This is the first in a five-part series on the politics of power. It begins by asking what makes rights and freedoms real. Later articles will examine the hierarchy among them, the machinery that sustains it, its international organisation through imperialism and dependency, and how working people can build counter-power.
Imagine a village where everyone agrees that theft is wrong. A law is passed, the judge condemns every robbery, and the people repeatedly demand justice. Yet the largest gang continues to steal because nobody possesses the strength to stop it. The law still exists, but it affords no protection. In this scenario, the problem is not a shortage of principles or laws; the problem is a lack of power to enforce them. International politics increasingly resembles that village.
In 2022, we argued in Socialist Voice that rights are ultimately subordinate to class power. Rights and freedoms in a capitalist society bear the class character of that society and, without organised forces capable of making them effective, remain formal promises. Events since then have confirmed that argument and exposed the weakness of relying upon declarations and legal institutions alone to protect humanity from imperialist power.¹
The genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has exposed the brutality of the State of Israel, armed and protected by US imperialism and sustained through the political, economic, and diplomatic complicity of the European Union and Britain. It has also exposed the limits of the liberal conception of universal rights. Millions have watched conventions, United Nations resolutions, humanitarian law and international courts prove incapable of halting the destruction of a people.
If even genocide cannot compel the most powerful states to obey international law, then the declaration of human rights offers no protection to those who are powerless. That is because rights are not the foundation of power, but rather power is the foundation of rights. The same applies to freedom: a liberty proclaimed in law becomes real only when people possess the material capacity and organised power to exercise and defend it.
Liberalism judges a political system by the rights and freedoms it formally recognises. Marxism looks beyond what is written in law and asks who actually holds power: which class shapes those rights, whose interests they protect, and who can enforce or set them aside. Law does not stand above society or apply itself impartially simply because a claim is just. It reflects the balance of political, economic and social power.
This does not mean that communists are indifferent to rights or dismissive of liberty. Every democratic freedom, trade-union protection and social gain won by working people must be defended. History shows, however, that these gains were not secured because their moral case became irresistible. The eight-hour day, universal suffrage, national liberation and the right to organise were won because organised people developed sufficient power to impose their demands.
Moral appeal is no defence against imperialism. It may awaken sympathy or expose hypocrisy, but it cannot compel a ruling class to act against its material interests. It is easy for those living securely within imperialist states to elevate morality above material reality. Those under bombardment, blockade or occupation cannot survive on the sympathy of people whose governments continue supplying the weapons and enforcing the siege.
Cuba provides one of the clearest long-term demonstrations of this. For more than three decades, the United Nations General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly for an end to the United States’ economic, commercial and financial blockade. In October 2025, 165 states again voted for its termination, with only seven voting against. When Cuba returned to the General Assembly in July 2026 following a further tightening of US measures, the United States attempted to prevent even an additional debate from taking place. That effort was defeated by 136 votes to 9, with 30 abstentions. Yet repeated resolutions, renewed debate and overwhelming international opposition have not brought the blockade to an end. It continues because the United States possesses the economic, political and military power to disregard the expressed will of the international community.
Palestine reveals the same relation in its most concentrated and horrifying form. International law has not been disregarded because its principles are unclear, nor because the arguments against genocide have been insufficiently eloquent. It has been disregarded because Israel and its imperialist sponsors have not faced a force capable of compelling obedience.
The hypocrisy is staggering, but hypocrisy alone does not explain what is happening. Selective enforcement is a normal feature of an imperialist system. International law is presented as universal while being enforced selectively: binding upon adversaries, optional for allies, and discarded when it obstructs profit, military strategy or geopolitical control. The states at the centre of this system proclaim universal standards while reserving the power to decide whose lives, sovereignty and rights will count.
Millions of people have now seen this contradiction directly. Palestine has politically awakened a generation. People have marched, organised, occupied campuses, challenged politicians and begun to reject the manufactured legitimacy of the US-led imperialist war machine. This political awakening raises a harder question: what comes next?
If outrage is not transformed into organisation, it can decay into frustration, despair or fatalism. The task is to understand what meaningful solidarity now requires.
The experience of Vietnam provides an earlier example. During the war, as US imperialism sought to impose its will through military force and crush the Vietnamese struggle for national liberation, Ho Chi Minh drew a clear distinction between the US government waging the war and the American people resisting it. He welcomed the growth of the anti-war movement because opposition within the United States and its allied countries could weaken the governments, corporations and military institutions prosecuting the war. By changing the balance of forces where they stood, workers and campaigners abroad materially assisted the Vietnamese struggle. The same principle applies today.
The greatest contribution Irish workers can make to Palestine is to build sufficient power in Ireland to force the Irish state to break materially with imperialism. Ireland cannot, by itself, compel Israel to end the genocide. It can, however, impose consequences, end its own complicity, uphold international law and give political expression to the clear sentiment of the Irish people. Such action, particularly if reproduced elsewhere, could help alter the international balance.
Recognition of Palestine and condemnation of atrocities matter, but they can be contained or reversed when a government confronts pressure from multinational capital, the European Union, the United States and Ireland’s own ruling class. These constraints also raise wider questions about Irish sovereignty and dependency, which a later article will examine. Here the immediate point is that popular sentiment becomes politically decisive only when it is organised.
For those awakened by Palestine, therefore, the task is to turn moral outrage into organised political power. It is organisation: in workplaces, trade unions, communities, anti-imperialist campaigns and communist organisation. It is the patient work of transforming sympathy into class consciousness, class consciousness into organisation, and organisation into power.
The moral and legal case has been established repeatedly, but Israel and its sponsors remain able to ignore it. Until an opposing force can impose material consequences, neither principle nor law will be sufficient to change their course.
The struggle for rights and freedom is therefore inseparable from the struggle for working-class power. Such power does not secure rights once and for all, but gives working people the collective strength to win, extend and defend them.
Power determines not only whether rights can be enforced, but which rights and freedoms prevail when they come into conflict. Capitalist society presents rights as universal, yet property, profit and the security claims of imperialist powers repeatedly take priority over social need, democratic control and national freedom. The next article will examine how this hierarchy of rights operates and how it is concealed.
Reference
¹ Eoghan O’Neill and Eoin MacDermott, ‘Are Rights Subordinate to Class Power?’, Socialist Voice, 3 March 2022.
