this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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Governments were formed and exist to protect property rights. As much as they can be said to have an underlying purpose, it's to protect property rights, and those who own more property will always have a greater level of protection.
The thing the liberal revolutions of the 19th century, socialist revolutions of the 20th century, and the development of social democracies in the 20th century taught governments is that there comes a point where wealth inequality gets so extreme that it threatens the stability of government, which poses the largest possible threat to property rights. Governments learned that they need to have some form of wealth redistribution in order to prevent a violent revolution. To the degree that governments do address wealth inequality, it's focused on doing it just enough to prevent the system from collapsing.
That's why there's really nobody focused on complete wealth equality. They don't want that. They want to maintain status quo property rights.
If anyone wants to read up more on “Governments were formed and exist to protect property rights” you might want to read The State and Revolution. It is pretty short and very relevant to this discussion
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Excellent rec, and one of Lenin's best works, alongside Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism IMO
State and Rev also has some of Lenin's best one liner quips ever written, definitely recommend that one. I should probably give it a second reading, it's a real banger of a book.
Lenin's uncontrollable urge to take any chance possible to shit on Kautsky will always make me laugh, lmao. For State and Rev in particular, (don't laugh!) is my favorite jab of his
My first interaction with that text was Marx Madness podcast, they had plenty of love for Kautsky dunking as well.
He's incredibly easy to dunk on, to be fair
I've never read Kautsky, so I'll have to take Lenin at his word since he was the first author to successfully lead a socialist revolution.
Lenin does a pretty good job elaborating on Kautsky's mistakes.
Kautsky does have some very good books to his name from before he became social imperialist that are worth reading even today like his summary of 1st book of Capital* or his history of early christianity.
*except the one chapter he allowed Bernstein of all people to write, but it's useful too, shows how Bernstein was clueless hack even then.
Keeping with Marx's proud tradition of dunking on Proudhon for an entire book then dunking on him whenever he could later too.
Well put.