ABSTRACT
Turning specifically to human rights, the turn led to a revision of leftist revisionism. The hypocrisy of rights fanatics has come under close scrutiny. Marx’s attack on natural rights inaugurated ‘ideology critique’. Persons and rights are necessary for the operation of capitalism both at the level of production of goods and at the level of circulation and exchange. Law facilitates the circulation of commodities by providing the forms of the legal person and individual rights. The declaration that legal persons are free and equal is the historically specific outcome of the operation of private law and the market. But legal ideology goes further to claim that all men are free and equal ‘by nature’. The radical left is represented by parties and intellectuals associated with Eurocommunism, left-wing social democracy, ecology and anarchism, political trends which constantly and consistently criticized Stalinism even at the height of the Cold War.
