The Left and Rights

A Conceptual Analysis of the Idea of Socialist Rights

Tom Campbell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135025731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

The book presents an analysis of the concept of rights and provides an illuminating expression of socialist ideals. The author outlines an analysis of fundamental human rights compatible with historical relativism and applies this to the political right of freedom of expression and the economic right to work. Finally he deploys the proposed analysis of socialist rights to explain the ambivalence of socialist thinkers towards welfare rights in contemporary capitalist states and to analyze the logic of assertions that welfare law is often counter-productive.

1 Reformists and Revolutionaries

If we value and defend our rights is this an expression of human dignity or an indication of our selfish and alienated condition? Is the notion of individual rights tied to the competitive individualism of liberal capitalism or would rights have a central place even in a socialist utopia? Is socialism the fulfilment or the negation of human rights? These abstract and largely conceptual questions seem unrelated to immediate political concerns, and yet the answers to them overflow with fundamental practical implications that can alter our whole approach to the central ideological disputes of the twentieth century. A clear grasp of the nature of rights is vital to our understanding of the disagreements which recur between the Soviet bloc and the Western powers over human rights and can radically affect the way in which we think about social policy issues in the modern democratic welfare state.

If the ideals of socialism can be expressed in terms of individual rights then, however different socialist rights may be from those most highly prized by the classical liberals, there is at least a continuity and similarity of thought forms and basic concepts in which major political disagreements can be clarified and debated. But if the ideological basis of socialism is so far removed from that of liberal democracy that it has no use for the language of rights, then there can be little room either for compromise or for significant dialogue between socialists and liberal democrats. In so far as the peaceful solution of political disputes depends on sustaining communication between those in serious disagreements, the conceptual compatibility of ‘rights’ and ‘socialism’ has a bearing on the prospects of reducing the political uses of violence both within and between nations.

The compatibility of socialism and rights can be approached either as a factual and empirical matter, requiring study of the actual practices of socialist societies (assuming that there are some at least partially socialist societies in existence), or as a doctrinal or philosophical question involving the careful analysis of the meanings and background assumptions of our ideas of ‘rights’ and ‘socialism’. In this book I adopt the second approach and investigate whether or not there is a philosophically acceptable theory of rights which holds for socialist as well as non-socialist systems of thought. But the two approaches – empirical and conceptual – are not altogether unrelated. The failures of many so-called socialist societies to respect what, in the West, are regarded as fundamental rights naturally gives rise to the presumption that, despite the references to individual rights in the constitutions of many of these countries,(1) there is something inherently antithetical between socialist theory and respect for individual rights. It may be no accident that governments espousing ‘collectivist’ doctrines appear to place less weight on freedom of speech, freedom of movement and the right to take part in the selection of political authorities than those nations which regard themselves as liberal democracies. (2) And the explanation for the alleged failures of ostensibly socialist societies to match standards of protection for the individual normally attained in Western democracies could be due in part to fundamental incompatibilities between socialist doctrine and the concept of rights as well as to wider and less intellectual determinants of political and legal practice.

The Dispute within Socialism

To ask whether socialism is a friend or foe of individual rights may seem to draw the lines of conceptual battle between the allies and enemies of socialism, the former taking the position that socialism is the only effective protector of the essential rights of the individual, and the latter responding with the view that the corporate goals and methods of socialism grant no significance to and offer no protection for the most basic rights of free men. But this is far too simple a picture of this particular conceptual war. The dispute about rights and socialism is as much a debate within socialism as about it. True, there is a great deal of literature from what might be called a ‘right-wing’ liberal stance to the effect that the introduction of new social and economic rights, such as the right to free health-care, education and employment, are in effect an undercover attack on the traditional civil liberties, and behind this there lies the more general charge that under socialism the individual counts for little against the requirements of society as a whole, or, more specifically, the working-class section of it. But a fiercer and in many ways more interesting and significant battle goes on within socialism itself between those who wish to reform and those who seek to jettison the liberal idea of individual rights. It is primarily to this family quarrel that I direct my attention.

Those socialists who reject the incorporation of the language of rights within socialism draw heavily upon certain non-socialist theories of rights, particularly those which propound an analytical connection between rights and law, and between law and coercion. This means that, in defending the view that socialism need not and indeed should not dispense with the idea of rights, I shall become deeply immersed in the criticism of those liberal theories of rights which are taken up into socialist critiques of rights. Thus, although my overall objective is to investigate a dispute within socialism, a great deal of the path to this objective will pass through the terrain of the central theories of rights in contemporary philosophical discussions.

The contending parties within socialism may be divided into revolutionaries and reformists. Those socialists who are revolutionaries on the issue of the place of rights within socialism argue that the whole notion of rights is incurably bougeois. They concede that right-claims may have played an important role in the emergence of capitalism from the constraints of feudalism and have a minor role in the transition from capitalism to socialism, but argue that they will have no place in a socialist society. In a community of genuinely social beings, it is argued, people will be united by bonds deeper than those of individual rights and sanctioned obligations. Under socialism all will work together spontaneously in a willing spirit of co-operation unencumbered by restrictive regulations and the self-interested competitivism in which the language of rights is rooted.

Reformists, on the other hand, while admitting the relative and inadequate nature of bourgeois rights, seek to salvage something of lasting value from the traditional concept of rights. By making a judicious selection from the list of liberal rights, dropping some, such as the right to own the means of production, introducing the economic and social rights associated with a full-employment, welfare-orientated society, and relating the idea of rights to human needs rather than to a priori conceptions of individual liberty, they hope to develop a distinctively socialist scheme of rights. Such rights do not serve to regulate the ‘free’ competition of self-centred individuals in the pursuit of scarce resources, but govern the communal arrangements of socially motivated persons committed to the co-operative satisfaction of human needs. On the reformist view, therefore, rights will not wither away along with the antagonisms of class-dominated societies, rather they will be transformed to serve the true interests of humanity. In some cases this will involve the actual satisfaction of interests to which bourgeois societies have paid only lip-service, in other cases old rights will be superseded by new ones, and in general the whole approach to rights will change from a situation in which rights mark the boundaries of legitimate, self-regarding behaviour to one in which they are part of the rule-governed framework within which the individual can fulfil his potential as a social being. (3)

The split between revolutionaries and reformists may be seen in the different positions they take up regarding human rights, in particular in the debate over the updating of the traditional concept of natural rights into the modern idea of human rights. (4) This issue has tended to divert attention from the more general question of whether rights of any sort are compatible with socialism, and the particular difficulties which some socialists see in the alleged universality and inalienability of human rights has helped to bias them against: the whole notion of rights. Nearly all socialists agree with John Lewis that ‘the conception of absolute, inherent and imprescriptible rights based on man’s origin and nature antecedent to society’ is a myth and that the alleged natural right to property, for instance, is an historically conditioned expression of bourgeois interests. (5) Some, like Lewis himself, have contended that by excising those liberal rights which are used by sectional interests to block government action for the common good, by ceasing to regard any rights as literally absolute or indefeasible, and by drawing up a new list of ‘human’ rights ‘based upon human needs and possibilities and the recognition by members of a society of the conditions necessary in order that they may fulfil their common ends’, it is possible to establish a set of socialist human rights, including the right to various forms of economic and welfare benefits as well as the traditional rights to free speech, freedom of the person, freedom of association and political activity. These rights, in a socialist society, could only be ‘set aside temporarily … in the gravest emergency and after the most critical scrutiny of the reasons’. (6) But others – like, most recently, Ruth Anna Putnam – deny that the goals of socialism can be captured by the conceptual apparatus of rights. Putnam insists that all rights are ‘context-dependent’ in that the interpretation of what counts, for instance, as ‘liberty’ will vary with circumstances, and the relevance of any list of rights will depend on the particular forms of oppression in a given society. She argues that ‘recognition of this double context-dependency involves a denial of an essential element of the original doctrine … independence of social context’, (7) hence the inherent theoretical weakness of the idea of the rights of persons. Putnam goes on to assert, in a manner reminiscent of liberal critics of the new social and economic rights, that elaborations of the sort suggested by Lewis have serious limitations since multiplying rights reduces liberty and therefore inevitably dilutes the force of existing rights. She would presumably agree with Maurice Cranston (8) that to add the new economic rights to the old civil liberties results in a weakening of the effectiveness of the latter. Thus there appears to be something like an unholy alliance between Left and Right on the practical and conceptual difficulties inherent in the reformist position.

Without denying that much of interest and importance has emerged from the debate about the incorporation of social and economic rights into the conception of human rights, it is unfortunate from some points of view that so much of the theoretical discussion about socialism and rights has centred on the notion of human rights, for there are logically more fundamental issues at stake concerning socialism and rights in general. Tangled up in the objections laid by socialists against the universality of human rights are reservations about rights as such. Many of Putnam’s points are not directed solely at the fallacies of the natural rights tradition but are relevant to all attempts to express the socialist ideal in terms of rights of any sort. Appeals to rights, she notes, involve the demand that these rights be embedded in legal codes, but laws involve a state and ‘the socialist regards the state as an instrument of class oppression’. In a socialist society there would be no state, hence no laws and no role for the language of rights. A socialist society is a co-operative society and where there are no conflicts of self-interest between competitively minded beings there is no need for the regulation provided by a system of rights and duties. ‘Rights’ we are told ‘are the prized possessions of alienated persons’. (9)

Liberal Concepts and Socialist Ideals

The revolutionary’s view that there is a conceptual tie between the notion of rights and the model of a society composed of self-interested competitive individuals of the sort who are said to exist in a capitalist society, but not in a communist one, finds some support in a recent attempt by Richard Flathman to provide a systematic analysis of the concept or – in the author’s terminology – ‘practice’ of rights, which has, on the surface, no ideological axe to grind. Flathman argues that: (10)

a right provides the agent who holds it with a warrant for taking or refusing to take an action or range of actions that he conceives to be in his interest or otherwise to advantage him…. The actions or warrants are commonly viewed by other persons as contrary to their interests, or limiting their freedom, or as in other ways disadvantaging them personally or as members of the society in which the right is held.

Flathman goes on to argue that there cannot be a right to an X unless having or doing X is in general, and in A’s (the right-holder’s) judgment, advantageous for A and in some way disadvantageous for B (the person with the correlative obligation), so that B will typically wish to avoid fulfilling his obligation to A, for to say that X is a right is to say that some A is warranted in doing X despite the fact that doing it will be thought to have adverse effects on the interests of some B. (11) Thus Flathman sees it as an analytic truth that the practice of rights involves a conflict between the interests of the right-holder and the interests of other members of the society, particularly those who may have obligations to act or refrain from acting in certain ways which are to their disadvantage but for the benefit of the rightholder.

Flathman’s analysis of rights as warrants for the assertion of the legitimate self-interest of the right-holder against and in conflict with the interests of others is typical of those liberal theories on which socialists draw to point to the alleged unsocialist nature of all rights. As Flathman himself admits, his analysis, presupposing as it does a conflict of individual interests, is at variance with the ideal of community, for ‘rights involve a certain holding back, a reserve … a competitive as well as a cooperative attitude … limits to sharing’, and he notes that there is ‘a whole range of concepts at odds with the practice: gratitude, generosity, charitableness’. Hence ‘asserting and respecting rights against one another is surely not, as such, a feature of relationships among or between friends’, (12) and thus, it may be inferred, between members of a completely socialist society. If there is anything at all in the image of a socialist society as a society of abundance in which individuals will willingly contribute what they can to the productive processes and everyone will be provided with what they require to fulfil their human potentialities, all without the intervention of laws backed by sanctions, then the conflict of interests which Flathman argues is presupposed in the practice of rights could not arise and socialism, in the end, must involve not the revision but the abandonment of the notion of rights, along with the institution of the state and its laws. Thus a patently old-style liberal analysis of rights fits neatly into the socialist critique.

Although there is this degree of theoretical accord between some liberal and some socialist interpretations of rights, the actual inspiration for the revolutionary socialist’s rejection of rights can be traced to Marx and Engels, and in particular to their attacks on the ineffectualness of ‘Utopian’ socialists such as Proudhon, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen and Lassalle, who criticised capitalism for not giving the workers their full rights to what they produce and called for the establishment of a new society based on an ideal of social justice. (13) Marx himself is said not to have condemned capitalism as unjust. (14) Following this line, many Marxian socialists reject the language of rights, except perhaps for shortterm tactical purposes in the organisation of political parties around legislative programmes, on the grounds that such moral stances are basically futile since social change does not come about through exhortation and moralising, but by timely political action in line with changes taking place in the economic base of society. They therefore reject appeals to rights as an irrelevant and ineffective strategy which exhibits a misunderstanding of political realities, a characteristic failure of Utopian socialists.

We shall have frequent recourse to the writings of Marx and Engels in the course of this book, for although they are but two amongst thousands of contributors to socialist ideas, their influence has been of such magnitude as to set them above all the rest as authoritative socialist writers. But part, at least, of the explanation for the absence of a socialist orthodoxy on the matter of rights lies in the paucity of material on this topic to be found in the writings of Marx and Engels and the difficulty of interpreting such as there is. An important passage in the ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’ appears to disown in their entirety the ideas of justice, rights and law (15) and there are many other passages of which the obvious, but perhaps superficial, reading counts against the reformist position. (16) But the primary and overriding concern of Marx and Engels was the exposure of the ideological, and hence deceiving, nature of bourgeois ideas and institutions. This, coupled with their general reluctance to enter into speculation about the nature of the future socialist or communist society, renders almost everything they say on these issues radically ambiguous, much depending on essentially terminological points such as whether we may use the term ‘law’ for non-imposed and non-coercive right-conferring rules, and whether there is a valid sense of ‘state’ in which it is not identified as an instrument for the exploitation of one class by another, but refers to those general administrative arrangements of a society which Engels, and almost certainly Marx, assumed would in communist society replace the use of physical coercion. (17) Marx and Engels can be viewed as being so involved in the criticism of capitalism that they were simply not concerned with developing a conceptual scheme to describe socialism. In this case to raise the prospect of socialist rights is to go beyond rather than to repudiate their work. (18) Thus although Marx and Engels do provide – particularly in their rejection of the juridical concepts of capitalist legal systems – most of the ammunition for those who would abandon rather than reform the concept of rights, their views, even if they can be definitively ascertained, cannot be regarded as conclusive on this issue, even for socialists. And it is to be regretted that their no doubt tactically justified refusal to anatomise the form of the socialism that was to come has done so much to inhibit open-minded discussion amongst socialists over what it is, or could be, to have a right.

To cast doubts on the usefulness of Marx and Engels as final authorities in this internal socialist debate is philosophically liberating, but presents us with the immediate problem of saying what is to count as socialist for the purpose of our argument. The prospect of becoming involved in the misconceived enterprise of determining what is ‘genuine’ socialism is a daunting one and yet it is necessary to have some working definition of socialism if we are to make progress with the conceptual tasks bef...