-There is a class war, it is true. But it is my class, the class of the rich, that is fighting it –and we are winning. (Warren Buffett)
-We are living through a capitalism of catastrophe, one that is less and less controllable. It is no longer a financial capitalism, but a planet-devouring-capitalism. (S. Nair)
1. The rich world is witnessing the brutal implementation of widespread austerity measures One wonders whether Northern leaders are conducting the economy with the foot on the brake pedal. They are clearly taking decisions based on ideology rather than on sound economics. The question is: Have human rights (HR) activists been reacting too little and too late…or hardly at all?
2. The greatest victory of ‘the system’ in all this has been achieved by imposing a belief. i.e., generating, maintaining and consolidating such a belief. (The dominant classes have been master creators of beliefs made myths).* Their convincing actually explains their winning so far –a winning that has combined ideology and communications.* Since what is at stake is too important, the time has come for us HR activists to replace the out-of-date belief system. I ask, does this mean we have to create transcendent and inspiring counter-myths?
*: Big religions have also successfully done so and have influenced billions –and then, religion becomes a source of problems and revolts if followers feel their spiritual beliefs are being trampled on –no matter how irrational or illogical their reactions may be.
The time has come
3. HR are certainly not new. They date back to the Declaration of the Rights of Men and Citizens in France in 1789, as well as to the first amendments to the US constitution in 1791 (appropriately called the Bill of Rights) as conceived by James Madison to limit the powers of the state and guarantee individual rights.
4. In 1948, the Universal Declaration of HR (UDHR) told us that we have to believe in its content (fair enough!), but did not give us guidance on how its contents must be made concrete. Telling people that they have rights to everything that is found in the UDHR has an important concrete meaning –don’t get me wrong. But that means people have to actively demand what is given all human beings in that historic document. In the UDHR, the most important word is ‘universal’, because it points to the ultimate convergence of humanity.
5. So how does this apply to us today? HR being universal, they cannot be at the whim or the discretion of the market: If anybody is excluded by the market, there are no HR. The global market will never ever include everybody in the world. It vies for the creation of value and thus for profits. As opposed to what the planted belief says, it gives little importance to creating jobs; the latter comes as a secondary (or tertiary) objective to the profit motive. HR can thus not be at the discretion of the market! Moreover, since the market cannot integrate all those that do not produce anything and that consume little, for the market they do not even count. For the market, then, economic social and cultural rights represent an unreasonable predicament, a ‘belief of some idealists that can never fly’.
6. As, better-late-than-never, the time has come, HR crucially call for HR learning and for ensuing social mobilization focused on very concrete grounds and objectives. Claim holders, as victimized people, must create a veritable collective avalanche. They must think hard what they can eventually achieve demanding together. “Divided we beg, united we demand” must be the slogan. As for duty bearers, HR language does not imply ‘passing the buck’, i.e., passing-on duties to others; if you are a decision maker, you are a duty bearer. Period.
A quick reminder about paradigms
7. When one model supported by an imposed belief system occupies the major part of the political spectrum of a society, we can talk of a dominant paradigm. Paradigms capture the thinking framework of people from which it is very difficult to escape. Metaphorically, paradigms can be characterized as: The water in which the fish swims –without for a moment suspecting that another environment like the air can exist. Paradigms define what can be thought and what not in a given historical moment; they determine the course of human affairs. A change of paradigm (‘a changes in the ideological climate’) necessarily implies resistance, pain and conflict –a frontal conflict with the values that govern society. Establishing the superiority of a new set of values requires using criteria particularly based on moral and ideological aspects. For countless generations now, the pursuit of wealth and power has not been censured by a counter-system of beliefs cleverly devised: ergo, our current defy in HR work! The time has come.
So, let’s talk about the prevailing model.
The elitist neoliberal economic model (ENEM).
Fortunately, the elitist neoliberal economic model is becoming more and more difficult to defend in public.
8. The common good enshrined in any type of social contract** is the last of the preoccupations of the ENEM, i.e., Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite and other-like slogans are not exactly the strong points of the ENEM. Millions of people have come to believe that the ENEM is at their service showing that the alienation behind the belief ENEM has created has its utility. What has been key for the ENEM has been to bring about knee-jerk reactions, not deep reflection. ENEM has also led to the narrow outlook of a charity mentality in foreign aid.
**: The concept of a social contract was first defined in 1761 by Jean Jacques Rousseau.
9. To link with the above, ENEM proponents have been master-belief-builders so that the model is deeply anchored in the psyche of hundreds of millions of people making them think it is their own ideas …just look at the Tea Party phenomenon in the US and at the scores of citizens that are constantly trying to impose religion on public life.*** We can be confident that an important percentage of voters vote against their own interests for reasons related to the beliefs the ruling ideology has planted in their brains. (Consider for instance that, in the US, citizens continue to hold-on to the myth that it is the land of opportunity, of equality and of assured social advancement).
***: It is possible to objectively measure the swing of politics to the right by looking at the vast majority of the traditional established media. This again shows that it pays to invest in ideology and communications. It never stops amazing me to see the power that a shared belief has: Something we have to take notice-of and learn in the HR movement!
10. ENEM has imposed convictions and a-shared-common-sense without having really come up with proofs –which they really do not have. But in the meantime, voters continue to receive a regular dose of conservative ideology. How is it possible? The neoliberal success passes through making-its-own a certain vocabulary in the political discourse of its strategy to influence people: Clever and deliberate. As a result, unbelievably (excuse the pun) inequality is more and more perceived as something natural; poor people are poor, because they so deserve. (Individualism and consumism foster the idea that “I am doing OK; I am sorry for you”). Instead, hierarchy continues to be hailed as the most efficient way of organizing any human aggregate –a move clearly directed at entrenching elites and ‘experts’ at the helm.****
***: Establishment experts show-off their degrees, but never show the fact that they are advisors to key interests of the ENEM –let alone mentioning their conflicts of interest or ‘revolving door’ employment history.
So, some of us get outraged
The best is to defeat your enemy without a struggle. (Sun Tzu)
11. Under these circumstances, sincerity needs to be celebrated. The message behind the message here is that speaking truth to power ought to be the norm …and power must be made to acknowledge this truth! (We may argue that there is such a thing as ‘the-right-to-getting-it-off-one’s-chest’ or ‘letting-off-steam’).
12. Street protests often do not help much, they represent brief shows of anger. They are isolated and have the bad habit of ending up retreating in desperation.
13. Being right and on the side of the truth and actually expressing our position in an aggressive way are two different things. Why provoking resentment when we can achieve the same results with a bit of discretion? A call for iron fists and velvet gloves here? Or, acting with firmness of objectives, but flexibly in the execution. (May one say such a recommendation is not only based on ethics, but on efficacy?).
14. As activists, we have been called a-band-of-militant-intellectuals and also ‘radical-democrats-who-want-that-everybody-be-listened-to’. No shame here.
15. But we are utterly divided. Different activist groups stay locked in their own realms and demands (HR, environment, women’s issues….) without realizing that their struggles are but one: changing the ENEM paradigm. There is just one conducting thread here: A ‘shishkebab mentality: keep worrying about the morsels and you are doomed to forget the skewer’.
16. If I am left with one thing to do about what to do when, as I say, ‘the time has come’, it is to apply in practice what you stand for, it is to galvanize every activist group to concentrate on the skewer and join forces to bring about the changes in the ideological climate that will break-with and replace the ruling paradigm. What this means for each of you I leave for you to decide.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org