Rent Study 1

quotes are from Volume 3 of Capital
Part VI. Transformation of Surplus-Profit into Ground-Rent
Chapter 37. Introduction

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch37.htm

"Landed property is based on the monopoly by certain persons over definite portions of the globe, as exclusive spheres of their private will to the exclusion of all others.[26] With this in mind, the problem is to ascertain the economic value, that is, the realisation of this monopoly on the basis of capitalist production"

"In the section dealing with primitive accumulation (Buch I, Kap. XXIV [English edition: Part VIII. — Ed].), we saw that this mode of production presupposes, on the one hand, the separation of the direct producers from their position as mere accessories to the land (in the form of vassals, serfs, slaves, etc.), and, on the other hand, the expropriation of the mass of the people from the land."

-- the transformation of peasants into proles --

"Like all of its other historical advances, it also attained these by first completely impoverishing the direct producers."

"The prerequisites for the capitalist mode of production therefore are the following: The actual tillers of the soil are wage labourers employed by a capitalist, the capitalist farmer who is engaged in agriculture merely as a particular field of exploitation for capital, as investment for his capital in a particular sphere of production. This capitalist farmer pays the landowner, the owner of the land exploited by him, a sum of money at definite periods fixed by contract, for instance, annually (just as the borrower of money-capital pays a fixed interest), for the right to invest his capital in this specific sphere of production. This sum of money is called ground-rent, no matter whether it is paid for agricultural land, building lots, mines, fishing grounds, or forests, etc. It is paid for the entire time for which the landowner has contracted to rent his land to the capitalist farmer. Ground-rent, therefore, is here that form in which property in land is realised economically, that is, produces value. Here, then, we have all three classes -- wage-labourers, industrial capitalists, and landowners constituting together, and in their mutual opposition, the framework of modern society."

"Capital may be fixed in the land, incorporated in it either in a transitory manner, as through improvements of a chemical nature, fertilisation, etc., or more permanently, as in drainage canals, irrigation works, leveling, farm buildings, etc. Elsewhere I have called the capital thus applied to land la terre-capital.[28] It belongs to the category of fixed capital. The interest on capital incorporated in the land and the improvements thus made in it as an instrument of production can constitute a part of the rent paid by the capitalist farmer to the landowner, [29] but it does not constitute the actual ground-rent, which is paid for the use of the land as such -- be it in a natural or cultivated state."

"A cultivated field is worth more than an uncultivated one of the same natural quality. The more permanent fixed capital investments, which are incorporated in the soil and used up in a longer period of time, are also in the main, and in some spheres often exclusively, made by the capitalist farmer. But as soon as the time stipulated by contract has expired — and this is one of the reasons why with the development of capitalist production the landowners seek to shorten the contract period as much as possible — the improvements incorporated in the soil become the property of the landowner as an inseparable feature of the substance, the land."

"But this is at the same time one of the greatest obstacles to a rational development of agriculture, for the tenant farmer avoids all improvements and outlays for which he cannot expect complete returns during the term of his lease. We find this situation denounced as such an obstacle again and again, not only in the 18th century by James Anderson, the actual discoverer of the modern theory of rent [On J. Anderson's theory of rent see K. Marx, Theorien uber den Mehrwert (K. Marx/F. Engels, Werke, Band 26, 2. Teil, S. 103-05, 110-14, 134-39). — Ed.] — who was also a practical capitalist farmer and an advanced agronomist for his time — but also in our own day by opponents of the present constitution of landed property in England."

"In agriculture proper this process does not yet appear quite as plainly as when the land is used for building purposes."

"This illustration of ownership in buildings is important. In the first place, it clearly shows the difference between actual ground-rent and interest on fixed capital incorporated in the land, which may constitute an addition to ground-rent. Interest on buildings, like that on capital incorporated in the land by the tenant in agriculture, falls into the hands of the industrial capitalist, the building speculator, or the tenant, so long as the lease lasts, and has in itself nothing to do with ground-rent"

"Ground-rent assumes the form of a certain sum of money, which the landlord draws annually by leasing a certain plot on our planet. We have seen that every particular sum of money may be capitalised, that is, considered as the interest on an imaginary capital. For instance, if the average rate of interest is 5%, then an annual ground-rent of £200 may be regarded as interest on a capital of £4,000. Ground-rent so capitalised constitutes the purchase price or value of the land, a category which like the price of labour is prima facie irrational, since the earth is not the product of labour and therefore has no value"

"In practice, naturally, everything appears as ground-rent that is paid as lease money by tenant to landlord for the right to cultivate the soil. No matter what the composition of this tribute and no matter what its sources, it has this in common with the actual ground-rent-that the monopoly of the so-called landed proprietor of a portion of our planet enables him to levy such tribute and impose such an assessment. It has this in common with the actual ground-rent-that it determines the price of land, which, as we have indicated earlier, is nothing but the capitalised income from the lease of the land."

"...it is possible that the lease money may conceal in part, and in certain cases in its entirety, i.e., in complete absence of the actual ground-rent when the land is, therefore, actually worthless-a deduction from the average profit or from the normal wages, or both...Economically speaking, neither the one nor the other of these portions constitutes ground-rent; but, in practice, it constitutes the landlord's revenue, an economic realisation of his monopoly, much as actual ground-rent, and it has just as determining an influence on land prices."

"A much more general and important fact, however, is the depression of the actual farm-labourer's wage below its normal average, so that part of it is deducted to become part of the lease money and thus, in the guise of ground-rent, it flows into the pocket of the landlord rather than the labourer."

---I wonder if the urban equivalent is the depression of service wages?---

"Morton, [Here Marx quotes John Lockart Morton. — Ed.] real estate agent and agricultural mechanic who was previously quoted, states that it has been observed in many localities that rent for large estates is lower than for small ones because "the competition is usually greater for the latter than for the former, and as few small farmers are able to turn their attention to any other business than that of farming, their anxiety to get a suitable occupation leads them in many instances to give more rent than their judgement can approve of. "

--- must remember that the commodity produced in the abode is labor-power, sold in the form of hours of labor ---

"The amount of ground-rent (and with it the value of land) grows with social development as a result of the total social labour. On the one hand, this leads to an expansion of the market and of the demand for products of the soil, and, on the other, it stimulates the demand for land itself, which is a prerequisite of competitive production in all lines of business activity, even those which are not agricultural."

"In so far as commodity-production and thus the production of value develops with capitalist production so does the production of surplus-value and surplus product. But in the same proportion as the latter develops, landed property acquires the capacity of capturing an ever-increasing portion of this surplus-value by means of its land monopoly and thereby, of raising the value of its rent and the price of the land itself. The capitalist still performs an active function in the development of this surplus-value and surplus-product. But the landowner need only appropriate the growing share in the surplus-product and the surplus-value, without having contributed anything to this growth. This is the characteristic peculiarity of his position, and not the fact that the value of the products of the land, and thus of the land itself, increases to the degree that the market for them expands, the demand grows and with it the world of commodities which confronts the products of the land-in other words, the mass of non-agricultural commodity producers and non-agricultural commodity-production."

Report from the pushcart wars

from the NYT:

Pushcart Vendors Gain Victory in a Labor Deal
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: November 23, 2004

Themistoklis Makkos, who immigrated from Athens in 1974, began building his pushcart empire with a solitary pretzel cart on West 34th Street.

With the help of his sons, he expanded to several more, and thanks to the Parks Department's decision to let companies bid for vending spots, he now controls most of the pushcarts in Central Park, a few blocks from his Fifth Avenue apartment.

But many Central Park vendors who work for Mr. Makkos's company - most of them from Bangladesh - say it has repeatedly broken wage and hour laws. They say they are not paid overtime, even when they work 80-hour weeks. They also complain that the company, M & T Pretzel, does not give them 30-minute lunch breaks, as required by state law, and requires them to pay Health Department fines or police summonses, even when the violations are the company's fault.

Several vendors took their complaints to the New York State attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, who is expected to announce a $450,000 settlement today with Mr. Makkos's company. As a result, some vendors are expected to receive $10,000 each.

Mr. Spitzer's investigators found that for several years, M & T had paid the vendors only $60 a day, even when they worked 14-hour days, often from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. during the summer. This meant that they often received less than the $5.15-an-hour minimum wage.

"No one should have to work from sunup to sundown for $60 a day," said Patricia Smith, director of the attorney general's labor bureau. "It's illegal, and it's wrong."

Jafar, a Central Park vendor who refused to give his last name, fearing that M & T would fire him for speaking out, complained that he was still earning the minimum wage, after years on the job.

"I work seven days a week, 84 hours a week, for a simple reason," he said. "I have a family to support, and I am paid so little. I do this for eight years, and I still get the lowest salary in New York City."

Quazi Rahman, who was the first Central Park vendor to complain to Mr. Spitzer's office, said he was fired last year when M & T refused to rehire him after the winter slow period.

"They said I was a troublemaker," he said. "The people who work for the company are very scared to speak. If you speak up, they say shut your mouth."

Neither Mr. Makkos nor his sons, Thomas and George, who are executives in the business, returned several calls made yesterday to M & T. The company's lawyer, James H. Tully Jr., said M & T did not realize that it was breaking the law by not paying overtime or providing rest breaks.

"The problem was that for these vendors in Central Park, the work is very seasonal, and the way M & T operated for a while was to have the people work longer hours during the heart of the season and lesser hours during the low period and not at all during the coldest months," Mr. Tully said. "M & T certainly didn't mean to break the law. They thought they were operating as seasonal operators were supposed to and didn't have to pay overtime."

He said that once the attorney general's office explained the situation, "I explained the law to M & T, and they worked out an arrangement where a fund has been established" to pay workers overtime that had been wrongly denied.

Ms. Smith, of the attorney general's office, said that under state law, the only seasonal workers exempt from overtime pay are counselors at children's summer camps.

As customers bought his $1.50 hot dogs and $2 ice cream sandwiches, Jafar, who was a rice merchant in Bangladesh, said his cart sometimes sells $4,000 in food and drink on busy summer days. Some carts gross more than $400,000 a year.

So great is the demand for the vendors' pretzels and sodas that the Makkos family bid a total of $536,100 in a Parks Department auction for the right to have pushcarts for a year at two choice spots in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The company first won many prime locations two decades ago by being among the first to realize their financial potential, outbidding smaller businesses in a move that made the family wealthy. The family also won the right to run the park's carousel and outbid Donald J. Trump to operate the Wollman Skating Rink.

For several other Central Park pushcart spots, M & T pays $50,000 to $100,000 a year. The company operates 42 of the park's 70 carts, for which it will pay the city $2.1 million this year.

"This company is making a lot of money on the backs of these poor workers," said Sean Basinski, director of the Street Vendors Project at the Urban Justice Center, a nonprofit advocacy group. "And the city is making a lot of money from M & T's bids. If M & T paid its people properly, it couldn't pay as much for these sites, so in a sense the city is also making money off of these poor workers."

Jafar and several other Central Park vendors said that when they need to run to the bathroom, usually several blocks from their pushcarts, they have to leave their carts unattended. As a result, the vendors said, passers-by often steal some sodas, and they, not M & T, have to absorb the cost of that theft.

Jafar said he had lost many days of work - and pay - going to court to fight summonses. He said the police have given him several tickets for not having a seatbelt while he stood in back of an M & T flatbed truck with several vendors as it ferried them and their pushcarts to Central Park from the company's headquarters on West 37th Street.

Ms. Smith said the company had acted illegally by making the vendors pay for the stolen items. She also said M & T had broken the law by not reimbursing them for fines and summonses that the workers paid even when the company was responsible.

She said the attorney general's office was looking into allegations involving other pushcart companies doing business in the New York City park system.

Mr. Basinski of the Urban Justice Center faulted the Parks Department for not uncovering these wage violations, which he said had gone on for years.

"Obviously there was no investigation whether the concessionaires were violating the law," he said. "It would have taken only someone to stroll through Central Park and ask a few questions."

Warner Johnston, a spokesman for the Parks Department, said: "This is the first time we've heard of the issue. If we had been notified of the problem, we'd take immediate action by making inquiries into the practices."

every day...

...I hate Bill Clinton a little bit more.

Just 'cause his tick-head is shriveled and baggy now don't be fooled he is still a blood-sucker. Only more self-satisfied.

Read what Pinky has to say:

krush the klintonista cult now

vile day in diddle rock

ok ok so it's obvious

Plus folks, if you want the real truth about the slipping hold of the Dems, look to big chief suckoff. He's the one who sold the entire party platform -- sold it off with no plan for replacement -- sold it off for what? For insincere love-pats from people who despise him.

big box 1

Depot dud: The new Home Depot on W. 23rd St. between Fifth and Sixth Aves. has made a big point of adjusting its inventory for urban dwellers, but the store may need a little more work. Business was brisk there Sunday during the chain’s first weekend in New York City, but a friend of Scoopy had trouble finding two items. When he asked a clerk if they had fold-up, grocery shopping carts, a woman shopper who overheard the request began directing the person to a nearby hardware store. "Hey, hey, hey," the clerk protested, until he realized the megastore did not have the carts, a necessary convenience in a world without supermarket parking lots and home driveways.

from the Villager

Three points:
1) Big Boxes are hitting the Big Apple
2) With the recent spate of complaints about physical under-exertion in the suburbs, this is a technology that points to the physical over-exertion in the cities. These devices are used, particularly by the aged, to cart heavy groceries from the supermarkets back to their apartments. Most of the aging housing-stock in my neighborhood (among others) is walk-up, prompting the question: how do these groceries get upstairs? The "over-dependence on cars" in the suburbs is mirrored by an under-technologization of transportation in the cities.
3) Big Box Deliveries -- a solution for cities? A solution for suburbs?

hallow

fall

A little bit of something 
is a world better than none.
     -- the Red Chef

Practice loss.
    -- Lao Tsu

When a thing can't be sustained anymore it will end. Sadness shrinks your feeling for it until it can slip away unnoticed.

This dropping down is the last option, rendering sense for fuel. Foliage melts away in the creeping colors of flame until only a cinder is left. Plants return to the root as the weather cools.

I took a number of blows this fall.
I lost my collaborator.
I lost my mint crop on the roof.

After the sadness, sleep.
Sleep and wait.
I lost the mint crop on the roof, but I saved cuttings.

I saved cuttings, and
therefore a small springtime is written in my heart.
It is not so hard to live in New York City.

What if the human heart is like bamboo
and its least remaining splinter
is the germ of a new grove?

Bush sings

This is a genius music site. Simply put: cut-up samples of GWB are arranged over Devo-style electropop. George can be heard singing "Sunday Bloody Sunday," a medley of "Imagine" and "Take a Walk on the Wild Side," and a shocking freestyle indictment of the Vice President...

Go check it out! This is the best digital art I've seen since EBN -- it lit my brain on fire.

(thanks go to Jimmylegs for turning me on to it)

Autonomy (is) for dummies

Recently I came across this series of articles by British Autonomists about the "irresistable rise of global anticapitalism." I was particularly disappointed because I thought, originally, that it was theory from around the world, instead of just using the world as examples...

Anyway, this is a work in progress...

D&G Pickles

"Comrades"
    Deluze and Guatarri,

(those overfed
  cheerleaders 
for the revolution)

  mistake motivation for desire,


and therefore never get beyond
   ponderous discussion
      of the
"motivations for revolution"


regular  Dr Phils
 in spooky robes,

   they're
ersatz clergy
  offering only more alienation.

---------


The axiom
that "the masses can be made
  to desire repression"?

   Only a priest

 would inflict 
the stigmata of facism
     on desire.



Deluze and Guatarri are preaching original sin...


***FASTBALL--STRIKE ONE***


-----------


After this  ghost story, 
  they figure the
    marks are
  softened up enough,


they transition from
   shock and awe
        to
     shuck and jive,

more witch-doctors than play-popes..




Their "big finding"?
  The totem they offer
 to protect us
     from the
         disfigurements
    of facism?


These gizmos   
    they call
  'desiring machines'

and these miraculous 
   little doo-daas
 turn raw people-juice
      into the 
    the rainbow of social history.


(and you're already crawling
   with them, you just
  gotta use them)
 
Their miracle switch
   can make worldly
       the naive,
     "ethically invest the socius"

  and anything else
    you can think of, 
 up to
   and including
      taking
             a difficult shit
           for you.       
 


***THAT'S THE PITCH***


and it ain't
       anywhere near
    the strike zone...


  (how the hell can you
     use something with such
  vague parameters?)
    

A "desiring machine"
    is like
   a motivation, but
     spooked up
   and with lousy controls...


Do motivations produce human behavior? (yes)
Does human behavior produce the revolution? (yes)
Wouldn't you like to know 
   how to produce the revolution? (well...)


by the time 
  the discussion
 gets this abstract,
    we're
   spooked out...


***WILD PITCH--COUNT IS 1-1***


----------


D&G never fail to point out the
    implicit   danger 
 of desire
    "folding back on itself,"

     short-term
   motivations no longer serving
     the overall process of production,
        becoming either


    irrelevant, disruptive
  or worse, encircling 
     and controlling it entirely:

    decadence, addiction
       and totalitarianism,
     artifices gone rancid.


Their safegaurd?

  "making oneself a body without organs"

     (what a disgusting phrase)

     While withdrawal
 to the body may be the appropriate
    counter to encirclement
  to the Kapshow's spooky trip

  (I prefer bull lee's "silence,
      silenct
    and the sanity drug apomorphine")


Deluze & Guatarri
 mash down
   desire into the machine

fusing
   desire (the unique)
     and
  motivations (the disposable).


The combination
  makes their 
    "desiring-machines"
   a tragedy,  
 both
    impossibly precious
  and unable to survive.


***STRIKE 2***


-----------


Such a simple thing as desire is uncorruptable!


First of all, it serves to follow the rigors
  of need:  what do we eat?
     where do we sleep?  when do we have sex?
  these concerns guide our
       social interaction 
 to a degree that should
      not be surprising to anyone.



The motivations for revolution
  are equally simple:

 denial of comfort
   and security
 is
   the basic operating tenent
       of wage labor.



The aim of labor
  is to support and sustain
     human life.
But this is a long-sighted
    view -- arial (or sattelite)

and here  "in-country"

 shorter-term imperatives
   take over from
     the geist of
   "total human improvement"




D&G pose: if our motivations are structured by
  capital's market,
and if this artifice gives desire its dominant form
    in our real world,
  does the only hope lie in
     a radical mutation

     (a "break-through of 
  the desiring-machines")

 allowing us to fly
    directly past the state-form?



Thier whole formulation is preposterous,
   something hastily squirted out
     under the bedsheets
    of social democracy.



***STRIKE THREE AND YOU'RE OUT BOYS***








	Posted by Sam on 04:36 AM
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