In the age of representative government, every class strove to identify its form of revenue with the general interests of society. [...]

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 to workers:

The level of wages expressed, not in terms of money, but in terms of the means of subsistence necessary to the working man, that is the level of real, not nominal wages, depends on the relationship between demand and supply. An alteration in the mode of taxation may cause a momentary disturbance, but will not change anything in the long run.

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. Even if the powers that be were so inclined, the state could do nothing against this iron law except provide some measure of poor relief. [...]

Until April 1849, Marx subscribed to a two-stage theory of revolution: a bourgeois-democratic stage—political emancipation—out of which the conditions for a workers’ revolution—human emancipation—would emerge. But even before the coup d’état of Louis Bonaparte, the progression of this so-called ‘permanent revolution’ had been thwarted and reversed. In the aftermath of defeat he struggled to identify the reasons why this scenario had failed to materialize. [...]

Previously Marx had been sceptical of if not hostile to America, seeing it in the mirror of Tocqueville’s literary travelogue as the land of completed democracy, but also of a hypocritical middle-class religiosity. His views on the pre-Civil War US were contradictory: he dismissed it as a backward society with undeveloped class contradictions—like the old Swiss republic, hardly a radical beacon—but also seemed to regard it as the most advanced frontier of bourgeois society. America had another significance for the early Marx: its slave system was the infernal shadow of this bourgeois world of alienated liberty. Only later would Marx come to see a contradiction between free wage-labour and slavery. Now, he assumed that American slavery was an integral part of the world system of bourgeois society that was based on wage slavery: ‘Modern nations have been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World.’ The two forms of slavery had risen together and would fall in the same way. The Marx of this period was a ruthless abolitionist: he conceived of his own times as the age of the abolition of state, private property, family, religion and nationality. Marx and Engels took this universalism to its ultimate conclusion in a rejoinder to Stirner’s racialization of the Hegelian historical schema into Negroid, Mongoloid and Caucasoid eras: ‘Even naturally evolved differences within the species, such as racial differences . . . can and must be abolished in the course of historical development.’

[...] the reproduction of capitalist social relations depends upon waves of cost-cutting, labour-saving investment but also on levels of employment that generate the income and surplus income that sustain this process—a difficult balance that over the long term might lead to permanent unemployment on an ever larger scale. It might be said then that the current historical situation is both a continuation and a structural convolution of this process, resulting from the failure of new phases of accumulation to materialize. The slowdown of the wheel of capitalist accumulation—staved off by publicly subsidized financialization, burgeoning debt levels and the new extremes of inequality—has led to a structural transformation in which its ‘laws of motion’ are faltering. The underlying value-determinations of the price system are being warped out of their earlier shapes with little prospect of a return to ‘normal times’ by the very efforts of the leading powers to keep the system afloat.

[...] Market fundamentalism is self-evidently false. Contra Karl Polanyi’s classic account, he says, capitalism does not homeopathically reform itself. Pure capitalism may be impossible, as Polanyi insisted; but in Mann’s view it needs actively to be tamed, regulated and modified and for that to happen there has to be struggle and countervailing forces, above all a vigorous lib-lab and union presence. The golden age was the product of just such a regulated capitalism put to good uses in the context of authoritative nation-states and powerful socio-political movements. Conversely, the Great Recession was a graphic example of what happens in the absence of such countervailing forces. Yet Mann also seems to say that the crisis of the time was real and that the golden age was over no matter who was in charge. If so, there were no progressive solutions to it, only bad ones, of which the neoliberal was the worst. At the same time, he suggests that causation also worked in the opposite direction. The question then becomes how far the crisis, once underway, was ultimately an ideological product of irrational neoliberalism and the obverse fatigue of the neo-Keynesians. It is hard to tell. Moreover, it is not apparent what could have been put forth instead, except defensive action and hoping for the best. Mann is perfectly aware that the essentials of ‘the golden age’ were no longer present and could not be recreated.

If the golden age is gone, its larger historical framework nevertheless remains, albeit precariously. This is the structure that has marked, unevenly, the leading edge of collective power ever since the Middle Ages, for which Mann’s infelicitous term is a ‘multipower actor civilization,’ decentralized and on the whole non-imperial, productively as opposed to lethally competitive: first Europe, then the West, then perhaps the World. Today the space for marcher lords—outsiders or borderland primitives who could suddenly take over the advanced centres and turn them into something more powerful and dynamic, only to fall to new outsiders—has vanished. The last marcher lords were the empires of the US and USSR, which took centre stage as a result of World War II. However powerful China has become, it will not be another marcher lord. For the PRC is already on the inside. It may well become the new ‘leading edge’, but it is and will remain part of a multipower actor civilization (recent US unilateralism being doomed to failure).