Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/181

 ture transformed into commercial industry, industrial capital applied to the land, the bourgeoisie of the towns transplanted into the country. Rent, instead of "attaching man to nature," has only attached the exploitation of the land to competition. Once constituted as rent, landed property itself is the result of competition, since thenceforward it depends upon the saleable value of agricultural products. As rent, landed property is mobilised and becomes an effect of commerce. Rent is possible only from the moment in which the development of the industry of the towns and the social organisation resulting therefrom force the landlord to have regard only to venal profit, to the monetary relation of his agricultural products; to see, in fine, in his landed property, only a machine for making money. Rent has so perfectly detached the landed proprietor from the soil, from nature, that he scarcely needs to know his lands, as we see in England. As to the farmer, the industrial capitalist and the agricultural laborer, they are no more attached to the soil which they cultivate than the capitalist and the workman in manufacture are attached to the cotton or the wood they use; they have regard only for the price of their exploitation, for the monetary product. To that fact is due the jeremiads of the reactionary parties who fervently pray for the return of feudalism, for the happy patriarchal life, for the simple and noble manners of our ancestors. The subjection of the soil to the laws which rule every other industry is and will always be the subject of interested condolences. Thus we might say that rent is the motive force which has cast idyllism into the historical movement.

Ricardo, after having supposed bourgeois production as necessary in order to determine rent, applies it nevertheless to landed property in every epoch in every coun