ARMY INSTITUTE OF LAW

LIBERAL AND MARXIAN THEORY OF RIGHTS

A PROJECT REPORT SUBMITTED TO ARMY
INSTITUTE OF LAW IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENT FOR THE DEGREE OF
B.A.L.L.B

SUBMITTED TO:
BY:
MRS GAGANDEEP DHALIWAL
KUMAR

SUBMITTED
ASHUTOSH

(FACULTY FOR POLITICAL SCIENCE)

150

ROLL NO.-

ARMY INSTITUTE OF LAW

Sector 68, Mohali

BONA FIDE CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that the Project Report titled

LIBERAL AND MARXIAN THEORY OF RIGHTS
for POLITICAL SCIENCE is a bona fide work
carried out by ARUN KUMARof B.A.L.L.B Ist year of
Army Institute Of Law, Mohali for fullfillment of
Bachelor of Art cousre of Army Institute Of Law,
Mohali.

Mrs GAGANDEEP DHALIWAL

KUMAR

ASHUTOSH

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A project is a golden oppurtunity for

learning and self development. I
consider myself very lucky and honoured
to have so many wonderful people who
lead me through, in completion of this
project.
My grateful thanks to Ransher singh,
who in spite of being extraordinarily busy
with there work, took time out to hear ,
guide and keep me on the correct path. I

am very thankful to them for their

support.

INDEX
CONTENT
1.Introduction
2.Rights
3.Liberal theory of rights
4.Marxian theory of rights
5.Bibliography

INTRODUCTION
Rights are legal, social, or ethical principles of freedom or entitlement; that is, rights are the
fundamental normative rules about what is allowed of people or owed to people, according to
some legal system, social convention, or ethical theory. Rights are of essential importance in
such disciplines as law and ethics, especially theories of justice and deontology.
Rights are often considered fundamental to civilization, being regarded as established pillars of
society and culture, and the history of social conflicts can be found in the history of each right
and its development. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "rights structure the
form of governments, the content of laws, and the shape of morality as it is currently perceived."
The connection between rights and struggle cannot be overstated rights are not as much
granted or endowed as they are fought for and claimed, and the essence of struggles past and
ancient are encoded in the spirit of current concepts of rights and their modern formulations.
Rights are often included in the foundational questions that governments and politics have been
designed to deal with. Often the development of these socio-political institutions have formed a
dialectical relationship with rights.
Rights about particular issues, or the rights of particular groups, are often areas of special
concern. Often these concerns arise when rights come into conflict with other legal or moral
issues, sometimes even other rights. Issues of concern have historically included labor rights,
LGBT rights, reproductive rights, disability rights, patient rights and prisoners' rights. With
increasing monitoring and the information society, information rights, such as the right to
privacy are becoming more important.

Some examples of groups whose rights are of particular concern include animals, and amongst
humans, groups such as children and youth, parents (both mothers and fathers), and men and
women.In this project I will discuss the nature of rights through two theories liberal perspective
and Marxian theory of rights. And hence we will be able to know the development in nature or
scope of rights with the passage of time.

RIGHTS

The main aim of modern states is to provide more and more facilities to its citizens and to
improve their living conditions and make them happy. To achieve this states provide many
facilities that are termed as rights. Popularity and the development of the state is known by the
right it provides to its citizens. The state which provides more right is a good state. Prof. laski
said the state is known by the rights it maintains.
There are two aspects of rights1. Personal aspect-it means rights are necessary for the personal welfare of the individual.
2. Social aspect-it is necessary to use these rights for the welfare of the society. This is the
social aspect of rights.

Definations of right
1. According to WILDE- a right is a reasonable claim to the freedom as the exercise of
certain activities.
2. According to T.H. GREEN-rights are those powers which are necessary for the
fulfillment of mans vocation as moral being.
3. According to AUSTIN-rights mean one mans capacity of exacting from another an
act of forberence.
There are two types of right. Negative rights and Positive rights.
Negative rights
Put simply a negative right is the right to be left alone. Specifically it is the right to think and act
free from the coercive force of others. Free from muggers, fraudsters and restrictive laws and
taxes. A negative right is an absolute. You are either free from the above or you are not. even the
slightest violation breaks this right. Imagine that a man stops you in the street once a week and

forces you to stand still for one minute - hardly a life changing violation - yet your right to be
free of the coercion of others is being broken. The degree to which this right is violated changes
from place to place but I know of no country where it is not routinely violated by the state.
Remember that a person cannot claim this right while violating the same in others. A mugger
cannot claim a right to be left alone whilst mugging people.
The kind of society where this right is prevalent is a society whose government exists only to
protect the individual from the force of others. The American Constitution and Bill of Rights are
the closest examples - which, sadly, modern day America is abandoning daily.

Positive rights
These are rights to something. A right to food, to healthcare, to education - whatever. The
reality of a positive right is that whatever the object of the right is (eg healthcare), it needs to
be created before the 'right' can be fulfilled. This creates an obligation upon others to create it
and it is the basis for slave societies and statist dictatorhips. In the UK positive rights exist
and each person who is taxed and restricted via legislation into providing the object of the
right is working a proportion of his/her life as a slave. This may seem a bit extreme, but it
isnt. Unless you agree entirely with your payment of every tax and everything the
government then spends your money on, you are being forced to work for ends you have
*not* given your consent to - just like a slave. Slavery was outlawed, but it crept back under
the guise of the 'public good'.
The reason most people tolerate, or even give apathetic support to it, is because they are not
thinking about which principles are being abandoned and which of their own rights they are
giving up by doing so. Many people find the costs of obeying restricitive laws and paying
50% in tax irritating but, amazingly, no more than that. "Its not all that bad!" They might say
- I would suggest turning back the tide of controls and restrictions now before it is terribly
bad - it has happened in other countries, however naively you might imagine "it cant happen
here". The answer is to ask, whenever some new scheme is proposed by the government, "at
whose expense?" and you will find that the expense is your freedom.

Features of rights

A right is the sovereignty to act without the permission of others. The concept of a right
carries with it an implicit, unstated footnote: you may exercise your rights as long as you

do not violate the same rights of anotherwithin this context, rights are an absolute.
A right is universalmeaning: it applies to all men, not just to a few. There is no such
thing as a "right" for one man, or a group of men, that is not possessed by all. This means
there are no special "rights" unique to women or men, blacks or white, the elderly or the
young, homosexuals or heterosexuals, the rich or the poor, doctors or patients or any

other group.
A right must be exercised through your own initiative and action. It is not a claim on
others. A right is not actualized and implemented by the actions of others. This means you
do not have the right to the time in another persons life. You do not have a right to other
peoples money. You do not have the right to another persons property. If you wish to
acquire some money from another person, you must earn itthen you have a right to it.
If you wish to gain some benefit from the time of another persons life, you must gain it
through the voluntary cooperation of that individualnot through coercion. If you wish
to possess some item of property of another individual, you must buy it on terms

acceptable to the ownernot gain it through theft.

Alone in a wilderness, the concept of a right would never occur to you, even though in
such isolation you have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In this
solitude, you would be free to take the actions needed to sustain your life: hunt for food,
grow crops, build a shelter and so on. If a hundred new settlers suddenly arrive in your
area and establish a community, you do not gain any additional rights by living in such a
society nor do you lose any; you simply retain the same rights you possessed when you

were alone.
A right defines what you may do without the permission of those other men and it erects
a moral and legal barrier across which they may not cross. It is your protection against

those who attempt to forcibly take some of your lifes time, your money or property.
Animals do not have rights. Rights only apply to beings capable of thought, capable of
defining rights and creating an organized meansgovernmentof protecting such rights.
Thus, a fly or mosquito does not possess rights of any kind, including the right to life.

You may swat a fly or mosquito, killing them both. You do not have the right to do the
same to another human being, except in self-defense. You may own and raise cows, keep
them in captivity and milk them for all they are worth. You do not have the right to do the

same to other men, although that is what statists effectively do to you.

There is only one, fundamental right, the right to lifewhich is: the sovereignty to follow
your own judgment, without anyones permission, about the actions in your life. All other
rights are applications of this right to specific contexts, such as property and freedom of

speech.
The right to property is the right to take the action needed to create and/or earn the
material means needed for living. Once you have earned it, then that particular property is
yourswhich means: you have the right to control the use and disposal of that property.

It may not be taken from you or used by others without your permission.
Freedom of speech is the right to say anything you wish, using any medium of
communication you can afford. It is not the responsibility of others to pay for some
means of expression or to provide you with a platform on which to speak. If a newspaper
or television station refuses to allow you to express your views utilizing their property,
your right to freedom of speech has not been violated and this is not censorship.
Censorship is a concept that only applies to government action, the action of forcibly
forbidding and/or punishing the expression of certain ideas.

LIBERAL THEORY OF RIGHTS

Liberalism is a historical movement the same as any. It began as a political movement aiming to
replace the institutions of feudalism and monarchism with ones based on individual liberty. It has
evolved into something different which can best be seen as two different positions; a moralistic
and ethical superiority discourse that seeks to impose itself in a form of humanitarian
imperialism or a liberalism with a libertarian tinge that advocates nonintervention and thus
excuses gross misery on the basis of the subjects struggle for rights. The contemporary human
rights movement thus acts as an obscurant for the relations of power and the interests they
represent. The agency is not in the individual, but in the institutions that do the empowering
actions of intervention, defense or assistance that is portrayed as an exercise of moral duty or
protects the rights of the holder within a certain border.
The liberal individualist theory of rights originated in seventeenth century Europe.
Its object was to secure certain rights for the new middle class although these rights were
proclaimed to be universal human rights. As Harold j laski in his state in theory and practice has
significantly observedThe birth of the liberal tradition can only be explained by the shilt in the residence of economic
power which accompanied it . at bottom it was a way of justifying the transfer of political
authority from a land owning aristocracy was prepared to admit stated its principles in terms of a
logic wider in theory then it cracy to a commercial middle class, and like all philophies which
seek to justify such a transfer, it stated its principls in terms of a logic wider in theory than it
prepared to admit in practice.
The exponents of liberalism came forward as champions of the rights of man but they interpreted
and formulated these rights according to the model of free market society which suited the
interests of new merchant-industrialist class. These rights when secured served as the foundation
of the capitalist system. In later phases the liberal theory of rights was sought to be modified so

as to accommodate the interest of the rising working class,consumers and ordinary people,
without prejudice to the functioning of the capitalist system.
The different theories of rights by liberalist are-

Theory of natural rights

Human beings are granted upon creation certain rights that they are guaranteed regardless of
what their government is, and they are (always) life and liberty and usually property as well. The
Natural Rights Theory works with the Social Contract Theory, which states that men in their
primal state are in a state of war where they act only in their self interest. Under a social contract,
men can agree to live by a certain set of rules and agreements (that everyone agrees to), even if it
involves giving authority to a higher power. Linking back to Natural Rights Theory, the three
rights are guaranteed by the government, which was established by the people under the
authority of the government, who agreed to establish the government in the first place to protect
their basic, natural rights from both external competition and from each other.
CONTRACTUAL BASIS
given by john locke. According to this theory certain rights were enjoyed by the man in the state
of nature that is before the formation of civil society itself; these comprise the natural rights of
man, which must be respected and protected by the state.
TELEOLOGICAL BASIS
Given by tom paineIt signifies the view that any developments are due to the purpose or design that is served by
them . this basis seeks to relate the rights of man with the purpose of human life. These rights
does not depend on any institutional arrangement.

Theory of legal rights

the theory of legal rights holds that all rights of man depend on the state for their existence; there
can be no right in the proper sense of the term unless it is so recognized by the state. Acc. To this
theory no rights are absolute.

There are no rights prior to the state.because they come into existence with the state

itself.
It is the state which declares the law and enforces it.
The substance of rights also changes with the law.

Historical theory of rights

The Historical Theory of Rights emphasizes that rights are the product of history. They have their
origin in customs which once possessed practical social utility and passed on from one
generation to another, ultimately having been recognised as inherent claims or rights. Burke
maintains that the French Revolution was based on the abstract rights of man, whereas the
English Revolution was based on the customary rights of the people of that country. There is
much truth in what Burke says.
The French Revolution itself was the result of the conditions that prevailed in the country, but its
slogan was liberty, equality and fraternity, the three abstract principles of universal application.
The Glorious Revolution, on the other hand, was simply a reassertion of the historic liberties of
Englishmen, which had been their heritage since the days of the Anglo-Saxons, and had found
due expression in the Magna Carta, the Petition of Rights, and various other documents of
constitutional importance.

The social welfare theory of rights

The Utilitarian's defend it. Utility is the measuring rod of a particular right.The theory has its
appeal in the sense of justice and reason.

MARXIAN THEORY OF RIGHTS

Liberal human rights theory is individualist and property centered. To Marx, freedoms in liberal
democracies are illusory in that the individual value advocated by the liberal regime is market
value, not human dignity. For Marx, the fundamental rights capitalism defends are not universal
human rights but rather the rights of capitalists to property and legal structures that follow. The
Marxist critic of human rights asserts that the rights and freedoms of bourgeois democracies are
but illusions, empty of meaning and purely formal, at most procedural. The working class,
lacking economic means, consciousness and intellectuals to enforce its rights, is subject to the
principles of equality and legality in theory only, masking de facto inequalities that are the result
of the struggle between different social classes.
Marxs criticism of human rights is premised on the distinction between the political man, which
due to a propensity for liberal states to highlight tends to be regarded as natural man, and man
as a member of civil society:
Man as a member of civil society, unpolitical man, inevitably appears, however, as the natural
man. The rights of man appears as natural rights, because conscious activity is concentrated
on the political act [...] The political revolution resolves civil life into its component parts,
without revolutionizing these components themselves or subjecting them to criticism. It regards
civil society, the world of needs, labor, private interests, civil law, as the basis of its existence, as
a precondition not requiring further substantiation and therefore as its natural basis. Finally, man
as a member of civil society is held to be man in his sensuous, individual, immediate existence,
whereas political man is only abstract, artificial man, man as an allegorical, juridical person. The
real man is recognized only in the shape of the egoistic individual, the true man is recognized
only in the shape of the abstract citizen.
Thus, Marxs criticism is a global condemnation of liberal regimes generally and the premise
through which they were founded as insufficient and able to see man only as a limited political
subject whose civil needs are to be tended to privately. For him, the state is concerned about
the protection of capitalist interests, while ignoring those of workers, because the state is only

concerned with equality in the political sense and not with that of sivil society. Therefore, liberal
human rights theory and capitalism,
"recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it
tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural
privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very
nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they
would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal
standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definit
side only -- for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is
seen in them, everything else being ignored."
The Marxist critique is relative, recognizing that as a part of historical development the limited
protection of human rights in the capitalist system of production is still higher than the previous
feudal stage. However, according to Marx, to achieve the next step forward in civilization,
proprietary relations must be suppressed and replaced with real, human relations that take into
account the conditions of civil society.
Far from being the means by which freedom is exercised, which is the usual liberal conception,
Marxism sees private property as the final mechanism of oppression and a source of separation
between men. The resolution of these inequalities would occur, for Marx, via a revolution aimed
at the implementation of a temporary dictatorship by the proletariat as a step towards the
disappearance of the state and its replacement by society. It would be with this act that the formal
and procedural logic of human rights would whither away along with the state. With this
transitionary phase and subsequent development, the narrow horizon of bourgeois right would
be crossed in its entirety:
"...after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also
the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a
means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the allaround development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more
abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety

and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his
needs!"
Marxs theory of human rights thus coincided with a theory of economic development and the
idea that socialism would bring about not only political emancipation of the working class but
also the unfettered growth of economic abundance through a new organization of the relations of
production. In most situations where Marxists have taken power, this has not been the case.
While seemingly sound in theory, Marxism's historical sore thumb has been the use of its
rejection of human rights as formal or bourgeois when its advocates have been in positions
of power. The rejection of human rights as an illusory product of private property relations and
the capitalist system has led to situations in which the repression of human beings has been
excused in the name of means to an end. At the level of practice, a valid liberal criticism of
Marxism is that the proletarian dictatorship, which in theory had been intended only to be a
temporary transitory phase, were ossified and institutionalized.
As the Russian Revolution was arguably the high water mark for historical Marxism, it is
arguably the most important reference to theories of human rights and the policies and practices
that the architects of this event adhered to and implemented. When looking at the Russian
Revolution, it could be counter-argued that the capitalist countries were the aggressors that
forced Russia into authoritarianism. Additionally, it could be argued that all states--especially
revolutionary ones--were founded on violence and suppression of dissent, not withstanding the
bloody birth of liberalism which, as some authors have pointed out, were not inherently
democratic but were made so only after a protracted struggle. But if a closer look is taken, the
theories of Marxism, especially after the Russian revolution, are imbued with not only a
willingness to use violence and repression, but a willingness to do so brutally and with little to no
moral restrictions.Marxism is rather straightforward in its approach to revolution. Lenin was
arguably the first to truly grasp and implement the implications of revolutionary Marxism and
the active engagement in terror and suppression of the previous holders power--such as
landowners, capitalists and those who had an active interest in taking up armed struggle against
the revolution. Writing his classic The State and Revolution, on the eve of the revolution in 1917,
Lenin but it quite bluntly when he wrote that,

"the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the
oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. We must suppress them in order to free humanity from
wage slavery, their resistance must be crushed by force."
While this statement is contextualized with a discussion of increased democracy of the
underprivileged and the full realization that it is transitory policy that acknowledges the lack of
freedom inherent in it, the implications are obvious and straightforward. His revolutionary
counterpart, Leon Trotsky, in a polemic against Karl Kautsky written in 1920 entitled Terrorism
and Communism, put it in even more direct terms:
Who aims at the end cannot reject the means. The struggle must be carried on with such intensity
as actually to guarantee the supremacy of the proletariat. If the Socialist revolution requires a
dictatorship the sole form in which the proletariat can achieve control of the State [A quote
from Kautsky] it follows that the dictatorship must be guaranteed at all cost.
What Lenin and Trotskys quotes point to is an honest admittance of the need to use force at any
cost to guarantee the ushering in of the a socialist revolution. It this theory, inscribed into the
practical application of Marxist revolution, through which the rejection of human rights and the
following authoritarianism and repression is used.
The way in which Marxism treats human rights follows a very distinct ideology of radical social
change. The first idea is that liberal human rights are premised on inequality and injustice and
should be seen as simply a theory natural to capitalism and therefore open to complete rejection.
The second idea is that if a movement has an emancipatory plan and ideology that conforms to
the rejection of capitalism and the desired institution of socialism, then terror and abuses to
human dignity can be accepted for a certain transitional period in order to suppress those who are
opposed to seeing this plan come to fruition. The rejection of human rights is to be tolerated
under the guise of necessity and a rejection of bourgeois morality.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. R.C. Aggrawal,Political Theory,2004
2. O.P.Gauba,An Introduction To Political Theory,4th Ed.
3. A.C.Kapoor,Principles Of Political Science
4. J.S.Badyal,Political Theory