MARX TO ENGELS?” 

{[London,] 26 November 1869 

Dear Fred, 

This week I have not been really on my feet, and the business 
under my arm is still a bother. That’s why I didn’t thank you 
earlier for the notes on Carey, whose volume I also received 
yesterday.* 

In my book against Proudhon, in which I still fully accepted 
Ricardo’s theory of rent, I already explained the fallacies, even 
from his (Ricardo’s) own point of view.° 

‘Ricardo, after postulating bourgeois production as necessary for determining 
rent, applies the conception of rent, nevertheless, to the landed property of all ages 
and al] countries. This is an error common to all the economists, who represent the 
bourgeois relations of production as eternal categories.’ 

Mr Proudhon naturally converts Ricardo’s theory into an 
expression of egalitarian morals at once, and thus discovers in the 
rent determined by Ricardo: 

‘an immense land valuation which is carried out contradictorily by the proprietors and 
the farmers ... in a higher interest, and whose ultimate result must be to equalise the 
possession of the land, etc.’ 

To this I remarked, inter alia: 

‘For any land valuation based upon rent to be of practical value, the conditions of 
present society must not be departed from. Now we have shown that the rent¢ paid by 
the farmer to the landowner expresses the rent4 with any exactitude only in the 
countries most advanced in industry and commerce. Moreover, this rent often 
includes interest paid to the Jandowner on capital incorporated in land. The location of 
the land, the nearness of towns, and many other circumstances influence the farm 
rent and modify the land rent... On the other hand, rent could not be the invariable 
index of the degree of fertility of the land, since every moment the modern application of 
chemistry is changing the nature of the soil, and geological knowledge is just now, in 

a See this volume, pp. 378-82. - > K. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy. Answer to the 
‘Philosophy of Poverty’ by M. Proudhon (see present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 202-04). Marx 
quotes in French. - ¢ in the original: le fermage (lease money) - 4 in the original: la 
rente 

our days, beginning to revolutionise all the old estimates of relative fertility ... fertility is not 
so natural a quality as might be thought; it is closely bound up with the social relations 
of the time.’ 

As far as the development of cultivation in the United States is 
concerned, Mr Carey ignores even the most familiar facts. For 
instance, Johnston, the English agricultural chemist, shows in his 
Notes on the United States*: the agricultural migrants from New 
England to New York State left worse for better land (better not 
in Carey’s sense of land, which still had to be made first, but in the 
chemical and also economic sense); the agricultural migrants from 
New York State who first settled beyond the Great Lakes, say in 
Michigan For instance, left better for worse land, etc. The settlers in 
Virginia exploited so abominably the land so suitable both in 
location and fertility for tobacco, their main product, that they had 
to move on to Ohio, where the land was worse for this product (if 
not also for wheat, etc.). The nationality of the immigrants also 
made itself felt in their setthements. The people from Norway and 
from our timber forests selected the rugged northern forest land 
of Wisconsin; the Yankees in the same territory kept to the 
prairies, etc. 

Prairies, both in the Unrrep States and Australia, are, IN FACT, a 
thorn in Carey’s flesh. According to him, land not absolutely 
overgrown with forest is infertile by nature, that is all natural 
grasslands. 

The joke of it is that Carey’s two great final conclusions (with 
regard to the United States) directly contradict to his dogma. First, 
as a result of England’s diabolical influence, the inhabitants, 
instead of socially cultivating the good model lands of New 
England ovisseminatep to the poorer (!) lands of the West. Thus, a 
move from better land to worse. (Besides, sy THE sy, Carey’s 
DISSEMINATION, in Opposition to association, is all copied from 
Wakefield.) Second, in the south of the United States we have the 
misfortune that the slave-owners (whom Mr Carey, as a harmon- 
iser, defended in all his previous works) take the better land under 
cultivation too soon and skip the worse. Thus, just what should 
not happen: starting with the better land! If, with this example, 
Carey convinces himself that the real cultivators—zin this case the 
slaves—are induced neither by economic reasons, or other reasons 
OF THEIR Own, but by external constraint, he should have been able to 

aj. F. W. Johnston, Notes on North America, Agricultural, Economical and 
Social. - > [E. Wakefield,] England and America. A Comparison of the Social and Political 
State of Both Nations. 

count on his own 5 fingers that this occurs in other countries too. 

According to his theory, cultivation in Europe should have 
originated in the mountains of Norway and proceeded from there 
to the Mediterranean countries, instead of marching in the other 
direction. 

Carey tries, by means of an extremely absurd and fantastic 
theory of money, to conjure up anyway the very disgusting 
economic fact that, in contrast to all other improved machinery, 
the always better earth-machine, increases the cost of its product— 
at least for a period—instead of cheapening it. (This was one of 
the circumstances that struck Ricardo; but he poked his nose no 
further than the history of corn prices in England from about 
[QA: garble stripped 2026-06-23]

As a harmoniser, Carey first proved there was no ANTAGONISM 
between capitalist and wage labourer. The second step was to show 
the harmony between landowner and capitalist, and this is done by 
showing land-ownership as being normal where it has not yet 
developed. The fact that may, under no circumstances, be 
mentioned is the great and decisive difference between a colony 
and an old civilised country: that, in the latter, the mass of the 
population is excluded by landed property from the soil, whether it 
be fertile or infertile, cultivated or uncultivated; while in the 
colonies, the land can, RELATIVELY SPEAKING, Still be appropriated by 
the cultivator himself. This may play absolutely no part in the 
rapid development of the colonies. The disgusting ‘property 
question’, and that in its most disgusting form, would of course 
put a spoke in the wheel of harmony. 

As regards the deliberate distortion that, because in a country 
with developed production the natural fertility of the soil is an 
important factor in the production of surplus value (or, as Ricardo 
says, affects the rate of profit), it follows conversely that the richest 
and most developed production will be found in those areas most 
fertile by nature, so it should be higher in Mexico, for example, 
than New England; I have already answered this in Capital, p. 502 
et seq.” 

Carey’s only merit is that he asserts, just as one-sidedly, the 
movement from worse to better land as Ricardo asserts the 
opposite. In fact, however, soil-types of differing grades of fertility 
are always cultivated simultaneously, and for this reason the 
Germans, the Slavs and the Celts very carefully distributed scraps 

a Marx refers to the first German edition of Capital, Vol. I (see present edition, 
[QA: garble stripped 2026-06-23]

of land of different types amongst the members of the communi- 
ty; it was this that later made division of the community lands so 
difficult. As for the development of cultivation in the course of 
history, this—depending on the circumstances—takes place in 
both directions simultaneously, and one direction or the other 
dominates according to the epoch. 

The factor that makes the interest on the capital invested in the 
land a component part of differential rent is precisely the fact that 
the landowner receives this interest from capital which not he, but 
the tenant-farmer has invested in the land. This fact, known 
throughout Europe, is claimed to have no economic existence, 
because the tenant-farmer system has not yet developed in the 
United States. But this fact presents itself in another form there. 
The land jobber and not the tenant-farmer is ultimately paid in the 
price he gets for the land, for the capital expended by the 
tenant-farmer. Indeed, the history of the pioneers and the Lanp 
jossers in the United States is reminiscent of the worst horrors 
taking place, for instance, in Ireland. 

But now vamn Carey! Vivar ror O’Donovan Rossa! 

Last Tuesday’s meeting was very fiery, lively, vehement.* Mr 
Mupp.eneaD,” or the devil knows what he’s called—a Chartist, an 
old friend of Harney’s—had foresightedly brought Odger and 
Applegarth along. On the other hand, Weston and Lucraft were 
absent, attending an Irish ball. Reynolds’s had published my 
RESOLUTIONS” in its Saturday issue, together with an asstract of my 
SPEECH (as well as Eccarius could do it; he’s no stenographer) and 
Reynolds’s printed it right on the front page of the paper following 
opening editorial. This seems to have scared those who are flirting 
with Gladstone. Hence the appearance of Odger and a LONG RAMBLING 
speech OF Mottershead, who got it in the neck badly from Milner 
(himself an Irishman). Applegarth sat next to me, so did not dare 
to speak against; on the contrary he spoke for, obviously with an 
uneasy conscience. Odger said that, if the vores were forced, he 
would have to vote for the reso_utions. But unanimity was surely 
better and could be obtained by a few minor mopirications etc. 
Then I declared—since it is precisely him I wish to push into a 
corner—that he should present his modifications at the next 
session! At the last session, although many of our most reliable 

a Thomas Mottershead - > See this volume, pp. 375-76. - © [Record of Marx’s 
Speech on the Policy of the British Government with Respect to the Irish Prisoners. 
From the Minutes of the General Council Meeting of 16 November 1869]