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Marxist Theory and Human Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

L. J. Macfarlane
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Extract

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 bourgeois 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 to require the denial of such rights to ever-widening sections of the society if political power is to be secured and retained.

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Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , 01 October 1982 , pp. 414 - 428
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1982

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References

1 Marx, Karl, On the Jewish Question (1843) is conveniently to be found in Tucker, Robert C. (ed.), The Marx‐Engels Reader, New York, W. W. Norton, 2nd Edition. The discussion on the rights of man appears on pp. 40–6.Google Scholar

2 Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), ibid, p. 531. Engels discusses the question in the final pages of Ch. X Morality and Law: Equality, of Part I of Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (Anti‐Dühring), 1878.

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

4 Ibid, p. 43.

5 Ibid, p. 46.

6 Ibid, p. 46

7 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ibid, p. 84.

8 Critique of the Gotha Programme, ibid, pp. 530–1.

9 Ibid, pp. 529, 538.

10 On the Jewish Question, ibid., pp. 42, 43.

11 Critique of the Gotha Programme, ibid, p. 531.

12 ‘Article 16, French Constitution of 1793’ quoted by Marx in On the Jewish Question, op. cit. p. 42.

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.

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

16 On the Jewish Question, ibid., p. 42.

17 Ibid, p. 41.

18 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 imposed 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.

20 Marx, Karl ‘The Chartists’, The New York Daily Tribune, 25 08 1852 Google Scholar, quoted in Avineri, Shlomo S. The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, Cambridge University Press, 1969, p. 214.Google Scholar

21 See for example Engels's letter to Bebel, 11 December 1884, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Correspondence, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1965, 2nd edition, pp. 381–2.

22 Karl Marx's conspectus of Bakunin's State and Anarchy (1874–75) in Tucker, op. cit., p. 545.

23 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 capitalists’, Letter to W. Liebknecht dated 11 February 1878, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Correspondence, 2nd edition, p. 314.

25 Letter from Engels to F. A. Sorge dated 7 December, 1889, ibid, pp. 407–8.

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 to freely elected workers’ and peasants' Soviets'. Collection of Reports on Bolshevism in Russia, His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1919, quoted by Leggett, George, The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1981, p. 313.Google Scholar

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

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

29 Ibid, p. 5.

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.

31 For a fuller discussion of 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.