Pants-of-dog wrote:So you agree that inheritance is a thing that happens, and that the amount of inheritance depends on your economic situation.
This is what Marx says. He also goes one step further and says that this then perpetuates the class system. This seems like a reasonable and logical conclusion based on the things you just described.
Well I did say that bit was ALMOST right. The particularly debatable bit is the bit about reproducing inequality. Now let's say some energetic and entrepreneurial character performs the rags to riches trick, okay so now he is rich. He marries and has children in the normal way, those children go to the best schools and have pots of spending money.. they have everything he never had as a child. Finally he dies and leaves his children a fat portfolio of stocks and shares, and all manner of other assets. Moreover he probably passed on to his children a lot more than just money such as his accumulated knowledge of how to make and manage money. Unless the children catastrophically mess up their shares of this fortune they will also in turn pass on this good luck to their own children... So far so terribly unfair for the envious have-nots, right?
There are some things working against this becoming a runaway process though:
- Firstly shit happens, life in all its glory has literally infinite ways of screwing things up even for the most fortunate among us. The Kennedy family back in the 60s could be described as particularly fortunate, where are they now?
- The more you have the more you spend. Our hypothetical rags-to-riches entrepreneur made his fortune by earning far more than he consumed, no joke that is literally how one becomes rich, he was able to do this by having a poor man's tastes with a rich man's earning ability. Eating homecooked food instead of going to 5 star restaurants, driving a box standard car instead of a luxury car, wearing off-the-peg cotton suits instead of tailor-made silk.
One thing his children won't and probably couldn't inherit from him is this kind of frugality, being born into money means being raised with the ability to indulge expensive tastes and the corresponding inability to be satisfied by modest things.
In addition to lacking their father's frugality they will also lack his energy because unlike their father they do not need to achieve anything given they have so much already. We are all of us lazy creatures at heart, we do stuff, work, make sacrifices and endure things in order to get stuff but when you already have that stuff there is not so much incentive to do the things required to get more.
Another important thing is that inheritance tends to
split estates into many smaller estates. The uber rich person will likely leave the bulk of his money to his children but he will likely have more than one child. With each generation that fortune will get split further and further.
The evidence for this is that the rich family names of the past are not the same rich family names of the present. The Rothschilde are perhaps the best example of a family that managed to remain perpetually wealthy, in no small measure by utilising fairly extreme measures like having carefully arranged marriages of first or second cousins in order to prevent inheritance disperse their fortune too much. They are literally the poster child of inherited inequality yet even their fortunes have waned from their peak.
The cycle might take centuries to complete but no family name that shoots to fame and fortune by whatever means can persist in that upward trajectory forever.
---------
Just as important as the above to note is that inequality doesn't matter.
Pants-of-dog wrote:Not really. The family is the main way in which social norms are passed from one generation to another. In a capitalist society, this includes the social norms that support hierarchies. If you have a boss, you have to do what the boss says. This is a social norm in capitalism that supports hierarchy. This social norm is passed down mostly through family.
This is pretty standard stuff that would you learn in an introductory political science or sociology class.
Hierarchy is supported by necessity, it is functional, parents are doing well when they teach their children how to survive and thrive in a civilised world. That said hierarchies are most strongly perpetuated by the institutions that need and use them. A military hierarchy is most strongly perpetuated by the military organisation that is structured by it and not so much by people in general. An "army brat" might be indirectly taught to respect the chain of command by his father's example but unless he joins the military himself that will have a very small and ever diminishing effect on him.
Pants-of-dog wrote:Please exaplin what is wrong about it. [engels's invention of the origins of monogamy] Thanks.
The best answer to this is to invite you to read up on human bio-psychology, biology in general and even some anthropology (it's not hard science but not everyone in the trade is a fruit bat peddling nonsense). Monogamy is more biological than cultural, seriously.