Marxist Theory: Rights in the Context of Class and Economy

Most theories of rights begin by asking what individuals are entitled to as human beings. The Marxist theory of rights starts somewhere very different. It asks who owns the means of production, and works outward from there. For Marx, rights are not eternal truths discovered through reason or granted by nature. They are products of a specific economic system, shaped to serve whichever class controls that economy. To understand any right, you first have to understand the material conditions that produced it.

This is a sharp departure from the legal, moral, and natural theories of rights. Where those traditions treat rights as fixed or universal, Marxism treats them as historical and class-bound. This makes the Marxist approach less a theory of what rights we should have and more a critique of how rights actually function in unequal societies.

Rights are rooted in the economic structure 🔗

The foundation of the Marxist view is historical materialism. Marx argued that the economic base of a society, meaning its mode of production and the relations between classes, determines its political and legal superstructure. Laws, constitutions, courts, and declared rights all sit in this superstructure. They do not float free of the economy. They reflect it.

This means rights change as economic systems change. Feudal society produced one set of rights tied to land, lordship, and serfdom. Capitalist society produced another set tied to private property, contract, and wage labour. Each system generated the rights its dominant class required. For Marxists, this is why talk of “timeless” or “natural” rights is misleading. There is no right that exists outside of history. What looks permanent is simply the legal expression of whoever currently holds economic power.

Why feudal and capitalist rights differ 🔗

Under feudalism, the rights that mattered were the rights of lords over land and labour. The serf had obligations, not entitlements. When the bourgeoisie rose to economic dominance through trade and industry, it needed a different legal framework. It needed freedom of contract, protection of private property, and the legal equality of individuals in the marketplace. So those became the celebrated rights of the new era. The shift in rights tracked the shift in who controlled the economy.

The state as an instrument of the ruling class 🔗

If rights flow from the economic structure, what enforces them? For Marx, the answer is the state. And the state, in his analysis, is not a neutral referee standing above competing interests. Lenin, summarising Marx, described the state as an organ of class rule whose function is to legalise and perpetuate the oppression of one class by another. The state exists because society is split into classes with irreconcilable interests, and it operates to keep the dominant class on top.

Under capitalism, this makes the state an instrument of the bourgeoisie. Marx and Engels developed the view that the state is generally a tool of the ruling class, though in certain conditions it can gain a degree of independence from all classes. The famous formulation from The Communist Manifesto is that the modern state is a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. The police, the prisons, and the military form its repressive core, while institutions that shape public consciousness reproduce the ideas that keep the system stable.

Bourgeois law protects bourgeois property 🔗

The law follows the same logic. In a capitalist society, the legal system is built primarily to protect property owners and to keep the wage relationship intact. Rules governing contracts, property, and labour are arranged so that the working class remains a source of labour to be exploited, while the propertied class retains its advantages. One legal analysis puts it directly: for Marx, the law becomes the instrument by which one class rules another for its private interests, which is why Marxists describe it as bourgeois law. The principles may be dressed up as universal and eternal, but in practice they reinforce the right of the bourgeoisie to own and accumulate.

The critique of natural and liberal rights 🔗

This brings us to one of Marx’s most influential arguments, developed in his 1843 essay On the Jewish Question. Here he examined the rights proclaimed in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and in early American state constitutions, and he was deeply unimpressed.

His complaint was that these so-called rights of man are really the rights of the isolated, self-interested individual of civil society. Marx observed that none of the rights of man goes beyond egoistic man, the individual withdrawn into himself and separated from the community. Liberty becomes the right to property. Equality becomes formal legal equality that ignores real economic inequality. These rights do not unite people into a genuine community. They protect each person’s ability to pursue private interest while leaving the underlying structures of domination untouched.

Marx also distinguished between two kinds of liberation. Political emancipation grants citizens formal rights within the existing order, but it secures only a limited freedom to chase private interests. What he wanted was human emancipation, a complete social transformation that would free people from the rule of private interest altogether. Formal rights, in this reading, can actually disguise the absence of real freedom.

The difference between formal and substantive equality 🔗

This is a useful distinction to hold on to. Formal equality means everyone is equal before the law. The factory owner and the worker both have the same right to sign a contract. Substantive equality asks whether they actually meet on equal terms. They do not. One owns the factory; the other must sell their labour to survive. The Marxist point is that formal rights can coexist with, and even conceal, deep substantive inequality. A right to property means very little to someone who has none.

Economic and social rights over political rights 🔗

Given this critique, what does the Marxist tradition value instead? The emphasis shifts from political rights to economic and social rights. The freedom to vote or to speak matters far less if you lack food, housing, healthcare, and secure work. Marxists argue that purely political rights, detached from material conditions, offer the appearance of freedom without its substance. Genuine emancipation requires meeting people’s economic and social needs.

This is why socialist states historically prioritised guarantees like the right to work, the right to education, and the right to social security over the classical civil and political liberties emphasised in liberal democracies. The argument is that a right to free expression is hollow for someone trapped in poverty, while a guaranteed livelihood gives real content to freedom. Whether socialist states actually delivered these rights in practice is a separate and heavily debated question, but the theoretical priority is clear.

How this maps onto the Indian Constitution 🔗

This distinction echoes inside the Indian Constitution itself, which separates justiciable Fundamental Rights from the non-justiciable Directive Principles of State Policy. The Directive Principles include commitments to an adequate means of livelihood, equal pay, and the right to work, which closely resemble the economic and social rights the Marxist tradition foregrounds. The framers drew on socialist thinking when shaping these provisions, even though they sit outside the directly enforceable part of the Constitution.

The state under socialism and its withering away 🔗

The Marxist theory does not stop at critique. It outlines a sequence of change. After a revolution, the working class would seize state power and establish what Marx called the dictatorship of the proletariat, a transitional state in which the proletariat becomes the ruling class. During this phase, the state would protect the rights of the working class rather than the bourgeoisie, and would oversee the transfer of the means of production from private to social ownership.

But this is meant to be temporary. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme of 1875, Marx made one of his most detailed statements about the future society. He argued that even in the early phase of communism, what he called the “narrow horizon of bourgeois right” would persist, because rewards would still be distributed according to labour performed. Since people have unequal abilities and circumstances, an equal standard applied to unequal individuals produces real inequality. Only in a higher phase of communism could society finally move beyond this and inscribe on its banner the principle of from each according to ability, to each according to need.

When the state becomes unnecessary 🔗

The logic here is striking. If the state exists to manage class conflict, then once classes are abolished, the state loses its reason to exist. Engels described this as the state “withering away,” dissolving from an apparatus that rules over people into one that merely administers things. In a genuinely classless society, there is no dominant class whose interests need protecting, so the coercive machinery of the state, and the class-bound rights it enforces, would no longer be needed. Rights would then serve genuinely collective interests rather than the private interests of any single class.

Strengths and criticisms of the theory 🔗

The Marxist theory of rights remains influential because it forces an uncomfortable question: who actually benefits from the rights a society proclaims? It exposes the gap between formal legal equality and real economic power, and it explains why declared rights so often fail the people who need them most. This insight shaped later critical traditions in legal and political theory.

The criticisms are equally serious. Critics argue that the theory underestimates the genuine value of civil and political rights as protections against arbitrary power. The philosopher Steven Lukes argued that Marx underestimated the importance of human rights, treating them as mere expressions of bourgeois egoism while ignoring how individual rights guard against state abuse. The historical record of states claiming to act in the name of the proletariat, where the promised withering away never happened and political freedoms were suppressed, gives this criticism considerable weight. Dismissing rights as bourgeois ideology can leave individuals dangerously exposed to the power of the state.

There is also a deeper tension. If all rights are simply tools of the dominant class, it becomes difficult to explain why the hard-won rights of workers, won through struggle, should be defended at all. Many later thinkers within and beyond the Marxist tradition have tried to recover a meaningful role for rights while keeping Marx’s insight about their economic roots.

What do you think? Are the civil and political rights we take for granted genuinely empowering, or do they mask the economic inequalities that shape who can actually use them? And if a society guaranteed everyone economic security but limited political freedoms, would that be a fairer arrangement or a more dangerous one?

References

1. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch01.htm
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_the_state
3. https://www.lawteacher.net/free-law-essays/business-law/law-in-the-socialist-society.php
4. https://csalateral.org/issue/7-1/moorby-marx-liberal-rights/
5. https://the1313.law.columbia.edu/2024/11/08/bernard-e-harcourt-introduction-to-marx-3-13-marxs-1844-articles-on-the-critique-of-hegel-and-the-jewish-question-claude-lefort-on-human-rights-and-politics-with-jean-louise-cohen/
6. https://www.mea.gov.in/Images/pdf1/Part4.pdf
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruling_class
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_the_Gotha_Programme