The method adopted for this article is as follows:- 1. The crisis of Rights, (Thesis, affirmation)  2. Rights and Society, (The form and its contradictory content, anti-thesis, 1^st. negation), 3.The Socialist Solution, (Synthesis, negation of negation)

During the last few decades the whole system of rights which has under pinned our society for hundreds of years has been eroded away. It is not the purpose of this article to document this process in detail, but rather to examine the question of rights as such, so that we are armed with the necessary knowledge to resist, and hopefully reverse the process. I make no apology for lengthy quotes from the Marxist classics; I invite the reader to make these his prime source of knowledge of the subject.

Since the Thatcher years trade union rights have been effectively negated. The first thing Thatcher did on taking office was to remove all restrictions on the export of capital so that investment could be moved away from the organised home workforce to less developed countries, and moved and moved again where workers become organised.  This has been one of the most baleful features of global capitalism.  A mass of anti-trade union legislation has made the one sanction working people have, the basis of our past and present struggle for rights, the right to strike, impossible, because striking workers can be sacked after eight weeks, it is now unlawful for workers to picket anywhere but their own workplace, employers can obtain injunctions to prevent industrial action and sue for compensation for any loss caused, and unions must compensate members disciplined for non-compliance with majority decisions. There is much, much more than this and trade unionism as we knew it in the twentieth century is at an end.

The legal rights of the individual have also been decimated. New Labour has enacted 700 new criminal laws since it came to power. The presumption of innocence and right to silence have gone, previous offences can be introduced as evidence of guilt in court, and asylum seekers and those suspected of involvement with terrorism can be detained without trial. At the time of writing a bill is going through parliament that will make it an offence to publicly voice certain thoughts concerning terrorism. Further, Prime Minister Blair has announced that the guarantee given to MP’s at the time of the attempted right wing coup against the Wilson government of the 1960’s that MP’s will not have their phones bugged is a thing of the past.

Long established democratic rights have disappeared. Behind the parliamentary pretence of democracy we are ruled by unelected committees and quangos, and worse, national governments as such no longer rule in their own right as a result of the integration of national economies into the global system. With the growth and proliferation of transnational corporations and the freedom of movement of capital the global instruments of capital have become omnipotent. The World Trade Organisation legally enforces dozens of international trade agreements which were never subject to any public discussion but are binding on national governments. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund dictate government policies as a condition of loans and debt re-scheduling. None of this is subject to any democratic control, nor can any national government plan its economy under conditions where vast amounts of capital flow freely and uncontrolled in and out of the country and slosh about on the money markets destabilising currencies. Our right to vote has been rendered meaningless.

All this adds up to a complete transformation of society and surely poses the most fundamental questions. What kind of society tears itself apart in such a destructive way? How is it that rights, not just a few rights but a whole system of rights, can be trashed so comprehensively? The answer to these questions requires something more than just political analysis, it requires an understanding of civilisation as such, in particular it requires an understanding of rights as such.

One of the earliest enquiries into the nature of rights was conducted by Rousseau, and his most famous work, The Social Contract, is still considered the most authoritative word on the subject. "Man was born free, but he is everywhere in chains", said Rousseau. That man is everywhere in chains hardly needs to be said, but the assertion that he was born free is a nonsense. How is it possible to imagine anything less free than a new born infant? Those around him have the power of life and death over him. He has no power whatsoever to procure the means to his life. Left to his own devices he will survive only for a few days or even hours. What sort of freedom is that? Perhaps Rousseau had in mind universal rather than individual man, the birth of man as a species; but this does not alter the case. In his famous book, Anti-Düring, Engels explains:-

"The first men who separated themselves from the animal kingdom were in all essentials as unfree as the animals themselves, but each step forward in the field of culture was a step towards freedom." Engels further explains, in agreement with Hegel, the real nature of freedom, and I cannot explain it better than he.

"Necessity is blind only in so far as it is not understood. Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility that gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves – two classes of laws which we can separate form each other at most only in thought but not in reality. Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject. Therefore the freer a man’s judgment in relation to a definite question, the greater is the necessity with which the content of his judgment will be determined; while the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and conflicting possible decisions, shows precisely by this that it is not free, that it is controlled by the very object it should itself control. Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature; it is therefore necessarily the product of historical development." (Ibid.)

How did Rousseau arrive at this notion that man was born free? Clearly his notion of freedom, as guaranteed by a system of rights, requires clarification. He cannot possibly have arrived at this view by direct observance of infantile man, either as individual or universal, so that since his conception of freedom did not come from the material world external to his senses, it can only have come from his own thought process, since there is no third place for it to come from. It must be said that Rousseau enjoyed the respect of both Marx and Engels as a materialist and a dialectician, but, living as he did at a time when the rationalist a priori method dominated philosophy, it is not surprising that his thinking is at fault on this matter. Engels explains the problem with this kind of thinking very simply.

"This is only giving a new twist to the old favourite ideological method, also known as the a priori method, which consists in ascertaining the properties of an object, by logical deduction from the concept of the object, instead of from the object itself. First the concept of the object is fabricated from the object itself; then the spit is turned round, and the object is measured by its image, the concept. The object is then to conform to the concept, not the concept to the object." (Op. cit)

Engels then goes on to explain in more concrete terms how all such thinkers as Rousseau reach their conclusions:-

"And when such an ideologist constructs morality and law from the concept, or the so called simplest elements of society, instead of from the real social relations of the people around him, what material is then available for this construction? Material clearly of two kinds: first, the meagre residue of real content which may possibly survive in the abstractions from which he starts and, secondly, the content which our ideologist once more introduces from his own consciousness. And what does he find in his consciousness? For the most part, moral and juridical notions which are a more or less accurate expression (positive or negative, corroborative or antagonistic) of the social and political relations amidst which he lives; perhaps also ideas drawn from the literature on the subject; and, as a final possibility, some personal idiosyncrasies. Our ideologist may twist and turn as he likes, but the historical reality which he cast out at the door comes in again at the window, and while he thinks he is framing a doctrine of morals and law for all times and for all worlds, he is in fact only fashioning an image of the conservative or revolutionary tendencies of his day – an image which is distorted because it has been torn from its real basis and, like a reflection in a concave mirror, is standing on its head." (Ibid.)

Let us now consider the opposite method, the one which starts with the object and abstracts the concept from it, and see what results we get by way of an understanding of rights as such. Karl Marx began his analysis of human social relations from the recognition that as a species we are part of nature and must struggle within and against the rest of nature to survive. He explained that we do this in an organised way and the form such organisation takes reflects the necessities which nature imposes upon us. Society organises itself, that is, acquires a political structure, in order to struggle with nature to produce and consume the means to life, that is, to conduct its economic life. But this organisation is historically conditioned, constantly changing and evolving as new natural resources are discovered and new techniques are developed. In his book, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx says:

"In the social production of their life, human beings enter into definite social relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of human beings that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness."

Our social consciousness is crowned with a system of rights which are nothing more that a set of rules for the conduct of our social lives, rules which every individual can learn and understand and by which he can conduct himself. And what is this social being that determines our consciousness, in particular the socially accepted system of rights by which we conduct ourselves? Capitalism, a system which is entirely based on one single right, the right to private property in the process of production of all means to life and therefore life itself. Those who live by this right, the owners of capital, would have us believe that it is a universal truth, good for all humanity for all time, but in fact it is, like all rights, historically conditioned and peculiar in its classical form only to a particular historical epoch, that of capitalism.

Let us examine this right more closely. In the first place we notice something about it which straight away tells us something most important about all rights. We all expect rights to apply equally to everyone and so long as they do we consider that we are all equal in all respects, and the right of private property does indeed apply equally to all. But while it is of the greatest importance to the owner of wealth, it is no use at all to he who has nothing. Hence equally applied rights result in hopeless inequality. This circumstance has led to the necessity to impose this right on society by means of heinous political oppression and violence. Every colonial war was fought to impose this right, every war in the twentieth century was fought between those who wished to impose this right for themselves at the expense of others. In the name of this right, the right to private property in the exploitation of oil reserves, Iraq has been devastated and 100,000 Iraqis killed.

How did this system of rights come into being in the first place? A study of the English Revolution of the 1640’s provides the answer and at the same time reveals the historically conditioned nature of rights starkly. Prior to the Revolution the system of rights prevailing, and which carved out the class structure of society, was that of the feudal system, the essence of which was the exploitation of peasant labour. Feudalism was based on agricultural production and the land was substantially the private property of the landowning aristocracy and the king. The peasant worker had the right to work strips of this land, and certain rights to the use of "waste", (common), land, such as to graze cattle and pigs. The aristocracy and the king had the right to demand the service of the peasants who worked their land. Each worker had to work the landowners land for up to three days a week and more at busy times such as harvesting. Landowners had other rights such as game and mineral extraction rights. The king was a unique case. He ruled absolutely through the Curia Regis, a body of officials which met constantly and governed directly. As well as having the same rights as the landowning aristocracy, he had the right to set and collect taxes and other forms of tribute, to demand services such as military service when necessary, and to maintain armed bodies of men to enforce his rule. It was also necessary for him to have some means of knowing what the more subordinate landowners needed to function properly and how to keep them satisfied, and the mechanism for this was the King’s Council, a body of aristocrats and landowners and anyone else the king thought fit to consult. The Kings Council met as and when the king called it, but inevitably its members consulted among themselves and began to meet privately, and through a process of evolution the King’s Council became Parliament.

At the same time the feudal system itself was evolving. The discovery of the Americas brought a great expansion of trade and shipping, provided impetus for technological development, and increased the supply of precious metal for coining. The result was the concentration of great wealth in private hands and the development of the market, the manufacture and exchange of commodities through the medium of money. The increased demand for commodities led to the factory system of production, and for this system to operate properly the serfs had to be liberated from the land, that is to say, labour itself had to become a commodity to be bought and sold for money. This was achieved by the "enclosure" of common land, and the sale of it for money to rich merchants and others, a measure which made peasant life impossible and created a vast pool of free labourers for the market. However, the old feudal system of rights under which trade and manufacture was controlled by a system of guilds which operated on a system of royal sanction and patronage, proved to be a fatal limit on such development. Merchants who enriched themselves, in a word became capitalists, could not gain entry to the guilds or trade freely. The economic conflict between on the one hand the rising capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, and on the other the king and feudal aristocracy, found political expression in the conflict between the king and parliament. An excellent account of this period is given by Christopher Hill in his book on Oliver Cromwell, God’s Englishman.

"In James’s reign Parliament, representing the men of property, was quite clearly arrogating more power to himself – over taxation, over commercial policy, over foreign policy – and asserting its own ‘liberties’, its independent status in the constitution. James I, an experienced and successful king of Scotland for thirty-six years, retaliated by enunciating the theory of the Divine Right of Kings and stressing the royal prerogative, the independent power of the executive." (Page 15)

This would have been in the early 1600’s, and the conflict grew sharper and sharper till 1640 when Charles I was forced to call Parliament because he could not raise taxes without its consent. This was the so called Long Parliament and it was unlike any that had met before for two reasons. In the first place the first political party had come into being. During the election leaders of rich bourgeois property owners such as Pym, Hampden, the Earl of Bedford and the Earl of Essex, toured the country seeking support and the result of the election was a Parliament overwhelmingly in favour of the rights of the capitalist property system and the free market that went with it. Secondly, this party had mass support not just among their own kind, but among the working masses as well, and this is of the greatest significance for the understanding of the nature of rights. The rights for which the bourgeoisie, (capitalist class), was fighting were to their own advantage alone, since those who owned nothing and did not even have the franchise could expect no advantage from a set of rights which protected those who did. Nevertheless, the transformation from feudal to capitalist rights was a great step forward for the unenfranchised and propertyless workers, because it prepared the ground upon which they could fight for the rights they wanted for themselves. It freed them from the patronage of the feudal system and allowed them to be paid money wages for their labour, a great advantage since it placed them in a position to choose their employer and bargain for their services for the first time. Hence the masses became politically active in support of the bourgeois party, holding meetings and mass demonstrations. From this historical experience we can conclude that in the first place a right is a social relation which benefits one class in particular, and through this class society as a whole. At the same time it is crucial to note that there is nothing equal about such rights, they operate to the advantage of one class to the disadvantage of the other.

Empowered by mass support the Long Parliament voted to dismantle the state through which the King had ruled by abolishing such bodies as the Star Chamber, declared all taxation without the consent of parliament illegal, and that Parliament could only be dissolved by its own consent. The King was instructed to dismiss his advisers and accept those approved by Parliament. As if to prove that the parliamentary system of rights would henceforth determine civil life, the leading royalists such as the Earl of Strafford was executed and Archbishop Laud was flung into the Tower of London and later executed. Others fled the country.

The King, now bereft of all formal means of rule, could do nothing but resort to naked violence in defence of his rights and those on which the feudal system was based. With his remaining supporters he resorted to military coup and tried to arrest the leaders of Parliament. The coup failed and the civil war of 1642 began, a vicious and bloody affair which ended in victory for the bourgeoisie and abject defeat for the King and the feudal system in 1646. During this period one of the leading Parliamentarians, Manchester, began to have second thoughts about the whole affair. Christopher Hill quotes him as saying,

"If we beat the King 99 times yet still he be King, but if the King beat us once we shall all be hanged," (Op. Cit., P. 69)

He was doubtless right about the King’s wish to hang them all, but in the event it proved necessary to beat the King only once. Did this settle the question of which set of rights would prevail? Not a bit – nor could it so long as people thought like Manchester. He saw rights only as qualities possessed by individuals, the King being a unique case with more powerful rights than anyone else, in particular the right to rule absolutely. Since such rights were the only ones he had ever known he regarded them as being universal, true for all times and places, rather than particular to the kind of society he lived in. In fact rights cannot be equated with individuals in this way. They exist in the first place objectively, as social relations between people, the relations we enter into in the process of production of the means to life, and secondly as the ideal reflection of these relations in social consciousness. In order to disabuse Manchester and society at large of their misconception and to instil the conception of the new system of rights in social consciousness Cromwell later found it necessary to decapitate the king.

As the capitalist mode of production matured and the corresponding relations of production became the norm, these relations became firmly reflected in social consciousness and a whole new system of rights was born. It is by such revolutionary means that rights as such have always come into being and passed away throughout history. This way of understanding rights, the materialist method, allows the object to determine the concept so that we can achieve an understanding of the history of rights as a developing process, and hence an understanding of what is happening to our rights today. Contrariwise, Rousseau’s method of allowing the concept to determine the object leads to nothing but confusion. "Might does not bestow right", asserted Rousseau in the Social Contract, but Engels pointed out in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific that Rousseau’s system of rights found its highest expression in the Great Terror of the French Revolution, an event which bestowed the new system of bourgeois rights on society not just in France but throughout Europe and America.

This period of history shows graphically how rights are historically conditioned and come into being and pass away as the means of production develop and it becomes necessary to transform the mode of production, the economic structure of society, in order to harness them satisfactorily. It also shows that such social transformation takes place through great social upheaval, and that rights, which are generally associated with social harmony and peaceful life, actually come into being by the most violent means. The cause of the devastation of our system of rights, as outlined above, is the transition from national to global capitalism, but this phenomenon is not to be compared to the revolutionary transformation from feudalism to capitalism. That was a social revolution because it transformed the relations of production, the actual mode of production, and it was also a political revolution because state power passed from the hands of one class to those of another. Under global capitalism the mode of production remains the same and political power remains with the same class, the capitalist class, the only difference being that the national boundaries and divisions within capitalism have been swept away, and with that all possibility for national governments to rule and administer an internal system of rights is at an end. In addition to the powers of the World Bank and the IMF given above the following features of global capitalism are the cause of the loss of our rights:-

The General Agreement on Trade in Services, (GATS), is a multilateral legally enforceable agreement on trade in services.

Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights enforces rules on patents and copyright.

Trade Related Investment Measures dictate government policy on foreign investment

The Financial Services Agreement enforces free movement of financial services.

The Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures sets limits on what governments may or may not subsidise.

The Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade prohibits national regulations that interfere with trade.

What is common to all these measures is that they extend and strengthen the right of private property in the means of production and at the same time remove the right of the people to elect and empower governments which will extend and strengthen the rights of individuals and collectively of the class to which 98% of us belong, the working class. The right of private property is omnipotent and directly negates all other rights. Clearly then, our rights can only be enforced by directly challenging and negating the right of private property. Self-evidently the only alternative to private property in the means of production is socialised property relations, and the necessity for such change has been making itself painfully felt since the first serious economic crisis of the capitalist era occurred in the nineteenth century. In masterly fashion Frederick Engels traces the transition from feudalism to capitalism and proves the necessity for socialism in one of his best books, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, in which he makes explicit the fatal contradiction contained in the capitalist system.

"In the mediaeval stage of evolution on the production of commodities, the question as to the owner of the product of labour could not arise. The individual producer, as a rule, had, from raw material belonging to himself, and generally by his own handiwork, produced it with his own tools, by the labour of his own hands or of his family. There was no need for him to appropriate the new product. It belonged wholly to him, as a matter of course. His property in the product was, therefore, based upon his own labour."

Engels then goes on to compare this with the capitalist factory system of production in which this kind of individual labour process had become socialised through division of labour, with each worker specialising in a part of the labour process and in which no one worker produced the whole product.

"Then came the concentration of the means of production and of the producers in large workshops and manufactories, their transformation into actual socialised means of production and socialised producers. But the socialised producers and means of production and their products were still treated, after the change, just as they had been before. i.e., as the means of production and the products of individuals. Hitherto, the owner of the instruments of labour had himself appropriated the product, because as a rule, it was his own product and the assistance of others was the exception. Now the owner of the instruments of labour always appropriated to himself the product, although it was no longer his product but exclusively the product of the labour of others. Thus, the products now produced socially were not appropriated by those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities, but by the capitalist. The means of production, and production itself, had become in essence socialised. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, everyone owns his own product and brings it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter rests."

In the next paragraph Engels sums up the nature of this fatal contradiction:-

"This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalist character, contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms of today. The greater the mastery obtained by the new mode of production over all important fields of production and in all manufacturing countries, the more it reduced individual production to an insignificant residuum, the more clearly it was brought out the incompatibility of socialised production with capitalist appropriation."

Here we have the underlying reason, contained in our social being, for the destruction of the system of rights which, with all its faults and injustices, has regulated society so far. With the inception of global capitalism this contradiction, and others that flow from it, has became so sharp as to cause the present insoluble crisis in our system of rights. No solution to this crisis will be found short of resolving this contradiction by socialising the means of production, so that both means and mode are harmoniously socialised, and all attempts at the defence of rights on any other basis are bound to fail. As a first necessity the national government and state must be subordinated to the will of the people so that the necessary transformation of the relations of production can be carried through by proper democratic and legal means. Following this we can expect the crisis of rights to be resolved not by restoring rights to their previous condition, but by the unfolding of a whole new system of rights which will reflect to new social structure but which, for the moment, cannot be predicted in detail.

Terry Button, January 2006

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