Chapter 4 - The Analysis of Capitalist Landownership: An Investigation of the Case of Great Britain (1977)

Summary

The boom and collapse of the land and property market in the early 1970s in Great Britain revealed a lack of knowledge and understanding of the present nature of private landownership by capital. The reaction of ‘the left’ (including that of the present author) to the events of that period was confused. One possible interpretation was to write off the political battle […] as just one more victory for industrial capital, in this case against the moribund remains of something called ‘landed property’. This latter, it was vaguely suspected, quite possibly still had feudal connections but was now virtually extinct, and certainly posed no major difficulties for capital. The problem with this interpretation – apart from incorrect assumptions of association between aristocracy, landownership and feudalism – was that it failed to answer the question of what role private landownership now plays in the British social formation. The assumption in fact appeared to be that landownership now played no structural role. But events themselves belied that view. […] The existing pattern of private landownership clearly was having contradictory repercussions on the wider processes of accumulation and of the reproduction of social relations. A common alternative view recognized the existence of such structural contradictions but attributed them to something variously entitled ‘the property sector’ and ‘landed capital’. The difficulty of this interpretation was that the definition and nature of this landed interest, and consequently of its specific economic and political effects, were left unanalysed.

The research from which this paper stems was concerned to analyse both the present nature of private landownership by capital in Great Britain, and also the effects of such private landownership on a social formation dominated by capitalism. This paper will indicate some of the results of that enquiry and will also make some points on the interpretation of struggles over, and changes in, the form of landownership in such a social formation. […] [It contains] a brief outline and analysis […] of the present forms of landownership by private capital in Great Britain, and of their relative importance. An overall theme stresses […] [the significance of structural social relations and] the empirical study of such relations in concrete social formations […].