Capitalism

At this meeting, the second chapter of the work continued: we discussed commercial agriculture. From our "Fili del Tempo", collected today in Comunismo no. 51, some key passages were read, including, at the beginning of the exposition: "The form given by capitalism to agriculture is that of a market, after having removed from the land, on the one hand, the "freed" worker and, on the other, the feudal lord, abolishing the inalienability of the fief and granting it to the bourgeois creditors, or competitors at auctions, partly selling it in lots to small and medium-sized farmers".

This historical process saw the emergence of various forms of agricultural production, still in existence today, accompanied by the powerful modern industrialization of the production of various manufactured goods and services. From the study "Property and Capital" in Prometeo: "We will recall how the bourgeoisie replaced the old feudal codes and investitures with a full application of 'Roman law' to private land ownership, in its protection and in its transmission, both hereditary and contractual. We will not repeat how the same set of articles applies to the dispossession of a peasant family from the land and to the ownership of thousands of hectares, and what the meaning of this arrangement is".

Continuing: "From Blanqui (History of Political Economy, 1839) Marx quotes this definition of bourgeois agriculture (as brilliant as his famous one: capitalism made land an article of commerce). Landed property emerged for the first time from the state of torpor in which the feudal system had kept it for so long. This was a real awakening for agriculture... It (the land) now passed from the regime of mortmain to that of circulation".

Further on in the exposition we find: "Cultivated land is first divided into possessions, each of which may include a single or multiple businesses or companies, while only in rare exceptions can the opposite occur (smaller properties, larger business). By possession or estate, we mean a collection of adjacent or not very distant lands belonging to a single natural or legal person; and by agricultural enterprise, holding, or cultivation unit, all cultivated land managed by a single entrepreneur: whether owner, landowner, tenant, or sharecropper".

Therefore, the question of small or large-scale cultivation must be related to the size of the farm, not to the size of the property, to what Lenin called the monopoly of farm ownership, not the monopoly of land ownership. Abolishing the latter could be a bourgeois program, which would mean, after releasing the land from the market, freed from feudal lordship rights, removing it from the market and placing it under state ownership. But abolishing the monopoly of property is only possible for land; abolishing the monopoly of farm ownership, on the other hand, is a revolutionary and communist task.

Continuing from the chapter: “He, She and the Other (Land, Money and Capital)” we repeated:

«All the research of critical communism is aimed at establishing the cause and the laws of the appropriation of other people's labor, of the social relationship whereby certain men and groups of men in successive historical societies provide their labor and worked, while there are other men and other groups who live by not providing work and by consuming in various ways what they have not produced (...) All Marxism is the theory of surplus value and in a more general sense of overwork, extended to all eras and not only to the capitalist one, and of the future forms of provision of overwork for “all” human society» (The Communist Program, “The Program of the Proletarian Revolution”).

«In the summary definition of the search for the causes of overwork, if one neglects the historical method, one can fall into misunderstanding by considering that the whole system derives from a condemnation of the “exploitation of man by man”, almost as if it were a moral position, which strikes that relationship as a crime, in every place and at every time, for its qualified essence and without regard to its extension in quantity (...) Communism will prevent an individual or even a part of society or even the State from being able to say to the worker: you will not be able to feed yourself if you do not perform the part of the work paid the right price (necessary work) when and where you are told, to crystallize your overwork there (...)

«The history of the theories that Marx developed before constructing his own, ours, is set out after it and is dotted step by step with luminous explanations of our own interpretation of all forms of overwork and, moreover, as in the other parts of Capital, with powerful glimpses that illustrate the revolutionary program and the communist social form.

«The oldest concept is that of the yield of cultivated land, since its first theorists were far from being able to see that even in this one uses, as we have seen, not “free” natural force, but always the work of men, who provide it as much as they live and live as much as they feed themselves».

The chapter continues with a comprehensive and crystal-clear analysis of the combination of fruits and exploitation in capitalized land rent, "the first celebration of the marriage between Miss Earth and Mr. Money". This section emphasizes: "But good cultivation of agricultural land is what makes it fruitful, not exploited, that is, does not deeply affect or destroy its future fertility: which, by gradually reducing rent, would deprive that land of its value 'in common commerce' or significantly reduce it. Our Italian word 'exploitation', which in modern times we apply to the entrepreneur's profit at the expense of wage earners, shows that every theory of overwork begins with a solution to the problem of land rent".

He followed the reading of the various passages on ground rent by quoting Marx: "According to the Physiocrats, ground rent continues to be the sole income of the nation; nature alone nourishes it and God alone creates it. Wages and interest merely transfer from one hand to another, always to other hands, what nature has given in the form of ground rent [...] The wealth of the nation is the capacity of the soil to annually supply this ground rent.

All things that have value, if we go back to the components and foundations of their value—we mean, however, exchange value—are simply products of nature. Although labor has given these things a new form, and thus increased their value, this value nevertheless consists solely of the sum of the values ​​of all the products of nature that have been destroyed in order to create this value in the new form, that is, consumed by the worker or employed in some other way.

And again: "This work [in agriculture proper] is therefore real and it alone is productive, because it creates independent organic bodies. Transformation work merely mechanically or chemically modifies existing bodies".

It was concluded that, on the contrary, in Marxism: «To establish the terms of the agrarian question it must be affirmed that in capitalist times the land rent is a part taken from social surplus labor as compensation for the monopoly of the land by its owners.

«At the beginning of the capitalist cycle, the landowners claim to be at the head of society; at its end, after having been relegated to a subordinate position, they can even be eliminated, without the life of the capitalist and wage-based mode of production having yet ended».