Clash of human rights versus monopoly capitalist “right to maximum profits”!

Statement of the Central Committee of Communist Ghadar Party of India, 8th December, 2011

The 10th of December this year marks 63 years since the signing of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

Statement of the Central Committee of Communist Ghadar Party of India, 8th December, 2011

The 10th of December this year marks 63 years since the signing of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. The 14th of November marked 21 years since the signing of the Charter of Paris by the European states along with the US and Canada, at a time when the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse. The Paris Charter declared that every country must strive to develop a market oriented economy, hold periodic multi-party elections and respect “human rights”, defined to give pride of place to capitalist private property right. 

For over two decades the US and other capitalist-imperialist states have been asserting that communism is the opposite of human rights, while capitalism and its democracy allegedly protect individual freedom and political rights.  However, the actual conditions of life have exposed the fact that imposition of monopoly capitalist “right to maximum profits” has institutionalized the violation of human rights on an unprecedented scale. 

Ruling parties that claim to represent the people are coming out in fierce and open defence of the "right" of monopolies to pocket maximum profits all the time, irrespective of the health of the economy and the wellbeing of the people.  Capitalist governments are blatantly attacking and negating basic rights, including the right to food, shelter and other requisites of human life in the 21^st century.  Imperialist powers are trampling on the sovereignty of nations and peoples as they unleash drone attacks and the latest missiles and bombs to impose their dictate.  While proclaiming “freedom of speech” they are trampling on the right to conscience, under the pretext of fighting against fundamentalism or extremism.

Faced with the unprecedented ideological offensive against communism in the past two decades and the escalated assault on people’s rights, our Party paid serious attention to the issue of human rights.  We probed its very definition and the mechanisms needed for its realisation. 

Far from remaining aloof from the question of human rights or condemning it as an “imperialist fraud”, our Party concluded that communists must actively expose the hypocrisy of the capitalist states and agitate for the modern definition of rights to become the cornerstone of civilized society and of democratic state systems in this century.

Whether it is a question of the right to work or the right to food, there is a clash between the proletarian world outlook and modern definition of rights, and the self-serving outlook and out-dated definitions of the ruling capitalist class.  We say these rights belong to every person by virtue of being a member of human society. Our enemies want to deny that these are universal rights, and their fulfilment is a social obligation and state duty.  They want to convert them into privileges and favours that are handed out to some and not to others, or can be given at one time and taken away at another time.

The bourgeois economists argue that it is not possible for the state to guarantee jobs, food, education, health and other essential needs for all members of society as a matter of right.  The truth is that it is perfectly possible but what stands in the way is the capitalist orientation of the economy, the domination and dictate of the monopoly houses and their greed for maximum profits.

It is not so well known to people these days that it was at the initiative of the anti-fascist forces headed by the then socialist Soviet Union that the United Nations started to work on a Declaration of Human Rights.  The US, Britain, France and other imperialist states exerted pressure to ensure that the Universal Declaration would remain merely formal and have no real content.  For example, they struck down a proposed amendment to Article 4 that “the state must ensure each person protection against criminal encroachments on his rights; provide the conditions preventing a threat of death from starvation and exhaustion.”  They made sure that the Declaration contained no measures which could facilitate the realisation of the basic freedoms and rights that it proclaimed.

The task facing humanity today is to overcome the limitations and obstructions to the realisation of the rights that belong to people by virtue of their being.  The times are calling on human beings to perform their duty of doing away with the conditions that give rise to the “right to maximum profits” being imposed at the expense of human rights. 

The struggle for human rights must be directed at replacing capitalist democracy with a modern proletarian democracy, with a new Constitution that enshrines the inviolability of human rights, along with enabling legislation and enforcing mechanisms to make sure they are never violated in practice under any pretext.