ABSTRACT
The nationalization, or socialization, of land was advocated by many thinkers in the nineteenth century and even earlier, but it is only Karl Marx who raised it to the rank of 'social necessity' and integrated it into an overall scheme for a new social order. Socialized agricultural land is farmed as either 'state farms' or 'collective farms'. Marx treated ground rent as a part of 'surplus value' unjustifiably appropriated by landowners and capitalists taking advantage of the monopoly of land ownership and the differences in the productivity of land. The pricing of land products in Socialist countries has always been governed by a curious mixture of different methods and criteria designed to serve particular objectives. In the traditional preoccupation with rent as a distributive category, Socialist authorities have not neutralized the differences in the income-yielding capacity of varying grades of land.
