Does No One Remember Magna Carta? Did She Die In Vain?

There has been a lot of hypocritical broo ha ha over the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta today in 1215.  The Tories have referred back to it, even as they propose to scrap the Human Rights Act, claiming that its existence proves that Human Rights existed in Britain long before the Act.  That in its self is telling, because in reality, even to the extent that the great charter had any meaning in terms of rights for anyone, it was only rights for the feudal barons themselves, not for the ordinary people of Britain.  No doubt, the Tories see no contradiction in the two, as they as always are only concerned with the rights and interests of those same privileged strata in society.

In fact, Magna Carta was scrapped within three months of being signed, as King John, got the Pope to annul it for all future time.  That illustrates an important point for today.  There are no universal, absolute or God given rights.  All rights are rights granted by society.  They exist only to the extent that society brings them into existence, and have any real existence only so long as society is prepared to enforce them.  The USSR had the most democratic constitution in the world - on paper. Bits of paper mean nothing ultimately, other than as something to point to, but unless those claiming their rights under such laws are able to enforce them they mean absolutely nothing.

Moreover, even with the best will in the world, and even with the social power required to enforce rights, that is no guarantee that such rights will be enforceable.  As Marx puts it, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme,

"Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby."

We may feel that everyone SHOULD have a right to a job, or to free healthcare, or free education, or for the state to provide this or that benefit, but that does not mean that given any particular set of economic conditions, such rights DO exist, or can exist, and so suggesting that these rights are in some way absolute, is not only utopian, but it is dangerous, suggesting that these rights may be compatible with an economic structure of society in which they are impossible.

The rights of Magna Carta were compatible with the rights of the barons of 8 centuries ago, and yet even then Church and State quickly overturned them.  They were reintroduced after King John and the Pope died, but only for those privileged layers of society.  Not even 4 centuries later, when the Civil War lopped off the head of Charles I, in order to extend those rights to a wider layer of society, did they extend to women, or to the majority non-property owning, members of society.  Those rights were only won a century ago, when eventually women got the vote.

There is little for the ordinary members of society to celebrate in the anniversary of the Magna Carta, it was a victory for the rights of our oppressors, and our struggle against those oppressors still entrenched in the Monarchy, and the landed aristocracy continues today, alongside our struggle against our new oppressors, the capitalist class.  Even to win a consistent bourgeois democracy by removing the inherited power of the Monarchy, the House of Lords and other such institutions we have a long way to go.  Don't celebrate organise.