Human rights: Food for a thought nobody is in charge ‘HR and globalization’
HRR 747
[TLDR (too lonf g didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about the flaws of a system in decline and why, if we wait too long, the consequences will be dire to humanity and to the planet. It also pays homage to a respected activist among us by excerpting from his writings. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
An homage to Bernard Maris, French economist, 1946-2015, murdered in the Charlie Hebdo incident in Paris) (Selected excerpts)
1. Economically, all that Marx had foreseen has realized. It brought about the globalization and commodification of the world, its proletarianization (the transformation of humanity into industrial or service wage earners and the disappearance of the peasant world) and undoubtedly its pauperization; add to this the transformation of the earth into a garbage dump* and the absolute increase of poverty. We have seen the generalization of the slum, or, at best, the dirty, poor, noisy suburb. However, today’s ‘noisy majority‘ (in effect silent) is not stupid, but resigned. (Slavoj Zizek) We know that the social elevator works only to go down…
*: The unpunished massacre of the earth is the last stage of capitalist globalization.
2. According to Marx, and from crisis to crisis, Capitalism should lead to a fantastic growth of the productive forces which would have permitted the arrival of a new society adapted to these new productive forces –the communist society. The law, the rules, the ways of life would have had to be transformed, because the old society of private property and commerce is incapable of responding to these new men moved by the new productive forces. But nothing of the sort! The growth is there, the furious accumulation of capital** and material goods, the inventions, the satellites, the autoroutes, the nanotechnologies, the GMOs… and nothing: the proletarian is absent as never before, even when he has the right to watch TV (and social media) for more than three hours a day.
**: What does finance capital want? Money. A little more money. What does a dollar want? To make something more than a dollar. The dollar makes dollars like the cancer cell makes other cells.
3. The aging of populations has concentrated wealth in the elderly. Capitalism henceforth marries old age. So many older people have a particularly greedy, selfish and short-term vision of life. The old struggle of the poor against the rich is accompanied by a struggle of the young against the old.
4. No compassion! In the struggle to abolish the bourgeoisie and Capitalism, Marx vilified petty-bourgeois socialism: “No whining, no moralism, no compassion, no philanthropy, no ‘social Capitalism’: Capitalism is not amendable”. The great modern discovery is that exploitation and suffering do not generate rebellion, but servitude. Production does not give birth to rebels, but to serfs.
5. We are approaching the moment when ‘fundamental freedoms’ are assured in richer countries; but there are no freedoms that allow man to go beyond his simple survival in the poorer countries. And man is pushed to use these freedoms to consume junk food and buy cars. The pauperization and plunder of the world leads to absolutely nothing but more plunder and more inhumanity. One hundred and fifty years after Das Kapital, there is no sign that humanity has humanized. And, at the same time, ethnic cleansing has reappeared. Moreover, we discover that dictatorship and enrichment make an excellent couple. (all from B. Maris)
In a globalized economy, nobody is in charge (Sam Delgado)
6. Globalization has remade how and where corporations make products. If it was difficult for activists at the turn of the 20th century to identify ethically made products, the challenge to the modern consumer is even greater. You may think regulations or legislation can compel companies to produce more ethically made goods and respect human rights (HR). But ultimately, no one government is responsible for the violations of a supply chain that crosses borders and oceans.
7. So ‘corporate social responsibility’ –or the idea that companies can hold themselves accountable– emerged, responding to this consumer demand. While corporate social responsibility sounds good on paper, the workers deep within these corporations’ supply chains –the ones that sew the clothes you wear and harvest the produce and ingredients for your food– say that they are not feeling the benefits of such programs. Despite the profits they help companies rake-in through their labor, many of these workers are still making pennies while stuck working in unsafe environments. In some cases, the conditions are so bad that they amount to exploitation that is clearly unethical and, in many cases, illegal under international HR law. Some of what corporate responsibility programs claim they are doing and have achieved, workers and advocates say, qualifies as greenwashing or ‘social washing’ –using these strategies and initiatives to mislead the public and appear as if they have robust, effective environmental or labor practices.
8. By moving overseas, companies can obscure unsafe working conditions (plus labor rights violations and other HR violations) from consumers both in the North and the South who may know very little about how the products they consume are being made. It is difficult to know how honest or effective these efforts at corporate social responsibility really are at protecting labor and the environment. Part of the issue is they are voluntary. There is no requirement for corporate social responsibility programs to show their methodology or metrics for calculating their progress and no obligation to release all results from a social audit. A company can change its corporate social responsibility programs at any point, or drop them entirely. There are no requirements to seek input from people they may impact. In short, no accountability.
9. The failure to really actively incorporate workers in a meaningful way in the auditing process means that social auditors miss huge things all the time. Many of these reports are designed as public relations stunts, front to end, giving the veneer of social responsibility without actually addressing the underlying problems; this is misleading.
10. Binding contracts are crucial to worker-driven social responsibility, a sharp contrast to those toothless corporate social responsibility initiatives. Human rights groups and labor organizations are now working together to set up programs that will legally bind brands to address working conditions and safety. The responsibility ought not be placed entirely on workers though to end their exploitation: Governments need to improve regulations and enforcement to protect workers. (S. Delgado)
For the Global South, globalization has often meant renewed foreign domination***
11. While dating back to the age of empire, foreign domination is less evident in post-colonial times, making it more difficult to organize against it. We live in a world dominated by powerful private interests, typically working through corporations, with transnational ones being the most influential. Mind you, they increasingly also control the main means of communication. It is the Davos World Economic Forum that sets agendas for the ‘lords of the universe’ making existing laws hardly neutral; they are crucial to Capitalism’s functioning. Since laws are made by the powerful to legitimize their interests, setting and enforcing bogus rules further privileges the interests of the lords. Many illicit practices are not even, strictly speaking, illegal as, for example, are massive illicit financial outflows from the Global South. This ‘hemorrhage’ has worsened in recent decades. (Jomo Sundaram)
***: From yet another perspective, we ought to look at Colonialism as:
–the regime that involves the systemic domination of lands, markets, peoples, assets, cultures, minds and political institutions with the purpose of exploiting, misappropriating and extracting wealth and resources. (David McCoy et al)
“We have stumbled into the twenty-first century with stone-age emotions, medieval institutions, and near godlike technologies” (Edward O. Wilson, US sociobiologist 1929 –2021)
—While traditional colonialism and neocolonialism were/are driven by political and government forces, algorithmic colonialism is driven by corporate agendas.
12. Yes, we live in a world where technological corporations hold unprecedented power and influence. Technological solutions to social, political, and economic challenges are rampant. Nothing new here. In the Global South, technology that is developed with Northern perspectives, values and interests is imported with little regulation or critical scrutiny. Western tech monopolies, with their desire to dominate, control and influence social, political, and cultural discourses, no different to what traditional colonialism did for centuries. While traditional colonialism used brute force domination, colonialism in the age of AI takes the form of ‘state-of-the-art algorithms’ and ‘AI driven solutions’ to social problems. Not only is Northern-developed AI unfit for problems in the Global South, the North’s algorithmic invasion simultaneously impoverishes development of local products while also leaving countries dependent on software and infrastructure from the North.The AI invasion thus echoes colonial era exploitation. From the HR point of view, the need is for an increased focus on ethical and political analyses grounded in concrete people’s experiences so as to address the well-known historical power asymmetries. (Abeba Birhane)
Bottom line
13. The decisive hindering role played by the blindness, cynicism and hypocrisy of those in power is unquestioned. The task before us thus is to, through messages, appeals and joint mobilizations, challenge duty bearers to question the adherence of the majority of them to the dominant financial system that makes them allies and accomplices of an exploitative economic system. [However, we and our peoples (as claim holders) are also co-responsible for the absurdity in which the world’s economy and politics is swimming, and in which hundreds of millions of human beings are drowning, because of leaders whom we have elected and who have abdicated their duty to defend, guarantee and promote the universal rights to life and life itself. (Riccardo Petrella)
14. Fellow reader, do not wait for the advancing and worsening development phase of Capitalism to demand the share of the cake of the have-nots: If you wait, it will be too late!**** Ergo, are strikes, social movement decisive actions, peaceful revolutions valid? Yes, they are. We will not lose hope, because, as the saying goes “he who fights is not dead” –and we intend to keep fighting. We need to open the doors to another model, one that we can begin to send to the trash the potions that conventional economists sell us.
****: For instance, proposals for direct global taxation of TNCs in the oil/gas sector, and for a global tax on international financial transactions have been on the table for years, they have remained just that –on the table.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
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