Marx’s Ricardian conception of real wages as permanently fixed at near the bare subsistence level ruled out anything but defensive struggles to keep wages from sinking below the subsistence minimum.
Except in a few stray passages from this period, Marx never conceptualized tax as the material basis of the connection between state and civil society, the form of revenue characteristic of this relationship. The upshot of what he did have to say was that taxes on capitalists would be of no benefit…
the vast German market was flooded with the output of English factories, conveniently drawing scarce capital into the outlet of public debt, thereby relieving the parlous finances of a government resisting parliamentary control of the budget
The relative backwardness of conditions on the continent led liberal and conservative parties to adopt positions on economic policy that were the obverse of the ones held by their counterparts in England
mid-1800s (when Das Kapital was being written)
In the age of representative government, every class strove to identify its form of revenue with the general interests of society. [...]
