Nuevo Perú: NOTES AND MATERIALS ON CONTEMPORARY PERU (III, continuation d. Annexes 3)
We hereby share an analysis by Nuevo Peru:
Continuing with our NOTES AND MATERIALS ON CONTEMPORARY PERU (III, continuation d. Annexes 3), we include the following as annexes:
3. Genesis of capitalist ground rent and ideas of special importance for backward countries
Introduction:
Chairman Gonzalo, at the beginning of the 1990s, noted the following:
In the latest analyses of the agricultural population, there is an increase in small landowners who are being given a lot of importance in the current government, in the current process of the old Peruvian State.
In Peru, first of all, there has not been a bourgeois revolution, the bourgeoisie was not capable of directing it in its historical moment, when it was revolutionary. Today, since 1917, when the era of the world revolution began, the bourgeoisie has become an outmoded and incapable class and only the proletariat is capable of leading democratic revolutions that destroy feudalism, in addition to socialist and cultural revolutions. Therefore, there was no old-style bourgeois revolution.
The Peruvian reaction, in the service of imperialism, has developed and continues to develop the bureaucratic path, bringing bureaucratic capitalism to the countryside and applying the evolution of semi-feudalism. Part of this process is the application of its three agrarian laws, in particular, the so-called “agrarian reform law” which is nothing more than another law of buying and selling land and which has not destroyed semi-feudalism but has evolved it; what we see today is a consequence of this buying and selling of land, the associative forms that emerged from this “agrarian reform” are being parceled out.
The relationship between latifundium and minifundiums. New process of land concentration: Here, a rural market is being created, land is being parceled out, the peasant population is increasing; this generates an increase in the price of land and the peasantry has to pay more for the land. What do the big bourgeoisie, the banks, the State, the big landlords want to impose? That the commercial banks have facilities to give credit to the countryside and, under mortgage guarantee, take over the land and thus promote a new process of concentration to apply evolutionary forms of semi-feudalism.
The division of the land, the parceling out, leads to minifundism and this determines a setback in the cultivation of the soil. On the plot, the whole family works until exhaustion, a great labor force is invested but the net product progressively decreases with the increase in the gross product. This same applies to micro and small production, as we have analyzed previously, the more gross consumption, the less net consumption and no one escapes this law, but this is optimal for imperialism because it buys at a lower cost, exploiting immensely. This phenomenon in the countryside also has an adverse effect on the proletariat because the countryside has to consume less, production has to fall, workers’ wages are reduced and there is a lot of unemployment.
Marx is describing what exploitation consists of, see the difference, in one way it is exploited: as an organized class the bourgeoisie exploits it through the State by means of taxes; and as capitalists, in the modalities of usury, of loans, of capital, of interest, the unpaid amounts are collected with the mortgage. And how does the big landlords exploit it? Through rent. This is how semi-feudalism is differentiated.
On the capitalist forms of rent: Differential rent refers to the greater yield that land has compared to other land; absolute rent is derived from the ownership of the land.
On the feudal forms of rent: Feudal forms have three modalities which are: the payment of rent in personal work, in kind and in money. Payment in money is also a feudal modality and the fact that the capitalists apply it does not mean that it does not have feudal roots.
To see the problem of the process of bureaucratic capitalism in agriculture and the evolution of semi-feudalism, we must study, analyze and compare the studies and reports with other documents such as agricultural censuses, the National Surveys on Rural Households that have been done in the field, although they have some limitations, so we could establish a table to classify based on property and exploitation relationship, to define poor, medium and rich peasants, big landlords and agricultural wage earners; and in turn establish the differences in each of these areas.
What we must know is that the studies, reports and documents of the academy or official institutions seek to confuse problems and in this way aim to suggest that there is a capitalist process that advances, and thus avoid and cover up bureaucratic capitalism.
See what are the specific, concrete situations in Peru (starting from bureaucratic capitalism) because today they are leading to an unbridled dispossession of peasants’ property.
Following this introduction, we present as an annex:
Genesis of capitalist ground rent and ideas of special importance for backward countries
Lenin, in his “Karl Marx”, in the section dealing with “Marx’s Economic Doctrine”, says:
“Without pausing to deal with the extremely interesting sections of Volume Three of Capital, Vol. I devoted to usurer’s capital, commercial capital and money capital, we must pass on to the most important section—the theory of ground rent. Since the area of land is limited and, in capitalist countries, the land is all held by individual private owners, the price of production of agricultural products is determined by the cost of production, not on soil of average quality but on the worst soil; not under average conditions but under the worst conditions of delivery of produce to the market. The difference between this price and the price of production on better soil (or in better conditions) constitutes differential rent. Analyzing this in detail, and showing how it arises out of the difference in fertility of different plots of land, and out of the difference in the amount of capital invested in land, Marx fully reveals (see also Theories of Surplus Value, in which the criticism of Rodbertus is most noteworthy) the error of Ricardo, who considered that differential rent is derived only when there is a successive transition from better land to worse. On the contrary, there may be inverse transitions, land may pass from one category into others (owing to advances in agricultural techniques, the growth of towns, and so on), and the notorious “law of diminishing returns”, which charges Nature with the defects, limitations and contradictions of capitalism, is profoundly erroneous. Further, the equalisation of profit in all branches of industry and the national economy in general presupposes complete freedom of competition and the free flow of capital from one branch to another. However, the private ownership of land creates monopoly, which hinders that free flow. Because of that monopoly, the products of agriculture, where a lower organic composition of capital obtains, and consequently an individually higher rate of profit, do not enter into the quite free process of the equalisation of the rate of profit. As a monopolist, the landowner can keep the price above the average, and this monopoly price gives rise to absolute rent. Differential rent cannot be done away with under capitalism, but absolute rent can—for instance, by the nationalisation of the land, by making it state property. That would undermine the monopoly of private landowners, and would mean the sole consistent and full operation of freedom of competition in agriculture. That is why, as Marx points out, bourgeois radicals have again and again in the course of history advanced this progressive bourgeois demand for nationalisation of the land, a demand which, however, frightens most of the bourgeoisie, because it would too closely affect another monopoly, one that is particularly important and “sensitive” today—the monopoly of the means of production in general.
(…)
With reference to the history of ground rent it is also important to note Marx’s analysis showing how labor rent (the peasant creates surplus product by working on the lord’s land) is transformed into rent paid in produce or in kind (the peasant creates surplus product by working on the lord’s land) is transformed into rent paid in produce or in kind (the peasant creates surplus product on his own land and hands it over to the landlord because of “non-economic constraint”), then into money-rent (rent in kind, which is converted into money—the obrok[2] of old Russia—as a result of the development of commodity production), and finally into capitalist rent, when the peasant is replaced by the agricultural entrepreneur, who cultivates the soil with the help of hired labor. In connection with this analysis of the “genesis of capitalistic ground rent”, note should be taken of a number of profound ideas (of particular importance to backward countries like Russia) expressed by Marx regarding the evolution of capitalism in agriculture:
“The transformation of rent in kind into money-rent is furthermore not only inevitably accompanied, but even anticipated, by the formation of a class of propertyless day-laborers, who hire themselves out for money. During their genesis, when this new class appears but sporadically, the custom necessarily develops among the more prosperous peasants, subject to rent payments, of exploiting agricultural wage-laborers for their own account, much as in feudal times, when the more well-to-do peasant serfs themselves also held serfs. In this way, they gradually acquire the possibility of accumulating a certain amount of wealth and themselves becoming transformed into future capitalists. The old self-employed possessors of land themselves just give rise to a nursery school for capitalist tenants, whose development is conditioned by the general development of capitalist production beyond the bounds of the countryside.” [Capital, Vol. III]
“The expropriation and eviction of a part of the agricultural population not only set free for industrial capital the laborers, their means of subsistence, and material for labor; it also created the home market.” (Capital, Vol. I) In their turn, the impoverishment and ruin of the rural population play a part in the creation, for capital, or a reserve army of labor. In every capitalist country “part of the agricultural population is therefore constantly on the point of passing over into an urban or manufacturing [i.e., non-agricultural] proletariat…. This source of relative surplus population is thus constantly flowing…. The agricultural laborer is therefore reduced to the minimum of wages, and always stands with one foot already in the swamp of pauperism.” (Capital, Vol. I) The peasant’s private ownership of the land he tills is the foundation of small-scale production and the condition for its prospering and achieving the classical form. But such small-scale production is compatible only with a narrow and primitive framework of production and society. Under capitalism, the
“exploitation of the peasant differs only in form from the exploitation of the industrial proletariat. The exploiter is the same: capital. The individual capitalists exploit the individual peasant through mortgages and usury; the capitalist class exploits the peasant class through the state taxes.” [The Class Struggles in France]
“The small holding of the peasant is now only the pretext that allows the capitalist to draw profits, interest and rent from the soil, while leaving it to the tiller of the soil himself to see how he can extract his wages.” (The Eighteenth Brumaire) As a rule, the peasant cedes to capitalist society—i.e., to the capitalist class—even a part of the wages, sinking “to the level of the Irish tenant farmer—all under the pretense of being a private proprietor.” (The Class Struggles In France)
What is “one of the reasons why grain prices are lower in countries with predominant small-peasant land proprietorship than in countries with a capitalist mode of production?” [Capital, Vol. III] It is that the peasant hands over gratis to society (i.e., the capitalist class) a part of his surplus product. “This lower price [of grain and other agricultural produce] is consequently a result of the producers’ poverty and by no means of their labor productivity.” [Capital, Vol. III] Under capitalism, the small-holding system, which is the normal form of small-scale production, degenerates, collapses, and perishes.
“Proprietorship of land parcels, by its very nature, excludes the development of social productive forces of labor, social forms of labor, social concentration of capital, large-scale cattle raising, and the progressive application of science. Usury and a taxation system must impoverish it everywhere. The expenditure of capital in the price of the land withdraws this capital from cultivation. An infinite fragmentation of means of production and isolation of the producers themselves.”
(Co-operative societies, i.e., associations of small peasants, while playing an extremely progressive bourgeois role, only weakens this tendency, without eliminating it; nor must it be forgotten that these co-operative societies do much for the well-to-do peasants, and very little—next to nothing—for the mass of poor peasants; then the associations themselves become exploiters of hired labor.)
“Monstrous waste of human energy. Progressive deterioration of conditions of production and increased prices of means of production—an inevitable law of proprietorship of parcels.” [Capital, Volume III] In agriculture, as in industry, capitalism transforms the process of production only at the price of the “martyrdom of the producer.”
“The dispersion of the rural laborers over larger areas breaks their power of resistance, while concentration increases that of the town operatives. In modern agriculture, as in the urban industries, the increased productiveness and quantity of the labor set in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste and consuming by disease labor power itself. Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the laborer, but of robbing the soil…. Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the laborer.” [Capital, Volume III]”
II
On the semi-colonial condition
With the first appendix, we show how the ROL intends to revise Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, regarding the problem of bureaucratic capitalism and the evolution of semi-feudalism. On the semi-colonial condition …
