| Abstract: | In the capitalist city, ground rents reflect for capital the image of its own development and uneven growth, by imposing upon each particular capital the laws of capital as a whole. Therefore, landed property and rent are neither the regulators of urbanization, nor the source of urban contradictions. Capitalist relations of production imply in themselves the autonomy of private poles of accumulation and deny the possibility of a real social control over the formation of the useful effects of agglomeration. These effects thus necessarily constitute for particular capitals non-reproducible or unevenly preconstituted conditions, and consequently so is the basis of surplus profits which can be transformed into ground rents. The existence of strictly non-reproducible conditions is the foundation of the transformation of branch surplus profits into absolute rent, the unevenly preconstituted conditions inducing differential surplus profits transformable into differential rent. It is the non-reproducibility of the commodity itself which is at the basis of surplus profits and monopoly rents. The transformation of these surplus profits into rents in no way implies the existence of a class of landowners, but only relations of production in which landed property is not only autonomous from capital, but also includes a social content which as such can put up an effective resistance to it. The basis of this resistance can as well be capitalist landed property as various forms of non-capitalist landed property. |
