This is a continuation of a series of posts on summaries of articles, mainly on education.
When I was a French teacher at Ashern Central School, in Ashern, Manitoba, Canada, I started to place critiques, mainly (although not entirely) of the current school system. At first, I merely printed off the articles, but then I started to provide a summary of the article along with the article. I placed the summaries along with the articles in a binder (and, eventually, binders), and I placed the binder in the staff lounge.
As chair of the Equity and Justice Committee for Lakeshore Teachers’ Association of the Manitoba Teachers’ Society (MTS), I also sent the articles and summary to the Ning of the MTS (a ning is “an online platform for people and organizations to create custom social networks”).
As I pointed out in a previous post, it is necessary for the radical left to use every opportunity to question the legitimacy of existing institutions.
If you would listen to a so-called Marxist, Mr. X (the name is irrelevant in this context), though, it was a waste of time doing what I did–but Mr. X never spells out he has dispelled the illusions of regular workers.
The attached article for the ESJ Ning is prefaced by the following:
Hello everyone,Attached is another article sent to the ESJ Ning. It is prefaced with the following:Richard McIntyre, in his article, “The Perplexities of Worker Rights,” maintains that the focus on human rights has, historically, been criticized by all theoreticians, including Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian criticisms of so-called natural human rights, Edmund Burke’s virtue criticism or Karl Marx’s historical and ideological criticism of defining human rights on the basis of a view of human nature that itself is based on a particular society—capitalist society.
It was only with the devastating consequences that arose from the Holocaust that the issue of human rights emerged once again and has been fed because of the globalization of capital. Human-rights advocates imply that the establishment of human rights provides the best means by which to prevent the degradation of human beings.
McIntyre has serious reservations about the use of human-rights legislation to protect especially the collective rights of workers. He is sympathetic with the goals of many who advocate for human rights, but he doubts in the efficacy of such rights in achieving the goal of human dignity. He notes the irony that human rights are supposed to be universal but require particular nation-states to enforce them. There is no international government for the enforcement of human rights, and human rights inevitable have relevance only within the context of national rights, and national rights are related to citizenship rights.
The focus is generally on individual rights rather than on collective rights. Solutions are legalistic rather than grass-roots oriented.
He points out that such human-rights organizations as Human Rights Watch focuses on particular companies and names them in order to “shame” them into stopping the trafficking of women and child labour rather than providing a broader analysis and critique of the social structures that lead to and perpetuate such situations in the first place.
McIntyre also points out that human rights focuses on individual rights—quite consistent with the neoliberal onslaught against the organized working class for decades. His point is consistent with the curious observation that Gail Asper, who was the keynote speaker at a Mel Myer’s Labour Conference. Would Gail Asper aspire to the building of a site where the workers of the world have been injured throughout the decades because of the lack of collective supports to protect workers? How many preventable injuries, diseases and deaths at work occur throughout the world because of the pursuit of profit at the expense of human beings?
Where is the right to organize and bargain collectively—a right according to the International Labour Organization– enshrined in national constitutions? Certainly not in Canada—nor, of course, in the United States (the land of the so-called free).
McIntyre maintains that Marx’s view that, technologically, we have the means to create a society without want and controlled by the workers themselves, but we lack the ideological and organizational basis for such a society. Recent social movements have certainly challenged the globalization of capital, but globalized human rights movements will unlikely mount an effective challenge to the power of employers throughout the world since they share the same premises as employers—individual rights. Class power and interests help shape what is considered a right in the first place.
McIntyre provides an example to illustrate how similar techniques in the past have been used by the capitalist class to divert criticism away from their power as such. Capitalist employers often criticized the slave system, with the consequence that attention was diverted away from a criticism of the exploitation of workers inherent in the wage system itself. Similarly, a focus on human rights without looking at the power of employers as such diverts attention away from the need to enhance the collective power of workers against employers within particular nations. McIntyre gives the example of the anti-sweatshop movement, a movement which many corporations can support since it looks like they are being good corporate citizens—while such a movement diverts people’s criticisms away from the power of corporations and employers as such. Rather than criticizing the power of employers as a whole, the anti-sweatshop movement focuses on a subset of employers. The anti-sweatshop movement thus does not define the problem as the existence and power of employers as such but as a particular subset of employers—convenient for the class of employers as a whole.
Historically, the courts have been hostile to workers’ rights (since courts tend to operate on the assumption that contracts are about individual rights). Consequently, collective worker rights have been won through collective bargaining (which itself, as I argued in another post, were won on the basis of breaking the law) and on specific legislation.
Other collective rights, such as the right to work, to receive medical care, to housing and to education, have not been enshrined in the American constitution (nor, for that matter, in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms). The human rights movement has generally neglected such collective rights despite the fact that many abuses of individual rights by governments are a function of individuals fighting for collective rights in opposition to such governments—and employers. Furthermore, in the case of the United States, individual rights have taken precedence over collective rights to such an extent that unions have been gutted, with much of the post-War collective-bargaining regime dismantled.
The civil rights movement was essentially coopted in the form of individual human rights; rather than the rights attaching to the working class, they were attached to individuals. Personnel departments (later euphemistically called human resources departments) transformed the individual rights into a form that permitted maximum profitability of corporations.
McIntyre does not deny that fighting for human rights may be useful in some circumstances, but the key word is “may” here. The assumption by many that human rights are in themselves good leaves out of account the impact on class and how individual human rights can be easily coopted by corporations for their own purposes.
McIntyre, however, does not address the issue of the extent to which the post-war collective-bargaining regime can be resuscitated following the first major world capitalist economic crisis and the subsequent move towards neoliberalism. It is likely that the labour movement will have turn to more radical means if it is to realize its collective interests. If the labour movement were sufficiently powerful to have collective-bargaining and other class rights enshrined in the constitution, for example, they would probably be sufficiently powerful to realize economic democracy—but that issue is for another post.
Equity and social justice—would they be better served through a struggle for individual human rights or through collective class rights?
The Abolitionary 