Nor did Marx expect national ownership to increase the relative strength of the workers _unless it was accompanied by a political revolution_.
Another vast capitalist reform predicted by Socialists since the Communist Manifesto (1847) is nationalization or municipalization of the ground rent or unearned increment of land.

At first Kautsky and others were inclined to expect that nothing would be done in this direction until the working classes themselves achieved political power, but it has always been seen from the days of Marx that the industrial capitalists had no particular reason for wishing to be burdened with a parasitic class of landlords that weighed on their shoulders as much as on those of the rest of the people.

Not only do industrial capitalists pay heavy rents to landlords, but the rent paid by the wage worker also has to be paid indirectly and in part by the industrial capitalist: "The quantity of wealth that a landlord can appropriate from the capitalist class becomes larger in proportion as the general demand for land increases, in proportion as population grows, in proportion as the capitalist class needs land, _i.e._ in proportion as the capitalist system of production expands.

In proportion with all this, rent rises; that is to say, the aggregate amount of wealth increases which the landlord class can slice off--either directly or indirectly--from the surplus that would otherwise be grabbed by the capitalist class alone."[90] The industrial capitalists, then, have very motive to put an end to this kind of parasitism, and to use the funds secured, through confiscatory taxation of the unearned increment of land, to lessen their own taxation, to nationalize those fundamental industries that can only be made in this way to subserve the interests of the capitalist class as a whole (instead of some part of it merely), and to undertake through government those costly enterprises which are needed by all industry, but which give too slow returns to attract the capitalist investor.
This enormous reform, in land taxation, which alone would put into the hands of governments ultimately almost a third of the capital of modern nations, was considered by Marx, in all its early stages, as purely capitalistic, "_a Socialistically-fringed attempt to save the rule of capitalism, and to establish it in fact on a still larger foundation at present_."[91] Indeed, I have shown in a previous chapter that radical reformers who advocated this single-tax idea, along with the nationalization and municipalization of monopolies, do so with the conscious purpose of reviving capitalism and making it more permanent, precisely as Marx says.

The great Socialist wrote the above phrase in 1881 (in a recently published letter to Sorge of New York) after reading Henry George's "Progress and Poverty," which had just appeared.