Modern human rights politics broke with the statist rights Marx attacked.

Evidence

In his early text, ‘On the Jewish Question’, Marx argued that the rights to equality, liberty, security and property enshrined in the eighteenth-century declarations amount to protections for the egoistic individual of civil society. In an article that challenges recent Marxist critiques of the complicity between human rights and neoliberalism, Samuel Moyn notes that the target of the young Marx’s criticisms was the abstraction of political emancipation within the nation-state, not the transnational, NGO-driven, legalistic human rights dominant today. When human rights came to prominence in the 1970s, Moyn argues, they broke fundamentally with the statist paradigm of the revolutionary rights of man that Marx criticised. This transnational politics of human rights may have come to prominence at the same time as neoliberalism, he argues, but human rights NGOs were merely ‘powerless companions’ of neoliberalism. Elsewhere, Moyn suggests that, while ‘the notion that individuals have basic rights was shaped by the political economy that always affects so much else in moral ideals and social relations’, this shaping was never complete, as human rights never reverted to their nineteenth-century role as protections of private property and freedom of contract. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 43

Categorization

• XREF: Samuel Moyn’s thesis that human rights NGOs were ‘powerless companions’ of neoliberalism speaks directly to the corrective-claims material in the library (the diamond-bourse and extralegal-institution work).
• SEED: Angle: a piece on the ‘powerless companions’ thesis — whether the dominant legalistic, NGO human rights actually enable or constrain austerity regimes, and what a materialist (Marxist) critique misses by conflating 1970s transnational rights with 1789 statism.