The vocabulary of social justice we must consistently adopt
15. Economic injustice is another clear cause of conflict; this is equally true for the uneven distribution of resources, for the lack of economic and political participation, for social inequalities and for unsatisfied basic needs –all symptomatic of a flagrant neglect of human rights (HR).
16. The ‘marketization’ of societies that is a key element of contemporary globalization is often implemented on the basis of outright coercion given the existing radical asymmetry in resources and in bargaining power. Ergo, no real social contract here.* Moreover, the constant reference to ‘cost‐benefit analyses’ in the context of the ongoing marketization (that handles distributional aspects so unfairly) is highly inappropriate, since what this technique does is to approximate the allocation of resources in a way that would be achieved by a perfectly-functioning (utopian) market –which, of course, is totally indifferent to issues of distribution, of social justice… and of HR.
*: The call for ‘aligning stakeholders’ for greater social justice is thus nonsensical. Stakeholders with an influence in the world economy have interests and records of performance that are antithetical to equity. I have spent considerable time observing how domestic cats interact with birds and small rodents. All are “stakeholders” in such interactions, but their stakes are quite different. I therefore suggest avoiding the term ‘stakeholder’; it unavoidably conceals more than it reveals about the unequal distributions of power, resources and opportunity. (Ted Schrecker)
17. Social justice and social fairness are not exactly equivalent; fairness implies abiding by a set of rules or principles to which all parties have loosely agreed-to; but it does not imply having arrived at a social contract… We must thus consistently adopt the vocabulary of social justice. (T. Schrecker)
18. Turning now to social injustice, the five purported tenets that maintain social injustice are that: elitism is efficient, exclusion is necessary, prejudice is natural, greed is good and despair is inevitable. Elitism, exclusion, prejudice and greed invariably foster inequality, foster the violation of HR and, in the end, foster despair.** (D. Dorling)
**: For instance, those in power believe that just a few citizens are sufficiently able to be fully educated and only a few of those are then able to govern (guess from what social class they come…); the rest must be led.
19. It is when social injustice is premised on maintaining inequality and privileges within (rich) countries that it also becomes easier for them as donors to be accessory to HR violations abroad.
And this brings us back to the social responsibility of businesses.
The social responsibility of businesses is to increase its profits (Milton Friedman)
20. Today, the property rights of corporations are far more powerful than the political rights of the people. The corporate ideology is that the private corporate sector is the realm of freedom, and public power the realm of tyranny. But this is sheer nonsense! “Laissez ain’t fair!” Corporations want to be private with respect to profit, accountability and decision-making, but rely on the public sector when they face risk and/or have losses. (We call this moral hazard). Let’s be clear: Corporations are subordinate bodies with no constitutional standing other than the individual rights of the individuals involved in it (the same rights as any human being has…). Corporations are not a ‘democratic citizens’ entity so they should not have any special political rights. Keep in mind that shareholders invest their money in companies for economic reasons, not to have them put their money to sleazy partisan political uses. (J. B. Raskin)
So where does this all put us (2)?
21. Nobody should believe the current economic risks will gently disappear by muddling through. Without embarking in bold changes, this could leave us with a yet more unstable world. (Michel Camdessus) Without trying to dramatize, we may be standing on the hinges of economic (and of HR) history.***
*: What irritates me most is today’s economists building econometric models –‘roadmaps of reality’, they call them– to purportedly enhance-our-understanding-of and (re)direct the invisible hand. An economic model is nothing but an oversimplified description of reality designed to yield hypotheses about economic behavior ‘that can be tested’. They are necessarily subjective, based on many assumptions. They try to convert predictions into precise numerical outcomes. They consist of a series of math equations that describe a theory. The designers of models aim to include enough equations to provide clues how the economy works, i.e., thousands of complex formulations called ‘nonlinear interconnected differential equations’. Models are also built to study what-if scenarios based on ‘historical data’. But errors are unpredictable since all economic models, no matter how sophisticated, are only subjective approximations of reality. Bottom line, no economic model can be a good enough description of reality. And guess what: HR do not even appear in their horizon….
22. Already since pre-biblical times, the world has been a profoundly unequal place. We thus need, already since before Methuselah, to build resistance. And, in our world today, advance comes from millions of small actions, organizing in your workplace, from going to your union meetings, from speaking up against these so widespread wrong beliefs and injustices, etc., etc., i.e., full circle back to our HR-based framework with the empowerment of claim holders and duty bearers at its core.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org