Rights by Virtue of Being Human
The principles contained in the U.S. Constitution are not pertinent when considering the question of rights and defending rights. Rights are not principles. They are acts of being. Rights by virtue of being human precisely means that they are not abstractions one aspires to but are established and affirmed by human beings with their acts of being. This is very different to saying that rights exist independent of time and space, brought down to earth by avatars, which the U.S. Constitution does, with principles such as "all men are created equal" and declaring the striving for "a more perfect union."
The principles spoken about in the Constitution are said to exist in incomplete form and the task is presented as one of "living up to them." For instance, it is common to hear it said, as Obama does, that "We are a better country than this," followed by statements like we are not living up to our principles, that we must fulfill the aspiration to be a more perfect union, and so forth. It is not accidental that in its origin, the definition for aspiration could be given as hot air.
To get at the conception of rights by virtue of being human, what is required is to cognize human relations as distinct from principles. This can be done by affirming our own vantage point of the Necessity for Change, captured in the phrase Understanding requires an act of conscious participation of the individual, an act of finding out. Based on recognizing Necessity for Change, it is possible to establish a vantage point of one's own for relations of humans and humans and humans and nature. The ensemble of human relations is indispensable and independent of individual will, as distinct from principles that come down from on high.
From the vantage point of the rulers, it is not possible to see beyond mediation, with knowledge broken up between different bureaus (into departments, silos) and mediated by sovereign representatives of government who sit in the Congress. Our vantage point of the Necessity for Change starts by virtue of being human which calls upon us to activate the human factor/social consciousness and carry out definite affirmative activities.
For the rulers, there is the projection of perfection, of a total democracy vs., for example, fascism, or the split between the illusion of a perfect union and reality. What is ignored is the reality we live in and the struggle for political power within those material conditions as they exist. What is required is to elaborate the kind of politics which need to be developed at this time by virtue of being human.
We are addressing this question of the politics of rights by virtue of being human, as opposed to some moral principle. End of History arguments say there is liberal democracy that has reached a state of perfection, its pinnacle. That is the moral principle. Since the 1950s, it means there must be political sovereignty (rendered as choice by election in a multi-party system) and consumer sovereignty (rendered as choice through markets). To not have these two choices is to have something different than democracy.
In the thinking of the rulers, the bottom line for this is what is called democratic peace. The principle involved is that democracies do not go to war with other democracies. If you belong to the club of democracies, the United States will not go to war with you. This is the view that was developed by Hobbes in the 1600s coming out of the English Civil War.
In the 1660s, to overcome the condition of civil war, Hobbes posits the conception of natural persons and he develops the artificial person. He says that the multitude covenants each with each, and then altogether covenant to create an artificial person of state. Even though states existed before this time, this is the first time the vocabulary of something called the state emerges. The conception of the state was further developed in the 18th century as part of the European enlightenment.
When Hobbes speaks of the artificial person of state, this person of state has monopoly right over the use of violence and coercion. The person of state deliberates over all the various issues put forward as desirable in the Preamble to the Constitution -- crime and punishment, war and peace, revenue. In his masterwork Leviathan, when dealing with the Covenant of the multitude authorizing the person of state to be their representative, Hobbes put it this way: "I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this man or to this assembly of men." He says, "Covenants without sword are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all" (Chapter 17).
The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution is the language of the artificial person of state. It was called the personne morale, the moral person of the state, an incarnation of morality. Then comes the personification of this principle, a sovereign established above party factions, party egos, which has the universal interest of the community in mind, which can be mediated by representatives.
Who does this moral person of state represent? It cannot represent the multitude who have no authority because they have already entered into the Covenant in which they are said to have contracted this moral person of the state to represent them. Henceforth, whatever their representative says represents them, makes it so. The idea is that no matter what anyone might think about coercion and corruption, they must feel satisfied that at least there is this moral person of state, as opposed to a tyrant in the shape of a monarch which the people rebelled against. In other words, for Hobbes, morality, justice and contracts only exist after the state is formed. The ultimate function of government is not to govern by goodwill, but to enforce laws through the fear of consequence, thereby making it rationally safe for people to cooperate.
Today, the consciousness the people are developing by waging the struggle in defence of their rights and the rights of all is that what is taking place is Not in Our Name.
A Different Kind of Political Power
WWI and WWII gave rise of a different kind of political power, that of the working class, of the Soviets, not on the basis of the pronouncements and rule based on moral principles as in the case of the bourgeois constitutions but on the basis of democratic centralism – that membership in the state recognizes the equality of all who are empowered to participate in taking decisions and overseeing their implementation. The state was not established in the name of a sovereign representative and moral principle called democracy but as Soviet power. This Soviet power was essential in defeating fascism and Nazism that came out of representational democracy.
Hitler participated in electoral politics. He consolidated power based on Article 48 of the German Constitution, which gave powers to the president when faced with crisis. Article 48 had been used many times before in the 1920s. Hitler was just one more case. He then acted to obliterate the Constitution as necessary to prevail against Soviet power.
The coalition of democracy at that time, during the Anti-Fascist United Front, included finance capitalists and their democracy and Soviet power based on democratic centralism. After WWII, by the mid-1950s, in the Soviet Union and people's democracies, the workers were deprived of the means to exercise Soviet power by the imposition of a form of Party dictatorship used to disempower the people. Instrumental in this was not only the conversion of the USSR into a nuclear superpower which contended for world domination with the United States, but the ability of the state and government in both the USSR and the U.S. to direct nuclear weapons to destroying any type of politics. The constant destruction of any type of politics is ongoing today to the extent that the restructuring of the state has become its all-round obliteration.
The Call of History
We say there is an ensemble of human relations. When we have a vantage point we must deal with this ensemble. An ensemble is not a matter of aggregating. It includes all the productive powers. Human productive relations have developed to the point where today more than 50 per cent of the world population lives in urban areas. China is now 50 per cent urban. Relationships between city and countryside have shifted drastically.
There are other social relations like those between intellectual and physical labour which are not distinct, the one from the other. Relations between males and females are coming apart at the seams right now. Another part is the social relation from one generation to the next. In the past, the worry about whether there would be a future generation did not exist. For instance, the conception among the Indigenous Peoples on Turtle Island was to always act in a manner that took into account the next seven generations. Actions were taken integral to the next seven generations.
Now humans have created technology that can obliterate the human species in the form of nuclear weapons, climate disasters, etc. These are the ensemble of human relations that cannot be dealt with by representative democracy, through viewing problems in silos, with different bureaucracies, and so forth.
What is introduced as technology has everything to do with the human factor/social consciousness. Technology, the relations between humans and nature, is an organ of humanity, and like any organ, necessary for further development. The development and use of technology depend on the human factor/social consciousness.
The rulers keep promoting the idea that nuclear war will start by accident whereas it cannot be called an accident when it is related to a system that has been in place for more than 70 years.
During the Spanish Civil War, the image painted by Pablo Picasso in 1937 of the Basque town Guernica was used to depict the aerial bombing of cities. At that time, a category called civilian was developed, as opposed to citizens. Because bombing was done by the military from the air, the military put forward the conception that a human person was a civilian, not a soldier. Then WWII began to tear apart what was previously held together by the moral person of the state, which was the fundamental problem of all constitutions coming out of democratic revolutions: the split between a civilian member of civil society and the citizen member of political society. This was propounded by Rousseau and others for whom the problem was always given as a paradox.
An example is the one which asks: if you have private individuals in civil society with private interests in their power, how do you restrain those selfish interests without the community coming apart? The answer of the rulers is to enforce a conception of popular sovereignty in which citizenship remains an abstraction. This is given as giving some civil rights while restraining selfish interests, especially those of workers and their labour power. In this situation everything is divided into two, the citizen and the individual in a civil society. As long as we keep things mediated by the vantage point provided by that moral person of state, then people will accept their obligations and punishment and feel powerless to stop those in power from waging war and determining rights as privileges.
Rights as privileges are a continuation of medievalism. Many labour struggles in the 19th century, for example, were tied to laws based on a relationship between master and servant, recognized as slavery. The body of law dealing with labour struggles were those of master and servant with rights as privileges granted by the master. What comes up against this is acting by virtue of being human.
There is a big split when it comes to conceptions of human rights. One conception is that when speaking about human rights there is a human essence, an attribute. It is tantamount to saying that the attribute of the productive power is the actual power.
An attribute of something is a property. For instance, redness can be an attribute of a rose, but the rose is not an attribute of redness. Today, it is commonplace to hear irrational arguments tantamount to saying that the rose is an attribute of redness. The predicate is substituted for the subject, red rose. This is a problem going back to the moral person of state and its development today in the context of everything coming apart which makes the situation more dangerous.
The other conception is that rights exist by virtue of being human, where the human factor/social consciousness must be activated. One way is as moral principle, coming out of public opinion, with what is a human person to be debated. The other recognizes that all social relations and the whole ensemble of human relations are independent of individual will. This is a fact, not a principle. Rights exist in their affirmation.
Some claim today that Nazis are trying to take our democratic state away from us and human rights are an aspiration, like the perfect union is an aspiration. The other is that there is an established standard that what is human is not a question of public opinion; it is the reference point that we begin with. It is not something to question and debate as you would with public opinion. There is no mystery of what the human standard of being human is. By virtue of being human requires a human being making claims on society as opposed to human rights being a moral principle where one person or groups of persons have claims against another – one immoral, the other moral.
What is happening now, including all the threats being made, stems from the original notion of natural and artificial person. The relation between political and civil society is not only unravelling; it is being torn asunder. And it looks like nobody among the rulers has a clue what to do about it. When Trump was elected, the first time, and more so the second time, no one knew what to make of it. There is a situation where nothing can be controlled by the existing state. The arguments that have developed over the centuries are no longer valid. Even finding the vocabulary of how to talk about developments is very difficult.
When talking with people there are some conceptions so deeply ingrained, it is difficult to settle scores with the old conscience of society. The slogan Who Decides? We Decide! is accepted as legitimate, but then not taken up as politics. In Louisiana when the known KKK Grand Wizard David Duke was running for Governor in 1991, Republicans wanted to disown him but could not do it. For their part, the Democrats put forward a known crook. There were even bumper stickers saying, "I'm voting for the crook." When the election took place, one of the largest turn-outs by African Americans who took the stand that David Duke could not be elected took place. They said that no matter what, he could not be elected. They took that stand. It was not a matter of voting for the lesser of two evils. It was a matter that there was no choice, Duke had to be blocked, period. The difference is not in ideas, but in the morale of people to act.
The instruments of coercion developed because one class had leisure to do that. It is not the other way around. Today, this older model of control with the moral person of state saying what can and what cannot be done has broken apart. Marx said the paradox must be sorted out by democratic revolution.
Completing the democratic revolution remains the problem to this day. How the working class can come to power and stay in power remains the problem which requires a solution. Everything that has gone into the conception of the state -- notions of community, family, machinery, everything -- now makes no sense. The importance of giving rise to modern definitions lies in how one classifies what is going on and the guides this provides for what action is taken.
(Based on Conversations held by the Ideological Studies Centre, 2008-2026)
This article was published in
Volume 56 Number 6 - July 6, 2026
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/TML2026/Articles/TS56062.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca