[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about the absence of a viable HR perspective in the ruling paradigm and why it has to be challenged. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
–Optimism is only due to a lack of information. (Heiner Müller)
Above all other movements, the human rights movement has realized that old clowns have to be kicked off the stage
1. In the dying paradigm, I think we find that many of its guardians have become uninterestingly odd persons rather than oddly interesting persons. Take for example: Those who make the decisions in the ruling paradigm are less educated in the liberal classics literature than human rights (HR) activists are in the classic socialist literature. No wonder, then, that the current, dominating development paradigm is ahistoric, atemporal, acritic and ambivalent. (Natalia Echegoyemberry) Acritic and ambivalent, because these activists have questions that the guardians of the paradigm cannot answer and the latter have answers that they do not want to be questioned about. (Richard Feynman)
2. Yes, all the mythology that Capitalism upholds ultimately conquers and dominates. This must, therefore, trigger and shape a class reaction (Marx) …and, yes, the patrimony of the (under) class must become the patrimony of larger sectors of society to eventually topple the dying paradigm. Key in this transition is to understand that ‘good sense’ is the opposite of ‘common sense’. (Antonio Gramsci)
3. Proposals for the needed paradigmatic transition
- We have the right to be equal particularly when difference makes us inferior; we have the right to be different when the purported ‘equality’ mischaracterizes us.
- There are no rights without duties. Duties exist to secure the ability to prevent the violation of HR and must be demanded. Duties cannot be limited to the ethical sphere. They must be enforced by existing and future legal systems.
- The rights of nature, must be recognized. The corresponding duties are incumbent on the state, communities, and citizens. The most serious violations of these rights constitute a new crime against humanity/nature –tantamount to ecocide.
- Respect for life and dignity implies recognizing the infinite diversity of ways of knowing and living in the world and of conceiving life, dignity, living well and living well together (Buen Vivir).
- The right to education must be understood as the right to know the world diverse ways of knowing, as well as rights and duties among human beings and in their relations with nature. Education, in general, and higher education in particular, must be reformed in order to intervene effectively in the struggle for the paradigmatic transition that must materialize in the next decade.
- The different development models must give way to: de-mercantilization, decolonization, de-patriarchalization, and democratization.
- The commons are all goods that must be shared by all human beings, men and women, without discrimination, as they are essential for life to flourish and for dignity to prevail. The right to free access to all common goods such as water, air, space, forests, rivers, seas, seeds, public space, culture, education, health, electricity, information, communication and the internet must be explicitly recognized.
- Food sovereignty must become the guiding principle of agricultural policy. Indigenous peoples and peasants have the right to their ancestral territories and their subsoil (and fisherfolks to their fishing grounds).
- Universal basic income is one of the important instruments for combating the growing vulnerability of workers and their families.
- Health is a public good, not a business. Vaccines are a common, public, and universal good. They all must be provided with the interests of the people in mind and made available for free and universal access. As soon as a pandemic or an emergency of equal severity is declared, all embargoes and economic sanctions that prevent the affected countries from protecting the lives of their citizens must be lifted.
- In the coming decade, the industrial production of indispensable goods must be ensured prioritizing small businesses and local shops that should be the main avenue for distributing products to consumers.
- Due to its ecological footprint, the international tourism industry must become less and less important in terms of wealth and job creation.
- A new type of relationship between the countryside and the city is urgently needed. The countryside does not precede the city, nor does the city represent a higher stage of coexistence than the countryside. Cities must be resized and given a new meaning and dignity.
- The public debt of countries rendered poor must be cancelled whenever its weight prevents them from meeting the above objectives. As soon as a pandemic or emergency of equal severity is declared, all embargoes and economic sanctions that prevent the affected countries from paying their debt by protecting the lives of their citizens must be lifted.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
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Postscript/Marginalia
—Multidisciplinarity: Insincere attempts at acting on the structural (upstream) causes of HR violations depart from a flawed analysis of reality and have consequently mostly failed (and are doomed to continue to fail). Among the most prominent of these are ‘Multidisciplinary Approaches’ to solve the problems of so many different human rights (HR) violations. There is nothing terribly wrong with this concept, but it just gratuitously assumes that looking at the problem of these violations from a ‘wider’ multi-professional perspective is going to automatically lead us to the better, more rational and egalitarian solutions. The call for multidisciplinarity, for sharing the respective paradigms of the different scientific disciplines where practitioners come-from, falls under the same optic of my criticism all along: Just by putting together brains ‘sowed’ differently, without considering where they are coming-from ideologically, is not going to, all of a sudden, make a significant difference in the outcome and the options chosen. They may well stay in the domain of immediate causes, only now everybody involved contributing a small monodisciplinary window to the package of (still pat?) solutions proposed. Multidisciplinary approaches –as opposed to a political approach– simply most often take the social and political context (i.e., the individual and institutional power relations*) as given; they, therefore, end up being conservative in their recommendations.
*: Do not listen to what they say. Look at what they do. Everything rests on power relations: it is not enough to play the guitar and promise the moon… (Politika)