The idea of human rights is an incredibly good one. There should be limits to what the state could do to you no matter how good the state is or how bad you are.
But most of the time the practical application of human rights is vile imperialist bullshit, an updated version of the White Man's Burden-stuff about colonisers selflessly giving the colonised the blessings of sanitation, civilisation and Christianity.
From a purely hypothetically thought experiment standpoint: you couldn’t be more wrong. If the state is good enough, there is no moral reason to limit it in any way. If the person is bad enough, there is nothing that exists that is bad enough to not be deserved.
Human rights are a good construct. They aren’t real. They don’t actually have any factual basis. They make the world a better place if we all agree to pretend they do exist and are factual. Assuming of course everyone else is acting in good faith.
End of the day, all that matters is results. Results being judged using communist criteria
We wouldn't need human rights in the perfectly good state. However the perfectly good state doesn't exist and probably never will. And even if we lived in a free socialist society where the state had the best intentions and the highest morals we could never be totally sure that it would have it all the time. People holding power should always be mistrusted.
I agree that all that matters is results. I also think that ultimately we get the best results by not letting the state do things like torture or racial discrimination.
The state exists to serve a class's interests, and it currently exists pretty effectively at maintaining capitalists' interests while production continues as is. The human rights concept is used to serve that state and its beneficiaries, not citizens or humans. The issue isn't "people holding power" necessarily either, as some liberal "power corrupts absolute power etc", but it exists as superstructure, derived from and in ways alleviating concerns as one class dominates the others. The concept is not the thing "not letting the state do things like torture", it would be the exercising of power that does that. Human rights are not that useful of a construct for us as the proletariat.
But wouldn't the concept of human rights still serve a purpose in that case to limit the power of individuals within the state from abusing their power?
I do not think so. I think superstructural elements like ideology and morality and the like might always exist, but human rights specifically are very fitting for a capitalist mode of production. There likely might be a post-commodity production morality, but it is not the goal of communists to find the optimal morality (whether in general to guide the movement, or to limit opportunistic individuals in the organizing, preparation for revolution, and revolutionary period), but to organize structures and organizations that can resist opportunism and serve the interests of the proletariat to gain power, and then abolish commodity production, classes, property, and move to production for need, etc.
It's not just vague "results" (poggers living standards linego up) that are sufficient for communist criteria, it's results that benefit the proletariat and advance our interests, as a class towards the goal of power and then abolishing all classes and overcoming the law of value. Pretending they do exist and are factual when they don't exist and now serve the capitalist mode of production is not useful, and does not provide us beneficial results. "They make the world a better place if we all agree" means they don't make the world a better place, and by a results based analysis are not useful.
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.
It is puzzling enough that a people which is just beginning to liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between its various sections, and to establish a political community, that such a people solemnly proclaims (Declaration of 1791) the rights of egoistic man separated from his fellow men and from the community,
Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person.
Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his “own powers” as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.
The idea is utilized to justify the liberal capitalist order, and has unexamined assumptions that once examined display the reason they are used, and the base behind the ideological construct. Organizations like HRW using them for imperial ends is not surprising and is not some extreme deviation.
I think everyone agrees the way human rights are implemented now is to support imperialism, but I think the original poster was just saying that the general idea of humans having rights that cannot be stripped away is a good one. Like in a communist society we would probably still have some conception of human rights
We might have some conception of rights, might not, might have some other moral structure, might not, but we wouldn't have a conception of human rights likely, which has always had that "not stripped away" based around application by a state to individual atomized humans. This contradiction will almost always exist in human rights and for the reason of it being for individuals outside of communities, it serves capitalism likely better than other modes of production. There are older forms of rights, or even different neo-republican positive rights, or non rights based morality structures, although maybe none of these will be in the communist society.
I feel like the human rights Marx is talking about in this excerpt are more like Locke's 'natural rights' rather than you shouldn't starve or torture people. That seems more in line with the historical context. But I've never read the whole Jewish Question so idk
Lol I find it hilarious that Marx wrote an article called "on the Jewish question" which was a critique of an article on "the Jewish question". Like I think he could've titled it better.
There will always be a normative component to our behavior (we should act to the interests of the proletariat as a class, in the goal of revolution to abolish commodity production and property and overturn the law of value, rather than be guided by moral principles), but even for moral principles human rights is pretty bad for our interests. Marx isn't saying "go and starve and torture a bunch of people", but that doesn't rely on human rights. Morality in general is superstructural and is based on the class structure and mode of production of the time, but human rights specifically assumes atomized individual man and evolved most definitively with capitalism and liberalism, so this text was specifically critiquing one very historically limited application of morality. Rights have existed for longer, and are also superstructural, but not in the human rights sense.
The idea of human rights is an incredibly good one. There should be limits to what the state could do to you no matter how good the state is or how bad you are.
But most of the time the practical application of human rights is vile imperialist bullshit, an updated version of the White Man's Burden-stuff about colonisers selflessly giving the colonised the blessings of sanitation, civilisation and Christianity.
From a purely hypothetically thought experiment standpoint: you couldn’t be more wrong. If the state is good enough, there is no moral reason to limit it in any way. If the person is bad enough, there is nothing that exists that is bad enough to not be deserved.
Human rights are a good construct. They aren’t real. They don’t actually have any factual basis. They make the world a better place if we all agree to pretend they do exist and are factual. Assuming of course everyone else is acting in good faith.
End of the day, all that matters is results. Results being judged using communist criteria
We wouldn't need human rights in the perfectly good state. However the perfectly good state doesn't exist and probably never will. And even if we lived in a free socialist society where the state had the best intentions and the highest morals we could never be totally sure that it would have it all the time. People holding power should always be mistrusted.
I agree that all that matters is results. I also think that ultimately we get the best results by not letting the state do things like torture or racial discrimination.
:anarchy:
The state exists to serve a class's interests, and it currently exists pretty effectively at maintaining capitalists' interests while production continues as is. The human rights concept is used to serve that state and its beneficiaries, not citizens or humans. The issue isn't "people holding power" necessarily either, as some liberal "power corrupts absolute power etc", but it exists as superstructure, derived from and in ways alleviating concerns as one class dominates the others. The concept is not the thing "not letting the state do things like torture", it would be the exercising of power that does that. Human rights are not that useful of a construct for us as the proletariat.
But wouldn't the concept of human rights still serve a purpose in that case to limit the power of individuals within the state from abusing their power?
I do not think so. I think superstructural elements like ideology and morality and the like might always exist, but human rights specifically are very fitting for a capitalist mode of production. There likely might be a post-commodity production morality, but it is not the goal of communists to find the optimal morality (whether in general to guide the movement, or to limit opportunistic individuals in the organizing, preparation for revolution, and revolutionary period), but to organize structures and organizations that can resist opportunism and serve the interests of the proletariat to gain power, and then abolish commodity production, classes, property, and move to production for need, etc.
It's not just vague "results" (poggers living standards linego up) that are sufficient for communist criteria, it's results that benefit the proletariat and advance our interests, as a class towards the goal of power and then abolishing all classes and overcoming the law of value. Pretending they do exist and are factual when they don't exist and now serve the capitalist mode of production is not useful, and does not provide us beneficial results. "They make the world a better place if we all agree" means they don't make the world a better place, and by a results based analysis are not useful.
Removed by mod
?
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/
The idea is utilized to justify the liberal capitalist order, and has unexamined assumptions that once examined display the reason they are used, and the base behind the ideological construct. Organizations like HRW using them for imperial ends is not surprising and is not some extreme deviation.
I think everyone agrees the way human rights are implemented now is to support imperialism, but I think the original poster was just saying that the general idea of humans having rights that cannot be stripped away is a good one. Like in a communist society we would probably still have some conception of human rights
We might have some conception of rights, might not, might have some other moral structure, might not, but we wouldn't have a conception of human rights likely, which has always had that "not stripped away" based around application by a state to individual atomized humans. This contradiction will almost always exist in human rights and for the reason of it being for individuals outside of communities, it serves capitalism likely better than other modes of production. There are older forms of rights, or even different neo-republican positive rights, or non rights based morality structures, although maybe none of these will be in the communist society.
I feel like the human rights Marx is talking about in this excerpt are more like Locke's 'natural rights' rather than you shouldn't starve or torture people. That seems more in line with the historical context. But I've never read the whole Jewish Question so idk
Lol I find it hilarious that Marx wrote an article called "on the Jewish question" which was a critique of an article on "the Jewish question". Like I think he could've titled it better.
Well I've had multiple people use it to say marx is antisemitic so yeah, probably lmao
There will always be a normative component to our behavior (we should act to the interests of the proletariat as a class, in the goal of revolution to abolish commodity production and property and overturn the law of value, rather than be guided by moral principles), but even for moral principles human rights is pretty bad for our interests. Marx isn't saying "go and starve and torture a bunch of people", but that doesn't rely on human rights. Morality in general is superstructural and is based on the class structure and mode of production of the time, but human rights specifically assumes atomized individual man and evolved most definitively with capitalism and liberalism, so this text was specifically critiquing one very historically limited application of morality. Rights have existed for longer, and are also superstructural, but not in the human rights sense.