Quick notes on ground-rent and misconceptions within Marxism

This new textby Monthly Review will allow us to make a quick point and to write some scattered notes on a very important subject: Marxists tend to confuse agrarian profit with rent, and this confusions go into the tributary/Asiatic mode debate. In the text the authors clearly demonstrate that, for Marx, slavery and plantations produce surplus value. This goes contrary to the opinion of Michael Roberts and others, which have spoken in their outlets against the idea that India and the “Third World” are even capitalists, because (so they say) ground-rent doesn’t produce surplus value, and since “Third World” countries, for these economists, are still mainly agrarian (which is not true either, but anyways –all “Third World” countries export and produce in terms of profit and value way more on industrial production than agrarian production, even to the end of the XX century itself, with just a few exceptions from sub-Saharan Africa-), then the “Third World” is not even capitalist.

One of the problems here is confusing ground-rent with agrarian profit. The profit extracted by the landowner of a plantation based on slavery, is surplus value. I mean the profit extracted by the subject actually producing and controlling production (whether a direct administrator-owner or an absentee landlord, etc). But the rent he pays to the actual owner of the land (in case he's not both), as ground-rent, of course it doesn’t produce surplus value, it is a completely different form. Marx even states that rent is based on the interest-rate, and not the profit-rate. So there’s no contradiction, except in Roberts’s and others positions: agriculture does produce surplus value, and as part of that surplus value, they make a disbursement in the form of ground-rent to the rentiers, etc. The confusion arises because when the owner of the land and the landlord are the same person, both profit and rent are indissoluble to them.

Now, in relationship with the tributary mode: if the tributary mode was really a tribute alone (hence: tributary) and not a form of agrarian profit turned into rent, you would need to show three different disbursements: one as agrarian profit, one as ground rent, and one as tax. And if the state doesn’t receive rent, they should receive only taxes (as tribute, precisely) and pay up rent to somebody else, plus earning their respective agrarian profit. This tripartite division doesn’t existe anywhere in the “Third World” (or the pre-Columbian latin American world). What you find is the state earning taxes and rent together, which makes the state a landowner, and not simply the receiver of a tribute. Or to put it differently: the state extracts a portion of surplus value according to labor-time (rent), and not a fixed fee (tribute) which would be paid by all productive processes equally. That doesn’t exist either anywhere in the “Third World”. Both of this elements prove, at least, that those modes are not tributary at all. 

But let’s just give their position some air: let’s say this doesn’t prove the Asiatic Mode, at least (although it is precisely the definition written by Marx himself on the Asiatic mode), but let’s give them a chance: at least it proves it cannot be just a tributary mode. In other words: if the state gets a tax and not rent, the state would not be related to agrarian surplus value as landlord, and then it wouldn’t be related to ground-rent (as the tributary mode defenders claim). There wouldn't be tax-farming at all! Tax-farmers would be just landlords, and then they would pay a tribute to the state, but that's not what tax farming is at all: they collect tributes precisely as landlords designated by the state, making rent and taxes indissoluble (just like in Marx's definition).  And if the state does indeed relates itself to ground-rent, with a sum calculated on labor-time and it’s respective surplus produce, etc, then its not a tributary mode, since it's not extracting just a permanent and general fee, but actual rent. You just can’t have one without the other, to put it mildly. This simple and gregarious fact escapes them.

The same can be seen in the case of the difference between the landlord system and the rotwari system in India: the state started to perceive only taxes after the introduction of the rotwari system, which means they received ground-rent and taxes together during the landlord system. There's no separate tribute and rent until the rotwari system. This simple historical fact disproves the whole tributary mode and it's defenders. This is all crucial to understanding the realities of the “Third World”, which Roberts and the defenders of the tributary mode distort, or simply confuse.  It’s the reality of capitalism in the “Third World”, and it’s the difference, for example, between Latin American agriculture and the rest of the “Third World” because of their historical past, etc. So be it.