this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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GenZedong
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So there's a proper, Marxist way to understand "natural rights," but you need to be careful here, because generally, it's a term used by Lockeans and other "classical liberals." Rights exist socially, because what is characteristically human is a social phenonomenon, rooted in humanity's ability to collectively transform the world around us: as Marx puts it, "man is a species being," and the humanity comes to know itself by production. Liberalism makes rights abstract and inhering solely in the atomized individual (himself a kind of abstraction, since there is no human being who does not exist and reproduce his nature via participation in some kind of collective), which ultimately means that rights can be debated and curtailed (or expanded). The concrete cannot be easily changed, but the fully abstract can. Thus liberalism is, in effect, a giant con game. It claims to make "human rights" unassailable by rooting them in the individual, but in the process makes them such that they can be defined out of existence.
I think you hit the nail on the head.