INTRODUCTION

Lord Bhikhu Parekh in his essay The modern conception of right and its Marxist critique
basically talks about the concepts of right and how it has changed with every passing
generation. According to him, Rights belonged to the realm of community/society. Honour
like rights was a communal virtue in such a society and was viewed as a collective matter.
There was no scope of a clash between individual rights and norms of societal honour. But
post-17th century, in the modern conception of rights, the individual was regarded as its
primary bearer. Since then, on the one hand, individuals have become aware of their rights,
powers and capacities; and on the other, they have got detached from social background and
relations. Communal ties and customary bonds got loosened. With every new generation,
individuals became more independent and self-assertive, especially with respect to their own
lives and related decisions.

(CHANGING) IDEAS OF RIGHTS

Further he states that we are so accustomed to the advanced idea of right that we have
overlooked that in pre-present day times, social orders existed without the cognizant
familiarity with rights and still there was opportunity and freedom. It is taken for granted that
the currently dominant conception of right is somehow self-evident and represents the only
way in which the concept of right can be understood, even though it is relatively recent in
origin, and does not go back much further than the seventeenth century and is fraught with
paradoxes and contradictions. We have become so accustomed to conceptualizing human
relations in terms of rights that we do not appreciate that nearly all non-western and most pre-
modern European societies managed, to do without them. In some of them men enjoyed
many of the liberties characteristic of a free society, such as security of life and
possessions .They did not murder each other at will, nor did their rulers deprive them of their
lives-except according to established procedures and for commonly agreed purposes. They
also had possessions which they used as they pleased and bequeathed to their children. They
followed the occupations of their choice and enjoyed freedom of movement. In the Roman
Empire, the rights presented were not individualistic but rather those given upon man by the
group for the acknowledgment of its basic reason, e.g. the privileges of the leader of a family.
Rights were obliged by law as well as. Also, rights were not supreme and represented
relationship just amongst people and not amongst them and the state. In the primitive society,
people obtained rights through a semi authoritative relationship of proportional and
constrained obligations of performing unquestionably since the other party had a privilege to
oblige him to so act. Yet they did not regard these are their rights or claims. He used the
Marxist critique to explore as to whether an alternative conception of a right exists.

RIGHTS AND MARXIAN CRITICISM

Almost from its inception the modern conception of right has been subjected to considerable
criticism by such diverse groups of people as the old natural law theorists, religious writers,
socialist and the Marxists. They were deeply troubled by it, and explored either an alternative
conception of right or a society to which the concept of right was not central. We have
become so accustomed to conceptualizing human relations in terms of rights that we do not
appreciate that nearly all non-western and most pre-modern European societies managed, to
do without them. Even classical Athens, widely acknowledged to be the cradle of western
democracy, managed to do without the concept of right. Indeed, like many classical
languages, classical Greek did not even have word for it. During the several centuries of
feudalism, rights were derived from several sources, of which the law was but one and not the
most important. The long established traditions, which defined the content of justice and
rights, severely limited the scope and authority of the law.

For Marx "rights" is a gadget to legitimize the imbalance of the Capitalist society which
depends on the two clashing necessities of seeing man as a ware whose aptitudes can be
distanced, making him saleable, and as a conceptual individual (and not a person) having
measure up to rights, which they can't practice similarly. By legitimizing the selfish quest for
self-intrigue, industrialists distance man from man and give a figment of "rights" to the
specialist who stays fastened to the business people even on changing the business
accordingly avoiding class solidarity and proceeding with misuse.

It is in this early formulation that Marx develops the notion of human rights in the service of
humans concerned only with their individual, asocial, self-interest.

According to him, domain of capitalist relations of production is claimed as co-extensive with

the domain of human rights. Moreover, they mutually advantage each other: human rights
provide the moral and legal (institutional) framework for the fair exchange of labor power
for wages. And the capitalist mode of production generates and compels the individualism
and self-interest essential for the allure of individual human rights.
It is the intimate linkage of human rights and the capitalist mode of production that define
Marxs view and the Marxist understanding of the ascendency and ubiquity of rights-talk in
political discourse. For Marxists, declarations and codifications of human rights are
inseparable from their role in bourgeois society, their place in the social fabric of capitalism.
Human rights doctrine serves as a secure and compatible foundation for morality, law, and
politics in the ascendency and maturation of the capitalist mode of production.

He does not dismiss the hypothesis of rights through and through but rather reprimands the
extraordinary ideas of both the nuclear individual and individual as a social creature. He
perceived the significance of independence, be that as it may he needed to cleanse it of the
average mutilations. This drove him to understand that institutional acknowledgment of rights
and material premise of individual property are essential bases of distinction as without them
it was conceptual and incredible all things considered a circumstance would commensurate to
vision.

Parekh closes by coming to a point that "Marx does not and can't get rid of the idea of right
out and out" and the individuals who trust that independence is a common fantasy and
henceforth "industrialist" rights are not required in a socialist society loaded with faultless
individuals, submit a grave slip-up. Furthermore, Marx's thinking is "equipped for offering an
option hypothesis of rights" which characterizes rights in a "non-possessive way" and
which proposes rights "other than those accentuated in the previous three centuries" and
which accommodates a touchy society involving agreeable individuals who don't "club each
other with their titles and rights.