When most people hear the phrase “human rights,” they picture the freedom to vote, to speak openly, or to worship as they choose. But there is an entire tradition of political thought that argues these freedoms mean little to a person who is starving, jobless, or denied medical care. The socialist perspective on human rights flips the familiar script. It insists that rights are meaningless unless they are grounded in material reality, and that the first liberation a person needs is freedom from economic exploitation. This view shaped the constitutions of the former Soviet Union, sparked decades of ideological debate, and quietly left its mark on the rights frameworks we live with today.
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Rethinking rights through economics
The socialist conception of human rights begins with a simple but radical claim: the individual is not an isolated, abstract being but is inseparable from society as a whole. From this standpoint, economic liberty must come before socio-political liberty, and freedom from exploitation is treated as the most fundamental right a citizen can hold.
This thinking draws directly from Karl Marx. In his 1843 essay “On the Jewish Question,” Marx examined the rights proclaimed in the French Declarations of 1789 and 1793 and concluded that none of these “rights of man” went beyond the egoistic individual – a person withdrawn into private interest and separated from the community. For Marx, the classic liberal freedoms were not universal truths but legal arrangements that protected private property and served the interests of the propertied class.
This is the heart of the socialist critique. Liberal democracies celebrate “negative” rights – protections that restrain the state from interfering with the individual. Socialist theory argues this is not enough. If the state simply leaves you alone but you have no job, no home, and no schooling, your formal freedoms are hollow. What you need are “positive” rights: active guarantees that the state will provide the conditions for a dignified life.
Two kinds of rights
Scholars often describe a socialist theory of rights as embracing two distinct types. The first are positive freedoms such as the right to work and the right to education. The second are economic rights to be free from exploitation. Importantly, the modern recognition of social and economic rights is itself almost unthinkable without Marx’s contribution. Even thinkers who reject communism often acknowledge that the entire vocabulary of “welfare rights” owes a debt to socialist thought.
This is why the distinction matters so much. Where the liberal tradition asks “What is the state forbidden from doing to me?”, the socialist tradition asks “What is the state obligated to do for me?” The answer reorders the entire hierarchy of rights, placing economic and social welfare at the top.
The Soviet constitutions as a blueprint
Nowhere was this philosophy written into law more explicitly than in the former USSR. Two documents stand out as the clearest expressions of the socialist approach: the Constitution of 1936 and the Constitution of 1977.
The 1936 “Stalin Constitution”
Adopted on 5 December 1936, this constitution was a deliberate attempt to showcase what socialism had supposedly achieved. It abolished old voting restrictions, introduced universal direct suffrage, and added the right to work. More significantly, it recognized a cluster of social and economic rights including the rights to work, rest and leisure, health protection, care in old age and sickness, housing, and education.
The state’s role in providing welfare expanded sharply. The document guaranteed the right to work, free secondary education, and medical aid for all toilers, along with social insurance and paid vacations for workers. The constitution declared that socialist ownership of the means of production formed the economic foundation of the country – a clear statement that rights were rooted in collective, not private, ownership.
The 1977 “Brezhnev Constitution”
Four decades later, the 1977 Constitution built directly on this foundation. Soviet legal commentators consistently insisted that 1936 had been the foundation of 1977, and that the later document extended constitutional status to economic and social planning across new spheres of life.
The 1977 text was longer and more detailed than its predecessor. It spelled out a sweeping set of guarantees:
Right to work: Article 40 promised guaranteed employment and pay, with the freedom to choose one’s trade or profession in line with ability and training.
Right to rest and leisure: Article 41 ensured this through a limited working week and paid holidays.
Health protection: The state maintained systems of health protection, social security, and communal services.
Education: A uniform, free system of public education provided general schooling and vocational training.
Social security and housing: The state provided pensions, disability support, and the responsibility for affordable housing, while the 1977 document also introduced provisions for environmental protection for the first time.
The serious criticisms
It would be misleading to present this system as a success story without acknowledging its severe flaws. The socialist model has faced sustained criticism, and much of it is well-founded.
The central objection is that by prioritizing economic and social rights, the Soviet state heavily restricted political freedoms. The state portrayed its guarantee of economic and social rights as a hallmark of socialist society, yet political opposition was met with arrest, and art, science, literature, and education were placed under strict ideological control. Western legal theory emphasized “negative” rights protecting the individual from state interference – precisely the rights the Soviet system suppressed.
There is also a sharp debate about whether these paper guarantees translated into real life. One historical assessment argues that under Stalin, the proclaimed rights were, in practice, largely a nonsense – universal in theory but undermined by the reality of a dictatorship. Critics point out that prioritizing collective welfare allowed the state to exert sweeping control over individual life, which in turn enabled serious human rights abuses.
Perhaps most telling is the verdict of insiders. After the collapse of communism, even Soviet academics who had once championed state socialism admitted they had vastly oversimplified the economic foundation of human rights, wrongly assuming that socialist property automatically created all the conditions for their fulfilment.
A lasting influence on global frameworks
Despite these failings, the socialist emphasis on welfare did not vanish with the Soviet Union. Its influence is woven into the most important human rights documents of the modern era.
From the UDHR to the ICESCR
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, blends both liberal and socialist traditions. It protects civil and political rights alongside economic, social, and cultural rights, including a right to social security. Tensions between the Soviet bloc and the West over which category of rights mattered most eventually led the international community to split these into two separate treaties.
One of these, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), came into force in 1976 and commits its parties to advancing labour rights, the right to health, the right to education, and the right to an adequate standard of living. The enduring logic behind this covenant echoes the socialist insight directly: civil and political freedoms cannot be meaningfully exercised in conditions of deprivation, exclusion, or systemic inequality.
The Indian connection
This influence is not distant or abstract – it is built into our own constitutional structure. The Directive Principles of State Policy in Part IV of the Constitution carry a clear socialist orientation. A specific cluster of articles, including Articles 38, 39, 41, 42, 43 and 47, follow socialist principles with the ultimate aim of building a welfare state that delivers social and economic justice.
The state is directed to secure an adequate means of livelihood for all, ensure equal pay for equal work, and make effective provision for the right to work, education, and public assistance in cases of unemployment, old age, sickness and disablement. The parallel with the Soviet guarantees is striking, even though the Directive Principles are non-justiciable rather than legally enforceable.
The framers understood exactly what they were doing. Dr B.R. Ambedkar argued that the Directive Principles were meant to provide social and economic democracy as distinguished from the political democracy offered by the Fundamental Rights – capturing the same conviction that animates the socialist view: political democracy is incomplete without socio-economic democracy.
What do you think? Can civil and political freedoms ever be truly meaningful for someone trapped in poverty, or are economic and social rights the necessary foundation on which all other rights must rest? And in a country like ours, should welfare guarantees such as the right to work and education be made legally enforceable rather than remaining guiding principles?
References
- https://sites.google.com/view/arunumrao/short-notes/political-science/socialist-perspectives-on-human-rights
- https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/
- https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/ws/files/1139130/Marxism_and_Human_Rights.pdf
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_Constitution_of_the_Soviet_Union
- https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/constitution-1936
- https://humanityjournal.org/issue3-3/social-rights-in-the-soviet-dictatorship-the-constitutional-right-to-welfare-from-stalin-to-brezhnev/
- https://www.crteducazione.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/RUS_USSR_Constitution_1977_EN.pdf
- https://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/regional_perspectives_on_human_rights_the_ussr_and_russia_part_one
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337629442_The_Failure_of_the_Socialist_Declaration_of_Human_Rights
- https://www.csis.org/analysis/whither-united-states-economic-social-and-cultural-rights
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Covenant_on_Economic,_Social_and_Cultural_Rights
- https://www.diplomacyandlaw.com/post/international-covenant-on-economic-social-and-cultural-rights-explained
- https://blog.ipleaders.in/directive-principles-state-policy/
- https://knowindia.india.gov.in/profile/directive-principles-of-state-policy.php
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_Principles_in_India
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