No rights without duties, and equally no duties without rights

Sashin's notes

This is a line from the leftist anthem L'Internationale, which I've written about here.

In my mind, it's of utmost importance. Do we live in a world where we are really free or are we still slaves?

If we have rights, that demand the action of others, we must also have duties to them. But in turn, if we have duties, if we have things that we are compelled to do we must in have rights.

The way the world is right now, our choice is to find our way in another's machine, working according to their wishes to make them wealth or starve. If we want to do things our own way we need capital which we need to earn or borrow, we need to somehow or another appeal to those who have it.

It's not just that we can find something useful and do it, in our own way, we have to find something profitable and if we don't have the capital upfront to get started (because we need to eat, drink water and have shelter now) then we will likely be making those profits for someone else.

If we have duties, we must also have rights that correspond with them. If we have rights, we must have duties that correspond with them.

The more wealth a person has, the more command they have over the lives of other people. We live in a world that to eat and to be sheltered we need to constantly pay money. Those without money are at the mercy of those who have money to survive. They say that if you don't like a job you can leave, but then you have to simply find another job. It's true that a worker isn't necessarily beholden to a capitalist, but the working class as a whole is beholden to the capitalist class all of whom have leverage over the worker and the incentives to secure and expand their capital and therefore increase this leverage.

When you buy something, you are commanding the forces of human labour. Let's say you go to the shops and you buy a chocolate bar. People had to pick the cocoa, people had to process it into the bar, people had to package it, and people had to distribute it. In the state of nature, none of these actions help you survive. In the state of nature, we need to acquire food, water and safety. However in the world we live in, because profitable labour can be traded for those things, if there is a market that consistently buys something, a new niche in the human ecosystem, a new way to make a living is created. Money itself commands human labour, market forces create and destroy entire ways of life. Wealth is necessarily power over other humans, and with those rights should come duties.