Mike Treen, a good friend and an editor of this blog who lives in New Zealand, suggested during a visit to the U.S. last May that I examine the question of real estate and house rents. I promised him that I would try to get to it. I couldn’t do it immediately because the 100th anniversary of World War I was fast approaching and demanded the blog’s immediate attention. But with no anniversary of similar importance approaching over the next few months, I now have some time to examine the question of real estate, rents and landed property in general.
I will begin with an examination of Marx’s theory of ground rent that he develops in Volume III of “Capital.” I will then examine how Marx’s theory relates to the related but different question of house rents, prices and mortgages, which Marx gave relatively little attention to.
After that, I hope to examine the latest developments in the world economy, which I have neglected recently because of the needs arising from the World War I anniversary. While much has been written over the years on the theme of the “decline of the dollar,” we now have the opposite phenomenon of the “strong dollar.”
The strong dollar refers to the U.S. dollar’s current rise against gold, the money commodity, and other currencies. These developments raise important theoretical questions on the nature and function of money, as well as a series of practical questions. For example, what does the current strong dollar imply for the evolution of the world economic situation, the new war in the Middle East, and the war danger in general?
Finally, another important anniversary is approaching early next year. Next March will mark the 30th anniversary of the election of Mikhail Gorbachev to the post of general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Long before the Gorbachev election, a debate had been raging within the socialist countries around these questions: If and too what extent are the products of socialist industry commodities? How relevant, if at all, is the law of value and commodity-money relationships to the construction of socialism? What are the historical limits to the law of value?
With the election of Gorbachev, the economists who strongly defended the view that commodity-money relations and the law of value either do or rather should prevail during the construction of socialism won the day. The consequences of their victory are all too obvious today.
The famed Argentinian-Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, who was killed by the CIA in 1967, many years before the election of Gorbachev, defended what even then was the minority opinion among economists in the socialist countries on this matter.
A Critique of Crisis Theory 