Paul B points out that much of what one would have expected
to appear in a book on landed property has already appeared
in the third volume of capital dealing with rent.
I am not sufficiently familiar with Marx's final plans for
capital to say whether the material that appears here was
originally prepared for a distinct book on landed property.
Does anyone else know?
As to the question of whether the start of a book on landed
property should be the understanding of rent derived from
Vol III. One difficulty I see with this is that it does not
deal with landed property on its own behalf but only as
an appendage of capital. I would have thought that landed
property is not only historically prior to capital, but
also logically so - in that its existence does not depend
upon capital. Similarly the commodity is both historically
and logically prior to capital. Rent similarly predates
capital and assumes a transformed form under capitalism.
I would have said at a guess that the logical and historical
precondition of rent is the absence of readily accessible
uncultivated land.