But, remembering their conflicting origins and descent, the landowner sees the capitalist as his presumptuous, liberated, and enriched slave of yesterday, and himself as a capitalist who is threatened by him; the capitalist sees the landowner as the idle, cruel, and egotistical lord of yesterday; he knows that the landowner is harmful to him as a capitalist, and yet that he owes his entire present social position, his possessions and his pleasures, to industry; the capitalist sees in the landowner the antithesis of free industry and free capital, which is independent of all natural forces -- this opposition is extremely bitter, and each side tells the truth about the other. One only need read the attacks launched by immovable on movable property, and vice-versa, in order to gain a clear picture of their respective worthlessness. The land-owner emphasizes the noble lineage of his property, the feudal reminiscences, the poetry of remembrance, his high-flown nature, his political importance, etc. When he is talking economics, he avows that agriculture alone is productive.
At the same time, he depicts his opponent as a wily, huckstering, censorious, deceitful, greedy, mercenary, rebellious, heartless, and soulless racketeer who is estranged from his community and busily trades it away, a profiteering, pimping, servile, smooth, affected trickster, a desiccated sharper who breeds, nourishes, and encourages competition and pauperism, crime and the dissolution of all social ties, who is without honor, principles, poetry, substance, or anything else. (See, among others, the Physiocrat Bergasse, whom Camille Desmoulins has already flayed in his journal Revolutions de France et de Brabant; see also von Vincke, Lancizolle, Haller, Leo, Kosegarten, and Sismondi.)
MARX NOTE: 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, which are 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 change. It is the child, the legitimate, only-begotten son, of the modern age. It feels sorry for its opponent, whom it sees as a half-wit unenlightened as to his own nature (an assessment no one could disagree with) and eager to replace moral capital and free labor by brute, immoral force and serfdom. It paints him as a Don Quixote, who, under the veneer of directness, probity, the general interest, and stability, hides an inability and evil intent. It brands him as a cunning monopolist. It discountenances his reminiscences, his poetry, and his enthusiastic gushings, by a historical and sarcastic recital of the baseness, cruelty, degradation, prostitution, infamy, anarchy, and revolt forged in the workshops of his romantic castles.
Movable property, itself, claims to have won political freedom for the world, to have loosed the chains of civil society, to have linked together different worlds, to have given rise to trade, which encourages friendship between peoples and to have created a pure morality and a pleasing culture; to have given the people civilized instead of crude wants and the means with which it satisfy them. The landowner, on the other hand -- this idle and vexatious speculator in grain -- puts up the price of the people's basic provisions and thereby forces the capitalist to put up wages without being able to raise productivity, so making it difficult, and eventually impossible, to increase the annual income of the nation and to accumulate the capital which is necessary if work is to be provided for the people and wealth for the country. As a result, the landowner brings about a general decline. Moreover, he inordinately exploits all the advantages of modern civilization without doing the least thing in return, and without mitigating a single one of his feudal prejudices. Finally, the landlord -- for whom the cultivation of the land and the soil itself exist only as a heaven-sent source of money -- should take a look at the tenant farmer and say whether he himself is not a downright, fantastic, cunning scoundrel, who in his heart and in actual fact has for a long time been part of free industry and well-loved trade, however much he may resist them and prattle of historical memories and moral or political goals. All the arguments he can genuinely advance in his own favor are only true for the cultivator of the land (the capitalist and the laborers), of whom the landowner is rather the enemy; thus, he testifies against himself. Without capital, landed property is dead, worthless matter. The civilized victory of movable capital has precisely been to reveal and create human labor as the source of wealth in place of the dead thing. (See Paul-Louis Courier, Saint-Simon, Ganilh, Ricardo, Mill, MacCulloch, Destutt de Tracy, and Michael Chevalier.)
