eoisie for economic supremacy and exploitation. In fact, all the most cherished values of democratic societies were denounced by Engels as merely being ideological tools for legitimising an exploitive system that would serve only the dominant economic group.38
With this idea in mind, Marx argued that basic human rights are not fixed but rather are constantly evolving according to the progressive stages of class warfare. In On the Jewish Question, Marx explained that in his opinion, the so-called rights of man are “simply the rights of a member of civil society, that is, of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community.” He saw liberty as not founded upon the relations between free and responsible individual citizens, but “rather upon the separation of man from man. It is the right of such separation.”39 For him, its practical application was the right to property. “If power is taken on the basis of right”, commented Marx and Engels in The German Ideology,
“ … then right, law, etc., are merely the symptoms of other relations upon which state power rests. The material life of individuals … their mode of production and form of interest which eventually determine each other … this is the real basis of the State … . The individuals who rule in these conditions, besides having to constitute their power in the form of the State, have to give their will … a universal expression as the will of the State, as law.”40
Photo by Adam Carr, wikipedia.com
Figure 3. Well over 500,000 people died during the Khmer Rouge’s reign in the 1970s. The extermination of political adversaries and of entire social groups is a normal practice amongst communist regimes. Such a bloodbath is the by-product of a materialistic worldview that deems the most powerful to be the ultimate arbiters of right and wrong.
Can Marxists then believe in the universality of human rights whilst remaining faithful to Marxism? After all, Marx talked about the “narrow horizon of bourgeois right” having to be eliminated in its entirety. What is more, Marx openly denied that any of our most important human rights possess any absolute meaning apart from their historical context. According to Marx himself, human rights exist insofar as the government creates them and allows them to exist. The idea of rights is, therefore, entirely subject to the supreme authority of the state.41
Marx strongly advocated the abolition of all legal and moral rules.42 Communism, as the fundamental good of humanity according to him, would have to eliminate “the conditions of morality and circumstances of justice”.43 Such a view of morality in practice amounts to “a self-consistent attack on non-relativist ethics”. As a matter of fact, says Freeman, “Marx, and subsequent Marxists have singled out [morality] as ideological and relative to class interests and particular modes of production.”44 To Marx and Engels, Freeman comments that
“ … all that ‘basic laws’ would do is furnish principles for the regulation of conflicting claims and thus serve to promote class compromise and delay revolutionary change. Upon the attainment of communism the concept of human rights would be redundant because the conditions of social life would no longer have need of such principles of constraint. It is also clear (particularly in the writings of Trotsky) that in the struggle to attain communism concepts like human rights could be easily pushed aside—and were.”45
Since Marx advocated that morality has no transcendent justification, and as such no independence from socio-economic facts and historical contexts,
“ … in the communist societies which were given impetus by variants of Marxist revolutionary thought and action, law became largely identified with the interests of the revolutionary vanguard or ruling party within the communist state. It did not support to function as a vehicle to protect against oppressive action on behalf of the state. Law was in a sense merely an application of ruling party policy.”46
The Soviet dictator Lenin once explained that in Marxism there is actually “not a single