Differential and Absolute Ground Rent

Differential and Absolute Ground Rent are concepts used by Karl Marx in the third volume of Das Kapital to explain how the capitalist mode of production would operate in agricultural production, under the condition where most agricultural land was owned by a social class of land-owners who obtained rent income from those who farmed the land. Rent as an economic category is regarded as one form of surplus value just like interest and industrial profit.

In good part, Marx's theory is a critique of David Ricardo's theory of rent, and it examines with detailed numerical examples how the relative profitability of capital investments in agriculture is affected by the productivity, fertility, and location of farmland, as well as by capital expenditure on land improvements. Marx aims to show that capitalism turns agriculture into a business like any other, operated for purely commercial motives; and that the ground rents appropriated by landowners are a burden for the industrial bourgeoisie both because they imply an additional production-cost and because they raise the prices of agricultural output.

According to Marx, the operation of the law of value and the formation of prices of production was modified in capitalist agriculture, because prices for farm output were co-determined by land yields and land rents. He extends his theory of agricultural rents to building rents and mine rents, and considers the effect on land prices.

This theory is the least known part of Marx's economic writings, and among the more difficult ones. However it became very important to neo-Marxists such as Ernest Mandel who interpreted late capitalism as a form of increasingly parasitic rentier capitalism in which surplus profits are obtained by capitalists from monopolising the access to resources, assets and technologies. Marxist writers such as Cyrus Bina have extended the concept of rents to oil rents [http://cda.morris.umn.edu/~binac/index.htm] .

Another possible reason for the relative obscurity of the theory is that in modern macro-economic statistics and national accounts, no data is provided on the amounts of land rents and subsoil rents because they are not officially regarded as part of value-added and consequently are not included in the calculation of GDP. Typically only the annual value of expenditure on land improvements and the value of leases of productive equipment are recorded.

Differential ground rent

Suppose for example that the ruling world market price for quality wheat is US$170 per ton f.o.b. Even if two investors have the exactly same amount of capital to invest in wheat production, the economics of producing wheat at that price are going to be quite different, depending on the actual yields (the productivity) of the land they use. The same amount of money invested in wheat production on area A yields a bigger crop of wheat and more profit than on area B, if A is more productive, fertile, better situated etc. than B. But not only that – given a known yield per hectare and a known price per ton of wheat, it may be either economic or uneconomic to produce wheat on particular soils. There exists a “hierarchy of soil types”, and if market demand and prices rise, more of the less productive (or marginal) land may be cultivated; if demand and prices fall, less of the marginal land may be cultivated.

That situation is the basis of what Marx calls Differential Rent I – the investor who produces wheat on the more productive lands reaps an extra-profit or rent, which varies according to the total supply and demand of wheat and the ruling market price for wheat. However, the income from wheat production will also depend not just on soil quality but on the number of hectares of each kind of soil being cultivated. Thus the supply of wheat and the wheat price, and consequently the rents obtained from their fluctuation, will also be influenced by e.g. whether the expansion of wheat production in response to growing demand occurs on better or worse soils. In addition, the profitability of wheat production may also be influenced by the ‘’actual amount of capital invested per hectare’’. Marx calls this Differential Rent II and he examines what would be the effect of more capital-intensive agriculture when the production price remains stable and when it falls while the extra yield from additional capital investments varies.

To summarise, the theory of Differential Rent I shows how extra profit is transformed into rent by equal quantities of capital being invested on different lands of unequal productivity, while the theory of Differential Rent II refers to the difference in profitability resulting from unequal amounts of capital being invested successively and intensively on different plots of land of the same type. Differential Rent II implies the appropriation of surplus profits created by temporary differences in yield which are due to the application of unequal capitals to the same type of lands.

Absolute ground rent

The absolute ground rent is sometimes explained as the rent which landowners can extract because they monopolise the access to or supply of land, and sometimes as the rent which arises due to the difference between the product-values and prices of production of output in agriculture, because of a lower than average organic composition of capital in agriculture as compared with industry. According to Marx's own concept, absolute rent cannot exist when the organic composition of capital in agriculture becomes higher than the social average.

References

*Karl Marx, Das Kapital Vol. 3, Part 6. [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch37.htm]
*Robin Murray, "Value Theory and Rent: Part One and Two", in: "Capital and Class" (London) no. 3 & 4 (Autumn 1977 and Spring 1978).
*Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory (Merlin, 1968), Volume 1, chapter 9.
*Ernest Mandel, "Late Capitalism". London: Verso, 1975.
*Ernest Mandel, "Marx's Theory of Surplus Profits", in Introduction to the Penguin edition of Capital Volume 3. Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1981
*Michael Perelman, "Farming for Profit in a Hungry World".
*Michael Hudson, "How Rent Gets Buried in the National Income Accounts" [http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2005w52/docw0ZMWYgp3A.doc]
*Dick Bryan, "Natural" and "Improved" Land in Marx's Theory of Rent. in "Land Economics", Vol. 66, No. 2 (May, 1990), pp. 176-181
*Makoto Itoh, "The Basic Theory of Capitalism" (Barnes & Noble, 1988), pp. 235-249.
*Ben Fine (1979)"On Marx's theory of agricultural rent" in "Economy and Society", 8:3 241-278.
*Kenneth Tribe (1977) "Economic property and the theorisation of ground rent", in: "Economy and Society", 6 (1) 69-88
*Ball, M. (1977) "Differential rent and the role of landed property", in "International Journal of Urban and Regional Research", 1 (3) 380-403.
*Cyrus Bina (1989), "Some controversies in the development of rent theory: the nature of oil rent". In: "Capital and Class", no. 39, pp. 82-112.
*David Harvey "The Limits to Capital". London: Verso, 1999.
*Isaac Illich Rubin (1975) "Essays on Marx's Theory of Value". Montreal: Black Rose Books, chapter 29.
*Kevin Cahill, "Who Owns The World? The huidden facts behind landownership". Edinburgh: Mainstream publishing, 2006

External links

*Capitalist ground rent [http://www.era.anthropology.ac.uk/Era_Resources/Era/Peasants/differential_rent.html]

ee also

*Economic rent
* Law of Rent
*Superprofit
*Surplus value
*Value product
*Rentier state
*Rentier capitalism