NATIONAL LAW INSTITUTE UNIVERSITY,

BHOPAL

POLITICAL SCIENCE

FOURTH TRIMESTER

LIBERAL AND MARXIST THEORY OF RIGHTS

Submitted to: - Submitted by: -

Prof. Raka Arya Durgesh Nandan Yadav
2018BALLB72
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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ...............................................................................3

INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................4

RIGHTS ...........................................................................................................5

LIBERAL THEORY OF RIGHTS .................................................................9

MARXIST THEORY OF RIGHTS ..............................................................12

CONCLUSION..............................................................................................17

BIBLIOGRAPHY..........................................................................................18

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to express my special thanks of gratitude to my Teacher Dr. Raka Arya who
has been a great mentor and has been a constant support throughout, as well as our
Director Prof. (Dr.) V. Vijayakumar who gave me the golden opportunity to do this
wonderful project on the topic Liberal and Marxian theory of Rights which also helped
me in doing a lot of research and I came to know about so many new things I am really
thankful to them.

I am also thankful to the library administration for the provision of necessary books and
texts needed for the completion of this project.

Lastly, I would also like to thank my parents and friends who helped me a lot in finalizing
this project within the limited time frame

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 INTRODUCTION

Rights are legal, social, or ethical principles of freedom or entitlement; that is, rights are
the fundamental normative rules about what is allowed of people or owed to people,
according to some legal system, social convention, or ethical theory. Rights are of essential
importance in such disciplines as law and ethics, especially theories of justice and
deontology.

Rights are often considered fundamental to civilization, being regarded as established

pillars of society and culture, and the history of social conflicts can be found in the history
of each right and its development. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
"rights structure the form of governments, the content of laws, and the shape of morality
as it is currently perceived." The connection between rights and struggle cannot be
overstated — rights are not as much granted or endowed as they are fought for and claimed,
and the essence of struggles past and ancient are encoded in the spirit of current concepts
of rights and their modern formulations.

Rights are often included in the foundational questions that governments and politics have
been designed to deal with. Often the development of these socio-political institutions has
formed a dialectical relationship with rights.

Rights about particular issues, or the rights of particular groups, are often areas of special
concern. Often these concerns arise when rights come into conflict with other legal or moral
issues, sometimes even other rights. Issues of concern have historically included labor
rights, LGBT rights, reproductive rights, disability rights, patient rights and prisoners'
rights. With increasing monitoring and the information society, information rights, such as
the right to privacy are becoming more important.

Some examples of groups whose rights are of particular concern include animals, and
amongst humans, groups such as children and youth, parents (both mothers and fathers),
and men and women. In this project I will discuss the nature of rights through two theories
– liberal perspective and Marxian theory of rights. And hence we will be able to know the
development in nature or scope of rights with the passage of time.

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 RIGHTS

The main aim of modern states is to provide more and more facilities to its citizens and to
improve their living conditions and make them happy. To achieve this state, provide many
facilities that are termed as rights. Popularity and the development of the state is known by
the right it provides to its citizens. The state which provides more right is a good state. Prof.
Laski said –the state is known by the rights it maintains.

According to Wilde, “A right is a reasonable claim to the freedom as the exercise of certain
activities.” According to T.H. Green- “Rights are those powers which are necessary for the
fulfillment of man’s vocation as moral being.” According to Austin- “Rights mean one
man’s capacity of exacting from another an act of forbearance.”

There are two aspects of rights:

1. Personal aspect-it means rights are necessary for the personal welfare of the
individual.
2. Social aspect-it is necessary to use these rights for the welfare of the society. This
is the social aspect of rights.

TYPES OF RIGHTS:

Negative rights: Put simply a negative right is the right to be left alone. Specifically, it is
the right to think and act free from the coercive force of others. Free from muggers,
fraudsters and restrictive laws and taxes. A negative right is an absolute. You are either
free from the above or you are not. even the slightest violation breaks this right. Imagine
that a man stops you in the street once a week and forces you to stand still for one minute
- hardly a life changing violation - yet your right to be free of the coercion of others is being
broken. The degree to which this right is violated changes from place to place but I know
of no country where it is not routinely violated by the state. Remember that a person cannot
claim this right while violating the same in others. A mugger cannot claim a right to be left
alone whilst mugging people.

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The kind of society where this right is prevalent is a society whose government exists only
to protect the individual from the force of others. The American Constitution and Bill of
Rights are the closest examples - which, sadly, modern day America is abandoning daily.

Positive rights: These are rights to something- A right to food, to healthcare, to education
-whatever. The reality of a positive right is that whatever the object of the right is (eg
healthcare), it needs to be created before the 'right' can be fulfilled. This creates an
obligation upon others to create it and it is the basis for slave societies and statist
dictatorships. In the UK positive rights exist and each person who is taxed and restricted
via legislation into providing the object of the right is working a proportion of his/her life
as a slave. This may seem a bit extreme, but it isn’t. Unless you agree entirely with your
payment of every tax and everything the government then spends your money on, you are
being forced to work for ends you have not given your consent to - just like a slave. Slavery
was outlawed, but it crept back under the guise of the 'public good'.

The reason most people tolerate, or even give apathetic support to it, is because they are
not thinking about which principles are being abandoned and which of their own rights,
they are giving up by doing so. Many people find the costs of obeying restrictive laws and
paying 50% in tax irritating but, amazingly, no more than that. "It’s not all that bad!" They
might say - I would suggest turning back the tide of controls and restrictions now before it
is terribly bad - it has happened in other countries, however naively you might imagine "it
can’t happen here". The answer is to ask, whenever some new scheme is proposed by the
government, "at whose expense?" and you will find that the expense is your freedom.

FEATURES OF RIGHTS:

1. A right is the sovereignty to act without the permission of others. The concept of a
right carries with it an implicit, unstated footnote: you may exercise your rights as
long as you do not violate the same rights of another—within this context, rights
are an absolute.
2. A right is universal meaning: it applies to all men, not just to a few. There is no
such thing as a "right" for one man, or a group of men, that is not possessed by all.
This means there are no special "rights" unique to women or men, blacks or white,

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 the elderly or the young, homosexuals or heterosexuals, the rich or the poor, doctors
or patients or any other group.
3. A right must be exercised through your own initiative and action. It is not a claim
on others. A right is not actualized and implemented by the actions of others. This
means you do not have the right to the time in another person’s life. You do not
have a right to other people’s money. You do not have the right to another person’s
property. If you wish to acquire some money from another person, you must earn
it—then you have a right to it. If you wish to gain some benefit from the time of
another person’s life, you must gain it through the voluntary cooperation of that
individual—not through coercion. If you wish to possess some item of property of
another individual, you must buy it on terms acceptable to the owner—not gain it
through theft.
4. Alone in a wilderness, the concept of a right would never occur to you, even though
in such isolation you have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In
this solitude, you would be free to take the actions needed to sustain your life: hunt
for food, grow crops, build a shelter and so on. If a hundred new settlers suddenly
arrive in your area and establish a community, you do not gain any additional rights
by living in such a society nor do you lose any; you simply retain the same rights
you possessed when you were alone.
5. A right defines what you may do without the permission of those other men and it
erects a moral and legal barrier across which they may not cross. It is your
protection against those who attempt to forcibly take some of your life’s time, your
money or property.
6. There is only one, fundamental right, the right to life—which is: the sovereignty
to follow your own judgment, without anyone’s permission, about the actions in
your life. All other rights are applications of this right to specific contexts, such as
property and freedom of speech.
7. The right to property is the right to take the action needed to create and/or earn the
material means needed for living. Once you have earned it, then that particular
property is yours—which means: you have the right to control the use and disposal

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 of that property. It may not be taken from you or used by others without your
permission.
8. Freedom of speech is the right to say anything you wish, using any medium of
communication you can afford. It is not the responsibility of others to pay for some
means of expression or to provide you with a platform on which to speak. If a
newspaper or television station refuses to allow you to express your views utilizing
their property, your right to freedom of speech has not been violated and this is not
censorship. Censorship is a concept that only applies to government action, the
action of forcibly forbidding and/or punishing the expression of certain ideas.

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 LIBERAL THEORY OF RIGHTS

Liberalism is a historical movement the same as any. It began as a political movement

aiming to replace the institutions of feudalism and monarchism with ones based on
individual liberty. It has evolved into something different which can best be seen as two
different positions; a moralistic and ethical superiority discourse that seeks to impose itself
in a form of humanitarian imperialism or a liberalism with a libertarian tinge that advocates
nonintervention and thus excuses gross misery on the basis of the subjects “struggle for
rights.” The contemporary human rights movement thus acts as an obscurant for the
relations of power and the interests they represent. The agency is not in the individual, but
in the institutions that do the empowering actions of intervention, defense or assistance that
is portrayed as an exercise of moral duty or protects the rights of the holder within a certain
border.

The liberal individualist theory of rights originated in seventeenth century Europe. Its
object was to secure certain rights for the new middle class although these rights were
proclaimed to be universal human rights. As Harold J Laski in his state in theory and
practice has significantly observed-

The birth of the liberal tradition can only be explained by the shift in the residence of
economic power which accompanied it. at bottom it was a way of justifying the transfer of
political authority from a land owning aristocracy was prepared to admit stated its
principles in terms of a logic wider in theory then it cracy to a commercial middle class,
and like all philosophy which seek to justify such a transfer, it stated its principles in terms
of a logic wider in theory than it prepared to admit in practice.

The exponents of liberalism came forward as champions of the rights of man but they
interpreted and formulated these rights according to the model of free market society which
suited the interests of new merchant-industrialist class. These rights when secured served
as the foundation of the capitalist system. In later phases the liberal theory of rights was
sought to be modified so as to accommodate the interest of the rising working class,
consumers and ordinary people, without prejudice to the functioning of the capitalist
system.

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The different theories of rights given by liberalist are:

THEORY OF NATURAL RIGHTS:

Human beings are granted upon creation certain rights that they are guaranteed regardless
of what their government is, and they are life and liberty and usually property as well. The
Natural Rights Theory works with the Social Contract Theory, which states that men in
their primal state are in a state of war where they act only in their self-interest. Under a
social contract, men can agree to live by a certain set of rules and agreements even if it
involves giving authority to a higher power. Linking back to Natural Rights Theory, the
three rights are guaranteed by the government, which was established by the people under
the authority of the government, who agreed to establish the government in the first place
to protect their basic, natural rights from both external competition and from each other.

CONTRACTUAL BASIS

This theory was given by John Locke. According to this theory certain rights were enjoyed
by the man in the state of nature that is before the formation of civil society itself; these
comprise the natural rights of man, which must be respected and protected by the state.

TELEOLOGICAL BASIS

This theory was given by Tom Paine. It signifies the view that any developments are due
to the purpose or design that is served by them. this basis seeks to relate the rights of man
with the purpose of human life. These right does not depend on any institutional
arrangement.

THEORY OF LEGAL RIGHTS

The theory of legal rights holds that all rights of man depend on the state for their existence;
there can be no right in the proper sense of the term unless it is so recognized by the state.
Acc. to this theory no rights are absolute. There are no rights prior to the state because they
come into existence with the state itself. It is the state which declares the law and enforces
it. The substance of rights also changes with the law.

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HISTORICAL THEORY OF RIGHTS

The Historical Theory of Rights emphasizes that rights are the product of history. They
have their origin in customs which once possessed practical social utility and passed on
from one generation to another, ultimately having been recognized as inherent claims or
rights. Burke maintains that the French Revolution was based on the abstract rights of man,
whereas the English Revolution was based on the customary rights of the people of that
country. There is much truth in what Burke says.

The French Revolution itself was the result of the conditions that prevailed in the country,
but its slogan was liberty, equality and fraternity, the three abstract principles of universal
application.

The Glorious Revolution, on the other hand, was simply a reassertion of the historic
liberties of Englishmen, which had been their heritage since the days of the Anglo-Saxons,
and had found due expression in the Magna Carta, the Petition of Rights, and various other
documents of constitutional importance.

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 MARXIST THEORY OF RIGHTS

Liberal human rights theory is individualist and property centered. To Marx, freedoms in
liberal democracies are illusory in that the individual value advocated by the liberal regime
is market value, not human dignity. For Marx, the fundamental rights capitalism defends
are not universal human rights but rather the rights of capitalists to property and legal
structures that follow. The Marxist critic of human rights asserts that the rights and
freedoms of bourgeois democracies are but illusions, empty of meaning and purely formal,
at most procedural. The working class, lacking economic means, consciousness and
intellectuals to enforce its rights, is subject to the principles of equality and legality in
theory only, masking de facto inequalities that are the result of the struggle between
different social classes.

Marx’s criticism of human rights is premised on the distinction between the political man,
which due to a propensity for liberal states to highlight tends to be regarded as “natural”
man, and man as a member of civil society:

Man, as a member of civil society, unpolitical man, inevitably appears, however, as the
natural man. The “rights of man” appears as “natural rights,” because conscious activity is
concentrated on the political act. The political revolution resolves civil life into its
component parts, without revolutionizing these components themselves or subjecting them
to criticism. It regards civil society, the world of needs, labor, private interests, civil law,
as the basis of its existence, as a precondition not requiring further substantiation and
therefore as its natural basis. Finally, man as a member of civil society is held to be man in
his sensuous, individual, immediate existence, whereas political man is only abstract,
artificial man, man as an allegorical, juridical person. The real man is recognized only in
the shape of the egoistic individual, the true man is recognized only in the shape of the
abstract citizen.

Thus, Marx’s criticism is a global condemnation of liberal regimes generally and the
premise through which they were founded as insufficient and able to see man only as a
limited political subject whose “civil” needs are to be tended to privately. For him, the state
is concerned about the protection of capitalist interests, while ignoring those of workers,

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because the state is only concerned with equality in the political sense and not with that of
civil society. Therefore, liberal human rights theory and capitalism, "recognizes no class
differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes
unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is,
therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can
consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they
would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an
equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one
definite side only -- for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and
nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored."

Marx drew attention to the distinction held between rights of citizens (civil or political
rights) and:

“the so-called rights of man ... are only the rights of the member of civil society, that is, of
egoistic man, man separated from other men and from the community.

“Liberty is thus the right to do and perform anything that does not harm others. The limits
within which each can act without harming others is determined by law ... This is the liberty
of man viewed as an isolated monad, with drawn into himself. ... liberty as a right of man
is not based on the association of man with man but rather on the separation of man from
man. It is the right of this separation, the right of the limited individual limited to himself.
The practical application of the right of liberty is the right of property. ... the right of self-
interest. .... It lets every man find in other men not the realization but rather the limitation
of his own freedom. ... Thus, none of the so-called rights of man goes beyond the egoistic
man, the man withdrawn into himself, his private interest and his private choice, and
separated from the community as a member of civil society ... The only bond between men
is natural necessity, need and private interest, the maintenance of their property and egoistic
persons.”1

1
On the Jewish Question, Karl Marx (1843)

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The Marxist critique is relative, recognizing that as a part of historical development the
limited protection of human rights in the capitalist system of production is still higher than
the previous feudal stage. However, according to Marx, to achieve the next step forward in
civilization, proprietary relations must be suppressed and replaced with real, human
relations that take into account the conditions of civil society.

Far from being the means by which freedom is exercised, which is the usual liberal
conception, Marxism sees private property as the final mechanism of oppression and a
source of separation between men. The resolution of these inequalities would occur, for
Marx, via a revolution aimed at the implementation of a temporary dictatorship by the
proletariat as a step towards the disappearance of the state and its replacement by society.
It would be with this act that the formal and procedural logic of human rights would wither
away along with the state. With this transitionary phase and subsequent development, the
“narrow horizon of bourgeois right” would be “crossed in its entirety”:

After the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith
also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become
not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased
with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative
wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right
be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his
ability, to each according to his needs!"

Marx’s theory of human rights thus coincided with a theory of economic development and
the idea that socialism would bring about not only political emancipation of the working
class but also the unfettered growth of economic abundance through a new organization of
the relations of production. In most situations where Marxists have taken power, this has
not been the case.

While seemingly sound in theory, Marxism's historical sore thumb has been the use of its
rejection of human rights as “formal” or “bourgeois” when its advocates have been in
positions of power. The rejection of human rights as an illusory product of private property

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relations and the capitalist system has led to situations in which the repression of human
beings has been excused in the name of “means to an end.” At the level of practice, a valid
liberal criticism of Marxism is that the proletarian dictatorship, which in theory had been
intended only to be a temporary transitory phase, were ossified and institutionalized.

As the Russian Revolution was arguably the high-water mark for historical Marxism, it is
arguably the most important reference to theories of human rights and the policies and
practices that the architects of this event adhered to and implemented. When looking at the
Russian Revolution, it could be counter-argued that the capitalist countries were the
aggressors that forced Russia into authoritarianism. Additionally, it could be argued that
all states—especially revolutionary ones--were founded on violence and suppression of
dissent, notwithstanding the bloody birth of liberalism which, as some authors have pointed
out, were not inherently democratic but were made so only after a protracted struggle. But
if a closer look is taken, the theories of Marxism, especially after the Russian revolution,
are imbued with not only a willingness to use violence and repression, but a willingness to
do so brutally and with little to no moral restrictions. Marxism is rather straightforward in
its approach to revolution. Lenin was arguably the first to truly grasp and implement the
implications of revolutionary Marxism and the active engagement in terror and suppression
of the previous holder’s power-such as landowners, capitalists and those who had an active
interest in taking up armed struggle against the revolution. Writing his classic The State
and Revolution, on the eve of the revolution in 1917, Lenin but it quite bluntly when he
wrote that, "the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom
of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. We must suppress them in order to free
humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be crushed by force."

While this statement is contextualized with a discussion of increased democracy of the

underprivileged and the full realization that it is transitory policy that acknowledges the
lack of freedom inherent in it, the implications are obvious and straightforward. His
revolutionary counterpart, Leon Trotsky, in a polemic against Karl Kautsky written in 1920
entitled Terrorism and Communism, put it in even more direct terms:

The struggle must be carried on with such intensity as actually to guarantee the supremacy
of the proletariat. If the Socialist revolution requires a dictatorship – “the sole form in which

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the proletariat can achieve control of the State”. It follows that the dictatorship must be
guaranteed at all cost.

What Lenin and Trotsky’s quotes point to is an honest admittance of the need to use force
at any cost to guarantee the ushering in of a socialist revolution. It this theory, inscribed
into the practical application of Marxist revolution, through which the rejection of human
rights and the following authoritarianism and repression is used.

The way in which Marxism treats human rights follows a very distinct ideology of radical
social change. The first idea is that liberal human rights are premised on inequality and
injustice and should be seen as simply a theory natural to capitalism and therefore open to
complete rejection. The second idea is that if a movement has an emancipatory plan and
ideology that conforms to the rejection of capitalism and the desired institution of
socialism, then terror and abuses to human dignity can be accepted for a certain transitional
period in order to suppress those who are opposed to seeing this plan come to fruition. The
rejection of human rights is to be tolerated under the guise of necessity and a rejection of
“bourgeois morality.”

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 CONCLUSION

Liberalism remains a vibrant and influential, if divided, political ideology. Liberalization

aims to replace the institutions of feudalism and monotheism with one's based on individual
liberty modern liberalism aims to achieve Limited intervention of an individual’s liberty
and greater equality among individuals.

Marx believed that there is no such freedom in liberal democracy and label it as
illusionary. He also believes that individual values advocated by the liberal regimes are
non-other than market value. For Marx, the fundamental rights capitalism defends are not
universal human rights but rather the rights of capitalists to property and legal structures
that follow. The Marxist critic of human rights asserts that the rights and freedoms of
bourgeois democracies are but illusions. The way in which Marxism treats human rights
follows a very distinct ideology of radical social change. The first idea is that liberal
human rights are premised on inequality and injustice and should be seen as simply a
theory natural to capitalism and therefore open to complete rejection. The second idea is
that if a movement has an emancipatory plan and ideology that conforms to the rejection
of capitalism and the desired institution of socialism, then terror and abuses to human
dignity can be accepted for a certain transitional period in order to suppress those who are
opposed to seeing this plan come to fruition.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY

 On the Jewish Question, Karl Marx (1843)

 BHARGAVA, R. and ACHARYA, A. (2016). Political Theory An Introduction.
Noida: PEARSON EDUCATION INDIA, pp.89-99.
 Heywood, A. (2017). Political Theory An Introduction. 4th ed. PALGRAVE.
 Johari, J. (2009). Principles of modern political science. 2nd ed. New Delhi:
Sterling Publishers, pp.134-141.
 Minogue, K. (2019). Liberalism - Contemporary liberalism. [online]
Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/liberalism/Contemporary-liberalism [Accessed
10 Sep. 2019].

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