Ground (Land) Rent, a part of the surplus product created by direct agricultural producers and appropriated by landowners. "The appropriation of rent is that economic form in which landed property is realised" (Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. Ill, p. 634). Ground rent came into being with the emergence of landed property. In slaveowning society, it was created by the slaves, the coloni (semi-free citizens) and free small landowners. Under feudalism, it was created by the serfs and represented initially by corvee (labour rent), later by share cropping (rent in kind), and finally, during the disintegration of feudalism, by money rent. With the transformation of agriculture into a capitalist enterprise, capitalist farmers who rent land pay the landowners part of the surplus value created by agricultural wage workers. Feudal ground rent reflected the relations between two classes, feudal landlords and the peasants they exploited, while capitalist rent reflects the relations of production between three classes of bourgeois society: wage workers, capitalist tenant-farmers and landowners. Feudal landlords appropriated the whole of the surplus product and sometimes even part of the necessary product of the serfs in the form of feudal rent. Capitalist farmers, however, only pay the excess of surplus value over the average profit from their capital for the land they use. Capitalist ground rent creates the false impression that the landowners do not 153 exploit workers, as the agricultural workers enter into direct relations only with the capitalist tenant-farmers and their exploitation by the latter is camouflaged by the formal equality of the sides in the sale and purchase of labour power and by the form of payment for it. Under capitalism, rent is paid in the form of rental. Apart from rent as payment for the use of land, rental can include interest on capital invested in the land and also depreciation of that capital. Capitalist rent has two basic forms, differential rent (see Differential Rent under Capitalism), caused by the monopoly of the land as the object of capitalist farming, and absolute rent, caused by the monopoly of private ownership of the land. Ground rent forms part of the prices of agricultural produce, thereby raising them. In the form of ground rent society pays tribute to the landowners, who lead a parasitic way of life and divert a mass of capital from productive application. Growing rent and rising prices of agricultural produce contradict the striving of capital for unrestricted expansion. This contradiction of capitalism is temporarily resolved in agrarian crises. Under imperialism, landed property merges with finance capital, which receives ground rent primarily in the form of interest on the peasants’ and farmers’ mortgages (see Mortgage). Socialist society, which has eliminated the conditions for the existence of absolute rent, has differential rent (see Differential Rent under Socialism).