Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/13

 dealt with in this volume which are barely touched upon in the single book of "Capital" which has been translated into English.

Marx's criticism of Proudhon's theory that "the time which is necessary to create a commodity indicates exactly its degree of utility," so that "the things of which the production costs the least time are the things which are the most immediately useful," has been matched by H. M. Hyndman's crushing refutation of the theory of Final Utility. The subject of rent, too, has been fully dealt with by the latter in the same book, "The Economics of Socialism," published, as the author says, in the hope of furnishing "the rapidly-increasing number of students of sociology with a concise and readable statement of the main theories of the scientific school of political economy founded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels." Neither of these facts, however, necessarily detracts from the value of this older work of Marx's. On the question of rent, after reviewing the Ricardian theory and the many objections which present themselves to that theory, Hyndman says: "It seems, therefore, that a wider definition of the rent of land under capitalism is needed than that given by Ricardo, and the following is suggested:—Rent of land is that portion of the total net revenue which is paid to the landlord for the use of plots of land after the average profit on the capital embarked in developing such land has been deducted." On the question of confiscating rent he says it "would not affect the position of the working portion of the community unless the money so obtained were devoted to giving them more amusement, to providing them with better surroundings and the like In fact, the attack upon competitive rents is merely a capitalist attack. That class sees a considerable income going off to a set of