Marx, economics and law, continued

A good example of what Marx is getting at by saying rights are "rights to inequality" can be found recently in Chief Justice Roberts' opinion (and especially in the oral arguments) in Parents Involved v. Seattle School District (which I wrote about previously here). As I said, Marx shows that the discrepancy between the form of rights granted by the law and the actual content of those rights as determined by the conditions surrounding a subject is the space in which the notion of rights moves and inhabits and tries to correct, but never is the space which it tries to do away with completely. This means that the language of rights can be used to take away rights, because rights are a notion that apply equally across all sectors of the economy and conditions surrounding a subject. This is because the subject of rights is a bourgeoisie subject, according to Marx.

Now, I don't know if this is all correct, but you do see one merit of the class-based view of history when you see it makes a demand upon thinkers to inflect a notion like rights through a disparate set of circumstances of subjects, rather than just apply them anywhere and everywhere. The proceedings in Parents Involved v. Seattle read like an interrogation as to why minorities weren't bourgeoisie enough. Roberts' questions especially seemed not just ignorant of economic and something like class reality but also willing to manipulate this distinction under the notion of rights. When he says "the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race"--!!!--he presupposes that race is at the same time bound up in conditions that can make it resist efforts to stop discriminating and that these conditions actually don't apply if we look at the subject right--that is, if we consider someone who is not a bourgeoisie subject a bourgeoisie subject. This duplicity is more than ignorance, it is willful ignorance, and it is the type of action that Marx knew could happen with the language of rights.