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[XLII.]
....But liberated industry, industry
constituted for itself as such, and liberated capital, are
the necessary development of labour. The power of industry over
its antagonist is at once made manifest in the emergence of agriculture
as an actual industry, when previously most of the work was left to
the soil itself and to the slave of the soil, through whom the
land cultivated itself. With the transformation of the slave into a free
worker--i.e., into a hireling--the landlord himself
is transformed into a captain of industry, into a capitalist--a transformation
which takes place at first through the intermediacy of the tenant farmer.
The tenant farmer, however, is the landowner's representative--the
landowner's revealed secret: it is only through him that the landowner
has his economic existence--his existence as a private proprietor--for
the rent of his land only exists due to the competition between the farmers.
Thus, in the person of the tenant farmer the landlord has already become
in essence a common capitalist. And this must come to pass, too,
in actual fact: the capitalist engaged in agriculture--the tenant--must
become a landlord, or vice versa. The tenant's industrial hucksterism
is the landowner's industrial hucksterism, for the existence
of the former postulates the existence of the latter.
....But mindful of the conflictual origins
of their line of descent, the landowner knows the capitalist as his insolent,
liberated, and enriched slave of yesterday and himself as a capitalist
who is threatened by him. The capitalist knows the landowner as the
idle, cruel, egotistical master of yesterday; he knows that the landowner
injures him as a capitalist, but that it is to industry that he owes all
his present social significance, possessions and pleasures; he sees in
the landowner a contradiction to free industry and to free capital
- to capital independent of every natural limitation. This contradiction
is extremely bitter, and each side tells the truth about the other. One
need only read the attacks launcehd by immovable on movable property and
vice-versa to obtain a clear picture of their respective worthlessness.
The landowner highlights the noble lineage of his property, his feudal
souvenirs or reminiscences, his poetry of recollection, his romantic disposition,
his political importance, etc.; and when he talks economics, he holds
that it is only agriculture that is productive. At the same time
he depicts his adversary as a sly, hawking, censorious, carping, deceitful,
greedy, mercenary, rebellious, heartless and spiritless racketeer who
is estranged from the community and freely trades it away, who breeds,
nourishes and cherishes competition, and with it pauperism, crime, and
the dissolution of all social ties, an extorting, pimping, servile, smooth,
flattering, fleecing, dried-up rogue without honour, principles,
Poetry, substance, or anything else. (Amongst others see the Physiocrat
Bergasse, whom Camille Desmoulins flays in his journal, Revolutions
de France et de Brabant; see von Vincke, Lancizolle, Haller, LeQ Kosegarten
and also Sismondi.) [Note by Marx: See also the pompous Old Hegelian
theologian Funke, who, according to Herr Leo, told with tears in his eyes
how a slave had refused, when serfdom was abolished, to cease being a
noble possession. See also Justus Moser's Patriotische Phantasien,
these being distinguished by the fact that they never for one moment leave
the staunch, petty-bourgeois, "Home-baked", ordinary, narrow-minded
horizon of the philistine, and, yet still, remain pure fantasy. It is
this contradiction which has made them so plausible to the German mind.]
Movable property, for its part, points to the miracles of industry and
progress. It is the child of modern times, whose legitimate, only-begotten
son it is. It pities its adversary whom it sees as a simpleton unenlightened
as to his own nature (and with this no one could disagree), who wants
to replace moral capital and free labour by brute, immoral violence and
serfdom. It depicts him as a Don Quixote, who under the guise of bluntness,
respectability, the general interest, and stability, conceals
incapacity for progress, self-indulgence, greed, sectional interest, and
evil intent. It declares him an artful monopolist; it pours cold
water on all his reminiscences, his poetry, and his romanticism by a historical
and sarcastic enumeration of the baseness, cruelty, degradation, prostitution,
infamy, anarchy and revolt, forged in the workshops of his romantic castles.
[XLIII.]
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