12. Record of Marx's Speech on the Right to Inheritance. From the Minutes of the General Council Meeting of July 20, 1869
12. Record of Marx's Speech on the Right to Inheritance. From the Minutes of the General Council Meeting of July 20, 1869[459]
I
Cit. Marx opened the discussion on the question: The Right to Inheritance. He said the question had been put by the Alliance of Socialist Democrats of Geneva and the Council had accepted it for discussion.[3] The Alliance of Geneva demanded above all the entire abolition of the Right to Inheritance.
There were two forms of inheritance. The testamentary right, or inheritance by will, had come from Rome and had been peculiar to Rome. The father of the Roman family had exercised absolute authority over everything belonging to his household. The Roman family-father must not be compared with the father of a family of the present day. The Roman household had included slaves and clients whose affairs and interestsb the head had been obliged to defend and maintain in public. There had been a superstition that when this man died his ghost remained as a watch in the house to see that things were done right or to torment if things were managed wrong. In the early times of Rome people had sacrificed to this house-god; even blood-feasts had been celebrated in his honour and to appease his wrath.c By and by it had become fashionable to compromise with this spirit by an heir-at-will. It had been the Roman immortality of the soul.d
The will of the deceased had been perpetuated by a testament, but this testament had not necessarily brought a fortune to the successor who inherited, but the will of the deceased had been looked upon as a religious duty. In course of time these heirs-at-will had laid claim to the fortune too, but even in imperial time had never been allowed more than a fourth by law.[3] That pagan superstition had been transmitted to Christian countries and b was the foundation of the right of will as at present existing in England and the United States.
The German right to inheritance was the intestate right, the family right, which treated an estate as a sort of co-proprietorship of which the father of the family was the manager. When this manager died the property fell to all the children. The Germans had known of no other hereditary rights; the Church of Rome had introduced the Roman right and the feudal system had falsified the German right, because feudal property bearing a military charge could not have been divided. T h e French Revolution had returned to the German right of inheritance. In England we had all sorts of nonsensical things; the individual had the most absolute right to will away his property, even to disinherit his own offspring, and by this rule long after he had ceased to exist.[1] This right of will might be left for the middle class to deal with as it was a point which would work against the aristocracy. In Prussia only a little of a man's property could be willed away.
The working class who had nothing to inherit had no interest in the question.
The Democratic Alliance was going to commence the social revolution with the abolition of the right to inheritance. He asked would it be policy to do so?
The proposition was not new. St. Simon had proposed it in 1830.4<i0
As an economical measure it would avail nothing. It would cause so much irritation that it would be sure to raise an almost insurmountable opposition which would inevitably lead to reaction. If at the time of a revolution it was proclaimed, he did not believe that the general state of intelligence would warrant its being sustained. Besides, if the working class had sufficient power to abolish the right to inheritance, it would be powerful enough to proceed to expropriation which would be a much simpler and more efficient process.
To abolish the right to the inheritance of land in England would involve the hereditary functions connected with the land, the House of Lords, etc., and 15,000 lords and 15,000 ladies would have to die before it became available. If, on the contrary, a working men's parliament decreed that the rent should be paid into the treasury instead of to the landlord, the Government would obtain a fund at once(1) without any social disturbance, while by abolishing the right to inheritance everything would be disturbed and nothing got.
Our efforts must be directed to the end that no instruments of production should be private property. The private property in these things was a fiction, since the proprietors could not use them themselves; they only gave them dominion over them, by which they compelled other people to work for them. In a semi-barbarous state this might have been necessary, but it was no longer so. All the means of labour must be socialised, so that every man had a right and the means to exercise his labour power. If we had such a state of things the right to inheritance would be of no use. As long as we had not, the family right to inheritance could not be abolished. The chief aim of people in saving for their children was to ensure them the means of subsistence. If a man's children, were provided for after his death he would not care about leaving them wherewith to get a living, but as long as this was not the case it would only result in hardships, it would irritate and frighten people and do no good. Instead of the beginning it could only be the end of a social revolution. The beginning must be to get the means to socialise the means of labour.
The testamentary right to inheritance was obnoxious to the middle class; with this the state could safely interfere any time. We had legacy-duties already, all we had to do was to increase them and make them progressive, as well as the income-tax, leaving the smaller amounts, £50 for instance, free. Insofar only it was a working-class question.
All that was connected with the present state of things would have to be transformed, but if testaments were suppressed they would be avoided by gifts during life, therefore it would be better to tolerate them on certain conditions than do worse. First the means for a transformed state of things must be got, then the right would disappear of itself.[3]
ir
Cit. Marx replied: if the state had the power to appropriate the land, inheritance was gone. To declare the abolition of inheritance would be foolish. If a revolution occurred, expropriation could be carried; if there was no power to do that, the right to inheritance would not be abolished.
Endnotes
[4 5 9] Marx spoke on the right to inheritance at the General Council meeting of July 20, 1869, during the debate of the programme of the Basle Congress (see this volume, p. 391). The record of his speech in Eccarius' hand has been preserved in the Minute Book of the General Council. There is also a brief summary in The Bee-Hive (No. 406, July 24, 1869) in the report of this Council meeting. T h e full text of Marx's speech on the right to inheritance was first published in English in The General Council of the First International. 1868-1870, Moscow, 1966.
[1] In the autumn of 1867 the General Council of the International Working Men's Association launched a widespread campaign among the English workers in support of the Irish national liberation movement led by the Fenians. The memorial written by Marx was an integral part of this campaign. The Fenians were Irish revolutionaries who named themselves after the "Féne"— a name of the ancient population of Ireland. Their first organisations appeared in the 1850s in the USA among the Irish immigrants and later in Ireland itself. The secret Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, as the organisation was known in the early 1860s, aimed at establishing an independent Irish republic by means of an armed uprising. The Fenians, who expressed the interests of the Irish peasantry, came chiefly from the urban petty bourgeoisie and intelligentsia and believed in conspiracy tactics. The British Government attempted to suppress the Fenian movement by severe police reprisals. On September 18, 1867, the Fenians made an armed attack on a prison van in an attempt to liberate Kelly and Deasy, two of their leaders. The latter managed to escape but a policeman was killed during the clash. Five Irishmen (Maguire, Condon, Larkin, Allen and O'Brien) were charged with murder and brought to trial. Although there was no direct evidence, they were sentenced to death. Maguire was subsequently pardoned, and Condon, as an American citizen, had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. The others were executed. The Fenian trial in Manchester aroused a storm of protest in Ireland and England. On the insistence of Marx, the General Council of the International began, on November 19, a discussion on the Irish question during which the leaders of the international proletarian organisation expressed their solidarity with the struggle of the Irish people for independence and condemned the position of the reformist trade union leaders who, in the wake of the English bourgeois radicals, denied the right of the Fenians to resort to revolutionary methods in the struggle. The discussion was scheduled to continue on November 26 (see this volume, pp. 189-93), but when the news of the conviction was received, the General Council convened a special meeting on November 20 and addressed a memorial to the Home Secretary asking for the commutation of the death sentence. The British Government ignored the memorial. Because of opposition from the trade union leaders, the English labour press did not publish the memorial in its original wording. A report on the special meeting of the General Council, published in The Bee-Hive, No. 319, November 23, 1867, only summarised it, and named the General Council members who had signed it. The French translation was published by Le Courrier français, No. 163, November 24. In English the memorial was first published in full in The General Council of the First International. 1866-1868, Moscow, 1964. This document is also preserved in the form of the manuscript copy made by Mrs. Marx which fully coincides with the text entered into the Minute Book. Written as an article, this copy was apparently to be sent to the press. In this volume the memorial is reproduced from this copy.
[3] Marx wrote this item on the basis of a letter from Johann Baptist Schweitzer dated April 29, 1868. The item was included in the report of the General Council meeting of May 12, 1868 published in The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 344, May 16, 1868, but is not to be found in the Minute Book. Informing Engels of Schweitzer's letter, Marx wrote to him on May 4, 1868 that he intended "to use this question in the interests of the Party", and insisted on an inquiry into the condition of the workers employed in the iron trade of the Rhine Province (see this letter and Marx's letter to Engels of May 7 and the latter's reply of May 6-7, 1868, present edition, Vol. 43).