The context of this is the repeal of the Corn Laws, and Marx's views of the time - explicitly based on Ricardo - are elaborated more in a pamphlet of a couple of months later - "On the question of free trade": http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/01/09ft.htm
The logic doesn't hold if wages are not pinned by competition to a level "which permits the workers penuriously to eke out their lives and the lives of their race". Later Marx ditched this idea, e.g. in Capital and the Critique of the Gotha Programme.
Cheers, Mike scandalum.wordpress.com
James Heartfield wrote:
>>I think Marx said sort of the opposite
>>
>>"If all taxes which bear on the working class were abolished root and
>>branch, the necessary consequence would be the reduction of wages by
the
>>whole amount of taxes which goes into them. Either the employers'
profit
>>would rise as a direct consequence by the same quantity, or else no
more
>>than an alteration in the form of tax-collecting would have taken
place.
>>Our
>>argument is that although some taxes are paid by the working class,
the
>>burden of taxation rests on the capitalists and has to be paid out of
the
>>profit accruing to them in the form of rent, interest and profit, the
>>basis
>>of which is the unpaid labour." ("Criticism and Critical Morality",
Marx
>>and
>>Engels Collected Works, Volume 6).
>>
>>... that last phrase, though would justify Shaikh's word 'ultimately'
in
>>the sense that the source of the profit from which the capitalists pay
tax
>>is the workers' unpaid labour, then, yes, workers unpaid labour is the
>>source of all government revenue.