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

306V. I. LENINlevel of productivity, and the construction of tall buildingsalso has its practical limitations. Beyond this any expansionof production also demands an extension of land area.The fixed capital invested in machinery, etc., does notimprove through use, but on the contrary, wears out. Newinventions may indeed permit some improvement in thisrespect, but with any given development in productivepower, machines will always deteriorate. If productivityis rapidly developed all of the old machinery must be replacedby the more advantageous; in other words, it islost. The soil, however, if properly treated, improves allthe time. The advantage of the soil, permitting successiveinvestments of capital to bring gains without loss of previousinvestments, implies the possibility of differencesin yield from these successive investments of capital.”(Das Kapital, III. Band, 2. Teil, S. 314.) 124Maslov preferred to repeat the threadbare fable of bourgeoiseconomics about the law of diminishing returns ratherthan ponder over Marx’s criticism. And yet Maslov hasthe audacity, while distorting Marx, to claim here, on thesevery questions, that he is expounding Marxism!The degree to which Maslov mutilates the theory of rentfrom his purely bourgeois point of view of the “naturallaw” of diminishing returns can be seen from the followingtirade, which he gives in italics: “If successive outlays ofcapital on the same plot of land, leading to intensive farming,were equally productive, the competition of newlands would immediately disappear; for the cost of transportaffects the price of grain in addition to the cost of production”(page 107).Thus, overseas competition can be explained only bymeans of the law of diminishing returns! Exactly what thebourgeois economists say! But if Maslov was unable to reador incapable of understanding Volume III, then at leasthe should have familiarised himself with Kautsky’s TheAgrarian Question, or with Parvus’s pamphlet on the agriculturalcrisis. Perhaps the popular explanations givenby those Marxists would have enabled Maslov to understandthat capitalism raises rent and increases the industrialpopulation. And the price of land (= capitalised rent) keepsthat rent at its inflated level. This applies also to differ-