Are human rights and capitalism incompatible terms or do they form a common front? Does capitalism endanger human rights or protect and spread them? Are human rights the basis of the capitalist organization of society or do they collide with and constrain it? This essay discusses the opinion expressed in Marx’s work entitled On The Jewish Question, written in controversy with the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer. The author of Capital —surprising as it may be to some of the activists and movements inspired by his thought— asserts that human rights and capitalism are on the same side of the fence. They arise, in fact, in the same historical period, and both are an invention of bourgeois ideology and system. But, disagreeing with the free-trade supporters, the big companies and the free market do not help the promotion of fundamental rights. For Marx, capital is assisted by human rights. The reason lies in the fact that in the revolutionary Constitutions of eighteenth-century «freedom» and the other rights are represented like holdings: freedom ends where another’s begins, just as a field. The individual is free as long as he is alone and does not interact with others. Marx refers, however, to the possibility of a different quality of freedom, not inhibited by relationships, but, on the contrary, realized through mutual bonds in a community. On the basis of this cue, this paper introduces the bracket model and the press model: they are two possible approaches to the distribution of goods protected by human rights. These models refer to two inventions: the first one has led to a concentration of power, wealth and prestige in the hands of few people, while the other has carried out their diffusion. The difference is not simply that, in the first case, a material good is divided in strongly unequal portions and, in the second, there is a fair partition policy. The press model allows the human rights goods increase in sharing. According to the mathematics of the press model, division gets the same result as multiplication.