Uncompleted tasks of the bourgeois revolution re. inheritance?

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/686/programme.htm


In The Class Struggle, Kautsky’s 1892 exposition of the ‘maximum part’ of the Erfurt programme, this remains the character of the division. Kautsky writes:

“The programme adopted by the German Social Democracy at Erfurt in 1891 divides itself into two parts. In the first place it outlines the fundamental principles on which socialism is based, and in the second it enumerates the demands which the Social Democracy makes of present-day society. The first part tells what socialists believe; the second how they propose to make their belief effective.”

However, in his 1902 The Social Revolution and The Day After The Social Revolution Kautsky explains the political part of the minimum programme as (to use what later became ‘orthodox’ language) ‘uncompleted tasks of the bourgeois revolution’:

“Let us imagine then that this fine day has already come, in which at one stroke all power is thrown into the lap of the proletariat. How would it begin? ...

“In the first place it is self-evident that it would recover what the bourgeoisie has lost. It would sweep all remnants of feudalism away and realise that democratic programme for which the bourgeoisie once stood. As the lowest of all classes it is also the most democratic of all classes. It would extend universal suffrage to every individual and establish complete freedom of press and assemblage. It would make the state completely independent of the church and abolish all rights of inheritance. It would establish complete autonomy in all individual communities and abolish militarism ...”

Kautsky here has plainly lost sight of the idea that the struggle for the democratic republic is connected to the proletariat’s struggle for political power: it is by some other means that the proletariat wins power.

Following Kautsky, this is also certainly the way Lenin used the idea of the minimum programme: the minimum programme (meaning the ‘political section’ of the programme) is the programme of the logic of the bourgeois democratic revolution; the maximum programme that of the proletarian socialist revolution.

On "The Democracy Question" (my recent blog), I am in full agreement with CPGB comrade Mike Macnair. As a RevLeft comrade said recently, "The bourgeois is not in favor of real democracy, it is fighting for its class supremacy and western democracy are only a means to that end. The working class is however."

However, what about inheritances? I've got this feeling that some anti-feudal aristocrat in the feudal intelligentsia (http://www.revleft.com/vb/capitalist-consciousness-feudal-t91804/index.html) and/or an outright bourgeois radical - both during the Renaissance - had a few choice words to say about inheritance, linking it with the legalism of aristocracy (in much the same way as private property serves as a legalism for the extraction of surplus value). Am I correct (and thus Kautsky validated - if only partially - from Macnair's criticism)? If so, which radical philosopher(s)?

[MarxSchmarx]

At the turn of the century, Francis Galton tried desperately hard to use the new sciences of statistics and heredity to justify the English aristocracy. He argued that early aristocrats became so because they were superior human beings. Thus, their children were likely to be superior human beings, and were hence deserving to be aristocrats anyway.

[Die Neue Zeit]

That's interesting to know about the conceptualist behind "standard deviation."

[apathy maybe]

Interestingly the "right" of "inheritance" is one that capitalists most often fight for, perhaps because it is one that is least defensible.

Personally I'm of two minds as to whether capitalists would want to get rid of it or not, but most probably I find that they wouldn't.

More later.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Interestingly the "right" of "inheritance" is one that capitalists most often fight for, perhaps because it is one that is least defensible.

Personally I'm of two minds as to whether capitalists would want to get rid of it or not, but most probably I find that they wouldn't.

More later.

Nothing to disagree with there, but what are your thoughts on radicals during the various bourgeois revolutions? Here's some of Macnair's responsive thoughts, BTW:


I think that (a) there certainly was some degree of attack on the right/ ideology of inheritance by radicals (which does not equal capitalists) in the bourgeois revolutions, but (b) the underlying proposition (that a pure capitalism would lack inheritance) is wrong.

(a) Attack on the right/ ideology of inheritance: Marx talks about it as a shibboleth of the French utopian left at some point, though I don't have the reference to hand, in the period of the 1st International. A search of the M/E archive on MIA for the word would probably produce references.

The opponents of the bourgeois revolution certainly used the ideology of natural/ inherited inequality to justify monarchy and the exclusion of the bourgeoisie from political power. Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis, produces some useful examples from 1679-83. Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders, and Bruce, The Rhetoric of Conservatism, provide examples from anti-radical thought of the late 18th-early 19th century. That said, today natural /inherited inequality remains a fundamental ideology used by pro-capitalist ideologues, including 'Libertarians'. For a small example, a couple of years back I and a couple of others debated Madsen Pirie of the Adam Smith Institute and two others on whether private schools should be abolished. When pressed, the free-marketeer Pirie fell back on the idea that the possession of enough money to pay for private schooling showed high intelligence which was inherited, so that the inheritance of social position through private schooling giving access to university, etc., was ultimately 'natural'.

A particular sort of inheritance *was* attacked in the French revolution and hence by the codifiers (and also, unsuccessfully, by English radicals). This was the family settlement (English entail/ strict settlement; continental fideicommissum), and the feudal inheritance rule of primogeniture (inheritance by the eldest son). The attack was grounded on the ideology that settlements etc were an interference with the prerogatives of god and primogeniture contrary to the natural equality of children, and more solidly on the idea that the effect of settlements and primogeniture was to tend to lead to concentration of landownership. These arguments reveal the fact that the attack is a result of *petty*-bourgeois (distributivist/ mutualist) ideology, not of the interests of the capitalists as a class.

(b) Classes IMO involve inheritance of social position, i.e.*inheritable* relations to the means of production. This is, I think, implicit in Marx rather than explicit, simply because he continued throughout his life to think of "ownership" as = "dominium" in the civilian (Roman law) terms he had learnt as a law student at Berlin in the 1830s. It is also implicit in Trotsky's analysis - part of his argument which was clearly proved correct by 1989-91 - that the Soviet bureaucracy could have no long-term historical future because bureaucrats could not legitimately pass on their positions and privileges to their children, but would have to convert itself into a class based on private property.

It follows that free markets without inheritance would not be capitalism, which is *substructurally* a class society, but be an unstable regime in ways similar albeit not identical to the Stalinist regimes.

[davidasearles]

There is nothing about bequeaths and successions of bourgeois private property that would make it an uncompleted task for the bourgeoisie to do away with when such bequeaths and successions are tools of the bourgeois to maintain their private property and wealth.

If they should be directly attacked by the workers in order to draw attention to the goal of collective worker control of the industrial means of production and distribution then that should be stated lest one start looking like a reformer that would prolong bourgeois society by atempting to make the most glaring aspects of the private property system a bit more palatable - diverting attention away from the central goal of collective worker control of the industrial means of production and distribution.

Just as a suggeston.

__________________________

"REVOLUTIONARY MARXISM":

Is besides the point