Steven Lukes argues that Karl Marx underestimated the importance of human rights. For Lukes, Marx treated human rights only as expressions of the egoism and individualism of bourgeois society and, in doing so, underestimated both the danger of arbitrary political power and the protection afforded by individual rights. My first aim in this essay is to show four substantial problems with Lukes’ reading of “On the Jewish Question,” the text that Lukes finds to contain the “roots” of Marx’s view. My second aim is to argue that—a hundred and fifty years after the publication of Capital—a re-assessment of the marginality of rights in Marx’s thought is overdue. There is nothing in Marx’s thought that should discourage socialists from demanding such rights and this essay finds that this is not a connection between Marxism and socialism that needs severing.