The Question of Human Dignity in the Works of K. Marx and its Paradoxes

Victor Alexeyevich Vaziulin

Proceedings of the International Conference ‘Ethics of Human Rights’, Lomonosov Moscow State University―Tula, 1994

1. The current approach to the understanding of human dignity in the ‘International Bill of Human Rights’[1] clearly shows a low level of methodological literacy: the concept of ‘human dignity’ is understood as a foundational notion but is neither clarified nor further developed in any way. As a result, a limiting empiricism characterises any further formulation. This methodological inadequacy is also blatantly evident in a Council of Europe document on human rights, for example in the book ‘Medicine and Human Rights’ (Moscow, 1992), which presents the results of many years of research on the subject, conducted under the auspices of the Council of Europe. The main content of the book is reduced to a simple presentation of cases and, in fact, proclaims a principled refusal to generalise.

2. In the commonly used meaning (Dictionary of the Russian Language. M., 1957. Vol. 1), human dignity is understood as respect for oneself, conscience of one’s rights, one’s value. Consequently, the common understanding of the dignity of a person is, firstly, the conscience of their rights and, secondly, the conscience of the value of their personality.

3. The question of human rights and morality in the works of K. Marx.

Human rights constitute determinations and enactments that pertain to the realm of law and politics. This is how K. Marx interprets them. According to K. Marx, human rights are the rights that emerged with the emergence of bourgeois society and represent human rights within bourgeois society.

With the emergence and development of bourgeois society, with the abolition of feudal privileges, K. Marx shows that there is a separation, or rather an alienation of the political sphere, where all are equal before the law, from a society of individuals, where community is a community of private owners, where community is a means for the realisation of private property. And the political sphere serves as a means for the realisation of private property.

On the example of the most radical and consistent, the boldest bourgeois constitution―the constitution of the Great French Bourgeois Revolution―K. Marx proves that the fundamental human rights―liberty, equality, property (i.e. private property)―are the rights of separated egoistic individuals, the rights of self-interest. He proves that these rights reflect the position of separated individuals who treat other individuals, society and community as a means to satisfy their ends and needs, and thus, as alienated from themselves.

In fact, freedom is defined in the Declaration of Human Rights of 1791 as the right to do and engage in anything that does not harm another person, i.e. the limits of each person’s activities without causing harm to others. Consequently, ‘…the right of man to liberty is based not on the association of man with man, but on the separation of man from man […] It is the right of this separation, the right of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself. The practical application of man’s right to liberty is man’s right to private property. […] the right to enjoy one’s property and to dispose of it at one’s discretion (à son gré), without regard to other men, independently of society, the right of self-interest.’[2]

Equality. Equality is the equality of the liberty described above: ‘Equality consists in the fact that the law is the same for all, whether it protects or punishes’[3] ‘None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society―that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community. In the rights of man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original independence.’[4] The only link that unites these individuals is natural necessity, private interest, the preservation of their property and their egoistic personality.

What about morality and human dignity?

Firstly, morality is subordinated to the sphere of law and politics, a fact also evident in the contemporary established meaning of the word ‘human dignity’ (as the realisation of human rights). Hegel insightfully captured the position of ‘conscious morality’ or ‘individual morality’ (Moralitat) and ‘habitual morality’ or ‘social morality’ (Sittlichkeit) in bourgeois society, by integrating the analysis of these concepts into the philosophy of law.

Secondly, the more society is a society of private owners, of isolated individuals, the more their relations are regulated by law, by politics, and not by morality, the less importance morality has in society.

Thirdly, liberty and equality are first and foremost the liberty and equality of private owners. Consequently, the basis of liberty and equality in bourgeois society is private property, and therefore human dignity is actually determined by private property (and therefore by property differences), but not at all by the value of the individual, although formally all are equal before the law and therefore all, having formally equal rights, have formally equal dignity.

4. Value of personality. The characterisation of a personality specifically from the perspective of its value constitutes a particular case of considering, from this perspective, nature, man and the world created by man. The concept of ‘value’ gains significance with the establishment of the domination of commodity and money relations. Under the domination of commodity and money relations, everything, including a person, the individual, is drawn into its orbit and is assigned a price. Everything can be sold and bought, everything can be evaluated and valued. A person, his qualities, his characteristics, become a commodity and thus a thing. The famous psychotherapist Fritz Perls rightly believes that ‘our (modern―V. V.) man is dead, he is a puppet, and his behaviour is really very similar to that of a corpse, which allows others to do whatever they want with him, although he himself, by his mere presence, influences them in a certain way’. But long before F. Perls, K. Marx, like no other scientist, no other thinker in the world, deeply understood and explained that in bourgeois society, in a world dominated by private property, by commodity and money relations, in market society, the human being is degraded and reduced to the status of a commodity, he is relegated into an object.

Therefore, to the extent that a person is reduced to the status of an object, their human dignity is also disregarded.

5. From the position of K. Marx and actual Marxism (as opposed to various pseudo-Marxist approaches), man constitutes the highest value for man and the main strategic task is to create a society in which people would freely unite to form society, treating everyone not as a means but as an end. Such a society is in a certain sense the opposite of the bourgeois, market society of isolated, egoistic individuals, each of whom treats himself as an end and others as means.

K. Marx made a tremendous effort to identify the actual ways, methods, means, etc. to achieve a truly human society, truly human relations.

6. K. Marx showed that human rights, the value of personality, the concepts of human rights and the value of personality are based on the dominance of money relations, the dominance of the market.

During the exchange of the products of labour of isolated producers, each of them exchanges, alienates the product of labour which satisfies the needs of someone else, in order to receive for it an equivalent product of others, which is capable of satisfying his own needs.

In the exchange of equivalents, there is liberty (everyone exchanges in order to satisfy his needs and in exactly the same way that the needs of others are satisfied), equality (in a law-governed way, exchange is an exchange of equivalents), private property (separate owners engage in exchange).

However, ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ only reign in the process of exchange, of the circulation of commodities and money, i.e. in the sphere of the surface. Marx does not limit himself to the study of exchange, to the study of the market, as vulgar economists do, the way that the vast majority of economists approach modern bourgeois society.

K. Marx does not simply document the circulation of commodities and money, he also exposes its contradictions, which lead into the depths of market society, into the sphere of commodity production. He discovers that at the heart of the visible paradise of natural human rights (of equality, freedom, and private property) lies the hidden hell of capitalist production, where inequality and unfreedom reign, where private property is revealed as having been primarily created not by those who own it, but by those who are robbed of it. The distribution of market shares among the wage-earners, like a fig leaf covering the nakedness of the ‘market society’, only conceals their position as wage-earners, but does not eliminate it.

Yet it is not only in the hell of bourgeois production, but also in the supposed paradise of the circulation of commodities and money, in the supposed paradise of the market, that the glow of hellfire can be seen, if one looks impartially, unselfishly and deeply. Egoism, the relegation of the human being to the position of objects, to the position of ‘living corpses’, to people who are spiritually dead, to puppets, to manipulators and manipulated, the denial, in essence, of human dignity―this is the reflection of the flames of hell in the paradise of ‘free market society’. A fire that cannot be extinguished without overcoming this ‘paradise’ that is the system of ‘free enterprise’. K. Marx, the great thinker and brilliant scientist, devoted his whole life to this end.

Notes

[1] The International Bill of Human Rights consists of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, and the International Covenants, the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which were adopted in 1966.

[2] K. Marx “On the Jewish Question”, 1844

[3] Constitution du 5 Fructidor An III, 1795

[4] K. Marx “On the Jewish Question”, 1844