[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about what both socialism and liberalism and its leaders lack that impinges on advancing the HR cause. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Note: You can easily translate the Readers to many languages, Use the app deepl.com and it is done instantaneously. It takes seconds to download the app into your computer or phone and translations are of high quality.
Socialism lacks much to be fair and just: How much of a worry for human rights?
-Perhaps in the end socialism will not even be called socialism, because it will be a hybrid. (Silvio Rodríguez)
-The scandal of the Inquisition did not make Christians abandon the values and proposals of the Gospel. In the same way, the failure of socialism in Eastern Europe should not lead us to discard socialism from the horizon of human history. (Frei Betto).
1. The above question begets three more questions:
- Have all the socialist attempts failed? The Right, in any of its expressions, jubilantly shouts “yes”. [“Socialism only works in two places: in Heaven, where they don’t need it, and in Hell where they already have it”. (an anti-Chavista activist in Venezuela)].
- What are failure and success in social terms? The yardstick with which both elements are normally measured is with the capitalist yardstick –wither HR. In the capitalist system we are all free to become millionaires…. if we work hard enough, no? (The ideological-cultural apparatuses of Capitalism are, of course, in charge of transforming this into the dominant creed). and
- Is capitalism par-excellence then the kingdom of freedoms? But freedom and HR are in the same family of principles, no? For sure, Capitalism has the secret to amass fortunes… (Yes but, do not forget that it is the exploitation of one class over another, how fortunes are amassed…!). Socialism, on the other hand, does not allow such amassing. Capitalists do not let any opportunity pass that serves to destroy the working class that questions their amassing fortunes, i.e., the socialist position. [Is this then a running creed?: Neither war between peoples nor peace between classes. (Ramiro Gomez)].
2. We are, therefore, left to ask yet another set of questions: Is it that from capitalism nothing can be expected? And from socialism yes? If yes, is there then hope for human rights? (Let us remember that in socialism, although political aggressions make it very difficult, people eat; in capitalism not everyone eats). (Marcelo Colussi)
…And what does liberalism lack?
-The liberal center, that flabby variety of the Right. (Francois Mitterrand).
3. Liberal ideology has an inability to truly understand the decline of the Western democracies we see in the 21st century. This demonstrates the intellectual dishonesty of liberal propaganda. (Oskar Lafontaine, Anne Applebaum).
4. Mind you: Today, liberalism is dead, not only in the United States: its opposite, neoliberalism, dominates(!) and even the conservatives of the old guard have been totally overtaken by the neoconservatives. (Boaventura de Sousa Santos).
Being realistic?
5. With a socialist Left that has become an ‘archipelago’ of groups, only nostalgia allows us to continue to hope and to continue in the struggle. “I am bored of always being a loser in politics.” It is not always healthy to walk around with nostalgia in tow, but it is more unhealthy and poisonous to abandon ideals (including HR). A declared adversary is of greater respect to me than a lukewarm and zigzagging ally. The socialist Left is still present in speeches and social networks, but completely absent in those scenarios where it should participate. In individualistic consumerism the neoliberal system found its best support. And in corrupt personalism the Right was able to divide the socialist Left, turning it into an archipelago of groups. Will the youth leading the current myriad social movements end up being absorbed by the ‘neoliberal machine’ as well?*(Arturo Muñoz)
*: Dear young ones, beware: Unpunished abuses tend to degenerate into incurable evils. (Louis Casado).
Where are the statesmen we need today? Do we have them?: a couple of iron laws-like thoughts
-Truly, in politics today there is an abundance of buffoons, demagogues and hypocrites. (A. Muñoz)
-Well, then there are also politicians that change color at the first opportunity they see gold.
6. For some politicians, truth is not merely what they are thinking, but also why and to whom and under what circumstances they say it. (Vaclav Havel, Temptation) [Hannah Arendt talked and wrote about The Lie in Politics].
7. Politics unfortunately too often is dependent on what politicians do-not-call-but-should-call ‘tribal thinking’. It is the toxicity of ‘political non-conversations’ (what the tribes omit and/or avoid) that is the true tragedy of the modern world. (Chris Anderson)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
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Postscript/Marginalia
-Worn and faded journalists and analysts assimilate the different ‘progressive’ Left governments of Latin America to the same Left. The truth is that such governments are diverse, not fitting into the same mold, and are based on very different histories and social formations. Their objectives are not identical, not in their strength, not in their degree of loyalty to the people –which in most cases remains to be seen. (L. Casado).
–What has been disappearing in the World Social Forum, every time some intellectuals abandon the club, is the sense of politics. Why does the Forum not want politics, and just want an ‘open space’ with some powerless shouting by an uninvolved, isolated ‘civil society’ that has no links to politics, one against the powers that be? What the Forum calls its ‘new political culture’ is a culture of despair, of ‘doing as if’, but in fact not doing anything at all. Its idea of the role of civil society died as soon as it was born. (Mind you, civil society organizations have also failed in the United Nations where States do not want to share power with them; they have failed at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where they have been simply co-opted). So much of civil society always is in fact on the side of power, just creating the illusion of a critical political approach, i.e., nothing more than a way to hide the really existing power relations. (Francine Mestrum)