Food Is *Clearly* Not a Human Right IN BOURGEOIS SOCIETY, BUT IN SOCIALIST DEMANDS AND SOCIETY....

Charles Brown CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us
Tue Apr 2 11:44:09 PST 2002


Food Is *Clearly* Not a Human Right IN BOURGEOIS SOCIETY, BUT IN SOCIALIST DEMANDS AND SOCIETY.... James Heartfield <Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk>

= From: dlawbailey <dlawbailey at netzero.net> writes

'Charles, Don't be dumb. You don't have a right to water, either.'

And I have to agree with him.

Or put another way, both are using a different concept of rights.

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CB: Yes, I think Dlawbailey and Justin are using a more bourgeois conception of rights and freedom. I am using, not surprisingly , a Marxist conception of rights, which includes the bourgeois concepts but goes beyond them to a fuller conception of freedom. See , for example, _The Nature of Democracy, Freedom and Revolution_ by Herbert Aptheker.

For socialists/ materialists, the right to a living is the most fundamental human right. In fact , the UN conventions on Human Rights are more Marxist than the U.S./Justin/Dlawbailey conception ( See Yoshie's post and Jim Heartfield's comment below)

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I think 'dlawbailey' (what is your name?) means rights classically understood, which are broadly the civil rights sometimes called negative rights, such as freedom of conscience, speech, association, from imprisonment and so on. These arise spontaneously out of a society of mutually exchanging individuals - not of course that they are always observed in such (nor indeed that there is not a counter-trend towards their delimitation in market societies, too).

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CB: Yes, they are expressed in the U.S. Constitution . The bourgeois conception of freedom is represented by the original U.S. Constitution. The more advanced conception of rights would be in the Soviet or Cuban Constitutions: right to a job , etc.

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If I understand him right Charles is appealing to an expanded concept of 'right' that includes social needs under the rubric of rights. Nineteenth century social democracy first adopted this manoeuvre but its highest expression is in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which includes such rights as that to a home, education and other welfare goods.

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CB: Yes the right to a material living. This difference between the bourgeois and communist conception of rights reflects the difference between idealism and materialism. Note that the bourgeois exclusive and priority attention to freedom of speech, conscience, press places first importance on thinking , on ideas for guaranteeing freedom. The communist conception is that physical existence is a premise for thinking, so both material and ideal rights must be guaranteed. If you can't eat, you can't speak, is the Communist logic.

The bourgeois have the power to undermine the theoretical right to freedom of speech in the U.S. by controlling the power to hire and fire. Threat of loss of job is as effective in repressing speech as is imprisonment.

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In strict sense this is a corruption of the concept of right that really cannot be sustained. The difference is pointed. For the most part, civil rights in the narrower sense are observed in advanced capitalist societies (of course with exceptions). Conversely, social rights are largely ignored in advanced capitalist societies.

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CB: Yes , it is a "corruption", actually improvement, of the bourgeois conception; it is a sublation of it, overcoming it. The actual term might be "freedoms" or "powers" . However, there is no reason to give an exclusively bourgeois interpretation of the term "rights". In German I think the word means "law". What we are discussing is the law. We can't stick to the term "rights" in it historical bourgeois connotation, because I am discussing the overcoming and preservation of the bourgeois law, including the bourgeois conception of "rights" that Dlawbailey and Justin uphold here.

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I don't mean of course that people in such societies do not have their basic needs met, but that they do not have them met as of right. On the contrary, it is as 'dlawbailey' says, through private agreements that have no enduring basis in civil society.

The demand for 'social rights' seems to have a compelling logic, but on closer inspection is just confusing: Capitalist society will not grant them, and communist society will not need them as a means to express social need. What really is clarified by raising them as a demand. Better to address needs in their given aspect as needs.

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CB: What Jim says here is strictly speaking true: Socialist rights cannot be met in bourgeois society. This demand is part of the reform demands of socialists or communists still within bourgeois society. This is a radical demand with the purpose of pushing bourgeois society to its limit, demonstrating that it cannot reform itself to meet these basic human ( not bourgeois) rights or freedoms, and that therefore a socialist revolution is necessary.

Dlawbailey and Justin are arguing as if they are not for socialism. Raising food as a human right is a programmatic demand of activists for socialism. Denying it is a surrender to bourgeois ideology and polity.



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