ABSTRACT
Tom Campbell’s The Left and Rights (1983) is a conceptual analysis of the place of the categories of rights and legal rules in socialist society. Campbell is concerned to question the views of many socialists who reject the appropriateness of these categories to socialist social systems. They do so, according to him, on a number of grounds:
(1) that rights are intrinsically tied to a competitive capitalist society in which supposedly autonomous individuals pursue self-interested claims against one another, whereas in a properly socialist society individuals will be cooperative and altruistic and not divided one from another by the self-interests of the capitalist market and by a system of production based on private property;
(2) that rights and legal rules entail a legal formalism that is at odds with the substantive goals of socialism and can only serve as barriers to their attainment;
(3) that competiting rights, claims and formal legal rules are tied to a coercive state system, whereas under socialism the repressive apparatus o f the state and the need for external controls on individuals’ conduct through sanctions will disappear;
(4) that the discourse of rights is a moralizing discourse inappropri ate to the realism of socialist political practice and the attainment of its political objectives; it ties socialist political thought and language to the very illusions of liberal individualism that socialism criticizes and seeks to supersede.
