The traditional concept of the inalienable rights of man, otherwise known as human rights and occasionally referred to by Marx as bourgeois right, holds a revered place in modern political thought as the sole ideological bulwark against authoritarian state violence, against the social barbarism characterizing the ancien régimes of feudal Europe, and that characterize military dictatorships and illiberal pseudo-democracies today.

These ideas were conceptualized by bourgeois liberal thinkers centuries ago, and even though at least tacit acknowledgements of these rights can be found in nearly every constitution of every government in the world, violations of these rights by governments remain endemic across the Global South and even much of the Global North. Why do these violations of human rights remain so common, and why are they often so grievous in nature? Why are said violations so unevenly distributed within these societies, overwhelmingly targeting the poor and the propertyless – the proletariat?

The Marxist critique of bourgeois right culminates in a complete rejection of the validity of the concept. In assuming the good faith of liberal, even social-democratic political thinkers who uphold a staunch belief in bourgeois right, we can assume the end goal of these thinkers and of Marxists is the same; human emancipation, or in other words, the uninhibited freedom to pursue one’s self-actualization, more broadly the pursuit of the mastery of humanity over itself and over nature, and an end to the social conditions, poverty, crime and war, among others, which obstruct this freedom. Marxists, unlike other groups, reject the ubiquitous assumption that guaranteeing these rights alone is a sufficient framework for enabling human emancipation. They may tacitly secure political emancipation – the freedom to own property, to speak and publish freely, to practice one’s own religion, and so on, but they do not address the inequality between individuals in civil society that exists under their abstract, equalized political identities (as citizens or some other form). This is the economic inequality inherent to class society; that its’ very existence depends on. As a matter of fact, the ideology of bourgeois right conceals this inequality.

Bourgeois right presumes that workers enter into social relations of production as free individuals, acting of their own volition. The distinctions between classes, between those who are able to own property and those who are not, are flattened or even disregarded under this notion. Of those who are not able to own property, overwhelmingly due to circumstances beyond their immediate control, they must necessarily sell their labor-power, because without wages, without money, they cannot reliably draw from the means of subsistence (the food, water, housing, medical care, and more which they need to survive). Those who cannot find a buyer for that labor-power, in other words, the unemployed, survive on the margins of civil society, often in states of homelessness, vagrancy, and utter poverty. That only accounts for those who are lucky enough to survive such circumstances to begin with. Many simply die. Millions of practically invisible people across countless societies have died this way in past centuries. All logic, all evidence points to this being an inherently coercive and violent relationship. Yet, this unavoidable consequence of inequality goes completely unaccounted for in the ideological construction of bourgeois right.

Of these rights, the most important (the one right above all the others that tends to be favored most by state institutions and state security) is the right to own private property; to own capital and to expand said capital through its interaction with the labor-power you purchase – the workers you hire. Following from the Marxian idea that the extraction of surplus value (in a word, exploitation) is a constitutive component of the expansion of capital, Marxists necessarily view the right to private property as nothing more than the right to exploit. More precisely, it is the right to appropriate labor; the time, the energy, the very physical being of another person solely for someone else’s gain, that of the capitalist. The capitalist mode of production and part of its resultant social relations, the wage labor system, cannot exist without an exploited class. There are those who own private property, and those who interact with it via their labor which they now no longer control, given that it has become a coercive condition of their survival. That value is ceded immediately, by law, to the capitalist. This is part of the hidden logic of the “human” right to private property that Marxists seek to cast out into public view in their rejection of it.

The state generally regards or disregards those other rights within its given constitution as the ruling class sees fit. They are disregarded as necessary for the uninterrupted accumulation of capital, which is a condition of their survival. Armed conflict between states and the resultant crimes against humanity committed by their armies, state sponsored violence such as acts of terror and suppression carried out against political dissidents, assassinations, imprisonments without trial, mass surveillance, even the very act of allowing illegal violence between groups (such as the lynchings of Black Americans in the early 20^th century in the United States, or the pogroms against Jewish communities in Tsarist Russia during the same period) to go unpunished, these social phenomena are downstream of the modern state’s raison d’etre, to support the external conditions of the existing mode of production – the political and legal conditions capitalism requires for its basic function – partly by suppressing the endogenous social forces that threaten the maintenance of the status quo; the very relationship between exploited and exploiter. This includes most centrally the self-directed activity of the proletariat – their strikes, their riots, their spontaneous seizure of control over productive forces; their organization altogether as a class acting in its own interest against exploitation.

It is in the ever-widening gap between what rights are enshrined in law and what actions by the state actually end up in enforcement that we see these many hundreds of thousands of violations. From a Marxist standpoint, it is clear this gap will always exist; the actions of the state are not solely driven by ideology or by law, but primarily by material, economic forces – by the drive of the capitalist to discipline and exploit labor in order to remain competitive, to not be pushed out of business by bigger capitalists. It will never be closed as long as capitalist states, – organs of class oppression – exist.

This drive has underpinned the long history of human rights violations – actions which enable that drive to be fulfilled – by ostensibly liberal, democratic states at least from the 19^th century to the present day. Only until we eliminate through revolutionary action the system which reproduces it, can we progress toward a more genuine safeguarding of human dignity and freedom.