Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/183

 to arrive at the equalitarian distribution of the product of inequality.

We can understand such economists as Mill, Cher-bulliez, Hilditch, and others, demanding that rent should be handed over to the State to be used for the remission of taxation. That is only the frank expression of the hate which the industrial capitalist feels for the landed proprietor, who appears to him as a useless incumbrance, a superfluity in the otherwise harmonious whole of bourgeois production.

But to first take twenty francs for the hectolitre of wheat in order to afterwards make a general distribution of the ten francs too much charged to the consumers,—that would indeed be sufficient to make the social genius pursue its zigzag way in melancholy, ready to knock its head against any corner.

Rent becomes, under the pen of M. Proudhon, "an immense land valuation made independently by the landlords and the farmers in a superior interest, the definite result of which must be to equalise the possession of the land between the exploiters of the soil and the manufacturing classes."

In order for any valuation whatever, determined by rent, to be of practical utility, it is necessary always to remain in the conditions of existing society.

But we have demonstrated that the farm rent, paid by the farmer to the landlord, expresses almost exactly the rent only in those countries most advanced in industry and commerce. Yet this farm rent often includes the interest paid to the landlord for the capital incorporated in the land. The situation of soils, the neighborhood of towns, and very many other circumstances, influence the farm hire and modify the rent. These