'natural rights' and Locke.

[Oswy]

Anyone got any basic advice with regard to arguments which rely upon 'natural rights', especially those who try and include the 'right' to 'private property' among them?

A basic Marxist critique of Locke's central position/s would be good too.

Many thanks!

[Revolutionair]

Saying that private property is a natural right is like saying that the color blue is better than other colors due to some natural right for the color blue. It makes no sense at all.

If someone talks about natural rights, ask them what they mean when they say natural right. If they say that natural rights are rights that we all have and always have had, tell them about hunter-gatherer societies. Tell them about the thousands of lawsuits every year due to people not knowing whose property is whose. Tell them that every form of society has claimed to be the natural state of things. Feudal landlords told their serfs that being a landlord was their 'natural right'.

[penguinfoot]

Marx presents a critique of legal rights in general in On the Jewish Question and his argument is essentially that legal rights and especially the legal rights that are established under capitalism, geared as they are to the preservation of private ownership, reflect and presuppose a society in which individuals exist only in an isolated way and confront each other as competitors over scarce goods and resource, because a right is something that you use to demand your share of something and to protect yourself against an attack that is assumed to have come from someone else, such that, in a society where there is no need for individuals to come into conflict with each other, there would be no real need for legal rights, especially a right to private property - but beyond that critique there is plenty in the Marxist tradition that you can use to critique someone like Locke, and I think that Marx would argue that his most basic flaw is that he does not treat capitalism as a mode of production that is a historic product. It is central to Marxism that capitalism only comes into being once the forces of production have reached a given level, having developed under previous mode of production, and, once established, cannot form a permanent basis for social organization, because capitalism, like every other mode of production, can only develop the forces of production up to a certain level, before the relations of production come to act in a regressive way by fettering the further development of those forces, at which point capitalism can be said to have exhausted its progressive and historic role, by preparing the material basis for a communist society. What Locke does, rather than recognizing the transience of capitalism, is fetishize capitalist social relations, by endowing them with divine sanction.

There is also another dimension to his fetishization which is that he obscures the actual means by which capitalism did emerge by arguing that private property has its origins in contractual agreement and that the right to ownership consists of a right to what human beings have worked on with their own labour - these arguments imply that capitalism was able to emerge more or less peacefully, and the entire point of the last chapters of Capital is to show that this is a fantasy that plays a powerful role in legitimizing the class rule of the bourgeoisie, because capitalism was actually established only through violent expropriation of communal property, and continues to rely on violence and the subversion even of its own standards of justice throughout its existence.

These arguments aside, though, it is worth asking whether there might be some commonalities between Marx and Locke, and even strains of influence. It is plausible to argue that the connection drawn by Locke between private property and laboring on the natural world anticipates the labour theory of value in certain ways because it recognizes the primacy of human labour activity in creating products for human use, but more than this, it also has something in common with Marx's refutation of traditional materialism, because it recognizes that the relationship between man and the natural world is a transformative rather than contemplative one, that man is compelled to act on the natural world in order to secure what he needs for his survival, and that both the natural world and man himself are changed in the process.

[Lobotomy]

From what I understand, Locke asserts that natural rights come from god. As an atheist I think that is a cop-out explanation--A sort of trump card that lacks depth.

[Acostak3]

From what I understand, Locke asserts that natural rights come from god. As an atheist I think that is a cop-out explanation--A sort of trump card that lacks depth. There are plenty of natural rights advocates who were atheists/agnostics and they don't seem phased.
Locke's natural rights can be turned against capitalism. Repudiate the state by showing that it is clearly not contractual/consensual. Repudiate capitalist land tenure a la Georgism. Use the labour theory of property against capitalism itself.

[Lobotomy]

There are plenty of natural rights advocates who were atheists/agnostics and they don't seem phased.

I'd be interested to see what their justification for the idea is. I think there is a secular Rothbardian natural rights theory but I've never looked into it.

[syndicat]

Locke had two arguments for private ownership over land and other means of production, one based on labor, the other on the earth as a common stock available for human use. taking the second, Locke's claim is that the "natural condition" of humans is that there is the whole world, all the land, that is available for our use. He says that there is no injustice in one individual taking over and claiming exclusive control of a piece of land "so long as there is other land and as good available for the taking by others." well, this leaves out future generations. in other words, in an early generation, in the era of nomadic tribes, there may have been plenty of land peoples could move into. but what happens when all the land is taken? then there is not land available for others to take. so in fact any taking of land for private property actually won't even satisfy "the Lockean condition" as it's called.

Locke's second argument was based on the idea that if you use labor to make enhancements to things derived from nature, then you have a natural right to claim the product of your labor as yours. Of course, the obvious problem with this argument is that it's incompatible with capitalism. workers mix their labor with raw materials but it is the owners of the firms who appropriate the fruit of their labor.

[penguinfoot]

There are plenty of natural rights advocates who were atheists/agnostics and they don't seem phased.
Locke's natural rights can be turned against capitalism. Repudiate the state by showing that it is clearly not contractual/consensual. Repudiate capitalist land tenure a la Georgism. Use the labour theory of property against capitalism itself.

Yes, there is nothing inherently religious about natural law arguments - just as the fact that Descartes relied on God for his cogito, in that he said that the correspondence between our perceptions and the world derives from God not wanting to deceive human beings, does not mean that the actual cogito line of argument is necessarily dependent on the existence of God. It is, however, highly problematic to say that Locke can or should be refuted by arguing that the state does not meet a given set of standards of legitimacy, because this argument still leaves the viability of transhistorical standards of legitimacy intact. In doing so it abstracts from the historical process and assumes that political institutions and social arrangements should be judged according to criteria that are not rooted in the practice of human beings in a determinate material environment. This is a kind of idealism that accepts a large part of Locke's epistemological terrain but it is even more problematic than Locke's own position because it is difficult to see how transhistorical standards of legitimacy can be supported or made viable without being given divine sanction.


Of course, the obvious problem with this argument is that it's incompatible with capitalism.

A further way you can critique Locke within his own framework is by recognizing that he never gives the notion of humans working on the natural world any specific or detailed content, so it's not clear what people would actually have to do in order to be able to claim something as their property - would it suffice for someone to kick a rock off a patch of ground, for example, in order for that ground to become theirs, on the grounds that they've improved it by clearing it for cultivation? If someone urinates on a tree, does that tree become theirs? You could certainly argue that someone has improved something by doing either of these things, however absurd they may seem!

[ExUnoDisceOmnes]

I'd be interested to see what their justification for the idea is. I think there is a secular Rothbardian natural rights theory but I've never looked into it.

I know some personally, and from what I understand they don't care about the God aspect. Although Locke threw in the word God, they feel that the natural rights apply anyways. Thus, they move beyond that and continue to advocate them.

[renzo_novatore]

Well, in my opinion, I hear all the time capitalist apologists saying that property is the fruits of my labor therefore I have a right to it and that I can do with it what I please.
Not only is this absurd considering that value is determined by demand and not by labor in a capitalistic situation, but also because of the fact that property is not NATURAL - it is an imposed institution to live at the expense of others. Indeed, let's say that property is the fruits of my labor, that I had made the means of production all on my own without help from anyone - and then, like all capitalists, I abandon it - would it be reasonable for me to demand compensation from people who are currently using it??? How are they effecting me? Are they hurting me? No! They're not.
Basic Proudhon, my friend, that is all.

Anyways, I suspect that property is considered to be the fruits of my labor because when the proletariat goes up to the capitalist and asks for food, the capitalist always says: "In order to get your food, you gotta please me, do my bidding, in other words labor for me!" Thus, labor becomes the basis of property.

[jastrub]

I had a big conversation with my parents about this a while ago. It really was a life-changing experience because I think I revealed to them both my socialistic and anarchistic leanings in that conversation.

My guilt with our current system of incomplete and inconsistent property rights had me hot and bothered, and in a moment of confused anxiety, I mentioned my worries to one of my teachers. Apparently, I was being an enemy to the state or something, because my parents were informed via email (don't you just love the public school system).

We had a very long discussion on Locke. I admired the enlightenment philosophes for a long time back when I still believed in individualist capitalism. However, I questioned whether one's right to own property conflicts with another's right to life and liberty. If Locke's three "god-given and natural rights" conflict each other, which one takes precedence? For instance, if a rich man withholds food from a pauper and claims that the food is "his property", is it a legitimate claim of a natural right if the pauper might die?

I eventually came to the conclusion that Locke's rights, in order, are successive of each other. Life trumps liberty and liberty trumps property. In the current class system we have, therefore, property rights are nullified because of their impact on the life and liberty of other individuals. In this new light, we can view Locke's principles as still valid.

Does this make any sense? Please tell me your thoughts, as I am not so sure whether this is consistent enough for me to accept as truth.

[Delirium]

Rights are a social construct. There are no natural or god given rights. All societies decide (one way or another) what thier members are allowed to do or not. Sometimes these are formalized such as in the us constitution, or other times they are informal such as in a hunter-gatherer society.