Human Rights

The rights that men ought to have and actually have, under certain socio-historical conditions, in accordance with their natural and social attributes, which are recognized by law and jointly enjoyed citizens, in political, economic, social and cultural aspects, including the right to life, right to health, right to portrait, right to writing, right to property, right to labor, right to safety, right to speech, right to belief, right to freedom, etc.

The concept of human rights arose with the appearance of certain socio-historical conditions, changes with the development of socio-historical conditions, and is closely connected with a specific social ideology. The enjoyment of full human rights is an ideal that has long been pursued by mankind. Under slavery and feudalism, slaves and peasants, who constituted the majority of the population, had no human rights at all. The bourgeois concept of human rights was first introduced in the Petition of Rights presented to the King by the British Parliament in 1628, and was the slogan of the British bourgeois revolution. After the struggle, the English Parliament passed the Habeas Corpus Act and the Bill of Rights in 1679 and 1689 respectively, which provided for some clauses for the protection of human rights. The 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau put forth the “natural rights of man”, which laid the foundation for the bourgeois theory of human rights. The 1776 Declaration of Independence of the United States, called by Marx the “first Declaration of the Rights of Man”, for the first time set forth in the form of a political programme: all human beings are born equal and endowed with inviolable natural rights of man—to live, to be free, and to pursue happiness. The Declaration of the Rights of Man, the programmatic document of the French Revolution of 1789, states: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” The declaration of liberty, security and resistance to oppression natural rights of man, and of property an imprescriptible right has directly affirmed the bourgeois concept of human rights in legal form. However, human rights is a social and historical category, and the fundamental defect of the bourgeois conception of human rights is that it regards human rights as natural and therefore eternal and universal, which is against science. Hegel also held that the “rights of man” are not natural, but arose historically.

It is impossible to achieve universal and equal human rights under the capitalist system, as Marx incisively pointed out: “Equal exploitation of labor-power by all capitalists is the first human right of capital.” Therefore, for quite a long time, human rights were only the privileges of the bourgeoisie, with obvious limitations. The core and fundamental purpose of the slogan of the bourgeois human rights is to maintain and develop bourgeois property. “And it is significant of the specifically bourgeois character of these human rights that the American constitution, the first to recognize the rights of man, in the same breath confirms the slavery of the colored races existing in America.” The proletariat opposes the bourgeois conception of human rights, but does not oppose human rights in general, on the contrary, on a number of occasions, it also advocates the guarantee of basic human rights. If the proletariat is to gain its own human rights and achieve genuine emancipation, it must abolish the private property in the means of production and establish the public property in the means of production. Therefore, the proletariat never takes the struggle for human rights as its basic programme, but sums up its tasks and slogans as the abolition of the private property in the means of production. As for the slogan and activity of fighting for human rights, the proletariat demands to differentiate for which class to fight for human rights, whom to fight for human rights, and what human rights to fight for, and then adopts different attitudes.

The historical background, social system, cultural traditions and economic development of each nation and country are very different, and there is often an inconsistency in the understanding and evaluation of human rights, and there is also variation in the implementation of human rights. Fundamentally, since human rights are prescribed by law, they are again a social concept with a class nature. In class society, there are no abstract human rights, but only human rights of classes within a certain historical context. The human rights put forth by the bourgeois Enlightenment thinkers during their revolutionary period as the antithesis of feudal privileges and theocracy, reflecting the demand of the new productive forces it represents to break through the fetters of the feudal system, were both an ideological weapon of the bourgeois demand to improve its political status and to compete for domination, and a reflection of the demand to change the personal and semi-dependent status of the slaves, serfs and peasants, and thus to have enough free wage-laborers in order to obtain a basic precondition for the development of capitalism, which was historically of a progressive significance, which is historically of a progressive significance. But in the capitalist society, the proletariat is in an exploited and oppressed position. Bourgeoisie law protects the rights of the ruling class. The ruled class does not enjoy the human rights of equality and liberty, and the people are deprived of their most important right to administer the State and manage the enterprises. Under the socialist system, the broad masses of working people, represented by the working class, have taken hold of the state power, abolished the private property in the means of production, eliminated the system of exploitation, and the working people have become the masters of the state and society, thus enjoy full personal liberty and democratic rights. Although the question of human rights has an international dimension, it is primarily a matter of national sovereignty. Therefore, the Chinese people oppose the interference in the internal affairs of other countries, especially numerous developing countries, by using human rights issues as a pretext, and oppose the promotion by any country of its own value ideas, ideologies, political standards and development models by using of human rights issues.