The capitalist press speaks of civil, human and even national "rights". In perfect democracies such as the USA, which are simultaneously also perfect fascist dictatorships, the proletariat is indoctrinated from an early age into a false sense of security by the study of legal documents such as the Constitution, with its Bill of Rights and Amendments, while the day to day reality of proletarian life conflicts with the basic assumptions of the bourgeois legal prattle expressed in those documents. For the bourgeois the “law” is respected and broken as needed to suit the needs of capital and ultimately it is only wielded as a weapon in its arsenal of class domination.

The brutal reality of class exploitation and the materially impossible nature of the very notion of "equality" be it between individuals within a nation or between nation-states under a system of private ownership of capital and the means of production is one example of the fiction spun by the ruling class to perpetuate the notion that there is some alternate universe, where a class society can have equality between individuals in different classes.

Bourgeois law is a very malleable thing and doesn’t even need to be followed when broken by the bourgeois. While it historically had a progressive role by codifying the interests of the progressive class of their day, the bourgeois, enshrining their rule of private property and equal rights with dictatorial legitimacy, paving the way for the completion of primitive accumulation and the expansion of capital into its ultimately monopolistic and imperialist phase, the rights were at all times suspendable under many different clauses and didn’t even nominally apply to the majority of the population for a long period of time because it was clear naked bourgeois rule since its very inception.

Capitalism, having swept away the feudal relics of explicit privilege of the nobility, presented equality as that which creates the optimum conditions for business to exploit the labor of its workers. It is the perfect legal framework for wage and, in the historical case of the USA, also of chattel slavery and for the relentless extraction of surplus value from the sweat and blood of the working class generally.

Illegal detentions and suspensions of “rights” are also “legally” justified because of “threats to national security” or “obstructions to enforcing federal law” similar to how they were “legally” justified during the anti-terrorist Patriot Act era laws that were also meant to protect national security and acts of terror.

But what is national security but the securing of the rule of the bourgeois? It must be so understood that the law is telling us in plain text that immigrants need to live in fear and not dare to make any demands of any kind, let alone wage demands, and definitely not even dream of fighting back in the streets lest the full force of the local military and law enforcement be deputized against them.

The crisis facing capital is so strong currently that when it’s not convenient, these legalities can and will also be bypassed, as necessary. The same law, Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which the Eisenhower administration chose to abide by is no longer being honored, for example, through the current administration’s use of the US Marine corps. The use of the federal law enforcement and military to enforce the threats and detentions against judges and politicians, it once again shows that capital will trample over any and all of its old traditions when profits are threatened.

As Marx wrote in “On the Jewish Question”:

«Above all, we note the fact that the so-called rights of man, the droits de l’homme as distinct from the droits du citoyen, are nothing but the rights of a member of civil society i.e., the rights of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community. … The right of man to liberty is based not on the association of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right of this separation, the right of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself. The practical application of man’s right to liberty is man’s right to private property... The right of man to private property is, therefore, the right to enjoy one’s property and to dispose of it at one’s discretion... without regard to other men, independently of society, the right of self-interest. This individual liberty and its application form the basis of civil society. It makes every man see in other men not the realization of his own freedom, but the barrier to it.»

If individual "legal equality" is a contradiction that benefits only the ruling class individually, the "legal equality of States" is such theatre, just on the global stage. Just as brute force is the only means of enforcing law between social classes, the only law between States is the force of war. The United Nations, similar to the League of Nations, created as organs of the capitalist states to co-organize their common exploitation, will use “world charters” and “right of veto” to advance the rule of capital and neither can nor will do anything to stop any of the ongoing conflicts or the next world war that capitalism’s drive to increase the rate of profit is driving humanity towards.

For the proletariat, the demand for "equality" requires nothing less than fighting against the class of owners of capital and owners of property in general and for the abolition of classes and the wage system, money and surplus value extraction which necessarily means fighting against the fictions of “human”, “civil” rights and bourgeois rule of law in general.