Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/178

 restating the same problem and increasing it by a syllable.

We may further observe that in determining rent by the difference of fertility of the soil, M. Proudhon assigns to it a new origin, since land, before being estimated according to the different degrees of fertilty, "was not," according to him, "a value in exchange, but was common." What has it now become, this fiction of rent which sprang from the necessity of attaching to earth man who was likely to lose himself in the infinity of space?

Let us now extricate the doctrine of Ricardo from the providential, allegorical and mystical phrases in which M. Proudhon has been careful to envelop it.

Rent, in the Ricardian sense, is property in land in the bourgeois state—that is to say, feudal property which has been subjected to the conditions of bourgeois production.

We have seen that, according to Ricardo, the price of all products is finally determined by the cost of production including in that industrial profit—in other terms, by the time of labor employed. In the manufacturing industry the price of the product obtained by the minimum of labor regulates the price of all other commodities of the same kind, provided that the least costly and most productive instruments of production may be multiplied to infinity, and that, therefore, free competition necessarily creates a market price—that is to say, a common price—for all the products of the same kind.

In agricultural industry, on the contrary, it is the price of the product obtained by the greatest amount of labor which regulates the price of all the products of the same kind. In the first place, we cannot, as in manufacturing