it's important to realize that when marx attacked human rights as "nonsense on stilts", he was referring to ecclesiastical law, in the form of natural rights (something derived by a handful of christian theologians, and that re-emerged as a sort of liberal theology). i mean, i don't disagree with what he said, which was an attack on the idea that rights come from some magical place in the heavens, rather than from human beings. 

that doesn't suggest he was opposed to rights, or thought that the rights of the individual were unimportant; to the contrary, he would have always self-identified as a liberal, and argued that the entire point of socialism is to maximize individual freedom by collectivizing production - that should create more freedom in the end, not less, and that was the idea that bakunin and proudhon and the rest ran with, even as marx attacked them as lacking the organization to get anywhere (and was right.) and they attacked him for being a pseudo-monarchist authoritarian (and were right, too). there's a real underlying connection between marx and the idea of "enlightened despotism", which is counter-revolutionary in scope. he often agreed more with the benthams than the paines.

it just means that he thought that rights were something humans create, and their value is subject to what we assign to them.

unfortunately, this has been misunderstood primarily for the reason that the american left tends to conflate socialism with collectivism or corporatism, without really grasping the contradictions in doing so. mussolini was a true collectivist in the corporatist sense; if we saw that kind of movement here, the first thing they'd do is wipe out any real left (just like the bolsheviks did, too). it's tied into the whole marginalization of economics on the american left in favour of the social sciences, because marx is seen primarily as a social scientist like weber rather than a political theorist like, say, james madison. it's the old cliche about what you like and don't like about marx, which seems to be less about class, exactly, and more about the enforcement of capitalist hegemony in the academy - even marx is stripped of his marxism, and those who study him are stripped of his praxis. it's a silly joke. but, it explains how the left has come to embrace these ideas that the left has always seen as on the far right, to the point it's taken up arms against them - the conflation of collectivism with the left.

if you really believe this stuff, you might want to read up on mussolini; you might find you want the trains to run on time, too.

but, you can't take rights out of the left and call it a left, it becomes incoherent and nonsensical. what's the point if you're not fighting for rights?