[TLDR (too long didn’t read): This Reader is about the rhetoric spread about a benign neoliberalism that, in reality, only pays lip service to human rights. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text].
-Science requires us to constantly think against and challenge our own brains, i.e., distrust the evidence, not adopting the first interpretation of a given phenomenon. This leads me to say that the so-called economic science is still in the caverns. (Louis Casado)
1. As I often do, let me start with a few pertinent one-liner iron laws:
- Competition and profit are one of the core themes of economic theory studies: One is the war and the other is the bounty…
- The ideal of Capitalism is to make something as cheap as possible to sell it as expensive as possible.* (Albino Gomez)
- The economic measure packages that governments take ought to carry a warning that said: “It has not been proven this product is good for the health of the citizens”. (Jean-Francois Revel)
- Market economies have evolved into market societies where price determines the value of everything. (Mark Carney) –wither human rights (HR).
- Technology reflects the biases of those who make it. And when those who make it are corporations, it reflects corporate imperatives making this one of the world’s most significant threats to democracy and to HR. (Mother Jones)
- When corporations refer to the bankruptcy of one of their subsidiaries they frivolously call it “redeployment to other markets”.
- It is so good to benefit from a tax that one does not pay. (Vilfredo Pareto), and a real old one,
- To be wealthy and honored in an unjust society is a disgrace. (Confucius)
*: [The goal has always been simple: ‘capture as much wealth as possible while sharing as little as possible’. In large part that has, for instance, meant shifting responsibility for the environmental and social harm that corporations unleash onto society away from themselves and onto governments and thus taxpayers …and for the most part, it has worked for them].
The topic of the concentration of wealth and of the pauperization of billions of human beings is not a topic that sprang up yesterday
2. It would be good to remember that Marx already described this phenomenon in the XIX century as an unstoppable, evil process part of the capitalist mode of production. The false ‘consensus’ that perennially favors the privileged –those who inherit wealth– has been sold to us as the must-have of ‘political stability’. But when the immense inequalities, unbearable inequities and social injustices that are behind HR violations are not resolved through methods that the prevailing ‘democracy’ allow, discontent and confusion will invariably seek all means to break that false consensus. (L. Casado) …a lesson/role for HR activists here.
3. Activists embracing a revolutionary change in HR must thus remind themselves that there is nothing normal, natural, or unchangeable about the social and political institutions that society and the prevailing ‘democracy’ have erected all over the world. –wither economic theories. Ergo, in order to have a world-with, activists must create a world-without–a watchword for all of us attempting to act within and against the massive legal, institutional, material, and financial HR-averting apparatus of the current global economy. (Maywa Montenegro de Wit)
4. In the community of HR activists, we are well aware of the capacity of the proponents of the corporate global system to co-opt language and concepts so that corporate narratives get away with generalities and with empty slogans. The corporate discourse may seem a poor cousin to the muscle of economic theory, but it does perform the important functions of legitimizing the global neoliberal discourse, as well as stifling public awareness of the stakes involved. This is the ably fabulized vision that is spread by ‘corporate spin docs’ to present the discourse as a vision universally shared. (Nora McKeon)
5. The avoidance of accountability of such corporate actors is yet another legacy of colonialism. Manifestations of this can be seen in the lack of an internationally legally binding instrument to regulate business activities (its negotiation endlessly dragging at the UN HR Council) despite the clear historical and continuing role of conflicted corporations** and their negative impact on HR especially in the area of the extraction of natural resources. The transition to justice from colonialism must, therefore, first ensure an eradication of the colonialism of the past and clearly prohibit the practice of it in the future –as the UN itself has said/claimed. What must be addressed is the systemic and structural issues that have created the problems at hand. Addressing the contemporary manifestations of colonialism today requires a reconstruction in our understanding of the relationship between businesses and HR within the broader context of geopolitics and the international political economy –no matter what economic theory says. (Wesam Ahmad)
**: Accountability goes beyond conflicts of interest and into corporate interference (the latter referring to any corporation intentionally damaging someone else’s contractual or business relationships with a third party thus causing economic harm. The result pursued is a higher concentrated corporate control). Furthermore, corporations and their allies embark in strategizing to oppose and get-rid-of government regulations and any democratic checks on corporate power. For this, corporations do use their outsized financial advantage to shape politics and policy thus robbing people of their ability to use local democratic channels to rein-in corporate-driven excesses and harm.
An active neo-mercantilism of the powerful countries lurks behind the rhetoric spread about a benign neoliberalism and globalization process (ChakravarthiRaghavan)
-“I would define globalization as the liberty of my group to invest wherever we want, at the time we choose, to produce whatever we want, sourcing and selling wherever we want and enduring the minimal possible obligations in relation to labor legislation and social conventions.” (Percy Barnevik, president of the transnational ABB, 1995)
6. If we can speak of the betrayal of the global political class, it is precisely in this sense: the absence of political will to reverse trends, i.e., abdicating their politics and playing a fundamental role in defending and promoting the general interest and the global common good.
7. As countries rendered poor struggle to cope with the pandemic, they are being set back further by restrictive fiscal policies. These are imposed by conditionalities demanded by countries rendered rich who no longer practice them themselves –if they ever did.
8. As if not already bad enough, some pandemic relief spending in many countries has been ‘captured’ by the politically well-connected as political elites and their cronies seize the lucrative new opportunities. [You have read that some corporations and individuals have benefited greatly during the pandemic, e.g., US billionaires have reportedly become over a trillion dollars richer over the last year and a half]. (Jomo Sundaram)
9. Moreover, in their secret free trade agreement negotiations, for instance, Northern trade representatives are deviously using the word ‘rights’ when what they are really all about is ‘privileges’. I am talking about intellectual property privileges, because these are ultimately, under duress, given to companies by States through forced policies and/or acts of law. Mind you that HR are too seldom enforced by law: Corporations 1: People’s Rights 0!
10. Among many, one of the structural reasons for the seldom acknowledged irresponsibility of the global dominant classes is their vision of life and of the world as essentially mercantile, productivity-oriented, techno-scientific, subservient to efficiency, conquering, elitist and ultimately violent. For them, knowledge cannot be openly shared and diffused; if it would, they would lose their profits and their power.*** Add to this how the commodification and privatization of knowledge, promoted by the public authorities, has destroyed the capacity of the State to act according to its prerogatives, its missions, and its obligations.
***: Take taxes: We have a global trade regime, but not a global tax regime. (Hans Dembowski) Tax evasion by the wealthy, it is universally agreed, must be deterred, but trickily continues (think Panama, think Pandora). To be equitable, taxation must be progressive (but, as you well know, it is not). More equitable tax systems are to get more revenue from those most able to pay while reducing the burden on the needy. Wealth taxes are the most progressive (but vigorously resisted) way to raise revenue while also reducing inequalities. (J. Sundaram)
11. So, with survival foresight, the dominant classes send their young to management and administration schools, where they learn the skills to conquer markets, eliminate competitors and maximize short-term returns on investment.**** No surprise, then, that it is rare to see that the priority objectives of grants-hungry higher education institutions are to foster the capacity of our societies to make universal HR, collective responsibility for general well-being, the security of humanity and fraternity a reality.
****: In recent years, these classes have also prioritized investment in artificial intelligence, especially in the field of robotics, primarily because their goal is to quickly achieve the manufacture of robot soldiers that do not unionize.
12. So, what can be done? First, it is up to the citizens to answer the question. It is not a question of asking the G2O member states –or, worse, the World Economic Forum– what to do. [The Davos Forum is the Vatican of neoliberalism. (Vicente Navarro)] It is necessary to carry the revolt to the heart of the power and to the very foundations of the dominant system: e.g., the private property of knowledge (patents) on a world scale. It is not a question of working on how to force private companies and public authorities to practice greater and more transparent ‘social responsibility’ and ‘environmental responsibility’. The history of the last 80 years shows that, unfortunately, this objective is an illusion within the dominant system. (Riccardo Petrella) What is needed is a regime of corporate social accountability managed by public interest CSOs!
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com
Postscript/Marginalia
-I do not know anything about geopolitics or about macroeconomics or about any of that nonsense, so do not pay too much attention to me. (Anibal Malbar) …not my case!