80 SOCIAL SCIENTIST formal subsumption of labour under capital in agriculture, still others may be productive partnerships of agrarian capitalists, with hired labour employed by the sharecropper. This particular point is recognized by Utsa Patnaik, who argues in her article that the form of rent payment (fixed or share kind rent, cash rent) tells us nothing about the actual mode of production prevailing in the agriculture. Patnaik develops Marx's argument about rent as a barrier to capitalist investment in agriculture. In an interesting elaboration she points out that with the co-existence of capitalist and peasant tenants in the same land tenancy market, it is possible to imagine a rectangular hyperbola relationship between the rent as share of output and the output per acre on different farms, as tenants using different techniques with varying productivities are forced to pay the same absolute amounts of rent. While Patnaik's developments of Marx's theory of rent are both important and interesting, her interpretation of the writings of Ricardo and Marx are open to debate. Thus she argues that Ricardo "ignores the economic effects of landed property per se." (page 72) However, for Ricardo, landed property is precisely the mechanism which forces the transfer of differential surplus produce as rent to the landowning class : otherwise it would be retained by the capitalist farmers themselves. Furthermore, Patnaik ignores the importance of intensive differential rent (DR II) in the Ricardian-soheme* This makes the theory of different rent perfectly compatible with the situation in which all land under cultivation pays a rent, as long as the marginal unit of capital used in cultivation pays no rent. In fact, in his notes on Malthus, Ricardo explicitly recognized that the case of all land under cultivation paying r€ni would be the most relevant for all old-settled societies. This in no way negates his explanation of rent determination. Patnaik feels that "it is not clear why the price of production in agriculture is determined by the price of production on the worst soil, i.e., under the most unfavourable conditions of production, as Ricardo states, and not determined by the price of production under the average socially necessary conditions of production " (page 74) The reason lies with the very fact that creates land rent in the first place : land of a particular fertility and location is a scarce and non-reproducible means of production. Thus agricultural cultivation is not strictly comparable with industry where the means of prcduction are reproducible and where therefore the average cost of production determines the price of the commodity. As far as Marx's theory of absolute rent is concerned, Patnaik states that it "is integrated consistently into his thecry of value." (page 74) This is true only insofar as absolute rent forms the difference between the value and the price of production of the agricultural commodity. (Marx argued that agricultural products would exchange at value rather than pri^e of production like all other commodities. Because the organic coiftposition of calpital in agriculture was judged to be lower than the