Sabri Oncu <[email protected]> wrote: > I have a question to the Marx experts: > > How do we distinguish between rent and profit? > > For example, if I bought a piece of land for X dollars and sold it > X+DX dollars with DX>0, did I make a profit or just collected some > rent? What sort of surplus value is associated with that DX?
first, I'd distinguish between individual profit (in your example) and "profit in general," which is what Marx was talking about (i.e., surplus-value). Second, Marx sees land-rent as one piece of surplus-value, a redistribution from the industrial capitalists, who actually arrange for surplus-labor to be done and surplus-value produced. (By the way, industrial capitalism can be done in agriculture: it doesn't have to be urban.) That is, after the industrial workers produce the surplus-value, some of it is kept by industrial capitalists but some of it goes to land-owners (as land-rent), some to financial intermediaries (as interest), and some to commercial capitalists. All of these groups provide some sort of service to the industrial capitalists in exchange: land-owners allow them to use their scarce natural resource and reap the natural benefits of the soil. These days, it's easy to point to other groups who can benefit from this kind of distribution: some elite members of the working class (such as superstar athletes) spring to mind. The state may be able to claim a piece of the surplus-value action, too. (The state can also be involved in industrial capitalism and the production of surplus-value, but not much in the US.) If you buy land and sell it, earning a capital gain of DX, some of that is cancelled out on the societal level by someone else's capital loss. If a net capital gain on land ownership is realized, that's a form of land-rent. The price of land, Marx suggests, is capitalized land-rent (the present value of expected future land-rents). If the price rises and the land is actually sold (rather than the capital gains being merely paper gains), then the gain is land-rent. I don't think this story changes if we're talking about differential or Ricardian rent (due to the superiority of some soil), monopoly rent (due to the ability to raise prices above the price of production), or absolute rent (due to blocked mobility of capital into agriculture). -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
