Explain how banishing the Right of Inheritance could help the Proletariat.

[Solidarity]

Hello Comrades,

I was a little confused on this issue. I understand how abolishing the right of inheritance for the bourgeoisie could help i.e. Sam Walton's son would not inherit Walmart , and would help abolish private property, etc, etc. But still a little confused. If I could get a detailed explanation I would appreciate it

Thanks. :)

[Hit The North]

In the UK, the wealthiest 10% own more personal wealth than the bottom 50%. A vast amount of wealth is locked away in personal possession and transmitted through inheritance among the rich. With the abolition of inheritance, the state would have access to this wealth and, theoretically, could use this social wealth for the social good, thus benefiting the working class via generous social welfare programs. However, there are two problems:

1. The rich would transfer wealth before death or employ other means to avoid the impact of anti-inheritance laws.

2. The state, being the instrument of the rich, would never pass such a law in the first place.

Obviously a government of the working class would want to abolish inheritance as a first step towards socialising the wealth that was otherwise in private hands and abolishing bourgeois property relations.

[leftistman]

Large estates would be brought into public ownership and thus would be used for the common good. It would also prevent people from being given supreme wealth and power which causes class struggle and exploitation.

[Urbandale]

Well, what exactly are you confused about? And are you referring to inheritance in a capitalist state or a socialist one? The arguments are different for both states, but the root is the same. Private ownership of property is bad(for various standard commie reasons), and inheritance is nothing but a holdover from feudalism that benefited the bourgeois, so they kept it around.

[Uppity Prole]

If a government redistributed wealth and land without abolishing the right of inheritance, it would just create a new elite further down the line.

After the revolution in France land was redistributed to the peasants which was a progressive act. Over several generations this land was inherited and consolidated between these ex-peasant families. These new land-owning families became a very conservative social force in the 19th C. and its interests became entwined with conservative elements of the new industrial bourgeoisie.

[ckaihatsu]

Besides as a hypothetical, just *mentioning* this as a political topic serves to cut against the heredity / biological status quo and argument for social organization.

In other words *why* should society's most fundamental social unit be that of the nuclear family -- ? What is it about genetic or biological ties that makes membership within a family the most "natural" kind -- ?

We may be seeing a gradual cosmopolitanization of society over the past few decades, and because of the Internet especially, as the availability of access to individuality -- through an increased variety of sources of information -- has increased. This means that people are no longer as *tradition*-bound and *culture*-bound as they used to be, which is definitely a progressive thing.

Yet, when it comes to domestic living -- and the very concept of *domestication* as well -- the world continues to remain in the Dark Ages with the de facto norm of royalty-like private property heritability, and its required form of social organization, the family lineage.

A moment of thought will reveal that most of the rest of bourgeois practice and culture revolves around the legitimization of the nuclear family norm, namely privatization.


The democratization of power...

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