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De: CLAUDIO <schuftan@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: dom, 2 may 2021 a las 1:25
Subject: Human rights: Food for a privatized thought ‘HR in the marketplace’
To: <mario.parada@xxxxx>
Human rights: Food for a privatized thought ‘HR in the marketplace’ Human
Rights Reader 575 THE MYTHS ABOUT WHAT THE PROMISED FREE-MARKETS-UNIVERSAL
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Human rights: Food for a privatized thought ‘HR in the marketplace’
Human Rights Reader 575
*THE MYTHS ABOUT WHAT THE PROMISED FREE-MARKETS-UNIVERSAL-CIVILIZATION WILL
BRING ARE A HUMAN RIGHTS BOONDOGGLE.* (Nicoletta Dentico)
*[TLDR* (too long didn’t read): This Reader is about the empty promises of
neoliberal ideology and how it captures democracy with the dire
implications this has for human rights. For a quick overview, just read the
bolded text].
-For more than three decades, or at least since the end of the Cold War,
the *grand infatuation* has been obsessively seeded that the world was
being knit together peaceably in a global journey *to the promised land* of
civilization and *of human rights, led by the free market* and by
privatization. It is around such a journey that guidelines were drawn for
the conduct of capitalism, of financialization, for the use of technology
and ultimately for the reigns of a directed democracy.
1. The truth though is that *the denial of human rights* (HR) we see
is *actually
enshrined in the very structures of a global capitalism* that promotes a
simplistic political narrative and makes no room for justified dissenting
alternative reasoning. Has the COVID virus not been a great teacher of the
need for sustainable development and about our collective priorities and
values, HR included?(i) The virus has no doubt been a brutal pedagogue --it
has made a mockery of the neoliberal model, and not only for health. As
Pope Francis said, *the global dynamics that has made COVID-19 so
disruptive has deep roots in the political and social order defined by
global marketization*, in the fact that *concepts* like ‘democracy, unity,
freedom, HR, justice and dignity’ have been *bent and shaped to serve as
tools for domination*, as meaningless tags that can be used to justify any
action’. (N. Dentico)
(i): *Viruses* and bacteria mutate: *you throw them out the door, they come
back-in through the window.* What they do is to succeed by changing their
strategy. *Capitalism does the same.* The capitalists exploit their workers
becoming very rich in total amorality --not because they are evil, but
because if they do not do so, they disappear. Surviving thus means
dominating all around you and forcing competitors into servitude; *this
leaves but one alternative: submit or rebel.* (Louis Casado)
2. Let us get a closer look on privatization and financialization:
• What is ultimately wrong with *privatization* is that it *commodifies*
particular *goods and services, thereby corrupting* their meaning and
nature, as well as *their respective purposes*. This embodiment of the
objectionable neoliberal rationality *makes the provision of certain public
goods impossible given that private actors are motivated by profit*-making
considerations *and are unaccountable* in the sense of lacking transparency
and *being politically unresponsive to claim holders* and the wider
consumer community. (Chiara Cordelli) The passion for property has been and
still is the ‘in thing’ today. (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
--already a century+ ago)
• About the Financial System, let us just state a fact: It was established
in such a way that *Finance is the only sector of human activity that has
no regulatory body*. Today, it has been clearly separated from the general
economy when, paradoxically, its original function was to be at its
service. *No political institution is able to control it*s global
structure. (Roberto Savio)
*The greatest success of neoliberal ideology may have been to make the
state become a caricature of neoliberal thought* (Boston Review)
3. We have to acknowledge that during neoliberalism and in recent decades, *the
law has changed in anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ways*. Law *has
turned away from concerns of* economic power, *structural inequality*, HR
and systemic problems of racial subordination --so much so that this *has
come to seem increasingly natural*. A *legal regime* intended to balance
power and promote democracy has given way to one that *ignores the huge
difference in power* between corporations and individual workers. Law
ignores this discrepancy and thus *deepens it*. Irrational and
opportunistic political and economic decisions are constantly subjected to
technocratic and ‘juristocratic’ oversight. This has helped create a world
of low-wage and insecure jobs that endangers workers’ health and safety.
And, furthermore, *trade regimes give capital priority* causing market
logic to rule-*over* more and more *public needs*. All the while, *the
marketplace* has increasingly become a *locus of concentrated power --laws*
unequivocally *condoning this*. (Boston Review)
[Yes, generalizations are risky and there will always be omissions. Even
then, some generalization is necessary given the urgency of giving some
sense to what, for now, does not seem to make any sense at all. (Boaventura
de Sousa Santos)].
*‘Much-less-state and much-more-market’, or the processes that
demolish/massacre democracy* (Riccardo Petrella)
4. The above is what the promotion of *the so called ‘Third Way’*
in-the-name-of-‘beyond-state-and-market’ is all about. The Third Way has
been *the Trojan Horse by which the political class gets elected to promote*
and defend *their brand of universal rights* and social justice for the
most marginalized social groups. *But this brand* literally *submits life*
on Earth *to* the economic *predatory imperatives* of a devastating
globalization of nature and of society.
5. We have thus seen the *replacement of the rule of law* and of the social
and democratic government *by a system called ‘global economic governance’
based on competition/exclusion*, trade agreements with *in-transparent*
negotiations --all urgently *calling on claim holders to confront duty
bearers.* Why? Because *this governance is based on* the *commodification
of all* essential and irreplaceable *goods* for life; *on the
marginalization of human and social rights; and on the privatization of
political power* --as demonstrated by the imperial power of the world’s
major private economic groups such as the GAFAM group
(Google-Apple-Facebook-Amazon-Microsoft) and the Big Food/Big Pharma group.
6. The *dominance of the* so-called *‘reasons of science and technology’
favor* a *mystifying* and utilitarian use of *technoscience* now playing a
major role in the Third Way brand.(ii) We are *witnessing the capitulation
of national governments to* a transfer of *the power of ownership* and of
the use and control (and therefore of regulation) *of life* on Earth to the
producers of new technology-intensive systems and services; this clearly
extends these producers’ hegemony *on a global scale*.
(ii): I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction.
The world will then have a generation of idiots. (Albert Einstein) […and
for Marx, history is actually the history of technological innovations].
7. *Patents are the highest expression of this*, together with the primacy
of the right of private interests to rule the world.(iii) *Everything is
decided by ‘technical’ committees* (most often mixed public-private) *dominated
by* representatives of TNCs and the of *world of finance*. In this
context, *scientists
act as servants and governments as supporting notaries*, adopting actions
by government decree thus *reducing the role of parliamentary institutions*
to little or nothing. Neither the citizens nor the majority of members of
parliament have fought to defend-to-the-end the sacrosanct right of the
people to information and to democracy.
(iii): The nation is the most precious possession of oligarchies. Their
allegiance to nation is stronger than that in any other domain including
family, religion, ethnicity. When they refer to the national interest what
they are actually referring to is their power-yielding class interests.
(Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein) [We know those oligarchies and we know them
well. We know they have no scruples when it comes to defend their
interests. (Grafitti in Chile)].
8. *Based on what principle of legitimacy do governments continue to claim
that they cannot give relevant information to citizens?*
-*The right to relevant information is* just as *fundamental* as the right
to clean water and air!
9. *The rulers go by the thought that most human beings are ignorant and
must remain so.* In the past they went essentially by the will of God; so,
then, today: they go by the reasons of their rulers?
*Farewell to the sovereignty of the people? No!*
-The mockery of people’s sovereignty could not be more discouraging.
10. As said, the *dominant social groups* in the most powerful countries *claim
that *their decisions are dictated by scientific and technical tenets.* It
is science, they say, and with-it technology, that *dictates political
choices*. They *claim* that the *sovereignty of the people* belongs to the
people, but that it *is expressed through its scientists* and technologists
(in practice through their financiers…). Ensuring the proper functioning
and sustainability of *the current flawed system* is very much based on
patents *regulated by WTO treaties.* The power of *science is* not used
openly, transparently and is not shared; it is increasingly centralized and
exclusive --and is *enslaved by technocrats…
*11. *The time has come* not for a transition (ecological, energy, digital
and other) according to the rules of the existing system, but *for the
liberation of humanity from the ‘lords of life’ and their new forms of
colonization of the world that are at the root of the current mega
upheavals and crises. (all the above from R. Petrella)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@xxxxxxxxx
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com
*Postscript/Marginalia*
-Frederick Taylor, 1856-1915, inventor of the rational organization of work
--Taylorism-- used to put up a sign in the work places where thousands of
workers worked that said: “Check your brain out” (leave your brain out of
the workplace). To think, you have those in management up there”.
-I found this metaphor revealing: Globalization naively expects ‘more birds
to fly-into, rather than out-of an open birdcage’.
[image: Myphotwithquote]
©2021 PHM | Ho Chi Minh City
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