Even Karl Marx used it as the basis for his condemnation of the Speenhamland system in his magnum opus Das Kapital (1867) thirty years later. Poor relief, he said, was a tactic employers used to keep wages as low as possible by putting the onus on local government. Like his friend Friedrich Engels, Marx saw the old poor laws as a relic of a feudal past. Releasing the proletariat from the shackles of poverty required a revolution, not a basic income.
