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Briefly, land in so far as it yields interest, is land capital, and as land capital it yields no
rent, it is not landed property. Rent results from the social relations in which the
exploitation of the land takes place. It cannot be a result of the more or less solid, more or
less durable nature of the soil. Rent is a product of society and not of the soil.
According to M. Proudhon, "improvement in the use of the land" a consequence "of
the perfecting of industry" causes the continual rise in rent. On the contrary, this
improvement causes its periodic fall.
Wherein consists, in general, any improvement, whether in agriculture or in
manufacture?? In producing more with the same labor; in producing as much, or even
more, with less labor. Thanks to these improvements, the farmer is spared from using a
greater amount of labor for a relatively smaller product. He has no need, therefore, to
resort to inferior soils, and installments of capital applied successively to the same soil
remain equally productive.
Thus, these improvements, far from continually raising rent as M. Proudhon says,
become on the contrary so many temporary obstacles preventing its rise.
The English landowners of the 17th century were so well aware of this truth, that they
opposed the progress of agriculture for fear of seeing their incomes diminish. (See Petty,
an English economist of the time of Charles II.)
Next: Strikes and Combinations of Workers
Footnotes
[1] L'homme aux quarante écus: "The Man of Forty Ecus" the hero of Voltaire's story
of the same name, a modest, hard-working peasant with an annual income of 40 ecus; the
following passage is quoted from the story.
[2] In the original manuscript, Marx makes a play on words in the French: turning
"propriete" (property) into "proprietaire" (landowner) and "rente" (rent) into "rentier"
(rent-reciever).
The Poverty of Philosophy
Karl Marx
The Poverty of Philosophy
Chapter Two: The Metaphysics of Political Economy
Strikes and Combinations of Workers
"Every upward movement in wages can have no other effect than a rise in the price of
corn, wine, etc., that is, the effect of a dearth. For what are wages? They are the cost price
of corn, etc.; they are the integrant price of every- thing. We may go even further: wages
are the proportion of the elements composing wealth and consumed reproductively every
day by the mass of the workers. Now, to double wages ... is to attribute to each one of the
producers a greater share than his product, which is contradictory, and if the rise extends
only to a small number of industries, it brings a general disturbance in exchange; in a
word, a dearth....
"It is impossible, I declare, for strikes followed by an increase in wages not to culminate
in a general rise in prices: this is as certain as that two and two make four."
(Proudhon, Vol.I, pp.110 and 111)
We deny all these assertions, except that two and two make four.
In the first place, there is no general rise in prices. If the price of everything doubles at
the same time as wages, there is no change in price, the only change is in terms.
Then again, a general rise in wages can never produce a more or less general rise in the
price of goods. Actually, if every industry employed the same number of workers in
relation to fixed capital or to the instruments used, a general rise in wages would produce
a general fall in profits and the current price of goods would undergo no alteration.
But as the relation of manual labor to fixed capital is not the same in different industries,
all the industries which employ a relatively greater mass of capital and fewer workers,
will be forced sooner or later to lower the price of their goods. In the opposite case, in
which the price of their goods is not lowered, their profit will rise above the common rate
of profits. Machines are not wage-earners. Therefore, the general rise in wages will affect
less those industries, which, compared with the others, employ more machines than
workers. But as competition always tends to level the rate of profits, those profits which
rise above the average rate cannot but be transitory. Thus, apart from a few fluctuations, a
general rise in wages will lead, not as M. Proudhon says, to a general increase in prices,
but to a partial fall that is a fall in the current price of the goods that are made chiefly
with the help of machines.
The rise and fall of profits and wages expresses merely the proportion in which capitalists
and workers share in the product of a day's work, without influencing in most instances
the price of the product. But that "strikes followed by an increase in wages culminate in a
general rise in prices, in a dearth even" those are notions which can blossom only in
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