[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are it behooves you. In the previous Reader (805) I reviewed some basic tenets of HR. Here, I go into a more in-depth analysis and ask you to bear with me to the end as I elaborate on notions expressed by M. Neocosmos. Most of the text is his though. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
—The human rights discourse risks producing a passive citizenship dependent on the power of states, empire, NGOs, etc. for its existence and thriving.
1. For Marxism, it is clear, not only that equal rights in an unequal society areimpossible, but also that, in a way, they area product of the ideological mystification of bourgeois individualism. This highlights clearly the inescapable contradiction of relying exclusively on the state to be the defender of rights and freedoms.
2. Today, in the twenty-first century, when classist solutions have largely become politically widespread, the human rights (HR) discourse is called to be about limiting state control over society. For this, the discourse is to enable a popular struggle that will require a period of empowering claim holders. Given the obvious de-politicization of the prevailing development model, much of its rhetoric has lost its progressive edge. Human rights activists need to embrace and encourage a democratic politics of rights. What this means, is not only that it is not states that are to protect and promote rights, but means that citizens, and their organizational representatives, acting as claim holders, must be made legitimate participants and active agents in the process. The missing link for this transformative potential for HR is not so much about asserting legal claims, but rather enabling political struggles in which HR ‘crystallize the moral imagination and amass power in their political struggle’.
3. The whole tenure of much of the current HR discourse is to disable the prevailing political thought, as it remains squarely within the realm of a fundamentally technicist mode of politics. Such a HR discourse becomes hegemonic in the absence or weakness of popular struggles. Moreover, the hegemony of the state-liberal version of HR makes it possible for the HR discourse to be seen as the only intellectual reference for a ‘Left’ politics.
The supposed liberatory potential of such a HR discourse must be vigorously contested, for it is fundamentally moral rather than political, conservative rather than transformative
4. The HR discourse can and will unavoidably be caught within the contradiction that it is the state-power with its legal and other institutions that is capable of emancipating humanity. According to this mode of thought, only institutionalized power can bring about justice, dignity and equality. But the wider society is excluded from holding the state directly to account! The danger is that HR can become some kind of a new ‘civil religion’.
5. The provision of existing social rights can be tracked back as the unfolding of a state logic that must be expressed predominantly in passing social legislation.Yet today, such legislation can no longer be put before popular politics. The populations of the world must, therefore, not be so easily coerced into deferring or abandoning their direct political rights of citizenship through the provision of what these laws offer, i.e., economic and social welfare cum a state social infrastructure aiming to provide higher standards of living that are simply unreachable for the majority in conditions of hegemonic market rule.
Active citizenship plays the key role through which a nation is to be built
6. Indeed, it can be argued that it is this conception of active citizenship, not the passive citizenship that must dominate the HR discourse of today. In the period of struggle we live-in, this demands a shift from a moral to a political community of active claim holders. Let us look at an example from Africa: A clear distinction can be made between a period of popular upsurge against colonialism, where people became transformed into active citizens taking their destiny into their ow hands, and a post-independence period, when they became passive citizens of the state. Understanding the transition in this way illuminates some of the links between state power, active citizenship, and the moral order necessary for national emancipation.
7. Under this optic, the prevailing HR discourse can be and must be displaced from its statist approach to being an active citizens political movement that critiques and rejects statist liberalism. To summarize, from an emancipatory perspective,citizenship is not about subjects bearing rights conferred by the state, but rather about people who think independently and become their own agents through their engagement in politics as militants/activists and not as politicians. [The point here is not to idealize popular struggles, but to note that, despite all their contradictions, they enable the development of a different conception of HR]. There must thus be a politics behind the HR discourse, a politics that prescribes alternatives to the statist discourse. To wrap-up here, these prescriptions are assertions of rights to be fought-for, not claims or pleas for HR to be conferred by the state on a passive citizenry –these would be institutionalized rights.
Can a ‘Human Rights Culture’ enable active citizenship?
8. Today, it seems impossible to think about a HR discourse outside the parameter of a popular politics. Also today, the HR language is pervasive in the societies of many countries rendered poor making their citizens believe that HR are the only way in which human emancipation can be conceived, simply because the HR discourse is seen to provide the parameters through which people in communities can resist oppression and assert their rights vis-a-vis the depredations of authoritarian states and capitalist interests. Yet at the same time, too often, the HR language used is the language of statist reforms…
9. We must, therefore, ask:
- Does the HR discourse have an emancipatory potential in those countries today?
- How are rights to be thought-of politically beyond morally?
- Does the HR discourse enable or disable active citizenship in those countries?
- Is the HR discourse, as being applied, fundamentally a-political?
These are some of the questions in dire need of answers, because in the statist HR discourse, people are seen primarily as legal subjects rather than as political subjects. People are seen by those holding power as victims, not as agents –and it is that power that pretends to act on their behalf. This power may be an NGO, a national state, a corporation or other.
For neoliberalism today, citizens’ rights are to be fulfilled by public interest civil society (not the state), the latter being largely equated with NGOs
10. This delegation to NGOs is expected to be carried out in a manner that keeps claim holders firmly away from any (emancipatory) politics that could question the liberal state itself. Civil society organizations can be tolerated, but only if they represent the haves’ interests. Mind you that NGOs cannot be conflated with an organized society as the term necessarily implies some form of exclusion!*
*: The role of many international NGOs in spreading the HR discourse forms one of the main pillars of imperialism today. It is important to emphasize this point here as these NGOs are constitutive of the currently hegemonic conception of democracy and of HR. However, it is becoming more apparent that just behind the benign and smiling faces of international NGOs or the humanitarianism of the UN lies a hideous grimace of all-out war and of the destructive and systematically anti-human power of the US, the only super-power and world policeman. In development matters, citizenship has lost its active content and has been reduced to being a client of NGOs.
11. Otherwise, when HR are taken out of popular control and placed in a juridical realm (where their fundamentally political character is removed from sight), HR become the subject of technical resolutions by the judicial system, i.e., if claim holders wish to have their rights addressed and defended, they have to rely primarily on the confines of the state institutions of, for instance, the (to them inaccessible) judiciary. As such, the struggle for HR depends on the outcome of fundamentally de-politicized state institutions. The whole system, both materially and culturally thus has the effect of excluding the majority from official state politics, while making it difficult, if not impossible, for them to mobilize politically. This ultimately amounts to a permanent system of political de-mobilization and disempowerment giving a whole new meaning to the concept of ‘the rule of law’. In short, neo-liberalism delivers socio-political passivity and empty choices in the absence of people’s power.
12. Paradoxically then, the HR discourse, purportedly concerned with providing the enabling environment for dignity and equality within the context of liberalism, fundamentally and systematically enables its opposite, i.e., political and social dis-empowerment. In the absence of political agency –given the prevailing political passivity– political choices cannot be made by the overwhelming majority, and political spaces and windows of opportunity shrink and disappear.
The process of institutionalizing HR is then, as said, a process of de-politicizing rights struggles and replacing them with a state-centered discourse
13. States have easily been able to get away with this, because of ideological confusion and the weakness of alternative centers of power. The technification of politics, the evisceration of politics from the state and society and its replacement by a managerialist and commercial ideology, has meant the exclusion of the majority from active citizenship and the structuring of an elite consensus around the need for political illiteracy and passivity. The introduction of multi-partyism and elections has not resolved this fundamental problem.
Bottom line
14. A couple of iron laws I extracted from Neocosmos’ piece:
- When one is struggling for rights against any injustice or oppression, one is exercising active citizenship and asserting one’s humanity and dignity.
- When one is appealing for HR, one cannot simply depart from one’s passivity vis-a-vis power.
- There must be an emancipatory politics at the base of the HR discourse.
- Simply relying on the number of recognized HR covenants and international conventions does not constitute the way forward to an emancipatory future.
- The progressive development literature rightly agrees that the success of the development process ultimately depends on popular organization itself.
- To, therefore, argue for development as a HR discourse that puts one’s faith in state politics and liberalism is simply futile.
15. While the state is definitely an important component of the field of politics, politics can no longer be reduced to the state. Therefore, always ask: Is active citizenship behind any regime struggling for HR? The answer to this question is certainly not obviously affirmative.
- Liberalism does not grant HR, indeed HR have to be fought for.
- Given that the state will only ‘grant’ or guarantee HR if forced-to by the people themselves, then one is entitled to ask how this is to happen in the absence of independent popular politics.
- We must now position ourselves better to distinguish a truly political struggle for HR from ‘an appeal’ for HR.
- A prescriptive demand for rights only becomes emancipatory when, in addition to being fought for by active citizens, it makes a universal appeal.
- At most, struggles for HR today seem concerned with incorporating HR into the existing system and do not, at first glance, provide a way to transform it. This critique, therefore, requires the re-appropriation of a notion of ‘active citizenship’.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
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