Social and Economic Rights
Lecture by Dr. Nikolas K. Gvosdev
Social and economic rights can be traced back to a number of paternalistic societies of the ancient and classical world, where the ruler assumed certain obligations to provide for the well-being of the people. In the Byzantine (East Roman) Empire of the Middle Ages, for example, the city government of the capital city of Constantinople sponsored distributions of bread and other foodstuffs to the poor, regulated business and set wages and prices, and sponsored schools, hospitals, orphanages, and other social institutions for use by the poor and indigent. In addition, the imperial government, from time to time, engaged in land redistribution, on the grounds that the continued acquisition of land by the rich would destroy a network of small, free peasant farmers and reduce them to serfdom.
The modern concept of "social and economic rights", however, developed in the aftermath of the French Revolution (1789). The French Revolution promised that all citizens would have basic civil and political rights; however, it soon became very apparent, that not all citizens were poised to take advantage of those rights. Economic stratification in society meant that those in the lower classes were effectively disenfranchised. Such calls for economic rights gained strength with the Industrial Revolution and the rise in a mass working class paid in wages rather than being independent property owners. Socialists, among them St. Simon and Marx, maintained that political and civil rights were largely meaningless to people who had no economic guarantees of a living wage, job, or access to resources, and that a government or regime that focused only on the protection of civil and political rights alone was protecting a system that permitted inequality to fester. The true exercise of rights meant the ability to live at something above mere survival, and that any system that did not guarantee basic levels of quality of life was violating rights.
Social and economic rights are based on the assumption that no human being comes "automatically" prepared to exercise political or civil rights, and therefore needs the assistance of the community to reach one's full potential. For example, voting rights cannot be effectively exercised unless a person can read and write; while each person could, in theory, learn individually, it makes more sense to offer universal schooling to all children regardless of their individual capacity (or the capacity of their families) to pay for such education.
Over time, a number of social and economic rights came to be codified. We might classify them as follows:
An important part of the socialist critique of human rights had to do with the concept of profit and "surplus value." Here, the notion was that the owner of a factory or business exploited his workers by paying them only a fraction of the value of their labor (in the form of wages) and keeping the rest of that value as profit for himself. Therefore, the call was heard for progressive forms of taxation that would capture this surplus value and allow it to be redistributed for the benefit of all.
In some cases, social and economic rights are distributed by the government (state-owned housing, state distribution networks for food and other resources, state-owned factories, etc.); in others, the state may administer certain programs designed to fill the deficiencies of the free market system in providing all citizens with a basic standard. However, there is no universal standard of social and economic rights that enables us to create a definitive reference point. Does the right to education, for example, encompass only basic education (reading, writing, basic skills) or does it mean that a person has the right to expect extremely specialized training (e. g. medical school) at state expense? What does "right to a job" mean? Is a person obligated to take the job that the state offers, or to decline it? To what extent does any person in society have a right to accumulate resources at the expense of others, and at what point does the state have the right to intervene? In early Soviet Russia, for example, in order to guarantee a person's right to housing, the Soviet government would arbitrarily move families into private apartments already owned by someone else, to ensure that all families had the same amount of space.
To what extent should a society infringe upon the "zone of freedom" that civil and political rights convey in order to provide the platform, the safety net, of social and economic rights? This has been the classic debate which will be addressed in next week's classes.