Human rights: Food for whose thoughts you accept ‘Politics and HR: who is benefiting?’
HRR 728
[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about the intricate political games (and their controlling actors) that keep HR out in the cold. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
—Americans have long seen their country as morally exceptional, but is their exceptionalism really moral when it comes to economic, social and cultural rights? (Joseph S. Nye)
1.Today I am in the mood of one-liners and I start with a bunch of mea-culpas in human rights work:
- If we have had some victories and took a small chunk of power away from those who have it, and do not seize power more fully ourselves, someone else will. (adapted from Susan Rosenthal)
- We have not learned to better ‘organize despair’. (Alberto Toscano)
- In our human rights (HR) work, we over-and-over fail to explicitly understand failures of political will, as well as to consider the social and economic roots of the lack of political will of duty bearers. (PHM)
- We further completely fail to consider the political forces that shape political will, in particular, the lobbying of corporations and the pressures of ‘free’ market promoters, (PHM) [Mind you: It is not a lack of political will, but rather the accumulation-of-a-political-will-by-the-powerful to oppose or stall the implementation of progressive policies that tackle HR abuses. We cannot forget that ‘a political will’ must be pulled from those in power and thus depends on the capacity of public interest civil society to forcefully demand needed changes].
- Have we resigned ourselves to live in the past and settle for achieving HR and democracy just ‘as-far-as-possible’? (Luis Vega)
Is politics the conduct of public affairs for the benefit of private individuals? (Ambroise Bierce)
–Pretending to be left-wing, in collusion with the right-wing social democracy, is a crude and clumsy way of covering up a betrayal. (Antonio Gramsci, 1891-1933)
2. Every regime relies on its privileged private individuals which we also call the elite. To ensure their stability, elites begin by: securing positions, fortune, titles, and honors, securing they can acquire national property, as well as exacting and plundering the public treasury. …And each regime produces its quota of privileged people, who hasten to build up a comfortable fortune before being expelled from power. (Minister of Police Joseph Fouché, Memoirs, 1824) …a premonition affecting most of today’s countries –left or rightwing…
3. The causes of the left-right rift do not seem to come from an ideological defeat of the Left anymore (if there are no ideas… how can they be defeated?) but rather from a triumph: that of private interests. Moreover, the signifiers ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ no longer designate principles and/or political behavior, but masks that hide what lies behind the smiles with which promises are sold, as well as behind the inability to correct the scandalous levels of social inequality. It is only about faces, not true intentions. (Louis Casado)
4. Capitalism has this capacity of eating up and infecting every capitalist-free zone. Despite efforts to create capitalism-free zones, history shows that Capitalism inevitably invades and corrupts these spaces. You cannot have pockets of Socialism surviving for long within Capitalism. It is not that one dies and the other lives. What happens is that Capital takes over the hegemony of the system, being parasitic on the previous system. (Yanis Varoufakis)
The class struggle is not an invention of Marx
5. Marx pointed out that in antiquity the struggle was between slaves and slaveholders, in the middle-ages it was between serfs and feudal lords and, in the modern era, it is between proletarians and bourgeoisie. The struggle is the object of permanent conflict between one and the other.
6. A class analysis provides us with a way of understanding the various conflicts that are expressed in the day-to-day social relations in which employers and workers are placed in a different place and struggle to safeguard their interests —that are obviously antagonistic and contradictory. Workers want to share more of the wealth they generate and employers seek to keep the largest fraction of the wealth generated by labor. In every public policy there is always this struggle of interests between one and the other class and, although the struggle sometimes seems subtle, this is not a sign that it has disappeared (with HR caught right in the middle!). (L. Mesina)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com
Postscript/Marginalia
When bad politicians choose tribe over truth
- Is man a political animal…? Maybe quite the opposite: Man is too often an animal politician… (L. Casado)
- It is stupid people that make stupid politicians famous. (Abhijit Naskar)
- Politicians do not care if we threaten not to vote for them. They know that the better-funded candidate wins more than 90% of the time –and they can only get that kind of funding by serving corporate needs. (S. Rosenthal)
- 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)
- Whenever citizens in the Global South want to take democracy into their own hands and elect politicians who are not on the list of those authorized by neocolonialism and imperialism, the powers of the global North organize clandestine actions to, in their words, ‘protect democracy’. Moreover, HR are only truly used by these powers when it defends neocolonial interests. (Boaventura de Sousa Santos)
- Henri Grouès, the French Catholic priest better known as Abbé Pierre (1912-2007), who did so much for the poor and the poor people, used to say: “Politicians know misery only from statistics. No one cries in front of figures.“
- How can politicians be so negligent? Truly, thank God for us the activists; confronting despair we march-on challenging the false narratives and the dereliction of duty of decision makers/duty bearers. (David Zakus)
- It is not true that politicians are the sinister ones responsible for all our ills. Thinking that they are is another symptom of our authoritarian dependence. We cannot divide society into politicians and non-politicians. We are all in the Polis, and we have the chance to take them on, to be part of the social ethics to hold them accountable —how much do we? (Luis Weinstein)