Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 13 - From Marx to Mao

298V. I. LENINThat rent cannot be abolished as long as the capitalist modeof production exists.Absolute rent arises from the private ownership of land.That rent contains an element of monopoly, an element ofmonopoly price.* Private ownership of land hinders freecompetition, hinders the levelling of profit, the formationof average profit in agricultural and non-agricultural enterprises.And as agriculture is on a lower technical levelthan industry, as the composition of capital is marked by alarger proportion of variable capital than of constant capital,the individual value of the agricultural product isabove the average. Hence, by hindering the free levellingof profits in agricultural enterprises on a par with nonagriculturalenterprises, the private ownership of landmakes it possible to sell the agricultural product not atthe highest price of production, but at the still higher individualvalue of the product (for the price of productionis determined by the average profit on capital, while absoluterent prevents the formation of this “average” by monopolisticallyfixing the individual value at a level higherthan the average).Thus, differential rent is inevitably an inherent featureof every form of capitalist agriculture. Absolute rent is not;it arises only under the private ownership of land, onlyunder the historically** created backwardness of agriculture,a backwardness that becomes fixed by monopoly.Kautsky compares these two forms of rent, particularlyin their bearing on the nationalisation of the land, in thefollowing propositions:* In Part 2 of Volume II of Theories of Surplus Value, Marx revealsthe “essence of different theories of rent”: the theory of the monopolyprice of agricultural produce and the theory of differentialrent. He shows what is true in both those theories, insofar as absoluterent contains an element of monopoly. See p. 125 concerningAdam Smith’s theory: “it is quite true” that rent is monopoly price,insofar as the private ownership of land prevents the levelling ofprofit by fixing profit at a level higher than the average. 117** See Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. II, Part 1 (German original),p. 259: “In agriculture, manual labour still predominates, while thecapitalist mode of production develops industry more quickly thanagriculture. However, that is a historical distinction which may disappear.”(See also p. 275, and Vol. II, Part 2, p. 15.) 118