introduced any variation we nevertheless wish to reiterate that we have not intended to develop any scholastic ‘subject’, within the limits of a programme that isolates it from others. The importance given to the agrarian sector and its theory lies in the fact that it encompasses the entire system. In order to understand its solution, it is necessary to clarify all the general and central cornerstones, to reach the explanation of the entire mechanism of present society, to give the equations of its dynamics; these will certainly be extrapolated, as in the past, so in the future.

2 – The Russian revolution – The problem of the influence of the rural classes had been fully defined before the two transitions of the bourgeois revolution, which overthrew the system of feudal serfdom, and the socialist revolution, led by wage labourers, both industrial and agricultural, in countries where significant strata of other rural classes, such as small tenant-farmers and landowners, are present. The solution to these questions is already contained in the ‘classic’ texts; just as Lenin claimed, and just as it presented itself in the social struggle in Russia.

3 – Between enemies and allies – With the emergence of the theory explaining struggles among human groups according to material interests and social position in production, the problem of class enmity arises alongside that of class alliances. The theory of class struggle does not mean the division of society into two classes. There are always more classes. We affirm that we are moving towards a classless society; not that one must first pass through a two-class society. The typical modern capitalist society is composed of three classes: proletarians, capitalists, and landowners, with three arrangements of one against two, and a fourth in which everyone is against the other two. In the heated periods of history, one of the class groups takes up an assaulting position against all the others. As the proletarian class recognises itself in history and sees the capitalist manufacturer against it, it becomes aware of the existence of various other classes that were already active in the old medieval society. The question of alliances with some of them immediately arises, and in the most varied ways. Marxism allows, for given historical circumstances, raising and enforcing the need for an armed and combative alliance in civil and national war between the wage-earners and their bourgeois masters; just as it outlines the relations between the proletariat and the other different classes in the aftermath of the complete bourgeois victory over the feudal regime. Only the proletariat has nothing of its own to secure. Only the wage-earning class is truly revolutionary because it is not tied to the infamous forms of family, inheritance, and homeland. The other strata, destined to fracture like geological formations of yielding and incoherent materials under the uplift of the flaming abyssal rock, or to be crushed between the folds of its corrugations, have been duly put in their place by Marxism, and not merely condemned to disappear. The working class, vanguard of the social revolution, has enemies; just as it has allies. At certain times, it fights ‘against the enemies of its enemies’. At other times, it will allow those lower strata who ‘take the side of the future’ to join it in its revolts, without entrusting them – always ready to follow the strongest – with central positions.

4 – Marx and France – Half a century after the first rise of the bourgeoisie to power, well over half of the French population is made up of peasants, a social stratum distinct from wage-earning proletarians and capitalists. The characters in the drama are not two, but three classes. A century has passed since then, and the French economy is usually described as predominantly agrarian and employs the labour of more than half of the population to whom it supplies the food product; with, in addition, strong exports. The secret of the anti-feudal revolutions has nothing to do with the ‘division of land’, either in France in 1789 or in Russia in 1917. The fields are already divided into small, technically autonomous farms, but over the whole network weighs the common shroud of the rights of feudal lords and religious institutions. Once the shroud is lifted, the land is ‘free’; but as a rule, there has been neither conquest by invasion nor the drawing of new boundaries between plots. Two miserable forms existed: serfdom and minimal cultivation. The former was dispersed, the latter unfortunately remains. First act. ‘No price had been paid’. ‘[T]he following generations paid, under the form of the price of land, what their semi-serf forefathers had paid in the form of rent, tithes, corvee, etc’. (Marx). The more the population grows, the more the land is divided, the higher its price, the higher the peasant’s debt (mortgage) becomes. But the more the land is subdivided, the more its fertility decreases and the more the increase in productivity is hampered. ‘The more, on the one hand, the population grew and the more, on the other hand, the partition of the soil increased, the higher became the price of the parcels (...) But in proportion as the price the peasant paid for his parcel rose, (...) necessarily the indebtedness of the peasant, that is, the mortgage, also rose (...) Now the fruitfulness of land diminishes in the same measure as land is divided’ (Marx). Today, at the end of the cycle, ‘the French peasant cedes to the capitalist, in the form of interest on the mortgages encumbering the soil and in the form of interest on the advances made by the usurer without mortgages, not only ground rent, not only the industrial profit – in a word, not only the whole net profit – but even a part of the wages, and that therefore he has sunk to the level of the Irish tenant farmer – all under the pretence of being a private proprietor’ (Marx).

5 – Peasants and politics – Marx says: ‘It can be seen that [the peasants’] exploitation differs only in form from the exploitation of the industrial proletariat. The exploiter is the same: Capital. The individual capitalists exploit the individual peasants through mortgages and usury, the capitalist class exploits the peasant class through the State taxes’. Leninism tells peasants that the dictatorship of the workers is that of their allies; something already written by Marxism in 1850, as was the other, that the constitutional republic is the dictatorship of all their exploiters; and Lenin also reiterated this. In 1950, to tell the peasant that the salvation of the constitutional republic constitution is his ideal, that it will guarantee him private ownership of the land, what is that then? Marxism, Leninism, democratic and petty-bourgeois socialism? It is not a matter of choosing between neat definitions: it is a load of crap.

6 – Between Bonaparte and the Commune – Marx goes on to say: ‘the Bonapartes are the dynasty of peasants (...) But let us not misunderstand. The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant who strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather one who wants to consolidate his holding’. These Italic Stalinists, who fight for the consolidation of the peasant within a grid-like enclosure traced around three plots, are they perhaps themselves Bonapartes, or only, as before, Vespasian? In Marx’s third work on the history of France – a veritable timetable of the express train of the revolution, announced late, but which will pass all the more sensationally – emphasis is placed on the relationship between the proletariat and the peasants. Marx reiterates that ‘The Commune was perfectly right in telling the peasants that “its victory was their only hope”’. Marx predicts that three months of relations between the Paris Commune and the French countryside would have provoked a peasant uprising: the French Junkers knew it and, according to Marx, ‘hence their anxiety to establish a police blockade around Paris’, to crush the first government of the proletariat in blood.

7 – Engels and Germany – Engels recalls that in Germany there was a great anti-feudal struggle with the peasant revolt of Münzer in 1525, which current history treats as a religious war, having not recognised its social basis. The peasants were defeated, and the chains of feudal serfdom reaffirmed. But the country nobles lost much wealth and autonomy in favour of the small principality: it was nevertheless a blow to feudal fragmentation. Thus, the small princes took advantage. In 1848, with workers, peasants, and urban bourgeois defeated, the great princes took advantage. But behind the small princes in 1525 were the petty bourgeois; behind the great princes in 1848 were the big bourgeois, and behind them the proletarians. In this unitary sense, even the counter-revolution is a historical step forward. Sedan and the formation of the empire, which led to German centralisation with a full 350 years delay after Münzer, were beneficial. A great historical question is thus closed, and that of the red international in Europe, of the dictatorship of the proletariat without a nation, is opened. Even if the peasant had no other inferiority, he has this one: the highest historical level he can reach, even by rising up, is national. In the 1874 preface, Engels deals with the question of alliances. The bourgeois had by now entered into an alliance with all the reactionary forces: nobility, monarchy, army, bureaucracy. In 1870, Engels says, we have the new class, the proletariat. But it is still far from forming the majority. It must therefore (how much work has been done with this therefore!) resort to alliances; and ‘can be found only among the petty bourgeoisie, the low-grade proletariat of the cities, the small peasants, and the wage workers of the land’.

8 – Allies in assistance – Let us review these social forces. Engels: ‘The petty bourgeoisie (...) is entirely unreliable except when a victory has been won. Then its noise in the beer saloons is without limit. Nevertheless, there are good elements among it, who, of their own accord, follow the workers’. (This concerns the organisation of the party, which is absolutely unrelated to the labourist form). As for the Lumpenproletariat, or urban underworld, according to Marx, ‘those who make use of these wretches betray the cause’. ‘The small peasants – since the medium-sized ones belong to the bourgeoisie – are either feudal peasants, still burdened with obligations to their lord, or tenant-farmers; the rent is so high that they are entirely dependent on the mercy of the landlord. From whom can they hope for salvation but from the working class? There remain the peasants who administer their own land, squeezed by the bourgeoisie and capitalist usurers. But they are very attached to that property, which in truth does not belong to them but to the usurer. They can be convinced that they will only be liberated by a government of the working class’. Engels finally discusses the agricultural wage-earners, pointing out their perfect social analogy with urban workers. As of 1874, Engels still had to lament that this class provided the voters for the Junkers and the bourgeois, the national-liberals, and the Catholic centre. Perhaps in Italy things were more advanced: priests and liberals did indeed have a following in the countryside, but, where farm labourers predominated, by the end of the 19th century the socialist political movement was already strong. One does not ask the agricultural wage-earner whether he is an ally; he is a brother in the militia of the revolution, who has held the front line a hundred times.

9 – Catastrophe among the conflicting theses

1 – Nature and Labour – The use values over which society disposes come from human Labour. Every class that controls the products through: the producers, their right to access land, the means of labour, has at its disposal goods it has not produced.

2 – Wealth and surplus labour – All income (in the form of Profit, Rent, and Interest) of non-productive classes derives from Surplus Labour (or Surplus Product) of the productive classes, to whom, for their preservation and reproduction, the political institutions (i.e. the power of the existing order) allocate the smaller part of the product.

3 – Partition of the product – The product (the value created in production, derived entirely from Labour) contains four elements: Constant Capital, Variable Capital, Profit, and Rent. Three withdrawals are taken from it: Wages, Profit for the capitalist entrepreneurs, and Rent for the landed proprietors.

4 – Assets and capital – Business Profits tend to equalise to an average rate until Rent comes into play. In this case, the product is sold at the price of production. For Marxism, the rate of surplus value is the ratio of Profit to Variable Capital; the rate of profit is the ratio of Profit to the cost of production, Constant Capital plus Variable Capital. For common economics, the rate of profit or dividend is the ratio of profit to capital assets. In this regard, it should be noted that land, money capital, and the appraised value of the means of labour (insofar as they remain intact with respect to the net product) are only social titles for making deductions from Profit (i.e. on Surplus Labour; and on Surplus Profit if it exists) and do not enter into the calculation of the distribution of the total product sold (the ‘turnover’ of the bourgeois).

5 – Differential Rent – Interest is part of Profit; the rest is business profit. Rent arises if there is extra profit relative to the social average rate of profit. An agricultural enterprise yields extra profit compared to another if, all other conditions being equal, higher fertility allows for a larger harvest. The net difference goes to the owner as Differential Rent.

6 – Law of the worst land – The price of industrial products tends towards their exchange value, equal to the price of production, including Profit at the average rate. The price of agricultural products is equal to the individual price of production of the least fertile land, which covers Costs and average Profit. On more fertile land, at the same expense, there is a greater product with a lower individual price of production; this results in a Surplus Profit which becomes Rent.

7 – Absolute Rent – There is also an Absolute Rent on less fertile land, and there too the market price is higher than the value, i.e. the price of production under the worst conditions; and this has been the case since the land has been wholly occupied and managed in capitalist enterprises. The historical capitalist mode of production, as it spreads, makes the price of manufactures fall and the price of foodstuffs rise.

8 – Industry and agriculture – Capitalism cannot reconcile: industrial and agricultural prices; the satisfaction of needs according to a social utility; the distribution of wealth, capital, and income. It therefore tends to diverge increasingly from equilibrium. And this is because the distribution of the product among the incomes of the classes is due to a current market price that is the same for commodities produced under different conditions and in different ratios of effort and result. This is due to the law of value (or equivalence in exchange) and to mercantile distribution. Industrial capital proceeds with an ever-improving organic composition (high technological level), which determines the general historical fall in the rate of profit even at a constant rate of surplus value. This process, in agriculture, is blocked both by the private monopoly of land and, above all, by the mercantile levelling of all products to be exchanged and by the unfavourable population-land ratio. The transfer of Ground Rent to the State would in no way eliminate the causes of this essential fact.

9 – Communism is anti-mercantilism – Measures that do not go beyond the mercantile and therefore capitalist framework would leave unchanged the enormous total social labour with the meagre total social consumption; and thus the imbalance between contributions of labour and enjoyment of consumption. These are the characteristics of the communist programme of the proletarian revolution to overcome corporate despotism and the anarchy of production: A – Abolition of the administration of production by companies. B – Abolition of distribution by means of mercantile and monetary exchange, both for commodity-products and for human labour power. C – A unified social plan, measured in physical quantities, for the allocation of labour power, raw materials, and tools to the various productive sectors and for the allocation of products to the sectors of consumption. Socialism is the abolition of all mercantile value and all coerced and paid labour. The surplus labour of each individual is given to society (not to others or to themselves).

10 – Parcelisation and misery – The strata of the agricultural working population other than wage-earners, which capitalist society will never be able to purge, are remnants of past social forms. They form a class, almost a caste of the oppressed, backward in relation to the modern world, incapable – however much their hunger revolts may disturb bourgeois power – of embodying new revolutionary social forms. The revolution is the task of the class of wage-earning proletarians in industry and agriculture; and its sole historical function is the revolutionary dictatorship.

11 – Monopoly and competition – The Marxist theory of value negates the bourgeois theory of competition, revealing the class monopoly character of the capitalist economy. Recent phenomena, which have confirmed Marxist doctrine and all its predictions, are fully framed within the rigorous theorems on Rent (applied to all natural forces: agricultural and industrial) and represent the current bases of surplus profits, monopolies, and rentier parasitism, which will further aggravate the imbalance of the capitalist social form.

12 – The enemy science – The only so-called possible science for modern economists and professors is based on recording concrete prices, whose fluctuations they follow, which can be extremely complex. Marxism retorts: Les professeurs à la Lanterne!