[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about in-which-hands it is to make the needed drastic political changes to a failing-to-provide system. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com

–Between a government that does wrong and a people who consent to it, there is shameful complicity. (Victor Hugo)

The dominant political class is a hotbed of frightening mediocrity… (Louis Casado)

1. Individuals do not have the whattodo power. Masses of individuals do not have that power either. (Parties claim to have that power, but…). Only the international working class has the ultimate power. Appealing to politicians, governments, and other authorities is a waste of time. Workers’ enemies will never be their friends. We need to build a worker-based anti-capitalist (and anti-war*) movement strong enough to defeat them.

*: Capitalists know that only workers can end their war-mongering system and stop them from keeping control. To prevent this, every social institution set up divides workers, undermines their confidence, and stops them from fighting back effectively. Only class solidarity can overcome them. We need more public protests, not to influence politicians but, for instance, to make the rebellion against war socially acceptable –and effective.

2. Public protests create a climate of rebellion that makes it easier to rebel at work and outside work.** Public sector workers are key to building a worker-based anti-war movement. All workers depend on public services, so every public-sector’s struggle to defend them has the potential to mobilize a class-wide fight. There is simply no substitute for the patient work of supporting workers to bring anti-capitalist activism into their workplace and beyond.

**: If we do not give them reform, they will give us revolution. (House of Lords MP, 1948)

3. The capitalist system is like a train heading over a cliff. Most of us are conditioned to see ourselves and others as powerless passengers. In fact, workers built the train; they laid the tracks, they supply the fuel, and every day they keep the train running. Yet we allow a tiny elite to direct the train, and they are driving it over a cliff, because it profits them to do so. They believe they will ultimately be OK, even as the rest of the world crashes and burns.

4. Workers can reject this social arrangement! They do not have to keep working for the exploiters. They can instead work for the betterment of all. The key is building workers’ power on the job. The more collective control they have in their own workplace, the easier it is to connect with workers elsewhere. Together, workers can stop the capitalist train and lay new tracks to take humanity in an entirely different direction. It is futile to appeal to the oppressors to change what they are doing. We need to work together to change what WE are consciously or unconsciously doing, i.e., letting our enemies drive the train. We have a world to win. (all from Susan Rosenthal)

The supposed disappearance of class conflict and of the working class (Vicente Navarro)

5. The emphasis on class as a category of power has been replaced by an emphasis on race, ethnicity and gender. But class, as a category of power, has remained unchanged(!) even during the reign of globalizing neoliberal model.*** See the contradiction?: The working class has not disappeared and is extremely frustrated; its anger is trying to be appropriated and exploited by the Extreme-right while ‘progressive and socialist governments abandoned their struggle for a transformative redistributive project based on social class. So, the Extreme-right parties present themselves as opposed to the globalizing neoliberal model, calling themselves anti-establishment liberals. (V. Navarro) [Note that, for capitalists, fascism is nothing more than an emergency resource; it will have to be once more defeated…]. (Politika)

***: Neoliberal governments’ fundamental mission is twofold: to create an attractive business climate through market-oriented institutions and to ensure elite dominance through market-driven class relations including mechanisms such as:

  • Their governance objectives set to optimize conditions for capital accumulation and maintaining the hegemony of elites by all means.
  • They orient key government resources towards the protection of business interests through tax breaks, concessions and other guarantee provisions.
  • They are strong in enforcing the rule of (their) law and maintaining the stability of social and economic institutions to provide a high degree of security for businesses.
  • They are obsessed with growth and see the private sector as the foremost engine of development.
  • They are for the privatization of assets, for deregulation or reregulation to ensure market sovereignty.
  • They are for the free mobility of capital so it can easily exit and enter any country.
  • They mainly regard competitiveness and productivity as a race to the bottom based on low wages and poor labor conditions.
  • They proclaim competition while tolerating oligopoly and monopoly power.
  • They absorb the risk of market failure through fiscal and monetary policies, including bailouts and subsidies.

At the same time, the authoritarian neoliberal states are essentially antidemocratic as their governance system is more responsive to elites and market forces than to the popular-democratic multitude. They resort to cooptation through the provision of exclusive access to government rents and resources while enforcing repressive authoritarian discipline on the masses and workers. They are further characterized by the dominance of the executive that bypasses the democratic requirements of parliamentary decision-making and judicial oversight. (Bonn Juego)  

Whatever we may think of neoliberalism, we have all interiorized it

6. What this means is that we, all too often, forget the individualization that this ideology, coupled with new technologies such as smartphones, has created. We too often forget we live in societies of people who can show solidarity towards each other, and who can plan actions together. The collective dimension of society has been neglected (or lost?) and ought to urgently be put back on the agenda considering that numerous people are prepared to take action, but do not know how to do it. (Francine Mestrum)

7. We live in a multipolar (and no longer a bipolar) world. The differences between the two poles used to be enormous. Today, the political differences are much smaller. They point to very different realities but, in all truth, the differences have been considerably attenuated. Seen from this perspective, the two systems (Capitalism and Socialism****) have more in common than one might think. They are acting within the same model of capitalist economic neoliberal development. (China is a one-party autocracy, the United States is a two-party autocracy: both parties agree on basic national objectives. Internally, both are highly capitalist. Externally, both are imperialist). [The U.S. now demands not only alignment, but vassalage, both in Europe and in Latin America]. (Boaventura de Sousa Santos)

****: In the 19th and 20th centuries, the dialectic of political confrontation was Socialism versus Capitalism. The struggle was directed to see which political system best solved the fundamental problems of the people, of the peoples, their economic, cultural and also political needs. The Left parties called themselves representatives of the working class; their political theory was one of furthering the class struggle, of the bourgeois class confronting the proletariat, of strengthening the international struggles of the working class for power. (Still today we speak of this Right and Left, but in rather general terms). Not coincidentally, the social-democratic parties that began to emerge were called social-democratic-workers’-parties founded to confront the conservative political currents. (The political struggle in the United States does not respond to any of these schemes; lately, rather, neo-fascist and neo-Nazi currents have emerged). At the end of the 19th century, in the heat of the Encyclical Rerum Novarum, the Catholic Church tried to give an answer to identify itself with the working masses and their most important workers’ struggles, which revolved around union organization, the right to strike, a fair wage and the reduction of the working day to eight hours. This gave rise to Christian-social currents that began to manifest themselves in the trade union organizations and in new political parties under these philosophical and religious banners. Therefore, the 20th century gave birth to three dominant political trends: Communist, Social-democratic and Christian-democratic. As the 20th century progressed, large corporations such as trusts, cartels, monopolies and oligopolies emerged, symbolizing the new capitalist stage, known as imperialism. This stage promoted wars, territorial occupations and the strengthening of colonial regimes or systems with the purpose of exercising control of strategic areas of raw materials, of markets for cheap labor and of markets for the placement of expensive products produced with those raw materials and cheap labor. (Vladimir de la Cruz de Lemos) The question is, where were HR in all these transitions?

So, then, let us not forget, there are human rights

8. Human rights violations are not necessarily the result of right-wing policies but, very often of social-democratic parties playing the neoliberal game. People are rightly fed up with listening to the soothing messages of the Right. And yes, the Right has social policies, though they are not emancipatory and probably focus on, for example, women’s traditional roles and certainly ignore class conflicts. There is more nostalgia for a past well gone than there is hope for a better future. (F. Mestrum) [In the next Reader I will look at the Left’s shortfalls…].

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City

Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com

All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com

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