L .

J Macfarlane

Mimist Theory and Human Rights

THE DENIAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN SOCIALIST STATES CAN BE

seen as the natural outcome of Marxist praxis: Marxist teaching
about the nature of the class struggle and the conditions
necessary for the emancipation of the proletariat from bour-
geois values is not only theoretically alien to the concept of
universal human rights, but its implementation by Marxist
revolutionaries in the circumstances expected to prevail is likely
t o require the denial of such rights t o ever-widening sections of
the society if political power is to be secured and retained.
The most extensive and direct expression of Marx’s own
views on rights is to be found in On the Jewish Question
(1843),’ in which he denies the claim of the French and
American revolutions to have established the universal, rational,
equal, inalienable rights of man. The main thrust of Marx’s criti-
cism of the ‘so-called’ rights of man is that, far from embodying
the fundamental rights of all men in all countries at all times,
(an obvious impossibility in Marx’s eyes), they essentially
express the interests of the emergent class of the bourgeoisie in
the Western world at a particular stage of historical develop-
ment. As Marx wrote 30 years later ‘Right can never be higher
than the economic structure of society and its cultural develop-
ment conditioned thereby’.2 But it is more important to realize
that in the context of class-socialist thinking (which Marx had
not clearly articulated in 1843), the ‘bourgeois rights’ set out
in the American and French Declarations were the rights of a
class and a form of society seen as doomed to extinction and
supersession by an infinitely superior, new and better order. I
1 Karl M a x , On the Jewish Question (1843)is conveniently to be found in Robert

C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engek Reader, New York, W . W. Norton, 2nd Edition.
The discussion on the rights of man appears on pp. 40-6.
2 Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875),ibid, p. 531. Engels dis-

cusses the question in the final pages of Ch. X Morality and Law: Equality, of Part I
o f Herr Eugen Diihring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Diihring), 1878.
 MARXIST THEORY A N D HUMAN RIGHTS 415

would argue that it was precisely because class socialists be-

lieved (or in their terms Knew), that bourgeois society would
inevitably be replaced by socialist society and that bourgeois
society was inherently unjust and socialist society inherently
just, and that they set a low value on ‘bourgeois rights’.

THE FRENCH DECLARATION O F T H E RIGHTS O F MAN

AND OF THE CITIZEN, 1 7 9 3
The Rights of Man are the rights of men as individuals and are
criticized by Marx for that very reason.
None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the egoistic
man, man as he is, as a member of civil society; that is, an individual sep-
arated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied
with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice.
Man is far from being considered, in the rights of man, as a species-being;
on the contrary, species-life itself - society - appears as a system which is
external to the individual and a limitation of his original i n d e p e n d e n ~ e . ~
The bourgeois revolution dissolved civil society into ‘natural’
individuals and made public affairs the general affair of each
individual.
The Rights of the Citizen, the political ri hts which can only
be exercised as a participating member o a community, are !
subordinated to the individual Rights o f M a n - political man to
non-political man. The French Declaration ‘reduces citizenship,
the political community, t o a mere means for preserving the
so-called rights of man; and consequently, that the citizen is
declared to be the servant of egoistic “man”, that the sphere
in which man functions as a partial being . . . it is man as a
bourgeois and not man as a citizen who is considered the true
and authentic man’.4 Man as citizen, political man, on the other
hand, is only ‘abstract, artificial man, man as an allegorical,
moral person’.5
‘Human emancipation will only be complete when the
real individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract
citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his

3 On the Jewish Question, op. cit., p. 43.

4 Ibid, p. 43.
5 Ibid, p. 46.
416 GOVERNMENT A N D OPPOSITION

work and in his relationships, he has become a species-being;

when he has recognized and organized his own powers (forces
propres) as social power so that he no longer separates this
social power from himself as political power’.6
This complete human emancipation is what Marx under-
stands as communism - ‘the genuine resolution of the conflict
between man and nature and between man and man - the true
resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between
objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and
necessity, between the individual and the species’.’ In his
Critique of the G o t h Programme (1875) Marx reiterates his
earlier views, declaring that under fully developed communism
‘the narrow horizon of bourgeois right’ will have been tran-
scended, since every right is ‘a right of inequality in its content’,
applying an equal standard t o unequal individuals.8
The following conclusions may be drawn from Marx’s writings
on rights.
The ‘bourgeois’ rights of the American and French Declar-
ations must be understood in the context of the liberal demo-
cratic theory and the democratic republic as serving the interests
of bourgeois man.
The demand for bourgeois democratic rights in a despotic
state must be seen not as a claim upon despotism, but as part of
the struggle a uinst it.
f
The use o established bourgeois political rights by workers
to further their class interests must be integrated into, and sub-
ordinated to, their struggle to overthrow bourgeois society.
Workers must beware of the cry of ‘universal’, sacred rights
being raised against them by the bourgeoisie to protect their
own narrow class interests, at first from encroachment and later
from supersession.
Rights of a bourgeois-like character will still have some role
to play, especially in the economic sphere, in the first stage of
communist society which is ‘in every respect, economically,
morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of
the old society from whose womb it emerges’. This is, or will

6 Ibid, p. 46
7 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ibid, p. 84.
8 Critique of the Gotha Programme, ibid, pp. 530-1.
 M A R X I S T T H E O R Y A N D HUMAN RIGHTS 417

include, the period of ‘the revolutionary dictatorship of the

proletariat ’.
The notion of rights will be meaningless t o ‘species-man’ in a
fully developed communist society.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of
the French constitution of 1793 specifies the ‘natural rights’ as
the rights of ‘liberty, property, security, and resistance of
oppression’. For Marx the foundation of these bourgeois rights
is bourgeois property: the abstract negative right t o liberty ‘to
do everything which does not harm others’ finds ‘practical
application’ as ‘the right of private property’ - ‘the right t o
enjoy one’s fortune and to dispose of it as one will: without
regard for other men and independently of society’. From this
standpoint the right to equality has ‘no political significance’,
being simply the equal ri ht t o negative liberty, while the right
B
to security is the right o the individual t o the rotection of his
person, his negative liberty and his property.‘ Socialism, by
abolishing the right of property as private ownership of capital,
would transform the nature of human relationships and the
character of the rights men would have or require. Personal
property rights might be expected t o remain during the lower
stage of communism (often characterized as the stage of social-
ism), but t o wither away at the higher stage which would
operate on the principle of ‘from each according to his ability,
t o each according t o his needs’.’’
In socialist terms the right of private property is a class right
of the bourgeoisie against society, a pervasive anti-human right
which colours men’s thinking and shapes their actions. More
particularly it is a denial, not simply of the right, but of the
very conception, of the working class achieving its liberation
and fulfilment. In the name of the universal right of every man
‘of enjoying and disposing as he will of his goods and revenues,
of the fruits of his work and industryy,’* workers are denied
their most basic needs and demands - the right t o work as
security of employment, the right to a living wage instead of a
s a i d , pp. 529, 538.
10 On the Jewish Question, ibid., pp. 42, 43.
1 1 Critique of the GothaProgramme, ibid, p. 531.

1 2 ‘Article 16, French Constitution of 1793’ quoted by Marx in On the Jewish

Question, op. cit. p. 42.

418 GOVERNMENT A N D OPPOSITION

bare subsistence, the right to adequate satisfying food, clothing

and shelter instead of life at the bare margin of existence, the
right to security in case of unemployment, sickness or old age
instead of consignment to the human scrap-heap. The assertion
that capitalism was inherently incapable of according such
basic social and economic rights to workers was a major theme
of Marxists against the reformists who argued that the con-
cession of such rights was not incompatible with the existence
of capitalist society. In the event the reformists have been
proved right as far as the great bulk of the Western working
class is concerned. However, a significant minority in the
Western world continue to live in poverty and squalor, and
although in absolute terms that minority has declined, in
relative terms it is bound to remain significant in an economi-
cally competitive and inegalitarian society. On the other hand,
each of the varying forms of socialist society which has been set
up not only recognizes widespread economic and social
inequality, but seeks to conceal an Achilles’ heel of poverty and
misery. Whether this results from the failure to secure to the
socialist poor the full value of their labour, or from the low
value of such labour under primitive socialism, it highlights the
need for effective vehicles through which the citizens of
socialist states may act to secure ‘the right of everyone to enjoy-
ment of just and favourable conditions of work . . fair wages’ .
. . . and ‘a decent living for themselves and their families’
(Article 7, International Covenant on Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights ) .
While exponents of class socialism denied that capitalism was
capable of transformation or reformation, they accepted that
some capitalist states were capable under favourable conditions
of according limited social rights to their citizens. Thus Marx
himself laid great stress on ‘the immense physical, moral and
intellectual benefits accruing to the factory operatives’ follow-
ing on the successful campaign by the English working class to
secure the Ten Hours Act.14 It is worth stressing that the Act
13 ‘Article 7 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights’ of

the United Nations, in Maurice Cranston, What are Human Rights, Appendix B, The
Bodley Head, 1973.
14 Marx, Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association (the

First International), 1864, op. cit., p. 517.

 MARXIST T H E O R Y A N D HUMAN RIGHTS
419
did not give the individual worker the right to work only ten
hours a day, but rather imposed on him through the law, what
Marx saw as the will of the working class. The individual worker
was not to be permitted to work more than ten hours, not so
much for his own good as for the good of his fellow workers.
Similarly Marx recognized the value to the working classes of
the ‘rights demand’ for universal, free, compulsory, elementary,
education. He was directly opposed, however, to either the state
or the church directly controlling the content of elementary
education and saw the limitations of working people receiving
‘the modicum of education’ compatible with their economic
condition, stressing that equality of education was not possible
in class society.”
As we have seen, Marx strongly criticized the individualistic
character of the rights of man, with their claims to privacy and
negative liberty, ‘founded . . . upon the separation of man from
rnan’.l6 More significantly Marx, in line with the anti-clerical
tradition of the Enli htenment, scathin ly denounced the
B 8
bourgeois declaration o the Rights of Man or failing to liberate
man from religion. ‘The incompatibility between religion and
the rights of man is so little manifest in the concept of the
rights of man that the right to be religious, in one’s own fashion,
and to practise one’s own particular religion, is expressly
included among the rights of man’.” The severe restriction
placed on freedom of religion in the communist states is in
keeping with the aim if not the spirit of Marx’s desire ‘to liberate
the conscience from the spectre of religion’.I8 Thus the Soviet
constitution permits only a right of religious worship not of
religious preaching, and subjects this right to extensive control
and restriction.Ig

15 Critique of the Gotha Programme, ibid, p. 539.

16 On the Jewish Question, ibid., p. 42.
17Ibid, p. 41.
I * Critique of the Gotha Programme, ibid, p. 540.

19 An Amnesty International Report on Prisoners of Conscience in the U.S.S.R.:

Their Treatment and Conditions, 2nd Edition, 1980, gives details of the restrictions
iniposed on religious freedom in the USSR (pp. 30-45), including the requirement
that all religious congregations must be registered with the Council of Religious
Affairs, which may refuse registration, and that without permission no activities may
be conducted. Registered congregations are forbidden to organize special gatherings
of children, young people or women for prayer or other purposes, to organize Bible
meetings, literature meetings, handicraft meetings, works meetings, etc.
420 GOVERNMENT A N D OPPOSITION

THE POLITICAL RIGHTS

Marx has nothing t o say on the issue of legal rights which so
exercised the seventeenth-century Levellers - the right to
equality before the law, t o freedom from arbitrary arrest, from
imprisonment and from torture, to a fair trial and t o reason-
able punishment. Marx, along with his successors, took these
bourgeois rights for granted as part and parcel of the legal
framework designed to protect the negative liberty of the
bourgeois individual from encroachment. Their existence in
bourgeois democratic states, and their marked absence in
militaristic states, was indicative for Marx of the more developed
stage of development of the former. But, while workin -class
organizations might avail themselves of the protection af orded 1:
by these rights in their struggles, they could not, and should
not, expect the rights to be fairly applied as between them and
their class opponents. What Marxists never envisaged before
1917 was that such minimum legal rights would be distorted or
set aside by socialist overnments, and that revolutionary terror
B
and arbitrariness wou d be presented as socialist legality.
The position with regard t o political rights is more difficult
t o unravel. For all socialists the right t o vote appears not as an
end in itself, but as a means t o other ends; but whereas for
reformist socialists it appeared as a right which bourgeois
governments could be forced t o concede, and which might then
be used within the framework of bourgeois society t o secure its
peaceful transformation into socialism, for Marxists it was the
class nature of the struggle for, or use of, the franchise which
was important. Thus Marx’s article on the Chartists written in
1852 argued that ‘universal suffrage is the equivalent of political
power for the working class of England’, because the proletariat,
as the majority of the population, had ‘in a long underground
civil war’ gained ‘a clear consciousness of its position as a
It was not to be assumed, however, that where workers
had secured the vote without a bitter struggle, they would
necessarily use it t o further socialist objectives. More crucially
Marxism taught, first that a socialist majority could never
expect to be allowed t o legislate its way peacefully to socialism,

20 Karl Marx ‘The Chartists’, f i e New York Daily Tribune, 25 August 1852, quoted

in Shlonio S. Avineri The Social and Political Thought of Karl Mam, Cambridge
University Press, 1969, p. 214.
 MARXIST THEORY A N D HUMAN RIGHTS 421

and secondly that, since a revolutionary crisis was unlikely to

find a Marxist party with majority backing from the electorate
or the nation, it must be prepared t o consider the seizure of
power from a government claiming t o represent the will of the
majority.21
Thus for revolutionary socialists the right to vote must be
subordinated t o the right of revolution, even where the absolute
majority of the electorate of the moment opposes that revol-
ution. It was assumed, however, that, as a revolutionary situ-
ation matured, the overwhelmin bulk of the working class
B
would come over in support o the revolution, and conse-
quently of the party of the revolution. Coercion would be
needed during the period of transition against the enemies of
the revolution, i.e. the class enemies of the proletariat, t o bring
about the socialist transformation: but once their defeat had
been secured universal democracy, as distinct from the class
of the intervening period, would prevail. With the
democracl
success o the social revolution ‘elections completely lose their
present political character’ and both class rule and the state
disappear.22
This simplistic and optimistic appraisal makes no allowance
for what realistically ought to have been expected and later
occurred.
The Marxist conception of the revolution appeared t o assume
the collapse of the whole international capitalist system, at
least in Europe. It made n o provision for a partial revolution
resulting in
(a) The division of the working class in the revolutionary state
between a majority supporting the revolution and a min-
ority against or even the reverse.
(b) The division of the working class in the capitalist states into
a minority favouring joining the revolution and a majority
against.
(c) The division of the international working-class movement

2 1 See for example Engels’s letter to Bebel, 11 December 1884, Karl Maw and

Frederick Engels: Selected Correspondence, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1965,2nd

edition, pp. 381-2.
22Karl Marx’s conspectus of Bakunin’s State and Anarchy (1874-75) in Tucker,
op. cit., p. 545.
422 GOVERNMENT A N D OPPOSITION

into two bitterly opposed camps with the revolutionary and

the non-revolutionary groups each portraying the other as
the betrayer of the working class.
(d) The opportunity for the ruling class in capitalist states to
play on the divisions between revolutionary and non-
revolutionary socialists to further its own class interests, and
in particular t o undermine the credibility of the concept of
working-class solidarity against its class enemy both at the
national and the international levels.
It was unrealistic of Marx to assume that a proletarian
government would be able to take steps which would both
improve the position of the peasant so as ‘to bring him over to
the side of the revolution’ and ‘facilitate the transition from
private ownership of the land to collective ownership’, through
‘outright turning over of big estates to the peasants’.23 The
problem had to be faced of what a proletarian government
would do in the face of peasant opposition to its land-socializing
policies. Would it not find itself obliged, in spite of Marx’s
objections to ‘stunning’ the peasant, to use force to limit his
proprietary rights, or even expropriate them altogether?
While Marx had claimed in the Communist Manifesto that the
development of capitalism would necessarily bring about the
division of the population into two increasingly homogeneous
and consciously antagonistic classes, the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat, he was later forced to reco nize that large groups of
!
workers, especially skilled workers, ailed to behave in this
manner.24 But if, as Engels asserted in 1889, ‘the bourgeois
“respectability” ’, which had ‘grown deep into the bones of the
workers’ in England, stemmed from the ‘division of society into
innumerable strata, each recognized without question, each
with its own pride but also its inborn respect for its ‘‘betters”
and “superiors” ’,*’ what reason was there for thinking that

13 Ibid, p. 543.
24 Thirty years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto Marx wrote ‘The
English working class had been gradually becoming more and more deeply demoralised
by the period of corruption since 1848 and had at last got to the point where it was
nothing more than the tail of the Great Liberal Party i.e. of its oppressors, the capi-
talists’, Letter to W. Liebknecht dated 11 February 1878, Karl Marx and Frederick
Engek: Selected Correspondence, 2nd edition, p. 314.
2s Letter from Engels to F. A. Sorge dated 7 December, 1889, ibid, pp. 407-8.
 MARXIST THEORY A N D HUMAN RIGHTS 423
the working class of any country would take up and maintain
a united position in relation t o a developing revolutionary
situation which threatened the respective positions of different
strata in relation t o each other as well as t o the bourgeoisie? In
particular was not a unity such as this inconceivable where, as in
Russia before the October 1917 Revolution, and in the rest of
Europe after it, rival Marxist parties competed bitterly for the
allegiance of a working class still in large part imbued with
bourgeois values and conceptions? Even if the bulk of the
working class in a period of great social unrest was carried along
by the prospect of a new and better order of things t o support
one Marxist party against another, as occurred in Russia
between April and October 1917, what reason was there for
believing such support and unity could be maintained in the
long and difficult aftermath period of the dictatorship of the
proletariat characterized by arbitrary rule, disorders and short-
ages rather than by justice, harmony and plenty? In such
conditions of disillusionment and suffering would there not be
the grave danger that wide sections, and possibly the bulk, of
the working class might desert the party of therevolution for
its more moderate opponents? If this occurred or threatened to
occur would the former be prepared to relinquish power or
would it not rather turn its wrath upon the moderates as the
betrayers of the revolution and of the working class?
Given the scale and nature of the problems involved in bring-
ing about the social transformation to socialism was it not likely
that deep and bitter disputes on party policy would break out
within the ruling party and that such disputes would be seen by
the dominant party group as threatening its own hegemony
which it had come t o equate with the success of the revolution-
ary cause?
Given the deep divisions between the different revolutionary
parties and factions, (even those claiming to express the same
principles) was it not politically blind to envisage relations
between socialist societies in terms of mutual respect and
assistance, in contrast to the conflict and dispute characteristic
of relationships between capitalist states? On the contrary might
not this expected contrast, itself so integral to socialist thinking,
invite action t o impose unity in the name of true socialism and
the cause of international soliditarity, by those in a power
position to do so?
4 24 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

In short a revolutionary situation as conceived in Marxist

terms was one likely to assume more the form of a struggle
between revolutionaries and non-revolutionaries and between
different groups of revolutionaries than one between the ruling
class and the oppressed classes: a struggle liable to degenerate
into civil war fought across, as well as on, class lines. Where this
occurs, as it did in Russia after October 1917, the conception of
the political rights of man as citizen is rejected in favour of the
revolutionary duties of man as worker t o uphold the revolution-
ary cause. The political rights of association and assembly, pub-
lication and protest, which the working class had demanded as
the democratic rights of all men were now discredited as the
bourgeois rights of a past age. Withdrawn at first from the
members of the exploiting classes, the denial of political rights
uickly spreads t o the supporters of opposition groups and
inally to members of the party itself. The revolutionary social-
ist state becomes a ‘red’ police state, openly proclaiming ‘red
terror’ against class enemies and class traitors (workers and
peasants who oppose the regime).26 Though these ‘extraordinary’
measures are generally enacted to deal with the civil war
emergency they become, if in a somewhat diluted and less open
form, the basis on which the state continues to ‘handle’ politics.

N O RESTORATION O F POLITICAL RIGHTS

The reasons for this are as follows:
(i) Political rights would involve the right to campaign for
and secure the rejection of socialism. Such a possibility had
never been conceived or had to be faced by Marx or by Marxists
before Lenin. But what was then only theoretically implicit has
since become explicit - that the conditions of conflict between
classes and parties, and within classes and parties, are the raw
26 On 10 March 1919 a mass meeting of 10,000 workers at the Putilov Works in

Petrograd passed a resolution declaring ‘that the Bolshevist government, acting in our
names, is not the authority of the proletariat and peasants, but a dictatorship of the
Bolshevik party, self-governing with the aid of the Cheka and the police.. . We
demand the release of workers and their wives who have been arrested, the restoration
of a free press, free speech, right of meeting, and inviolability of the person; transfer
of food administration to co-operative societies; and transfer of power t o freely
elected workers’ and peasants’ Soviets’. Collection of Reports on Bolshevism in
Russia, His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1919,quoted by George Leggett, The Cheka:
Lenin’s Political Police, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1981,p. 313.
 MARXIST THEORY A N D HUMAN RIGHTS 425
ingredients of a revolutionary situation which does not permit
of resolution in a manner which paves the way to communism,
seen by Marx as ‘the genuine resolution of the conflict between
man and nature and between man and man’.27 There are, there-
fore, strong reasons why in terms of the values of socialism
itself there should be widespread disillusionment and rejection
of this socialism, which if given political expression might carry
the ‘human-face’ socialists to power, but which might ‘ust as
easily (given the petty bourgeois, inefficient, harsh, ar itrary
and bureaucratic character of this socialism) produce any one
of a number of non-socialist or anti-socialist outcomes. It is this
latter danger which provides the main argument directed by
the party hard-liners against the party ‘wets’ to justify no
further liberalization. The tired and dispirited nature of the
present Soviet party leadership leads one to wonder whether it
has entirely escaped them that there can be no greater condem-
nation of that party and its leaders, that after 6.0 years of their
socialism its beneficiaries might opt to throw off ull socialism
along with these socialists.
(ii) Even if the possibility of socialism itself becoming an
issue could somehow be avoided, the granting of full political
rights would threaten not only the position of the established
party leadership, but the whole system of arbitrary authority on
which the state is based. It would therefore constitute a political
leap in the dark of society-shaking dimensions, opening up the
prospect of a period of ever-increasing political uncertainty and
tension; which in the case of Russia would almost certainly lead
to the break-up of the state into separate national units and the
collapse of the Bolshevik political and social system. What the
outcome of such a collapse would be no one can tell; but it is
only the most stubbornly rose-bespectacled among socialists
who will assume that this would herald the dawn of socialism
both ‘true’ and ‘free’.
(iii) The rulers of established socialist states find it necessary
both to restrict the political rights guaranteed to their own
people and to ignore, distort or violate many of the rights so
guaranteed. Thus Article 34 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution,
while repeating almost verbatim the terms of Article 26 of the
United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political

27 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844, op. cit., p. 84.

426 GOVERNMENT A N D OPPOSITION

Rights excludes ‘political or other opinion’ from the list of

specified grounds on which the law of signatory states must
‘prohibit any discrimination and guarantee to all ersons equal
and effective protection against discrimination’.2!t In the same
year an officially published booklet entitled The Rights and
Obligations of the Citizens of the USSR declared ‘Our legis-
.
lation . . forbids the “freedom” to slander socialist democracy
and the Soviet system. Socialist society gives no one the
freedom to commit actions aimed at restoring bourgeois ways
or to propagandize bourgeois ideology, or the right to commit
anti-social acts. It is forbidden to create anti-Soviet organiz-
ations, or t o use national survivals or religious prejudices for
criminal In these terms political rights are a sham, since
they may only be exercised in ways acceptable to the ruling
political elite. The only political rights effectively secured are
those exercised on behalf of, or in support of, that elite.
(iv) It has to be recognized that any attempt on the part of
the political leaders of a socialist state slowly and gradually to
extend the effective rights of the citizen is fraught with grave
difficulties. The ‘new course’ will encounter bitter opposition
from ‘hard-liners’ determined to frustrate what they see as
socially reckless policies threatening both their position and
their esteem. The bitter irony of the socialist states is that it is
likely to be the ‘hard-liners’ who are shown to be correct:
since the very limited extension of rights which is all that will
be risked, far from satisfying the regime’s critics, will only
whet their appetites. The resulting political excitement and
escalating unrest, giving rise to mounting opposition from the
uppurutchiki, will soon force the ‘liberalizers’ t o retreat.
The socialist states and their supporters always try to direct
attention away from the area of civil and political rights, on
which they are so vulnerable to criticism, to economic and
social rights which are held to be of much greater importance
and inadequately provided for in the capitalist states. Compari-
sons, however, are extraordinarily difficult to make since hard
reliable information is not easy to come by; especially with
regard to the quality of the social services provided and the
extent of inequalities of standards of treatment available to

28 Prisoners of Conscience in the U.S.S.R., p. 3.

29 Ibid, p. 5.
 MARXIST T H E O R Y A N D HUMAN RIGHTS 427

different groups and in different localities within the socialist

states. Private medicine in the West, for example, has its Soviet
e uivalent in special privileges and priorities for members
9
o the bureaucratic and intellectual elite: privileges which serve
to secure from that elite both personal political allegiance and
a supine indifference to the violation of ordinary citizens’

r:
ri hts. Against this, however, it should be noted that in the area
o economic and social rights the socialist states have striven
hard to provide adequate facilities for their peoples. Their
accomplishments are most striking outside Europe - Soviet
Central Asia compares favourably with Pakistan and India.
It is necessary, however, to distinguish between the provision
of economic and social facilities and the creation of economic
and social rights, in that the latter require the existence of means
which can be used to secure access t o the facilities as ofright. In
this sense it is questionable whether Soviet citizens do have
economic and social ri hts, since they lack the means to demand
i!
their rights and to en orce them against the authorities. It is a
feature of all welfare states that welfare rights are liable to assume
the form of benefits distributed through the bureaucracy to
those who meet the requirements laid down by the governing
elite. The remote official, or the still more remote computer,
determines each individual’s entitlements. Before such anony-
mous authorities the individual appears as a supplicant, rather
than a man of rights, awaiting their sovereign decisions on his
case. But the hold of the official on rights’ determinations is less
secure and arbitrary under political systems, like those in Western
states, that provide extensive facilities for organization and
protest, and which possess an independent judiciary. It is
precisely the absence of political rights in the socialist states
which reduces economic and social rights to the level of privileges
which I can hope to have accorded t o me, but which I have no
right to demand against the authorities. In particular the
absence of free trade unions in the communist states means that
there is no body that can be relied on to stand up for workers’
rights, where these rights conflict with the aims or interests of
the economic and political establishment.30

30 See Workers Against the Gulag: The New Opposition in the Soviet Union, edited

and introduced by Viktor Haynes and Olga Semyonova, with a preface by Eric
Heffer, Pluto Press, 1979.
428 GOVERNMENT A N D OPPOSITION

The perversion of the trade unions in communist states into

agencies for controlling the workers on behalf of the govern-
ment and their renunciation of the strike weapon is one of the
main reasons why the workers are unable t o take effective
collective action t o secure the economic and social rights to
which they are entitled by law. In Poland, however, new trade
unions armed with the strike weapon emerged and were able t o
wrest from the authorities not only union rights but general
rights of liberty and free expression. But under the conditions
ruling in Poland, and in all other countries of the communist
bloc, these liberty rights necessarily threatened Communist
Party rule and consequently led, under pressure from Polish
hardliners and a united Soviet leadership, t o the military take-
over and political r e p r e ~ s i o n . ~ ~
It is important t o recognize, however, that within the ‘hard-
core’ class struggle tradition of revolutionary socialist theory
there is an important strand of thinking, well represented by
Rosa Luxemburg, which upholds the principles of mass
spontaneity and democratic rights. That strand, however, has
never been the dominant one and, more importantly, has never
secured the opportunity t o prove whether its democratic
principles are capable of being put into practice. For this reason
I have concerned myself with the mainstream of revolutionary
socialism which sees party organization and party struggle as the
key to political power. In this form revolutionary socialism finds
expression through an authoritarian organization concerned t o
protect its ideological purity and organizational identity by
attacking its revolutionary rivals even more bitterly than its
reformist opponents. Lacking any commitment to democratic
rights it accepts that any means are justified t o secure political
power for itself, power which it equates with the victory of the
proletariat. That victory will make possible the ‘overthrow’ of
capitalist and the ‘creation’ of socialist society. Socialist societies
are societies without rights as enforceable claims; societies
which in the name of socialist legality hound those who stand
up for the rights legally guaranteed them. Revolutionary so-
cialist theory is unacceptable unless and until it makes positive
provision for genuine political rights.

31 For a fuller discussion o f this theme see Ch. 7 of my Pelican book, The Right to

Strike, 1981, which Polish Solidarity had proposed to publish in a Polish edition.