Libertarian or democratic socialists - in contrast to more authoritarian members of the socialist tradition - tend to preserve and maintain their philosophical links to more mainstream liberal beliefs, and represent their political program [correctly] as an evolution or perfection of the clearly flawed and self-serving modern liberal democratic state. Among the liberal values that socialists defend are the fundamental so-called human rights - political, civic, social, economic and cultural. A society that truly guaranteed all the rights identified in that tradition to would not only be normatively desirable, but in all likelihood have a radically re-imagined political and economic structure. I am of course guilty myself of this philosophical borrowing, writing at length about the desirability of orienting radical politics around ‘fundamental rights’ in my first book, “Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder”.
In Chapter 12 of my second book, “Evolutionary Politics: Socialism for Social Species” [Available Now!], I endorse what is broadly known as the ’social theory’ of rights.
“We cannot therefore speak of the ‘natural rights’ of individuals as the early liberal philosophers did. A person alone in a state of nature has no claims to make on another, and therefore no claims by others to be protected against. All norms are social norms and all rights are social rights.”
In other words, my position on rights is that they are dialectical - worked out through social relationships, and in many respects constitutive of interpersonal relationships in societies delineated by that kind of symbolic legal norm. All laws, norms and institutions are strategic solutions to the problems of group life, and as such these norms evolve in a historically contingent way in response to the material conditions of the group. A necessary corollary of the social theory of rights is that the content and scope of rights can vary depending on the social context - different populations with different structures or facing different problems may understand rights differently, as liberal societies of course did at different historical stages of their own development. For many advocates of a rights-based approach to philosophy, law and morality, the social theory of rights is unacceptable precisely because it means ‘human rights’ are not truly human rights because the benefits and privileges attaching to those claim vary by place, time and culture - what we have instead are the rights of Americans, Chinese citizens, Ugandan citizens and so on.
The social theory of rights is juxtaposed in the literature against several alternative theories, the first and foremost of which are natural law theories. The natural law tradition states that rights are observable features of the universe, which the modern liberal democratic state has merely discovered and codified through the use of “capital-R Reason”, or through its unique historical experiences, or as a result of its unique history, culture or traditions etc. The natural law tradition has its origins in religious belief - “all men are created equal” - but does not require a specific spiritual belief to be true. Natural rights are laws of the universe since, as Spinoza believed, a creator deity could not create natural laws that were contrary to Reason - nor could any rational sovereign.
The alternative, that we liberal humanists in law school used to frown upon, is the legal positivist school, which argues that rights are not observable features of the universe, but rather contingent grants of privileges by legal authorities. In other words, human rights as we know them today did not exist before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written (which is unenforceable anyway), and the only rights an individual may claim are those that are enforceable through the legal and executive arms of a particular state. Whether we regard this cynical view positively (as conservatives do) or negatively (as most Marxists and social critics do), it’s hard to argue that it’s at least trivially true - the rights we think we have today are specific legal entitlements that were granted by specific sovereign authorities under specific historical circumstances. For a traditionalist, what gives human rights their power is that they were granted by righteous authorities and have stood the test of time in the face of subsequent historical events.
Materialism and Liberalism
Let’s presume for a moment that universal human rights are a desirable ethical good. It’s trivially true that a resident of Mogadishu, Somalia does not enjoy the same degree of protection of their right to life as a citizen of Canberra, Australia; it’s trivially true that the material capacity of a Western European state to guarantee a basic standard of living, good quality healthcare and education, and a right to housing, is dramatically better than the capacity of Sierra Leone or the Solomon Islands. Yet of course, as humanists and egalitarians, we want the citizens of Mogadishu, Freetown and Honiara to enjoy the same standard of human rights as ourselves. In Leninism there’s a concept of “the transformation of quantity into quality”. In other words, a material leap forward, or leap backwards, can be so significant as to categorically change the classification of an object, process or social relation. From a human rights perspective, it’s clear that a relative deprivation of rights can be so severe that we would no long recognise that an individual was having their rights - and thus their equal dignity as a member of our species - respected at all.
Marxism is a materialist philosophy. We do not begin from the supposition of abstract principles about the nature of human life and deduce our political beliefs from these idealist abstractions, but instead are interested first and foremost in social conditions as they actually are. In many instances, this allows us to see the good work that has been done by the bourgeois revolutions - but not be so blinded by their philosophical commitments that we can’t criticise them. Socialists are somewhat less prone than liberals to the disappointment of theory not matching reality. Marx was of course correct when he cynically observed that liberal rights were first and foremost bourgeois rights - to negative liberty, property and security of the individual against the state - but we need not give in to such cynicism and reject the idea of universal human rights in their entirety, as many historical communists did.
“None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society – that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community. In the rights of man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original independence. The sole bond holding them together is natural necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of their property and their egoistic selves.”
I’ve discussed Marx’s concept of ‘species-being’ or ‘Gattungswesen’ in an earlier blog, but to quickly summarise, the Marxist theory of human nature begins and ends with his or her existence as a material being. The fact that human beings share common needs - food clothing, shelter, health, education, culture - creates a common ‘human nature’. “The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body – both inasmuch as nature is his direct means of life, and the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity.” In process philosophy such as Marxism, the essence of an object is defined by its relationships (not the other way round, as in classical metaphysics) as a result human nature is defined by the totality of human social and material relationships.
Thus, from the concept of species-being, it it relatively straightforward to recover the universality of human rights from a Marxist framework. Rights are those material needs which are necessary for the full development of the human individual, and which the individual cannot guarantee through their own powers such that they enter into social relationships and constructs in order to secure them. And while a society’s ability to secure fundamental rights may vary by material circumstances, our shared biological and cultural inheritance as humans means we have much more in common than we differ from one another. Both Marxists and universalist liberals would look equally aghast at the argument of some pro-state or pro-capitalist developmentalists that, actually, the citizens of Mogadishu, Freetown or Honiara don’t need as much food, shelter or healthcare as citizens of the West.
Class and Dialectics
One of the fundamental misunderstandings of both critics of socialism and vulgar Marxists is to fall into the metaphysical trap of treating Marxist concepts as categories and not social relationships. We have human rights not thanks to some innate spark or divine soul which makes us distinct from the rest of nature, but because we’re utterly reliant on making claims on each other in order to satisfy those material conditions of life which make us distinct as a species. We are treated as members of a certain race or ethnic group for sociological purposes not because of the colour of our skin or our place of birth, but because of how other people and social structures treat us based on those superficial and meaningless tags. We are coded as male or female not on arbitrary sexual characteristics observed at birth, but because others treat us in culturally-specific and largely arbitrary ways based - partly but not wholly - on those characteristics. Identity and performance cannot be separated entirely from one another since, as Marx wrote, “The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process . . . .life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.”
In this way, class position is, also, a fundamentally dialectical relationship. For Marx, a huge component of what makes us human is the observation that we must produce those things we need to satisfy our material needs, and that the act of production is in large part a social activity. The only way that human beings can grow sufficient food to feed ourselves, to refine the raw materials and assemble the finished goods which are characteristic of us as succesful, tool-using species is by entering into social relationships with others. And because production is a social activity, those who relate to production in different ways will be treated in different ways, and may come to see themselves as a members of different groups. Class position is not a matter of antagonism between rich and poor, determinable by some crude measure of wealth or income. It is about your material relationship to the means of production and your self-conscious identification of your social position in relation to production.
So, for instance, if you own your own home (no matter how expensive), then you are not a ‘capitalist’, since you are both the producer and consumer of housing services and you are not involved in any dialectical relationships with other people (partners and children notwithstanding). On the other hand, if a bank or landlord owns your home, then you have entered into dialectical relationship that contains within it the potential for class antagonism. Similarly, if you’re a retiree or pensioner who funds their retirement through taxes or savings generated through your labour (and with the caveat that those savings are stored in particular assets), then congratulations, you’re still a member of the working class even if your labouring days are long behind you. And yes, small business owner, you may ‘own’ your tools in the classical sense -your ‘means of production’ - but the odds are good that to get your business up and running you’ve taken loans or investments, you rent vehicles or properties form someone else, you rely on a technology platform you don’t own to advertise or to send you customers, or if you’re a franchisee, you might not own the intellectual property to your own goods and services. So your relationship to those who truly own the means of production is that of worker to capital.
Because society is complex, one’s class position is never binary; and the structures of modern capitalism often work to disguise or complicate those relationships as much as possible. Your class position may vary across different aspects of your life and relationships. A significant portion of private savings, for example, are not simple stored as cash or bonds but in the stock market, largely in the form of pension funds or passive investment vehicles. This puts private savers in a position of potential antagonism with the workers in those firms, because both groups make claims on the surplus value produced. The market works to obfuscate that antagonism, by distributing ownership widely (if you own stock in IBM, the odds of you interacting with an employee of that firm as an owner are miniscule) and by putting in place managerial intermediaries who exercise authority over workers within the firm on behalf of owners and thereby shield them from the hostility of the labouring class.
The professional-managerial class, a phenomenon largely unknown to the 19th century, therefore represents a very real phenomenon owing to the contradiction between their relationship to production and their self-conscious class position. The PMCs are almost entirely working class in a material sense - their salaries may be high, but they still survive based on labour rather than capital income - but whether out of ideological indoctrination or simple self interest, they identify their class position with that of capital and the capitalist system, acting as its enforcers, guardians, defenders and high-priests. That is true whether they are literal managers of firms, or members of the NGO industrial complex working to promote and advance human rights. Building a working-class movement that somehow includes or subordinates the PMCs is perhaps one of the defining challenges of the modern left - a task we cannot even begin to attempt until left-liberals and socialists start speaking a mutually intelligble language.