Marxists reject the moral language of bourgeois rights, which can seem scary and even surprising. Human rights—What’s bad about that? Many progressive successes have been won in the conceptual framework of human rights and equal rights, and many struggles are still portrayed in this language. But Marx claimed that this moral language of ‘human rights’ and ‘political rights’ was a historical product of bourgeois society that is being produced by and helps to maintain bourgeois social relations.
It can be scary to give up the kind of language of “rights”, when it's been useful language to rally around in the past, and especially when it seems like many Marxists don’t offer up a clear alternative for talking about “how we ought to act”. I would think that many Marxists, if pressured to offer the alternative, would fumble and veer into a sort of language of a mechanical history, which denies people’s free will to make choices. But we can make choices, within our historical conditions, to attempt to change our historical conditions—and because we can make choices, it may be useful to have a way of speaking about what choices we “ought” to make. Normative language is not dissolved, but it must take on a new form, beyond the constraints and blindspots of a language centered around “bourgeois rights”.
The Marxist alternative to the language of bourgeois rights is, in my opinion, likely very similar to the process that has come to be known as ‘Non-Violent Communication’. Marxists, if we are to create a comradely environment in our organizing environments and the world we are trying to build, should probably promote this general style of basic analysis and communication.
The Marxist alternative to “rights” talk, which vaguely approaches NVC, is already evident in Marx’s writings. Instead of an analysis of what can be morally justified as a human right or a political right, a running thread in Marx is his focus on humans’ material needs and wants. First and foremost, what material basics make the rest possible? What is necessary to promote human self-development and sustainable integration with the natural world? Some human needs and desires will be widely and robustly shared; others will be more contingent on society’s level of technical knowledge.
Non-Violent Communication vs “Rights”-Talk
Non-Violent Communication is a process of communicating and making requests in terms of our needs, almost always alongside stating our feelings and our observations. We also attempt to avoid language and implications which can turn communication into an unproductive mess of blaming, guilting, and defensiveness. It helps provide a basic, but effective process to working through our feelings, rooting our feelings in our relationships with the world and the people around us, and how those relationships might be meeting or failing to meet our shared human needs.
By communicating in a language of shared human needs—such as needs in the categories of physical wellbeing, honesty, connection, creativity and play, peace, autonomy, and meaning—we are able to relate to each other and see each other’s concerns as valid. By the involved parties recognizing each others’ underlying human needs which are touched on by the conflict, the parties can go on to work together to find a solution to the conflict, by finding the outcome that tries to meet all of those needs—or at least find an understandable balance. This kind of language allows us to understand ourselves and our feelings, and to connect with others across various backgrounds.
Compare this to the language of “rights”—in a conflict, people might lean on arguments about which rights exist that say whether certain people’s actions are permissible or not. But this often ultimately elides the underlying necessary conversation around how the conflict only exists because people’s needs aren’t being met, and how the other people involved in the conflict might be acting out of a worry that if they were forced to change their behaviors, that some of their needs wouldn’t be met as a consequence.
When people are stuck using the language of “rights”, often what will happen in a conflict is that one side gets judgmental about “That is not within other people’s rights to do!”, while the other side reacts defensively by framing things in terms of what they believe is within their rights. This can make some people feel morally superior or inferior, or responsible or not responsible, but often this style of addressing conflict does not result in the best material solutions. Through these “rights”-framed conversations, we may be able to shame people to act in the way we want them to by using this language, or an adjudicator may come down on one side or another and mobilize the state to extract certain behaviors and concessions from the losing side. But also as a result, the losing side will probably have a niggling thought that they have been coerced, and they may be displeased about how some of their own needs have gone unconsidered in the process.
We are better able to solve conflicts when we have a direct conversation about the needs people are concerned about, because this allows us to work together in conversation to reach an outcome that meets everyone’s needs as best as possible. This collaboration around meeting our human needs ought to be our goal with our comrades—not the achievement of mere bourgeois feelings of moral superiority, or of an imperfect material solution that comes at the cost of solidarity.
“Rights”-Talk is obfuscatory and distracting
Rights-talk is obfuscatory, and can be used to justify situations which drastically fail to meet people’s needs. As I write today, bourgeois rights and legalistic language are currently being deployed to justify Israel’s military actions of genocide in Gaza—“Israel has a right to defend itself,” they say, as the Israeli state bombs hospitals and shoots children. It’s the same tactic as how this language was used to justify colonialism, imperialism, and blatantly legalized racism / sexism / homophobia in the past. “The needs of the class of people who must sell their labour power in order to live, are different from the needs of those who live off the proceeds of their property. Property rights are of little use to those who have no property.” (Marxists.org glossary entry on Workers’ Rights) If we understand our oppression in the conceptual framework of bourgeois rights, we risk distracting ourselves from the most important conversations around how we can best organize to meet everyone’s human needs.
Socialists have long argued against obfuscatory, non-practical language. Marx famously points out the misleading language of commodity fetishism which arises from people trying to understand the practical ways that commodities relate to each other within the context of capitalism. The scientific and mathematical minds of the socialist Vienna Circle argued for ‘logical positivism’, as a way of cutting through the ambiguity and ungroundedness of metaphysical language. They believed that people would gradually understand the world and its issues through more pragmatic, logical, and observationally-rooted language—and that this would hasten the political shift to socialism. Under socialism, they believed, people would understand the world more through that logical positivist lens, and that this would help us understand ourselves, how we want to structure society, and the project of advancing our scientific and logical knowledge.
“Rights”-Talk is about modifying the rules of inherently unfair social structures
At its basics, bourgeois rights essentially delineate a barrier between what actions and social guarantees are considered by the state to be morally permissible/impermissible, or guaranteed/deniable. Outside of historical context, it seems like most of our needs can be met by people coming up with ways to distinguish actions as “good” or “bad”. But in historical context, we have to analyze the social power (of the state, and in materially-produced ideology) which selects what actions and guarantees rise to the level of a legal or moral “right”. The fight to expand rights to more people, to have more inclusive rights, to have rights that defend workers, women, and minorities—these are in bare reality, a power struggle between economic classes, and/or power struggles between hierarchically-ordered social categories (like race and gender) which are a product of class society.
The language of bourgeois “rights” serves as ideological cover for this real historical context. It leads our struggles to be framed in ahistorical terms of “What should be considered a right?”, and “To whom ought rights be extended to?” But all of this is taken from an assumption that these are even questions that are ultimately worth fighting over at such a granular level. In bourgeois society, it can seem valid to the ruling class that they should ponder about whether voting rights should be extended to women or non-white people. In a socialist society, such basics of inclusive democracy and freedom would be taken for granted, and it would be ridiculous to even consider an idea that some people should be denied political input because of their race or gender.
Clearly, we can work within the language of bourgeois “rights” to win actual advancements for the proletariat. But, for most cases nowadays, I’m not sure how much it aids the long-term struggle to continue to use an analysis or style of messaging in the language of bourgeois “rights”-talk. Our goal is a society in which the piece-meal reforms that can be achieved by “rights”-talk would be taken for granted, and in which the meaningful societal problems that face humans are best understood in the conceptual framework of, “How can we best meet all of our needs?”
The analysis of Non-Violent Communication keeps us focused on what matters, so we can better organize to revolutionize our social structure
Among our comrades and our fellow working-class, we can replace our “rights”-talk with a style of language which treats us all as equal humans with essentially the same basic human needs. By doing so, we avoid the moral blaming and shaming, and can focus on solving our problems together to meet all of our needs to the best of our capacity.
We avoid issues of “Who gets what rights?” (see, for example, the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Suffrage, or Queer Liberation) by recognizing the basic shared needs in all of us.
We overcome issues of “What should we do when lawful bourgeois rights allow for some people to act in ways which create situations where other humans do not have their needs met?”—such as the rights of capitalists to exploit workers and the community, or of the rights of the ruling bourgeoisie to use force to maintain the strictures of class society. In these cases, we can recognize that the working class’ needs for material security, community, and freedom are not being met; and that the bourgeoisie are motivated by a fear of losing their level of material security and positive freedoms. We can skip over the obfuscation of “private ownership rights over capital” which justifies the present system, and build a socialist system—by and for the people—which can provide a high level of security, community, and freedom for all.
Our end goal is a society in which we see each other as humans, and work together to meet all of our needs. Clearly, in the present moment, there exists a class society, and divisive social categories which have emerged from class society—and we cannot simply change our language and how we relate to our fellow leftists, and expect these class structures to simply dissolve. But this language and analysis in terms of human needs—rather than of bourgeois rights—allows us to build a clear-eyed picture of what we ought to be doing in each situation. Focusing on materialist and human needs, not the bourgeois idealism of “rights”—this is what keeps our problem-solving clearly focused on the goals that matter: meeting human needs, and building a society which is focused on meeting human needs and helping humans achieve the goals we freely set for ourselves beyond meeting our basic needs.
I view NVC primarily as a way for comrades to communicate with each other, as well as potential comrades (that is, other curious and well-meaning people). Of course, there will be a large number of class enemies who dig their heels in and use whatever at their disposal to maintain their unfair advantages. In the face of these people who uphold oppressive systems, NVC provides us a proletarian, material analysis rooted in human needs, so that our struggle is not misled by the obfuscatory “rights”-talk of these oppressors. A focus on our material needs and of the social structures and material systems which affect our capacity to meet those needs—this kind of analysis makes it more obvious which social structures and material systems are required to change, for human society to best meet everyone’s needs.
Anyways, shout-out to my comrade, “dialectical materialism”
Reading back what I’ve written, I am reminded of that moment in the Foucault-Chomsky debate, when Foucault gets Chomsky to say that he, Chomsky, believes in a larger concept of justice, separate from the mere “justice” that is constructed through the power of the bourgeois social system. When I first saw that moment, I laughed. “Foucault got Chomsky there!” I thought, “Any form of ‘justice’ is ultimately going to be one imposed by society’s power structure, so there cannot be such a metaphysical concept of ‘justice’ as Chomsky believes in.”
I think this observation still holds up, in the sense that there is no objective, free-floating universal concept of ‘justice’. But Chomsky was getting at something—we are trying to create a communist society, in which we seek to work together to meet people’s needs as best as we can. That could be termed “justice”—although I’m not sure how useful it would be to do so.
I think it’s enough to say that we want to achieve such a world, and that we are willing to put our time and energy into achieving it. That sort of broadly-shared political commitment doesn’t require us to posit some metaphysical concept of “justice”. This is the sort of change in language, away from the metaphysical, and toward what we commit to materially and practically to meet people’s needs, which those of the Vienna Circle expected and promoted.
Similar to how the concept of “justice” loses its usefulness, so to will fade away the apparent usefulness of the bourgeois language of “rights”.
This is what I mean: It is possible to simply argue that my focus on “human needs” is merely a replacement of “rights” language. One might argue that I am simply saying that all of our human needs should be considered human rights, and that the obfuscatory and detrimental rights which justify exploitation should be removed from our framework of what is right and wrong.
But at that point, when “rights” are identical to “needs”, what use is there for the language of “rights”?
Remaining within the language of bourgeois “rights” simply keeps the door open for future obfuscation. The “needs”-talk of NVC is more rooted in what we can observe scientifically. That is: What do people require to reproduce themselves and society? What do free people seek out when these basic needs of material reproduction are met? What material opportunities exist for people to achieve those needs and wants? — In this sense, “needs”-talk is more objectively grounded in humans’ metabolic relationship to the world around them. Mere “rights”-talk exists in the idealist conceptual framework of free-floating metaphysical concepts—which is partially why it can be molded to serve the interests of the ruling class. Admittedly, it is easy to imagine a world in which the fight over “what counts as a right” turns into a fight over “what counts as a human need”—but at least we would have a more objective conceptual framework at our disposal.
Furthermore, “needs”-talk allows for us to better understand how we are committed to each other in society—we all play a role in meeting each others’ needs, from our everyday interactions to the larger social structures we collectively create. On the other hand, the language of “rights” seems to make the responsibility of “guaranteeing people’s rights” primarily the duty of sovereign states.
Modifying “rights”-talk to make it match one-to-one with human needs—this leads to “rights”-talk becoming unnecessary, superfluous, and a way for bad-actors to potentially reintroduce injustice through obfuscatory language. We would have essentially modified the definition of “rights” to the point that it would have become unhelpful baggage.
The language of “rights” is useful for winning certain concessions—until it isn’t. The quantitative revolutionary reforms that can be understood in the language of bourgeois “rights” have been falling away for a qualitatively different struggle around meeting our human needs. The inherent incompatibility of “rights”-talk versus the needs-focused society that people would want to live in—that is what leads to the downfall of “rights”-talk. A dialectical materialist analysis can be applied in this case, and perhaps doing so would be fruitful. But I think I’ve already covered the main points.
I end with a quote from Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program:
In the higher phase of communist society, ... after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased ... only then can the narrow horizons of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: ‘From each according to her ability, to each according to her needs!’
— Marx, as quoted in the marxists.org glossary page about Marxism and rights
For the future...
I would like to write something more practically focused—perhaps a toolbook for using NVC among comrades, among potential comrades, and within our socialist analysis. I already have a name for it: ‘Communication for Comrades’!