Soviet delegates judged formal rights hollow without economic transformation

Evidence

While Hayek attributed the UDHR’s social and economic rights to the Marxism of the Russian Revolution, the Soviet delegates shared much of his cynicism about the practical effects of declaring such rights. In a capitalist country, the Soviet bloc delegates argued, there would always be a ‘flagrant contradiction’ between what was said in the declaration and the reality. The declaration of a right to rest, for instance, ‘had a hollow ring in a society in which a small group always rested, while the overwhelming majority worked all the time’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 225

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Marx’s critique of merely formal/bourgeois rights, and connects to the reader’s interest in how rights discourse relates to material conditions. — connects to: Soviet delegates at the UDHR drafts rejected civilisational hierarchy language as obsolete — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 77; Constitutional declarations of political principles signal their impotence, not their power — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting…, 921
• SEED: Article angle: the strange convergence where Soviet and Hayekian critics both dismissed declaratory social rights as empty formalism — a ‘strange bedfellows’ piece on the right and left agreeing on the hollowness of rights without economics.

Broader Connections

• Constitutional declarations of political principles signal their impotence, not their power #corroborates (0.85) — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 921