[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about denials, big and petti political differences, the heavy hand of the market, the shortcomings of Socialism and how all these affect the prospects of HR. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
1. The bourgeois political class as a whole is in a state of denial. Polarization between ideologically different political parties tends to occur in an ever-narrowing circle of political views and solutions. There is a clear difference between parties that defend human rights (HR) and parties that attack them –particularly in the case of the extreme Right since, with its politics of hate, the extreme Right is the political conscience of a neoliberalism gone haywire.* (Boaventura de Sousa Santos)
*: Yes, fascism has become neoliberal (…or the other way around?). (Marga Ferre)
2. But is it enough to distinguish the Left from the Right? It is certainly not enough when facing the two great challenges that limit the relationship between a) humanity and nature (the impending ecological catastrophe) and b) human coexistence (e.g., artificial intelligence).
3. Yes, the circle of the politically possible has narrowed and, within it, the political class pushes to point out differences that, in fact, are more demagogical than real in an effort to dupe us —and our denial of this fact accepts this state of affairs as an inevitability; but fortunately, many of us do not fall for it –surely not on HR issues! As a consequence, the response to our social protests brings about repression.**
**: Violence is the last refuge of incompetence. (Isaac Asimov)
4. Regrettably, political parties have lost the chance of being leaders in the discussion of the problems that most challenge contemporary societies. Therefore, they cease to be addressed and listened-to, because they are part of the current state of denial. (B. de Sousa Santos)
Sovereignty no longer rests with the people, but with the markets
-It can be said that politics in capitalist countries reflects the economy that is the true, original and constitutive basis of power. (Oscar Gonzalez).
-It is important not to confuse ‘politics’ with ‘the political’ –notions whose graphological proximity hides an enormous conceptual difference.
5. The market, a substitute for political decisions (the political), has managed to impose itself as a decision maker over governments, parliaments and magistrates –all supposedly elected by popular will.***
***: Only brave members of parliament would speak out and vote against the military-industrial complex and lobby –yet bravery is certainly no hallmark of many a parliamentarian. (Jeffrey Sachs) Politicians in the Western world are reduced to their actual social stature –by nature insignificant. (Emmanuel Todd) Yes, in times of widespread deception, the mere fact of telling the truth is (would be) revolutionary. (George Orwell)
6. As Samuel Huntington (Connecticut politician, 1731-1796) used to say, national governments are nothing but residues of the past whose only function is to facilitate the action of the elites (or to ‘facilitate the beatification of the status-quo’, as per Harold Laski –English political theorist, 1893-1950). The confusion arises when looking at the programs of what was the Left and what continues to be the Right****: both now bowing to the infallibility of the market. The elite (or oligarchy) imposes itself talking about what they call free elections. Elections, actually, fulfill two conditions at once: they designate those who will assume the load (not the office…), and they legitimize the elite’s power in the face of those who elected them.***** (Louis Casado)
****: The political lexicon has shifted to the right: the Left no longer dares to speak of class struggle, while the Right practices it every day. (Jean-Laurent Lastelle, Renaud Chenu)
*****: It is not politics that makes a candidate become a thief. It is your vote that makes a thief become a politician. (graffiti in Santiago, Chile) [A wall graffiti is a mural type of expression; it is the impressionistic expression of a dissent; a printed tattoo, a mural slogan of morality. (Victor Villegas)].
The different forces of the Left are always divided –less so by ideology than by old inertias or rivalries between personalities.
7. All great innovative movements, even when they fail, leave their mark on the history of the country –and from the ruin often emerge seeds that blossom in the following period. Not only in HR work, but in general, this presents us with a double challenge: a) to, at the same time, build a party and b) to build a front of parties. An impossible mission? Even if indeed ambitious, this double challenge is urgent. The most difficult thing is that it presupposes a condition never realized until now. In this context, it seems appropriate to recall:
- There are no depoliticized citizens; there are citizens who do not allow themselves to be politicized by the dominant forms of politicization, be they parties or organized civil society movements.
- There is no democracy without parties, but there are parties without democracy.
- Being on the left is a point of arrival and not a point of departure –this is demonstrated by historical facts.
- There is no democracy, there is democratization.
- Being a member of the ruling political class is always transitory.
- Conventional parties are suffering from a movement towards fundamentalism.
- The electronic information revolution and social networks are not, in themselves, an instrument unconditionally favorable to the development of participatory democracy and the fulfillment of HR.
- The needed party-social movement alliance will only thrive if constantly struggling against inertia.
- Popular political education is the key to sustaining a party-movement alliance.
- We live in a period of defensive struggles. It is up to the party-movement entity, not only to act as a de-facto brake, but also not to lose sight of the needed offensive struggles at hand. (B. de Sousa and Santos)
When I speak of Socialism I am not referring to socialist parties, because they have long since abandoned Socialism
8. I am not referring here only to the versions of Socialism that were discussed and practiced in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century; not even to the Socialism that actually exists today in China, Cuba, Vietnam or North Korea, just because I do not know whether they are forms of socialism or forms of ‘heroic-and-sustained-resistance-to-the-savage-capitalism’ that dominates today in the global North (and elsewhere). I have also stopped talking about Capitalism and started talking about ‘the-market-economy’, as if the entire market were capitalist and as if Capitalism were not so much market as anti-market (i.e., monopolies).
9. From here to Socialism there is currently no path, there is a wall. If it is true that the pessimistic version of how Capitalism is leading humanity, nature and HR into the abyss, it is no less true that the alternatives and the agents who could fight for them are too weak or absent. I would say ‘the alternates’ should not even feel obliged to use the term Socialism particularly when addressing HR…
10. Socialism today is (is it?) made up of a multiplicity of ideas and languages that synthesize ways-of-living-in-the-world-in-an-ecologically-shared-way, namely, ecologies of knowledge, of living, of cultures and of tolerance. Some ideas and languages are Eurocentric and others are not. Many are the result of unfathomable mixtures between different cultural universes that today constitute a pluriverse breaking once-and-for-all with the order of a single idea and a single language. Here are some of the names (in alphabetical order): agrarian reform, agroecology, alternatives to development, anticolonialism, antiracism (Black Lives Matter), buen vivir, care economy, cooperativism, common goods, counter-hegemonic human rights, degrowth, eco-socialism, feminisms, food sovereignty, global justice movements, health as a public good, nationalization of strategic sectors, New Non-Aligned Movement, neozapatismo, pachamama, pan-Africanism, pan-Arabism, political ecology, popular education, rights of nature, self-determination, socialisms (African, Asian, etc.), secularisms, ubuntu, ujamaa, universal basic income, water as a public good… (B. de Sousa Santos)
Bottom line
11. Instead of handing over the keys of the city to bad politicians, we would do better to change the lock. (Politika) Any locksmiths among you to take the challenge face-on?
12. It will be a matter of giving greater political density to our discussions and management of HR issues –this is and will be an imperative for us from the Left so as to bring down neoliberalism. (Revista Primera Piedra)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
Postscript/Marginalia -There is no crueler tyranny than that which is exercised in the shadow of the laws and under the colors of justice. (Montesquieu)