but, i'm just as vocal about rejecting much of any concept of property rights, including intellectual property rights.
and, while i'm not a marxist, marx and i wouldn't actually have much disagreement about rights - as i'd also agree with his denunciation of natural rights theory as fantastical, pseudo-religious statist nonsense.
that video i watched yesterday was really mislabelled, but it was more due to the interviewer rather than the author, who i take it wanted to talk about marx & natural rights but instead got hijacked by a discussion of post-modernist interpretations of leninist conceptions of human rights, which have little to do with marxist theory. i had some mild difficulty following it (i think i followed the content of the conversation, even if i didn't get the references), but he seemed to think that marxism was the same thing as leninism (ack.) and then tried to define marxist human rights theory as this pseudo-fascist application of taylorism to leninism, as it existed in the soviet union (double ack.).
it's sort of baffling to me that anybody would define themselves as a leninist in 2021, but the point needs to be stated as clearly as possible: leninism is not marxism, and people that call themselves unhyphenated marxists don't tend to cite lenin very often. certainly, if you're going to title a video with a reference to marx in it, you shouldn't talk about leninism as the content - and if you're going to talk about leninism, you shouldn't title your talk as being about marxism. these aren't related traditions anymore, if they ever were. unhypenated marxists tend to interpret leninists as cryptofascists, and leninists tend to look at marxists as smelly idiots.
so, it took me some time to figure it out...
i'll readily concede that human rights were not particularly important ideas in the soviet union. china's not in the realm of european civilization, so talking about human rights is a complicated thing, but the russians are europeans so the discussion can be had in the context of european rights theory - and the soviets were pretty vicious, there's no question, and right from the start to the end, too. but, lenin's economic theory was not marxist, it was taylorist, which is the point that unhyphenated marxists make in rejecting him as a fascist. taylorism was the same economic theory in use in american manufacturing at the time, had parallels in dickensian england and was the basic economic framework adopted by mussolini and hitler (although hitler was also famously a fordist and a keynesian). this is a big part of why unhyphenated marxists are so dismissive of leninism - it's just based on the same economic framework as then contemporary capitalism, as orwell so aptly pointed out.
and, if you read lenin carefully, he didn't even obscure the fact. for all the talk of russia trying to leapfrog the capitalist state of development, lenin was actually pretty explicit in his embrace of historical materialism, and the need for russia to go through the process in the right order - which is why it ended up the way it did, rather than in spite of it. mao tried a little harder, but lenin was fully cognizant of the restraints imposed on russia within the theory of historical materialism, and didn't even get that far before he was dead.
stalin was of course a tsar, so the whole thing falls apart after that. but, this idea that lenin was doing anything other than just trying to convert russia's backwards economy into an american-style taylorist capitalist state is kind of outside the realms of actual factual reality. there's just so much propaganda around it, including his own, that it's hard to get to the really simple, unremarkable facts of the matter.
so, marx would have been just as critical of the russian revolution as he was of the french revolution, and trying to frame marx' views on much of anything in terms of leninist theory is a ridiculous category error.
...even if it took me a few tries to figure out what they were even talking about.
marx lived before any meaningful articulation of "human rights", anyways - what he had in front of him was "natural rights theory", as begun by religious scholars and culminated in things like social contracts and lockeanism. as mentioned, i agree that the crux of this theory is a lot of bullshit - there are no rights out there in the ether to find with human reason, and there is no god to put them there. but, we do have democracy, and ought we not use the legislature to decide certain things are inviolable by the state? indeed, we must.
marx had no faith in a bourgeois state to actually uphold any concepts of rights theory, though, and i don't blame him for that view, at all. you have rights until you don't - because they're not out there in the ether, there is no god to put them there and the bourgeoisie can eliminate them with a stroke of a pen if they truly want to. but, to suggest that means we ought to shrug it off is both nonsense and entirely the opposite of what marx meant to say; marx' point was not that rights don't or ought not to exist but that, as we cannot trust the bourgeois state to uphold them, we must constantly be vigilant in upholding them - or risk collapsing into slavery. if he were alive today, he'd be as vocal a defender of individual rights theory as anybody.
he didn't like property rights, and i do not either, but it's a result of the proudhonian idea (that he stole) about property being theft. marx would have advocated the libertarian principle that an individual's rights end where another's begin, and for that reason would have argued that property rights are impossible, and aligned with proudhon on that point as a result of it - even if he attacked him in an apparent attempt to deflect from the fact that he stole a lot of his ideas and then tried to take credit for them. it's because of things like this that anarchists can accept marx as a valid theorist, while rejecting people like lenin and trotsky as basically fascist goons.
so, i mean, i'm not a marxist, and i'm not interested in reading all these secondary sources on the evolution from marxism to marxist-leninist-maoism, as it becomes a kind of fascism in the process. but, i know enough about marx to know he'd have stood with me and the other anarchists on most rights issues, and not with these post-leninist cryptofascists that want to bring in taylorism (along with some kind of cult of reason) at the boot of a gun - and that that guy was badly misinformed via solely reading misleading secondary sources if he thought marx would be aligned with taylorist producerism over enlightenment liberal rights theory.