(London,] 5 October 1853 
28 Dean Street, Soho 

Dear Cluss, 

That I have writer’s itch, and this in the ‘loftier sense of the 
term’, you must needs conclude from the fact that I am writing to 
you today although—as so often nowadays—I have been working 
without a break for thirty hours on end. 

D’abord,? 1 want you, if it is at all possible, to get the German 
press to publish my Palmerston article.*° 

On the 17th Jones will be setting forth on another tour of the 
manufacturing districts and tomorrow evening will call in here to 
get material for a campaign against that great HuMsuc.**” It is comic 
that we are forced to teach the English their own history. 

Willich’s journeymen’s association (the London one), already 
demoralised since our resignation, has now become too much of a 
good thing even for that Hippopotamus Schapper, who has also 
withdrawn. 

Quant a* Carey and Ricardo’s theory of rent**: 

1) If we assume—as Carey would have it—that rent is simply 
another form of profit on capital or, still more precisely, of interest, 
this does not disprove but merely simplifies Ricardo’s theory. The 
economic antithesis, in the most general sense, would simply 
coincide with the antithesis of capital and wage labour, Prorir (and 
INTEREST) ON ONE SIDE and WAGES ON THE OTHER. The antithesis to capital 
within property would be eliminated (in so far as we disregard, 

@ See this volume, pp. 371 and 372-73. - > First - © German Workers’ Educational 
Society - 4 As for 

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Die Reform of 2 November 1853 with Marx’s article ‘Palmerston’ translated by Cluss 

d’abord, the antithesis between individual kinds of capital deter- 
mined by the division of labour, and then, the antithesis between 
individual capitalists), but the antithesis te property would be all 
the more comprehensive. 

2) I am of course aware that, in an attempt to complete his 
theory, the worthy Carey also reduces profit (interest included) to 
wages in a different form. D/abord, is not Protestantism, for 
example, merely a different form of religion from Catholicism? 
Does the antithesis, the contradiction, the struggle between them 
cease—and that is what you are dealing with—because they are 
both religions? Thus, even assuming that profit and wages are 
simply 2 different forms of the return on labour, the result is not 
to reconcile them but merely to reduce their difference to a 
simplified expression. 

But how does he define their otherness? Profit is the wages for 
past labour. Wages are the profit on immediate present labour. Eh 
bien! How does this avail him? For it is precisely from its 
thraldom, from its slavery to past, materialised labour that present, 
i.e. actual labour seeks to emerge, and from its thraldom to the 
product of labour that labour seeks to be emancipated. The old 
feudal laws were also at one time the present expression of popular 
activity. Is that any reason why we should be subjugated by them 
now? 

At best, therefore, he is merely changing the phrase ‘oppression 
of labour by capital’, into the phrase ‘oppression of present labour 
by past labour’. 

There still remains the question, ‘How do I gain possession of 
past labour?’ By labour? No. By inheritance on the one hand and, 
on the other, by the fraudulent exchange of past for present 
labour. If past labour were exchanged for an equal quantity of 
present labour, the owner of past labour could continue to 
consume only so long as he had aliquot portions to exchange and, 
at a given moment, would himself have to start working again. 

3) Carey has himself wholly failed to understand Ricardo’s 
theory of rent when he maintains that it is based on the successive 
deterioration of land. Ricardo—as I have proved in my book against 
Proudhon >— falls into the common error of all other bourgeois 
economists, when he passes off the form of landed property as an 
‘eternal natural law’ of history in general, whereas it is the product 
of purely industrial circumstances. His theory is true only of 

4 Well! - > K. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy. Answer to the ‘Philosophy of Poverty’ by 
M. Proudhon. On critique of Ricardo’s theory of rent see Chapter II, § 4: “Property 
or Rent’. 

14— 2736 

bourgeois society in a condition of full development. Rent, in its 
commercial form—the only one he mentions—does not otherwise 
exist at all. It therefore leaves him unaffected to maintain that at 
various historical epochs it was not the worse, but rather the 
better, lands that were successively cultivated. The historically better 
land of one period does not count as land at all for the other{s]. 
Moreover, Ricardo does not speak only of the natural properties 
of the soil, but also of its situation, a social product, a social 
attribute. 

The fertility of the soil, as I have likewise already said in the 
Anti-Proudhon, is something purely relative. Changes in the soil’s 
fertility and its degree in relation to society, and that is the only 
aspect of fertility with which we are concerned, depend on 
changes in the science of chemistry and its application to 
agronomy. 

4) Assuming a given condition of society, not any society, but one 
of full bourgeois development, with a populous countryside [...] etc., 
even this part of Ricardo’s theory— unessential to his system—is 
correct. 

Firstly. Types of land, with an equal infusion of capital and 
equally well situated for markets; how can their rents be 
differentiated? Merely by their natural fertility. This constitutes 
the level of rent. 

On this assumption, when will a corn field of inferior quality be 
cultivated or a less productive coal-mine be exploited? When the 
price of corn or coal has risen so high as to enable the less 
productive ones to be cultivated or exploited. Hence the cost of 
production of the poorer land determines the rent of the richer. (This is 
Ricardo’s Law.) 

Secondly. Does this exclude a constant increase in fertility? 
Hence, does it include Malthus? By no means. 

If 1 is the best land, followed by 2, 3, 4, etc., and fertility is 
increased tenfold, the relation between 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., remains as 
before. Were fertility to become so great as a result of chemical 
discoveries that 1, 2 and 3 sufficed, land 4 would no longer be 
cultivated. The cost of production of land 3 (let it =3) would then 
determine the rent. When land 4 (let its production costs =4) still 
had to be brought under cultivation, the rent of land 1 (let its 
production costs =1)=4—1=3. The rent of land 3=3—1=2. The 
rent of land 2=2—1=1. Now, however, the rent of | would =2, 
that of 2 would =1 and that of 3 would =0. Should the fertility of 
the land so increase that only 1, the best land, had to be cultivated, 
rent would disappear completely. 

5) Ricardo’s theory is based not on the doctrine of rent, but on 
the law that the price of a commodity is determined by its cost of 
production. That law, however, should not be understood as 
meaning that the price of individual commodities is determined by 
their cost of production. Rather, the commodity produced under 
the most unfavourable circumstances, and made necessary because 
of the demand for it, determines the price of all other commodities 
of the same kind. ¥E.g. if demand is so great that flour, the 
production price of which is 20/-a Quarter, can be placed on the 
market, then a qr. of flour costing 19, 18, 17, 15, etc., to produce 
is also sold at 20/-. The amount by which the market price, 
regulated by the cost of production of the dearest Quarter to be 
placed on the market, exceeds the production costs of the less 
expensively produced flour, regulates the rent. What, then, gives 
rise to rent? Not the land, as supposed by Ricardo, but the market 
price and the laws by which it is regulated. If the quarter, which 
costs only 15/-(profit included) were sold, not at 20/-, but at 15, 
it could not carry a rent of 5. Why, then, does it do so? Because 
the market price is regulated by the flour the cost of production 
of which =20. In order that this may be placed on the market, 20 
must be the general market price. Hence, if rent is to be 
overthrown, it must not be interpreted philanthropically; rather 
the laws of market price and thus of prices generally and thus 
the whole Framework of the bourgeois economy must be over- 
thrown. 

So much for today on this subject. 

Your 
K. M.*° 

On types of land having the same properties and an equally 
favourable situation, the rent will, however, be determined merely 
by the proportion of capital wedded to the land. Nor does Ricardo 
deny this. Rent is then merely interest on capital fixe.* To say that, 
in cases in which rent does not exist in an actual, specific sense, its 
specific antithesis to capital and labour does not exist either, is no 
less true than to say that, where there is neither labour nor 
investment of capital, no antithesis between capital and wage 
labour exists. Instead there is, in the case under consideration, an 
antithesis between profit and interest, between rentiers (in the 
ordinary sense) and industrial capitalists. The less the tenant pays 

a fixed capital 

14* 

the man whose capital is wedded to the land, the greater will be 
his profit and vice versa. The tenant and his LanpLorp (even though 
the latter simply draws interest on the capital employed on the 
land) would thus be as much at loggerheads as before. 

The case most favourable to Carey is as follows: 

Let the product of labour, the profit and interest =2, rent =1, 
wages =2. Now if, as a result of a rise in the productivity of 
labour, the product doubles and =10, the rent might =2, profit 
and interest =4, wages =4. To that extent it could be said that 
every kind of revenue may increase at no expense to labour and 
without landowner, capitalist and worker being mutually at 
loggerheads. But: 

1) Assuming this most favourable instance to be real, all it 
means is that the antitheses—rent, profit, wages—all three, 
become more marked without losing any of their qualitative 
position relative to one another; 

2) Relatively they can only rise or fall at each other’s expense. In 
the foregoing example, the proportion =1:2:2. Does not the ratio 
remain the same if it =2:4:42 A change in this relative income 
would occur if, for example, wages were to =5, profit =3, and 
rent =2. The profit would then have fallen relatively, although in 
absolute terms it would have risen. 

3) It is par trop* naive to suggest that, if the total product of labour 
rises, the three classes among whom it is to be shared will share 
equally in that growth. If profit were to rise by 20%, the workers 
would have to strike to obtain a 2% rise in WAGES. 

4) The conditions that govern an increase in the total product preclude 
such relatively equal increase from the outset. If the increase is due to a 
better division of labour, or to a greater employment of 
machinery, the worker is, from the outset, placed at a disadvan- 
tage vis-a-vis the capitalist. If it be due to increased fertility of the 
soil, the landowner is worse off vis-a-vis the capitalist.