Human Rights and the Left
This piece original appeared in the May 2015 edition of Upswell Magazine
Human Rights: a refrain that has almost become a byword for progressive activism. If, pace Jameson, post-modernism is the cultural logic of late-capitalism, human rights is the politics of the post-political era. Yet, those on the left — from the liberal twitterati and Non-Government Organisations, to some on the radical end of the spectrum — try to appropriate this language. In doing so, the left are “running to the barricades of liberalism,” as James Muldoon puts it in a recent article for Overland journal, no longer interrogating these ideas as “white, masculine bourgeois ideology,” but holding them up as “the best that can be hoped for in the current political climate.”
The recent furore over Tony Abbott’s appointment of Institute of Public Affairs policy analyst Tim Wilson as the Australian Human Rights Commission’s “Freedom” commissioner has demonstrated the left’s outrage that the political right would dare intrude on “our” terrain of human rights. Globally, ever-more pressing demands by activists for western intervention into civil conflicts of third world nations in the name of these universal principles — often framed around the Responsibility to Protect principles — also illustrates a disturbing return to a 19th century notion of the White Man’s Burden. The question we need to ask, however, is whether these ideas are really ours to begin with? Looking at recent writing on the topic, and examples of human rights “activism” in Australia and globally, it becomes obvious that this tendency provides a poor way of imagining possible futures. They impose a frustratingly narrow moral compass onto politics, shifting attention away from the task of broader social transformation.
“From the Politics of the State to the Morality of the Globe:” Human Rights in/as History
A spark of academic interest has begun to shine new light on human rights, shaped in particular by the work of Samuel Moyn. His influential book The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History highlights how the idea of human rights is a much more contemporary one than is commonly understood. Far from a universalism extending back to ancient times, given a new global importance by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the idea is of a much more recent vintage, finding its apogee in the mid 1970s. Notions of rights rose to their position as the dominant way of articulating a critical politics out of the seeming failure of other utopias — namely the national liberation and socialist ideologies of the “long Sixties.” As Moyn puts it, this was a movement “from the politics of the state to the morality of the globe.”
But why such a movement at that specific time? Radical sentiment had been on the rise throughout the 1960s, with movements rejecting the liberal coordinates of the post-war order. Sterile consumerism, stolid politics of various shades of conservatism and discrimination on the basis of colour, gender and sexuality were rejected by activists. Many were inspired by third world revolutionary movements in Indochina, China and Africa, while other looked to the example of reform communism in Czechoslovakia. By the mid 1970s, however, these dreams were swiftly becoming nightmares. Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring in 1968, and attempts to continue its impetus petered out soon after, while the reality of third world “left” nationalist regimes was revealed — with Pol Pot standing out here as an example of pure violence and hatred.
Such realisations bred despondency. As Jess Whyte has put it, “for many, human rights seemed to offer a substitute utopia for the much-damaged utopianism of revolutionary Marxism.” It ought to be no surprise that the founders of many human rights groups, like Medicines San Frontiers, were once Maoist agitators, repenting for their past heresies. Ambitions of gearing the state towards societal transformation — revealed as mere pathways to mass murder and repression — were replaced with calls for an individualised rhetoric of liberties against states. Indeed, it is sometimes highlighted how the rise of human rights to political supremacy coincided well with the rise of neo-liberalism as an economic system.
Groups such as Amnesty International made the idea of a globalised form of individual rights, as opposed to those for collective liberation or for significant changes to the economic or political function of the capitalist world central to political discourse in the mid-to-late 1970s, just as it was becoming a central plank of United States foreign policy under the Carter Administration. Barbara Keys explores how much the US political elite turned to ideas of human rights in the post Vietnam era, and have never looked back. Human rights provided an “antidote to shame and guilt,” their popularity in American diplomatic discourse served to “shift attention and blame away from the trauma of the Vietnam War and the embarrassment and self-criticism of the civil rights movement and Watergate.”
The rhetoric of human rights was brought from the periphery to the heart of the political arena by Jimmy Carter and the ballooning Soviet human rights movement he supported, serving to absolve American guilt and recuperate imperialism on a new, moral foundation. Ever since then, the US and other powers like France have marshalled discourses of human rights to mount what are pretty old fashioned military interventions — all under the cover of these most universal and inviolable principles.
Of Human Rights Commissions and Culture Wars
Yet many on the Australian left still consider these principles — born of (at least, imagined) leftist defeat and right revanchism — as decent grounds for political intervention. Tim Wilson’s appointment as Australia’s ‘Freedom’ Commissioner within the Australian Human Rights Commission was read as a crime against the organisation’s good name, despite the fact that the organisation’s previously wall-to-wall leftist commissioners failed to deter the Labor government from its descent to the bottom of the refugee policy barrel. And sure, Wilson has used the position to push his libertarian agenda, although even Tony Abbott must have seen the irony in appointing an outspoken critic of government intervention in people’s lives (not to mention spending in general) to a plush, $300,000 a year plus taxpayer funded job at a rights lobby.
Moreover, discourses of human rights tend to limit the scope of our analysis. The Human Rights Commission’s “Racism — it stops with me” campaign, for instance reveals a politics mired in the liberal ideological consensus: that racism is the result of bad ideas held by bad — read: working class — individuals who can be changed through personal intervention by enlightened anti-racists. Any systemic critique of racism as a class issue, or an understanding of ideas as formed in dialogue with lived experience and material reality, is nowhere to be seen. Human rights rhetoric works to transform demands that would previously have emanated collectivist hues into those matching the individualising politics of the 21st century. As Wendy Brown puts it, human rights “constitute a juridical limit on regimes without empowering individuals as political actors; rather, it is an instance of … “negative liberty,” the right to be let alone to do as one wishes.” The connection between human rights and a resurgent Hobbesian liberalism could not be clearer.
As such, when the left engages in debates on human rights, we do so on the terrain of the enemy. As Jeff Sparrow remarked in a recent article for the blog Rightnow,
[R]ights and rights discourse have become central to what remains of the Australian Left. The “turn to rights” entails a certain understanding of injustice or oppression, in which wrongs are susceptible to legal redress … The most common critique of refugee policy condemns mandatory detention as an infringement of the rights of detainees; activists rally over same-sex couples’ right to marry. Even in the workplace, unions focus on what the ACTU calls “your rights at work.”
This, I think, highlights an important paradox in the left’s current understanding of cultural politics. Our misunderstanding of how ideas are reinforced and transmitted leaves us open to swallowing hook, line and sinker ideologies and worldviews of the right. Human rights are not, as they were at the time of the United Nations Convention of the 1940s, an open terrain whereby different notions of rights — social, political, economic and individual — can be debated and contested. These are not ideas to be appropriated, or turned in a progressive direction, but rather ones that need to be directly confronted. By complaining about Wilson’s appointment to a barely understood government body, we appear not only aloof and elitist, but end up fighting for control of an inherently problematic discourse. Instead of serving emancipatory ends, its individualising and highly moralised vocabulary will only further atomise an already fractured opposition. As Muldoon puts it in a slight different context, “we mourn a lost object that we never desired, nor ever really possessed.”
It is not through some crude march through the institutions, of holding various posts in the governmental/political apparatuses that we are going to make a better world, to commandeer the ideological terrain. In fact, fighting for these positions within the state bureaucracy is far from the “war of position” Gramsci envisaged. For Gramsci, the contest for hegemonic supremacy — as opposed to the “war of manoeuvre” he reserved for revolutionary situations — instead occurs outside of the state apparatus proper: in creating connections between and across various rebellious social relations rather than within the cloisters of power. And human rights, as it is articulated by the Human Rights Commission and the IPA alike, is not the best set of ideas around which to create such connections.
Human Rights and Post-Post-Imperialism
Much like this domestic context, the left often treat global human rights norms as some grand, non-ideological idea that the left can appropriate, and that imperialist nations are constantly undermining. Writing in Jacobin magazine, Belén Fernández castigated NGO Human Rights Watch as a “revolving door” of US imperial sycophants and operatives. At least feigning surprise, Fernández pointed out that:
From Cuba to Ecuador to Syria to Ethiopia, HRW’s edicts and positions have often been suspiciously in line with US policy. Cuba is regularly demonised as a human rights offender, when the US’s own offenses — not least in Guantanamo — are far more serious. In Ethiopia, a committed US ally, HRW has been disproportionately lenient on repressive government behaviour.
Human Rights Watch should “stop granting prominent organisational roles to individuals with firm ties to the state and the corporate sector,” which might ensure “that the rights of humans don’t get confused with the prerogatives of empire.” This is an odd argument, given that the rights of humans are currently the prerogative of empire. Everywhere, the “rights” of humans are used to encourage the opening of markets, impose “stability” in “rogue” regions and, most menacingly, to ensure that western nations enforce their so called “responsibility to protect” the citizens of other, third world, nations. Former PM Julia Gillard’s calls for western intervention to ensure the education of girls in third world nations, and the wider #bringbackourgirls campaign, targeting the disgraceful kidnapping of schoolgirls by Boko Haram in Nigeria, take on sinister hues in this context, potentially legitimising colonial interventions.
Third world national liberation struggles, contrary to contemporary remembrance (pace the sickening obituaries to Nelson Mandela as a “man of peace” and “fosterer of reconciliation” in those same newspapers who once labelled his and the ANC’s necessarily violent tactics as terrorism), were never human rights movements. In fact, as scholars have highlighted, they often opposed ideas of human rights as dangerous western interventions. While this was often for self-serving reasons — reinforcing the rule of some tin pot dictator wrapped in the rhetoric of decolonisation — its transnational, or more properly trans-state dimension was recognised as a threat to newly created countries crafting (albeit, largely unsuccessful) indigenous forms of independence. “If anti-colonialism generally spurned human right” Moyn argues, it did so in the name of “alternative internationalism,” doomed but noble enterprises like the Non-Aligned Movement or the Tricontinental, which “incorporated subaltern national liberation, and focused not on classical liberties…but collective economic development.” Such ideas, antithetical to the globalised marketplace, are the failed utopias that the contemporary human rights movement is built on.
Much as Davide Rodongo has argued that western nations used the plight of oppressed Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century to undermine the empire’s hold on European territories, the rhetoric of human rights serves largely as a smokescreen for imperialism, and is taken on board by an activist community who see themselves — rather than the oppressed of third world nations — as the “answer” to the world’s problems.
Conclusion
Moyn’s argument that human rights constitute a “last utopia” is not intended to be read pessimistically, as a claim that all other hopes for better worlds are dead. Rather, it is recognition that history has multiple destinations, and the one we have arrived at is not a teleological culmination of all our past efforts, but just one utopia — one internationalism, even — amongst many. The turn to human rights was born of the global retreat of the 1960s activist wave, but with new waves of struggle and forms of organisation — from Occupy to the M15 movement in Spain — it is time for the left to ask whether the idea of rights is all we can hope for.
