He wrote: "We believe in positive rights, that people do have a right to what they need to survive; that it is just as unacceptable to allow people to starve because they cannot afford food or die of illness because they cannot afford health insurance as it is to just walk up and shoot them. A case could be made that committment to this idea defines what is to be on the left."
The idea of 'positive rights' defines one strand of the left - reformist state socialism. But that strand of the left is thoroughly authoritarian and hostile to working people's autonomy. The meaning of 'positive rights' to that tradition was an uncritical identification with government institutions as the essence of socialism. In 'Red' Vienna's much-trumpeted inter-war municipal houses, Social Democrat councillors enforced a 'social contract' with tenants, which committed them to responsible parenting. Where this was lacking, social workers were on hand to remove children to the municipal Child Observation Centres. http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/printable/3657/
The addition of the later concept of positive rights only tends to water down the civil rights to self-government and independence first formulated in the revolutions in England (1649), France (1789) and America (1776) the addition of so-called 'positive rights' has the effect of down-grading those substantial liberties with a quite different idea. The welfare state is not a right in itself, it is at its best a creation of the democratic right to self government (though one would have to admit that even where there was no democracy many reactionary governments also introduced welfare assistance). The Marxist scholar Franz Neumann explained this in his essays on welfare published in the US in the late forties.
There is another tradition on the left, one which values working class independence and fights to defend the rights that C.B. Macpherson denigrate as 'negative'. We can defend welfare without kow-towing to the false argument that welfare provision is a right - an argument that removes the case for welfare from the political realm and attempts to place it beyond debate in a constitution-like sanctity. The leftist tradition that puts working class autonomy above identification with the state, of course, has no trouble defending women's rights to abortion.