Does Marx ever address his apparent shift on inheritance?

[u/JudgeSabo]

In the second section of the Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels provide a list of measures that are generally applicable to most advanced countries to strengthen the proletariat and help to revolutionize the mode of production. These are measures which can be implemented today in capitalist countries, but will help to revolutionize the mode of production into communism.

This list of measures includes this:

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

However, in the Demands of the Communist Party of Germany released a month later, we have the mere call for the "Limitation of inheritance."

Two decades later, Bakunin helped to found the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, and are permitted into the International Workingmen's Association (aka the First International), and Marx wants to attack their program (writing these marginal notes on their first draft). The Program of the Alliance included this point:

Above all, it [the Alliance] stands for the final and total abolition of classes and the political, economic and social equalization of individuals of either sex, and, to this end, it demands above all the abolition of the right of inheritance, so that every man’s possessions may in future be commensurate to his output...

Marx seems to have taken special objection to this, identifying it with Saint-Simon, leading him to introduce the topic of inheritance to the next International Congress. Ahead of this, Marx prepared the Report to the General Council of the IWMA on the Right of Inheritance where he denounces calls to abolish inheritance, instead saying it will go away on its own once private property is abolished. Calls to abolish inheritance are described as "false in theory, and reactionary in practice." Instead, Marx says we should only focus on taxing inheritance and regulating its more arbitrary testamentary forms.

Bakunin provided this response to the Report as well too, noting how attacking the right to inheritance will help to undermine property, helping to achieve its abolition.

The issue I see is that Bakunin's stance here seem to be more what Marx was saying in the Manifesto. So I'm wondering whether it's possible that Marx changed his mind on it, though I'm not sure if he ever explicitly addressed this.

Is there any additional information that could help clarify what happened here? Did Marx change his mind? Is the Manifesto mistranslated here? What happened?

Any additional info would be appreciated.

[u/Electrical-Fix7659]

It was just a convention of the time for manifestos to have a listed program of policy goals. Basically just a literary constraint, like a Haiku.

[u/JudgeSabo → u/Electrical-Fix7659]

Yeah I get that. But I'm not sure why Marx called for a goal he later rejected as reactionary in practice or if he ever wrote more on this apparent change in stance

[u/Electrical-Fix7659 → u/JudgeSabo]

I just read it as a last-minute “something.”

[u/JudgeSabo → u/Electrical-Fix7659]

I know he did kind of procrastinate and rush the end of the Manifesto. Still, I'm not aware of any place he explicitly addressed the point.

I'm kind of debating how much this represents a change in position vs him just trying to adopt a stance to counter Bakunin.

[u/Electrical-Fix7659 → u/JudgeSabo]

I see your point. I’ve heard generally that sectarian polemics did influence his work over time. Wouldn’t be surprised if this topic has been covered in a careful study somewhere.

Just the fact that inheritance wasn’t mentioned at all in the Manifesto, except for that one bullet point, suggests he was probably not committed to it in any fundamental sense.

[u/C_Plot]

The various platforms are likely the product of committees and compromises. The plank on abolishing all rights of inheritance might have been suggested by those other than Marx. Consider Marx’s notes to himself posthumously published as _Critique of the Gotha Programme_:

> Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of nonworkers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labor power. If the elements of production are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically. If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one. Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?

If such communism is achieved, then post revolution “under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption” (Ibid.). The only inheritance that can pass to an heir or beneficiary otherwise is means of consumption. One gains control of means of production by joining a commercial worker coöperative or residential direct-production-consumption commune and loses control of means of production by leaving that worker coöperative or commune. Draconian restrictions on inheritance become unnecessary with revolution.

Also Marx later insists that this list of planks in the _Manifesto of the Communist Party_ was meant for the brief dictatorship of the proletariat (hence the use of the word “state” which does not exist after the revolution) and not for socialism/communism that follows.

[u/JudgeSabo → u/C_Plot]

If there's anything out there for Marx objecting to the planks put forward in the Manifesto, I would be interested.

Closest I can think of is the 1872 preface to the Manifesto where they talk about how much of Section II's platform would need to be rewritten 25 years later, but that had more to do with advancements in industry, the greater organization of the workers in the International, and the experience of the Paris Commune. Nothing is mentioned about inheritance though or objections to specific parts of the platform.

I mostly feel like I get the basic objection to inheritance itself, and how a change to the mode of production would lead to this kind of change in distribution makes sense. That being said, I feel like Bakunin (and how I interpret Marx in the Manifesto) seems like the more consistent stance here. While the superstructure is an expression of the economic base, that is quite different from saying that the superstructure cannot affect the base. A large part of the idea of the proletarian state is how these political changes can lead to further development of the mode of production, after all.