Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/180

 THE METAPHYSICS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 173

tion should be subject to the régime of the great industry ; in fine, that the landed proprietor himself should aim at nothing more than the monetary revenue. /

Rent may no longer exist, as is the case in Ireland, although farming there has been developed to an ad- vanced degree. Rent being the excess, not only over wages, but over the industrial profit, it cannot exist where the revenue of the proprietor is only a previous deduction from wages.

But, far from making of the exploiter of the soil, of the farmer, a simple laborer, and “dragging from the peasant the excess of the product which he cannot be prevented from regarding as his own,” rent sets before the landed proprietor the industrial capitalist, instead of the slave, the serf, the tributary, the wage-worker.

Further, a considerable time elapsed before the feudal farmer was replaced by the industrial capitalist. In Germany, for example, this transformation did not begin until the last third of the eighteenth century. It is only in England that this relation between the industrial capialist and the landed proprietor has been fully devel- oped.

So long as there was only the cultivator of M. Proudhon there was no rent. When there is rent the peasant is not the farmer, but the workman, the employé of the farmer. The degradation of the cultivator re- duced to the position of simple workman, day-laborer wage-worker, laboring for the industrial capitalist; the intervention of the industrial capitalist, exploiting the land like any other factory; the transformation of the landed proprietor from a petty sovereign into a vulgar usurer: those are the different relations expressed by rent.

Rent, in the Ricardian sense, is patriarchal agricul-