10.09.2008
Civil society and human liberation
The US neoliberal offensive has used universal human rights to advance its own hegemonic project, writes Gerry Downing
When Marx wrote On the Jewish question in 1843, he made the first socialist criticism of the bourgeois secular regime of rights, the ideological foundation for his later critique of capitalism as a whole. The basic argument is that the secular regime of rights, as developed by the American and French revolutions at the end of 18th century, represented civil, but not human, emancipation.
Marx examines the French Revolution’s Declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen and passages from others constitutions to make his point - which equally applies to the UN Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. In fact these civil rights presuppose increasing inequality and alienation (they bifurcate human psyches), the citizen equal before the law and in voting rights (eventually) and man as he really existed in society, oppressed and exploited:
“Where the political state has attained its true development, man - not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality in life - leads a twofold life, a heavenly and an earthly life: life in the political community, in which he considers himself a communal being, and life in civil society, in which he acts as a private individual, regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers. The relation of the political state to civil society is just as spiritual as the relations of heaven to earth. The political state stands in the same opposition to civil society, and it prevails over the latter in the same way as religion prevails over the narrowness of the secular world ....
“But, the right of man to liberty is based not on the association of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right of this separation, the right of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself”.1
Nevertheless, the regime of rights was, of course, a big step forward compared to the arbitrary power of monarchs, nobility and church under the anciens régimes. In examining the conflicting claims of cosmopolitans and communitarians, cultural relativism, feminist arguments and Asian values, we will keep Marx’s vital distinction in mind and seek to show that a false dichotomy is being posed here.
Jef Huysmans, in his contribution to Ordering the international: history, change and transformation, examines in detail the actual conditions of life in islamic societies. His ‘third way’, whilst flawed, is nonetheless based on the real experiences of men and women. It is false to suppose a clash of civilisations, as Samuel Huntington and Osama Bin Laden do, because societies are in internal conflict. As Huysmans correctly points out, the ‘cultural values’ of the communitarians implicitly defend reactionary practices like wife-beating and female circumcision, which are fiercely opposed by women and activists increasingly informed by the spread of television, mobile phones, etc.2
But we can see that their arguments echo the alienation of civil man, as against “life in the political community, in which he considers himself a communal being” above. In this their criticisms of cosmopolitanism are trenchant and ring true. However, the ‘small is beautiful’ opposition to efficient global organisation of trade and the international division of labour, as advocated by the likes of George Monbiot, has a patronising view of the oppressed, in which they are supposed to endure tyranny because of some kind of biological determinism.3
But it is also true that the imposition of ‘human rights’ is the mode of advancement of the US exploitative-led neoliberal agenda - even if we were to ignore the nauseating hypocrisy of George’s Bush’s and Condoleezza Rice’s condemnation of the Russian invasion of the sovereign state of Georgia. “That’s what we do”, as Private Eye satirised Bush saying on a recent front page.
UN declaration
Let us first establish what the difference is between the legal and political rights of individual states and the universal human rights which the UN declaration of 1948 proclaimed. Rights were guaranteed by the state and applied to its citizens before 1948, although there was some attempt to universalise them - eg, the Geneva Convention, etc - after World War I. However, the experience of Hitler and the holocaust provided the impetus to proclaim a regime of natural, universal rights, the property of every individual on the planet, with the UN as guarantor, although the cold war meant that this did not get very far.
There were seven votes against the 1948 declaration. South Africa and Saudi Arabia were opposed, for obvious rightwing reasons, and the USSR and three satellites voted against for two reasons. The first was repressive, as with the rightwing votes, but the other reason was progressive: they objected to the declaration because it contained no reference to collective rights like food, water, housing and healthcare. Soviet-type societies claimed legitimacy because they partially compensated for their repression by providing a measure of these welfare needs.
In the cold war period the ‘non-aligned’ movement tended to be dictatorial (like Nasser’s Egypt) but talked a lot about (Arab) socialism and provided some welfare. Of course, other newly independent states opted for ‘democracy’ and US leadership (and many opted for dictatorship and US leadership, but ‘rights’ were never an issue here - the worst of both worlds: these were ‘our bastards’) and some switched allegiances, like Egypt under Sadat.
And here the rights debate is situated. What value is the right to vote in conditions of famine? Would the poor and hungry not accept a great diminution of legalistic ‘human rights’ if they were guaranteed decent welfare provisions? These arguments had force while the USSR existed; the neoliberal offensive, led by the US, was kept at bay by working class resistance and defence of the welfare states in the advanced metropolitan countries.
But the Reagan/Volker offensive in the early 80s in the US and Margaret Thatcher’s defeat of the British miners in 1985 set in train the series of events that led to the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the USSR in 1991. Now at last history had ‘ended’ and we all can claim our rightful human rights; a new world order has been established and ‘democracy’ has finally triumphed, trumpet the neocons.
Military intervention to ensure the global spread of these values became the policy of the US increasingly in the 90s and the first decade of this century. It is perhaps worth looking at one case in some detail to throw some light on conflicting views of these values.
Yugoslavia began to break up under economic pressure and ideological offensive from Germany and the US. The richer provinces of Croatia and Slovenia demanded independence because they began to resent the transfer of their wealth to southern provinces like Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Macedonia. Serbia, readopting old great Serb chauvinism under Slobodan Milosevic, waged war, which included the ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs from territory he regarded as Serbian. Croatia likewise ethnically cleansed Serbs from their territory and Bosnia-Herzegovina was little better. But the Serbs were the only ones demonised in the western media: their crimes outweighed all the rest.
However, it is the intervention in Kosovo by the US military that exposed the real thrust and hypocrisy of the rights propaganda. In June 1999, just after Nato had bombed Yugoslavia, the US began the construction of Camp Bondsteel. It was afterwards revealed that this had been planned months before the bombing began. It was ostensibly set up to assist Kosovan refugees from Serbian reprisals. To ‘stabilise’ the province the US had secretly sponsored the Kosovan Liberation Army (KLA), which was a neo-fascist organisation with strong links to organised crime, the Albanian and Italian Mafia. They ethnically cleansed much of Kosovo of Serbs, Roma and dissident Albanian inhabitants. Meanwhile the biggest US base since Vietnam was constructed on seized land.
According to the World Socialist Web Site, “In April 1999, British general Michael Jackson, the commander in Macedonia during the Nato bombing of Serbia, explained to the Italian paper Sole 24 Ore: ‘Today, the circumstances which we have created here have changed. Today, it is absolutely necessary to guarantee the stability of Macedonia and its entry into Nato. But we will certainly remain here a long time so that we can also guarantee the security of the energy corridors which traverse this country.’
The newspaper added: “It is clear that Jackson is referring to the 8th corridor, the east-west axis which ought to be combined to the pipeline bringing energy resources from central Asia to terminals in the Black Sea and in the Adriatic, connecting Europe with central Asia. That explains why the great and medium-sized powers, and first of all Russia, don’t want to be excluded from the settling of scores that will take place over the next few months in the Balkans.”
“In 1997, the KLA was recognised by the US as a terrorist organisation linked to the drug trade. President Clinton’s special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, described the KLA as ‘without any questions, a terrorist group’.”4
It is clear from this that the ‘human rights’ of the Kosovan Albanians, or indeed those of Roma, Croatian and muslims in the region, were only a cover for the real intention of US imperialism: continued global expansion and maintenance of its world hegemonic position. The desperately poor, but ‘liberated’ citizens of newly independent Kosovo live under US/Nato occupation and look with increasing anger at the vast sums of money expended on this massive base, apparently visible from space like the Great Wall of China. Although the US is not a colonial power like the British and French were, arguably the proliferation of these bases (730 in over 50 countries by 2003) is their substitute for this and a preparation for World War III if one is necessary to maintain its hegemonic world position - Georgia is the latest manifestation of this.
Battle for rights
But there are, nonetheless, real issues of violations that the propaganda of human rights highlights and these do cause real social movements to develop. For instance in Iran not only women’s rights are being fought for, but workers’ rights also. Mansoor Osanloo, leader of the Teheran Bus Workers union, and many others are in prison (for five years in Osanloo’s case), for the ‘crime’ of attempting the un-islamic task of organising a trade union to fight for better wages and conditions. Indeed the first strike Osanloo organised was to demand that they be paid their wages, a rather fundamental ‘human right’.
The islamic regime of Ahmadinejad denounces women activists and trade unionists as stooges of western imperialism and demands national unity in the face of a threatened US-Israeli attack. Should they cease their struggles or maintain them, and how do they answer the ideological offensive of the Iranian regime? Is it not islamic culture to wear the hijab and to marry the husband chosen by your father and accept the position of second class citizenship?
Does not the shia champion the mustazifin, the oppressed, against the mustakbirin, the oppressor? Not in Iran, with its billionaire oppressing mullahs. There is a developed civil society with a large and prosperous middle class, so, while they have to endure many humiliations at the hands of the religious police, they have managed to maintain many rights and privileges not available to their sisters in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
As Jef Huysmans explains, it is not just the material wealth, but also the clash between the shia muslims of Iran and the sunnis of Saudi Arabia that allows for some room for manoeuvre.
Therefore the culture of islam differs greatly from country to country and does really depend on how developed the civil society has become, on size and the level of material wealth achieved by the middle classes and the combativity of the working class and poor.
Egypt shows this more than any other country, with the possible exception of Turkey. Egyptian cities have expanded enormously in the past decade and unemployment provides a ready recruiting base for the Muslim Brotherhood. This brand of militant islam - only one of at least four contending ideologies within the religion - seeks to impose a literal interpretation of sharia law, advocates jihad against all liberal intellectuals and non-muslims, has carried out many massacres like the one at Luxor a few years ago and is viciously repressed by the Egyptian state.
On the other hand, the Egyptian working class and trade unions are also suppressed by the Egyptian state. They have been engaged in very militant strike waves for the past three years in the cotton mills, many led by women. The Muslim Brotherhood does not approve, but its influence is waning, not only because of police oppression, but because the Egyptian working class seeks their right to fight for better wages and conditions on their own behalf, not as a gift from a new Nasser.
The rising battle for rights by the organised working class is a rerun in certain respects of the bourgeois battle for rights of the American and French revolutionaries of the 18th century, but workers can only achieve their rights when they abolish exploitation itself. Then they will be able to tackle the material conditions that fuel the oppression of women, gays and lesbians and all other forms of human oppression.
That is the difference between a civil regime of rights and a human regime of real economic and social equality based on the production of the superabundance of wealth, which Marx outlined in The German ideology.
Notes
1. K Marx On the Jewish question: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question
2. J Huysmans, ‘Culture, rights and justice in a globalising world’, in W Brown, S Bromley and S Athreye (eds) Ordering the international: history, change and transformation London 2004.
3. See G Downing, ‘Zoological determinism’ Weekly Worker November 8 2007 (a critique of an article of the same name which appeared in The Guardian October 23 2007).
4. November 26 2004, www.wsws.org/articles/2002/apr2002/oil-a29.shtml
