Giroux, 14 Henry A. Giroux, Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University

Human Rights

Neoliberalism leads to abuse of the labor market and ultimately systematic human rights abuses

Christa Wichterich No Daye (20 years after: the Women’s Human Rights paradigm in the neoliberal context, http://wideplus.org/20-years-after-the-womens-human-rights-paradigm-in-the-current-neoliberal-context/

Twenty years later, a lot of frustration about global governance has built up: The MDGs have not cohesively been rooted in the human rights paradigm and have not included gender mainstreaming in a systematic way. Feminist networks tried to intervene into macro-economics and the trade agenda, into the WTO- and FTA‐regime. However, it seemed to be impossible to introduce a human rights agenda in order to balance and correct the free trade paradigm and investment rights of the corporate sector including the financial market. Market rights overrule and undermine the human rights agenda. The multiple crises mirror that global governance completely failed to regulate the expansion of the capitalist economy that is corporate‐driven, growth‐oriented, resource‐ and emission-intensive. It is not guided and hardly tamed by a rights and needs framework. As a result we are confronted with a new multipolar power structure, deepening inequalities and man‐made “natural” disasters all over the planet. The rise and primacy of economic and financial governance has led in the countries of the North to “post‐democracy” (Colin Crouch), a shrinking of democratic space and decision making, a loss of transparency and accountability, and a loss of public goods and commons. States to whom we addressed our rights claims have abandoned and corrupted their role as developmental and welfare states. Through austerity regimes coined as the only solution to the debt crisis, states facilitate the reconfiguration of capitalism and the dismantling of the European social model. Austerity is a highly disciplinary regime that shifts economic power to the market and social responsibilities to the individuals. It downloads costs to the private households in terms of precarisation of wage and pension, unemployment, dismantling of public services and social security, increase in VAT as well as the privatisation of public goods. Austerity systematically undermines citizens’ rights and subjects them to so-­‐called internal constraints and the logic of efficiency, productivity and competition while creating an ideological consensus that everybody has to sacrifice something. Additionally, costs are shifted to the Global South e.g. to the offshore production of plenty of cheap consumer goods which flood the markets in the north. Textile exports from Bangladesh to the EU boomed in 2010 – actually in the middle of the EU crisis. The horrible incidents in the global textile industries revealed once again that fashion brands, retail labels and discounters from the North pressurize manufacturers in the South to minimize production costs, leading to the unregulated, unsafe construction of factories, the intensification of exploitation of mostly female labour, and the disregard of safety standards, minimum wages and labour rights. Low priced consumer goods in crisisprone Europe are supposed to compensate for the precarisation of livelihoods and lack of social security and to pacify citizens. This kind of human rights violations correspond with the absence of human or workers rights clauses in trade agreements.

Human rights are intrinsically tied to the state system-human rights are self-consciously presented as a force that can reverse the evils of the squo.

SAMUEL MOYN 2014 (Professor of Law and History, Harvard University, A POWERLESS COMPANION: HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE AGE OF NEOLIBERALISM, Vol. 77:147)

It is worthwhile to begin by to establishing how much work would be required—certainly far beyond that done so far—to regard human rights as an apology for “neoliberal” capitalism, in part because of how much work Karl Marx’s own texts leave to be done. And this is so for two overlapping sets of reasons. For one thing, there were the different phases in Marx’s own account of rights, which provide an inadvertent reminder of how institutionally new international human rights today are. Second, there is massive distance between the globalizing capitalism to which he bore witness and our world. Even if his own work provides considerable resources for thinking about rights generally, it falls silent when it comes to the specificities of our problem, both because of the “neoliberal” form of our capitalism as well as the globalizing reformism of our rights movements. Marx, of course, offers his most famous criticism of “human rights” in On the Jewish Question, where he takes the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen as an index of the failure of political emancipation compared to the “human emancipation” for which he calls.17 Yet in this early text, Marx usefully makes central (even if he fails to effectively theorize) what may have been the central fact of the rights of man for most of their history: they have long been constituted within the state.18 There is, of course, no doubt that the political language of natural rights had an elective affinity, or an even deeper relationship, with the birth and expansion of capitalist social relations, and Marx eventually understood that the reduction of rights to his original statist framework was misleading.19 Yet it remains of great interest that, in taking the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 as his early prooftext, Marx believed that a moral philosophy of natural rights in its most abstract formulations depends in history on the agency of the state (even nation-state) to be politically operationalized.20 Marx did not take this 17. See KARL MARX & FRIEDRICH ENGELS, THE MARX-ENGELS READER (Robert C. Tucker ed., 2d ed. 1978). 18. See id. at 23–24. 19. The classic argument is C.B. MACPHERSON, THE POLITICAL THEORY OF POSSESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM: HOBBES TO LOCKE (1962). 20. Historians such as Richard Tuck have diagnosed a much deeper causal relationship than Marx himself perceived between the ascendancy of rights in early modern natural law theory and the perfection of modern state as the essential and long-term forum of their political meaning. See RICHARD TUCK, THE RIGHTS OF WAR AND PEACE: POLITICAL THOUGHT AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER FROM GROTIUS TO KANT (2001). I followed Tuck’s general argument somewhat slavishly in my own book in distinguishing international human rights. See Moyn, supra note 1, at ch.1. MOYN_BOOKPROOF (DO NOT DELETE) 1/9/2015 12:33 AM No. 4 2014] A POWERLESS COMPANION 153 alliance to be a contingent mistake; to him, it was rather a core feature of the rise of rights. Textually, to put it differently, Marx’s critique of human rights is a critique of political emancipation within the state. If his critique is directed at the formal abstraction of rights, then it is abstraction within a (rather institutionally concrete and historically specific) forum of the political citizenship provided by the state.21 Marx’s insistence on the limits of the state as an agent of emancipation, alongside his lack of interest in the state-making many have prized down through the era of twentieth-century decolonization, should thus not distract from the fact that his own framing of the significance of the rights of man in his most classical treatment fails to link them to the workings of global capital. Whether or not Marx’s critique transposes easily to the abstractions of rights in moral philosophy, then, it definitely requires significant theoretical work—and ultimately, a changed account from that early essay—to apply it to modern-day international and global human rights politics. When they became a newly prestigious mobilizational and legal option, international human rights politics broke in fundamental ways with the statist framework within which Marx himself worked and the institutionalized rights politics that he observed in the French Revolution. If anything, the centrality of the state to bourgeois order indeed meant that the response of working men had to be itself globalizing, though certainly not in the mode of contemporary human rights activists. None of this means that the entanglements of “human rights” and “modern capitalism” (including “neoliberalism”) do not exist, but it does mean that they are not obvious, even or especially for Marxists, who must build rather than assume an account of them. And as much as Marx’s own theoretical evolution after On the Jewish Question provides better grounds for success in this venture, it also leaves severe obstacles. For one thing, it is also true, as recent research has shown, that Marx himself was by no means above invoking rights as a basis of progressive reform, in spite of his apparently totalistic rejection of them before.22 Indeed, as Andrew Sartori emphasizes, the constitutive emancipatory promise of liberalism and its rights talk as Marx understood both as much authorized intermittent criticisms of capitalism (and empire) as obfuscated their obvious depredations.23 But the real challenge is that Marx’s ultimate critique of rights is general, going to the relation between the globalization of capital, property ownership, and social abstraction, rather than anything so narrow and 21. That was why the response to a bourgeois regime of rights required the liquidation of the distinction between the state and civil society, and though perhaps not what Engels later called the “withering away” of the state. 22. See DAVID LEOPOLD, THE YOUNG KARL MARX: GERMAN PHILOSOPHY, MODERN POLITICS, AND HUMAN FLOURISHING 150–63 (2009); Justine Lacroix & Jean-Yves Pranchère, Karl Marx fut-il vraiment un opposant aux droits de l’homme?: Émancipation individuelle et théorie des droits, 62 REVUE FRANÇAISE DE SCIENCE POLITIQUE 433 (2012) (both demonstrating Marx’s deployment of rights talk for the sake of emancipation). 23. ANDREW SARTORI, LIBERALISM IN EMPIRE: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY (2014). I am very grateful to Professor Sartori for assistance with this part of the article. MOYN_BOOKPROOF (DO NOT DELETE) 1/9/2015 12:33 AM 154 LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS [Vol. 77:147 particular as an analysis of international human rights regimes and movements (which, if they existed in his time, did not interest him). When he evolved beyond the juvenilia of On the Jewish Question, Marx altered his presentation of bourgeois rights to moderate the statist emphasis of his early account. But these theoretical shifts were really in the service of an account emphasizing how a (potentially) globalizing set of market relations required a set of social abstractions that might comfortably take formal individual rights as its legal form. Hence Marx’s claim in Capital that the capitalist market is a very Eden of the innate rights of man. . . . [There individuals] contract as free persons, who are equal before the law. Their contract is the final result in which their joint will finds a common legal expression. . . . [E]ither in accordance with the preestablished harmony of things, or under the auspices of an omniscient providence, they all work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal, and in the common interest.24 Yet even in the evolved form of Marx’s critique, there is a drastic set of differences between that general account—which might fit, for example, the modern globalization of markets and the globalization of property rights quite well—and some specific account needed to capture the particularity of international human rights regimes and movements in the last several decades.25 After all, neoliberal capitalism is a specific episode in the history of capitalism that Marx never knew. More important for my purposes here, today, human rights are often self-consciously presented (though not with great plausibility, as I ultimately argue) as a force that can or will moderate or even reverse the evils of the current form of global market relations. Stereotypically, and to some extent really, human rights legal orders and mobilizational politics have lost their associations to the defense of freedom of contract and private property—there are other bodies of law, and other movements, for that purpose. Rather, in human rights regimes from the United Nations processes to treaty mechanisms, and in human rights movements from Amnesty International to global antipoverty campaigns, the goal is to ameliorate the suffering of others or even insist upon the basis for justified, though minimal, redistribution. Whatever one wants to say about human rights as they exist today, in short, must depart radically from Marx’s early work, and build 24. 1 KARL MARX, CAPITAL: A CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 280 (Ben Fowkes trans., 1976). 25. As Marx’s own treatments imply, appeal to natural and human rights remained more common in his own era as cited rationales for the protection of free contract and private property. In fact neoliberals today refer much more rarely to the justificatory basis of natural or human rights than their nineteenth-century forebears did in defense of their economic liberalism, presumably because reformists and humanitarians have so successfully captured the language for their cause. Compare ROBERT GREEN MCCLOSKEY, AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN THE AGE OF ENTERPRISE 1865–1910, ch.5 (1951) (entitled “Judicial Conservatism and the Rights of Man”), with Samuel Moyn, Nationalism and Capitalism as Nineteenth-Century Rights Movements, in OXFORD HANDBOOK OF HUMAN RIGHTS HISTORY (Devin O. Pendas ed., forthcoming) (both demonstrating the popularity of libertarian rights talk in the nineteenth century). MOYN_BOOKPROOF (DO NOT DELETE) 1/9/2015 12:33 AM No. 4 2014] A POWERLESS COMPANION 155 substantially on his later work. And though Marx could not have theorized either neoliberalism or human rights as they are now known, he might not have been surprised to learn that the chief objection to the latter is that they share the same historical era as the former without unsettling it.

Human rights rest on a state-centric conception of citizenship. Rights become afforded by the nation-state, as it is transformed from a protector of social rights to a regulator meant to benefit market economics

Evans in 2000 (Tony, Department of Politics, University of Southampton, Alternatives: Social Transformation & Humane Governance, Oct-Dec2000, Vol. 25, Issue 4, CITIZENSHIP AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION)

Three broad criticisms of the project to promote international citizenship are important to the critique of neoliberal thinking on universal human rights. First, although the central aim in proposing an international citizenship is to find a solution to the statecitizen vs. humanity problem, Linklater's project remains largely statecentric. As long as state citizenship remains integral to developing international citizenship, "international citizenship appears to depend on the idea of the state-citizen, with other notions of political identity and rights effectively only developing via the permission of the state."[47] This suggests that the rights attached to international citizenship are bestowed from above, rather than demanded and developed from below, notwithstanding recent reports of movements organized to resist further globalization in many regions of the world.[48] Given that the idea of international citizenship is in part a response to the demand for greater democracy under conditions of globalization, conditions that alienate people from existing social institutions, the statecentric focus seems ambiguous.[49] On the one hand, proponents argue that new forms of transnational association are stimulated by a desire to reestablish control over political life, following the perceived failure of the state to act in the interests of citizens, while on the other, the state is presented as integral to developing new forms of international political association.[50] Moreover, the observation that global politics is now characterized by a multiplicity of transnational actors, including non-governmental organizations, transnational corporations, international financial institutions, and international organizations, is seen by proponents of international citizenship as an exciting and revolutionary phenomenon that demands a new democratic project for global governance. Following this observation, much academic and political energy has been put into proposals that seek to promote democracy within a framework of some kind of global governance in which the state permits the "development of multiple forms of citizenship."[51] What this project fails to acknowledge, however, is that the development of transnational association generates new forms of loyalty that may not be conducive to new forms of democracy, including the protection of human rights. Indeed, some of the new transnational associations, particularly those concerned with transnational corporations and financial institutions, may actually encourage the very practices that democracy and citizenship are supposed to ameliorate.[52] Furthermore, although the idea of citizenship assumes some kind of equality,[53] civil society is not free of social, political, and economic inequalities. By failing to note the undemocratic nature of transnational associational life, and capital's need to maintain inequality, proponents of international citizenship fail to take full account of social and economic power. As Pasha and Blaney have pointed out, most of the recent interest in global democracy and human rights "does not move our imagination beyond a liberal frame" but, rather, points to "a failure to attend to the mutually constitutive relationship of civil society, capitalism, and the liberal state," which offers a distorted view of the emancipatory possibilities associated with transnational associational movements.[54]

The global human rights regime is part of a process of ideological homogenization. Human rights are only defended in the name of civil and political rights, pushing economic and social rights to the periphery.

Evans in 2000 (Tony, Department of Politics, University of Southampton, Alternatives: Social Transformation & Humane Governance, Oct-Dec2000, Vol. 25, Issue 4, CITIZENSHIP AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION)

Although the neoliberal consensus accepts the universality and unity of all internationally agreed human rights in formal and legal terms, the political practice of promoting civil and political rights to the exclusion of economic and social rights has a long history within the modern human-rights regime. We have only to recall that the decision to draft a nonbinding Universal Declaration of Human Rights, rather than a single, legally binding covenant, was itself a consequence of disagreements between Western countries who sought to prioritize civil and political rights and Socialist and less-developed countries who favored economic, social, and cultural rights.[21] With the collapse of the Cold War and the increasing pace of globalization, the role of universal human rights seems to have taken a new turn in world politics. Instead of fulfilling its intention of offering protection to the weak and the vulnerable, neoliberal interests have co-opted the idea of human rights as a justification for grabbing "even more of the world's (and their own nations') resources than they previously had" and to "steal back the concessions to social democracy that were forced out of them at the end of the Second World War."[22] It remains common practice to prioritize trade issues over those of human rights, although the rhetoric often suggests otherwise. Globalization has strengthened the conviction that human life is of value only insofar as it contributes to the greater value of economic growth and the global expansion of capital.[23] As Michael Lewis has observed, while Secretary of State Madeleine Albright continues to speak in the language of human rights and values, "the world would be more true to itself if the American embassies were sold off to American investment banks as foreign branch offices."[24] This is not to suggest that the discourse on universal human rights is of no further interest to the neoliberal consensus. On the contrary, the defense of human rights as civil and political rights, including the right to own and dispose of property freely, promotes the accumulation of capital at the expense of distributive policies that could have empowered the poor. Thus, although "property and investment rights are protected in exquisite detail" under GATT and NAFTA, the rights of workers, women, children, the poor, and future generations (environmental rights) are ignored.[25] Underpinning the move to a global economy is an ideology of modernity, which rests upon the twin goals of economic growth and development, defined as increasing global capital accumulation and consumption. The central means of achieving these goals in all countries, whether the wealthy North or the impoverished South, is strategic planning at the global level, global management, and the creation of global regimes and agreements. Ideological convergence has the effect of homogenizing and limiting the policy choices of governments. The global human-rights regime provides the quintessential values on which this program of convergence and homogenization is built. Global management requires adherence to rules that ensure all countries conform to the development model so that the "hidden hand" of the market can operate efficiently. Consequently, responsibility for defining and implementing the rules governing the international economy shift away from the state toward international institutions. Where in the past the state could hope to adopt national strategies for ordering the national economy--including perhaps the nationalization of key industries--the global organization of production and finance means that the state no longer initiates policy; rather, it reacts to global economic decision-making forces against which it can mount little resistance. The WTO speeches of President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair cited earlier seem to confirm this.

Neoliberalism rests on the artificial divide between public and private, with the state seen as a regulator to promote noninterference in the private sphere. This denies individuals economic, social, and cultural rights while masking the larger structural economic problems that cause human rights violations in the first place

Evans in 2000 (Tony, Department of Politics, University of Southampton, Alternatives: Social Transformation & Humane Governance, Oct-Dec2000, Vol. 25, Issue 4, CITIZENSHIP AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION)

Second, the project for an international citizenship does not avoid the problems that arise in the relationship between the citizen and civil society described by the neoliberal conception of citizenship. Central to these problems is the notion that the neoliberal citizen is "defended from the state by a series of rights which enable a plurality of ways in which individuals can live their lives within the private sphere of civil society,"[62] thus separating public from private life. In this standard neoliberal interpretations of the state-citizen relationship, the task of protecting the freedom of the individual from interference in the pursuit of economic interests is assigned to the public sphere of the state. Citizenship is therefore concerned with protecting civil and political rights, rights that the state guarantees in the name of the private sphere of civil society. Although, in formal terms, economic and social rights are often afforded formal parity with civil and political rights, according to the neoliberal conception of citizenship, civil and political rights must be prioritized in order to provide the conditions for wealth creation. Citizens can turn their attention to honoring a duty to support the least fortunate only when these conditions are achieved. This approach to universal rights has a long history, one that is readily found in the postwar debate on human rights. For example, although the well-known "Four Freedoms" speech made by President Roosevelt during 1941 included the freedom from want, he defined this to mean "economic understanding which will secure for every nation a healthy peace-time life for its inhabitants everywhere in the world."[63] Thus the freedom from want did not suggest that the deprived and excluded had a right to claim assistance from those who benefited most from the global economy, but rather that states accepted a duty to remove structural, commercial, and cultural barriers between states that threatened the potential expansion of neoliberalism on a global scale.[64] A more recent manifestation of this can be seen in the World Bank's policy that equates a market-based system with civil society and advises that assistance must concentrate "on re-creating the conditions that will allow the private sector and institutions of civil society to resume commercial activities" following war and civil disruption.[65] This is reflected in the general definition of citizenship adopted by neoliberals, which provides for legal rights and rights of participation but only "the duty to promote the widest possible good."[66] While the citizen has the right to seek legal protection if personal and political freedoms are threatened, those suffering economic deprivation have no such rights but must, instead, rely upon the good faith of duty holders. The duty placed upon the citizen is not even one to protect the poor and vulnerable from further violations, a duty that implies positive action, but rather the lesser requirement to promote their cause in some indeterminate fashion. Such an approach echoes arguments that have often punctuated debates in the human-rights regime developed at the United Nations. For example, the exchanges at Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco over whether the United Nations Charter itself should call for the promotion or protection of human rights and the prolonged debates during preparation for the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights over the distinction between rights and duties.[67] Furthermore, fostering a duty to promote human rights in the interest of the widest possible good tends to reinforce the centrality of the individual in the human-rights debate at the expense of structural causes of violations. Current practices that are the cause of many human-rights violations--practices that are legitimated by neoliberal freedoms exercised within existing structures--are marginalized and are less likely to present a challenge to the dominant value system.[68] These criticisms suggest that the attempt to secure universal civil, political, and economic rights through the medium of citizenship may, in fact, reinforce a set of values that support current exclusionary practices found in globalization. Notwithstanding the addition of duties as well as rights in the modern interpretation of citizenship, the idea of the international citizen does not offer a convincing argument for securing human rights in the age of globalization. It fails because it confuses the rights of the individual with the rights of the citizen and does not take full account of the relationship between civil society, the state, and the citizen.