Continuing with our NOTES AND MATERIALS ON CONTEMPORARY PERU (III, continued Annexes d, 3), we include the following as annexes:
3. Genesis of capitalist ground rent and ideas of special importance for backward countries
Introduction:
President Gonzalo, at the beginning of the 90s, 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 large estates and small estates. New process of land concentration: Here, a rural market is being created, land is being parcelled 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 landowners 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 parcelling 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 labour 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 analysed 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 landowner exploit it? Through rent. This is how semi-feudalism is differentiated.
On the capitalist forms of land 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 land 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 capitalist applies 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, landowners 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 “The Economic Doctrine of Karl Marx”, says:
Without pausing to give an account of the extremely interesting sections of the third volume of Capital devoted to usurer's capital, commercial capital and money capital, we pass to the most important section, the theory of ground rent. Owing to the fact that the land area is limited and, in capitalist countries, is all occupied by individual private owners, the price of production of agricultural products is determined by the cost of production not on average soil, 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 under 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 the difference in the amount of capital invested in land, Marx fully exposed (see also Theories of Surplus Value, in which the criticism of Rodbertus deserves particular attention) 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 technique, the growth of towns, and so on), and the notorious "law of diminishing returns" is a profound error which charges nature with the defects, limitations and contradictions of captalism. Further, the equalization of profit in all branches of industry and national economy in general presupposes complete freedom of competition and the free flow of capital from one branch to another. But the private ownership of land creates monopoly, which hinders this free flow. Owing to this monopoly, the products of agriculture, which is distinguished by a lower organic composition of capital, and, consequently, by an individually higher rate of profit, do not participate in the entirely free process of equalization of the rate of profit; the landowner, being a monopolist, can keep the price above the average, and this monopoly price engenders absolute rent. Differential rent cannot be done away with under capitalism, but absolute rent can-- for instance, by the natlonalization of the land, by making it the property of the state. Making the land the property of the state would undermine the monopoly of private landowners, and would lead to a more systematic and complete application of freedom of competition in the domain of agriculture. And, therefore, Marx points out, in the course of history bourgeois radicals have again and again advanced this progressive bourgeois demand for the nationalization of the land, which, however, frightens away the majority of the bourgeoisie, because it too closely "touches" another monopoly, which is particularly important and "sensitive" in our day -- the monopoly of the means of production in general.
(…) For the history of ground rent it is also important to note Marx's analysis showing how labour rent (when the peasant creates surplus product by labouring on the lord's land) is transformed into rent in
produce or in kind (when the peasant creates surplus product on his own land and cedes it to the lord due to "non-economic constraint"), then into money rent (which is rent in kind transformed into money, the quitrent of old Russia, due to the development of commodity production), and finally into capitalist rent, when the peasant is replaced by the agricuItural entrepreneur, who cultivates the soil with the help of wage labour. In connection with this analysis of the "genesis of capitalist ground rent," note should be made of a number of penetrating ideas (especially important for backward countries like Russia) expressed by Marx on the evolution of capitalism in agriculture. "The transformation of rent in kind into money rent is not only necessarily accompanied, but even anticipated by the formation of a class of propertyless day labourers, who hire themselves out for wages. During the period of their rise, when this new class appears but sporadically, the custom necessarily develops among the better-situated tributary farmers of exploiting agricultural labourers for their own account, just as the wealthier serfs in feudal times used to employ serfs for their own benefit. In this way they gradually acquire the ability to accumulate a certain amount of wealth and to transform themselves even into future capitalists. The old self-employing possessors of the land thus give rise among themselves to a nursery for capitalist tenants, whose development is conditioned upon the general development of capitalist production outside of the rural districts." (Capital, Vol. III, p. 332.) "The expropriation and eviction of a part of the agricultural population not only set free for industrial capital, the labourers, their means of subsistence, and material for labour; it also created the home market." (Capital, Vol. I, p. 778.) The impoverishment and ruin of the agricultural population lead, in their turn, to the formation of a reserve army of labour for capital. In every capitalist country "part of the agricultural population is therefore constantly on the point of passing over into an urban or manufacturing proletariat. . . .(Manufacture is used here in the sense of all non-agricultural industries.) This source of relative surplus population is thuspage 32 constantly flowing. . . . The agricultural labourer is therefore reduced to the minimum of wages, and always stands with one foot already in the swamp of pauperism." (Capital, Vol. I, p. 668.) The private ownership of the peasant in the land he tills constitutes the basis of small-scale production and the condition for its prospering and attaining a 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 peasants differs only in form from the exploitation of the industrial proletariat. The exploiter is the same:capital. The individual capitalists exploit the individual peasants 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 pretence of being a private proprietor." (The Class Struggles in France.) What is "one of the causes which keeps the price of cereals lower in countries with a predominance of small peasant land proprietorship than in countries with a capitalist mode of production"? (Capital, Vol. III, p. 340.) It is that the peasant cedes to society (i.e., to the capitalist class) part of his surplus product without an equivalent. "This lower price (of cereals and other agricultural produce) is consequently a result of the poverty of the producers and by no means of the productivity of their labour." (Capital. Vol. III, p. 340.) The small-holding system, which is the normal form of small-scale production, deteriorates, collapses, perishes under capitalism. "Proprietorship of land parcels excludes by its very nature the development of the social productive forces of labour, social forms of labour, social concentration of capital, large-scale cattle raising, and a 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 dissipation of means of production and an isolation of the producers themselves go with it." (Co-operative societies, i.e.,associations of small peasants, while playing an extremely progressive bourgeois role, only weaken 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, almost nothing, for the mass of poor peasants; and then the associations themselves become exploiters of wage labour.) "Also an enormous waste of human energy. A progressive deterioration of the conditions of production and a raising of the price of means of production is a necessary law of small peasants' property." 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 labourers over larger areas breaks their power of resistance whileconcentration increases that of the town operatives. In modern agriculture, as in the urban industries, the increased productiveness and quantity of the labour set in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste and consuming by disease labour power itself. Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, 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 labourer." (Capital, Vol. I, end of Chap. 15.)
II
On the semi-colonial
condition
With the first appendix, we show how the LOD intends to revise Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, regarding the problem of bureaucratic capitalism and the evolution of semi-feudalism. On the semi-colonial condition……
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