Leftist Radicals Who Refer to Human Rights Abuses and the Abuse of International Law: Should Such References Be Criticized?

References to human rights and international law seem to be in vogue by the radical left these days. Thus, John Clarke, former major organizer for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, posted the following recently on Facebook:

Imagine if a regime Washington was hostile to had carried out 1% of the human rights abuses and violations of international law [my emphasis] that Israel has engaged in. It would have faced Security Council resolutions, sanctions, a freezing of assets and a US led fleet of warships would be enforcing a total blockade.

It would be very useful if the countries of the Global South stopped playing multilateral charades on Washington’s terms and took meaningful efforts to isolate and sanction Israel in open opposition to the Biden administration.

Of course, the US government (and the Canadian government and various other governments) refer to international law and human rights abuses when it is convenient for them–and then forget such talk when it is to their advantage. Hypocrisy runs rampant in a politics that represents the interests of the class of employers. However, using talk about human rights and international law plays into the hands of the class of employers since such means limit our actions to playing the game that is, ultimately, in the interests of the class of employers.

We should certainly point out the hypocrisy of political regimes that call for sanctions for human rights abuses and breaches of international law with the one hand while ignoring such abuses and breaches when it is convenient for them. We may even use international law at times as a defensive tactic to prevent a government from exercising its power that is contrary to the interests of workers, citizens, immigrants and migrant workers; we should, though, in such a case make it clear that we do not idealize international law (and talk of human rights). Such idealization plays into the hands of the class of employers since it gives the message to the working class that we need to respect the law and some vague norm called human rights independently of our own class interests.

I have pointed out the limitations of the use of human rights and international law in other posts. I draw on thost posts in the following critique.

Human Rights as a Substitute for the Struggle for a Socialist Society

Human rights, for example, has emerged at the grassroots level to replace attempts to create a socialist society. From Samuel Moyn (2018), Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, pages 122-123:

… especially in the global north, Cold War assumptions had long since damaged the 1940s communion of civil and political with economic and social rights, through the sheer force of insistence and repetition. And then, the new visibility of human rights ideals occurred as activists, disillusioned about the failures of socialism, the violence socialist politics sparked, or both—including in socialism’s postcolonial forms—embraced their roles, conceiving of “human rights” as a morally pure form of activism that would not require the exaggerated hopes or depressing compromises of past utopias.Graphic evidence of the turn away from socialism and the skepticism toward social rights comes from Peter Benenson and Aryeh Neier, the respective founders of the first prominent global non-governmental organization and of the major American one concerned with human rights across the period. Despite having stood as a candidate for the Labour Party several times in his earlier life, when Benenson founded Amnesty International in the 1960s, he explicitly understood it as an alternative to socialism and set in motion a pattern that led the group to confine its attention to a narrow focus on political imprisonment. It added torture to its bailiwick in the 1970s. and the death penalty in the 1980s, shifting to poverty only after the millennium. “Look on the Socialist Parties the world over, ye mighty, and despair,” Benenson explained to a correspondent in justification of his emphases. Part of the reason for his depression was his own serial losses in election campaigns, but he also admitted, in the Christian idiom that frequently crept into his work, that “the quest for an outward and visible Kingdom is mistaken.” For the founder, human rights activism was much more about saving the activist’s soul, rather than building social justice.

American Aryeh Neier founded Human Rights Watch in the 1970s with an exclusionary attention to political violations in left-and right-wing regimes. Despite his early political awakening, thanks to the six-time socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas, and his past as the president of the labor-affiliated Student League for Industrial Democracy (which later became Students for a Democratic Society), Neier nonetheless chose a class-free civil libertarianism as his definitive mode of politics. Given that the American Civil Liberties Union, over which he presided before co-founding Human Rights Watch, had ascended to prominence by departing from the class politics that originally birthed it, Neier’s Cold War stewardship of liberties and rights confined his attention to basics like free speech and a free press. Human Rights Watch functioned primarily to transfer such single-minded civil libertarianism abroad, with funding from foundation grants that singled out state repression rather than pursuing a more contentious social justice. Through the end of his career in the organization, Neier fought bitterly with anyone who tried to make room for distributive justice, including as a matter of social rights, tirelessly invoking the Cold War liberal Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between negative liberty and positive self-realization in his defense.

Human rights as an international grassroots movement emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s, and it arose and flourished shortly before neoliberalism arose. This is no coincidence. This does not mean that they are the same, but they are both hegemonic projects that inhibit a movement towards the abolition of a society characterized by the class power of employers and therefore the emergence of a socialist way of living.

Human rights as usually presented via AI not only substitute the pursuit of human rights at the expense of the struggle for the elimination of the class power of employers and the associated economic, political and social forms of exploitation and oppression–that is to say, as a substitute for the struggle for socialism. Human rights organizations, despite their own sometimes detailed efforts to substantiate what they consider to be human rights abuses, often simply neglect to contextualize such abuses in the wider context of the class power of employers.

From Christoph Henning 2005), Philosophy After Marx: 100 years of misreadings and the normative turn in political philosophy, pages 8-9:

Marx has largely disappeared from the stage of philosophy since 1989: he has been
declared definitively dead by his critics. His place has been taken, within the sociophilosophical literature published in Germany since the 1990s, by the rise of normative principles. Discussions turned on whether the newly unified country required a new constitution, on how to conceptualise the hierarchy of norms within the ‘postnational constellation’ formed by the new nation state and the new Europe, on how human rights and ‘justice’ might be grounded philosophically, and such like. As rewarding as such normative reflections are, they cannot replace inquiries into the material base. When a normativistically restricted point of view takes the place of the former social theory,
super-normativism results.

Human rights organizations and individuals often justify their activities and views on the basis of an abstract respect for being human without linking this up with the general exploitative and oppressive structure of the capitalist economy and the capitalist state. Indeed, human rights organizations display a decided lack of analysis of the socially determined material conditions of the production of human life characteristic of class society. In particular, advocates of human rights can consistently oppose violations of human rights and the continued existence of the exploitation and oppression of workers on a daily basis. From Samuel Moyn (2014), “A Powerless Companion: Human Rights in the Age of Neoliberalism,” in pages 147-169, Law and Contemporary Problems, Volume 77, page 149:

although the record of capitalism in our time is highly mixed when it comes to the achievement and violation of basic human rights, its most serious victim is equality (of resources and opportunities alike) both in national and global settings—a value that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the international human rights movements following in its wake do not even set out to defend.

It must be said that it is debatable whether “its most serious victim is equality;” its most serious victim may well be freedom. That issue, however, will not be addressed here.

International Law as Law Limits the Struggle for a Socialist Society

We can, under some circumstances, use the international law in terms of its content, but we also need to make clear that this use is due to the exceptional circumstances and that international law in terms of its form not only limits what can be achieved but can easily reinforce the political and economic structures of power.

China Mieville, in his book Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law, emphasises that the law, because of its formal nature of theoretically treating everyone as a legal, isolated subject with, in general, equal rights that are enforceable if one of the parties decides to breach the formal rights of others, has as one of its background conditions the use of force or coercion to ensure that such rights are respected. Law, rights and obligations thus necessarily involve some form of coercive agent to enforce the law, rights and obligations.

But what happens when the so-called equal legal subjects formally are in fact unequal in terms of their actual social and material power?

Robert Knox (2009), in his article “Marxism, International Law, and Political Strategy,” in pages 413-436, Leiden Journal of International Law, Volume 22 (2009), page 417, addresses this issue:

In order to resolve this question Mieville analyses the relationship between law and coercion… although it posits individuals as formally equal, these individuals have radically opposed interests. These opposed interests can only be resolved through violence, which means that the possibility of violent resolution is inherent. … Once it is acknowledged that international law has a deep structural connection withv iolence, the solution …
is that – in Marx’s words (from which Mieville takes the title of his book) – ‘between
equal rights force decides’.

Mieville, however, according to Knox, limits his definition of coercion to military coercion. He also assumes that the only actors on the international stage are nations. Knox argues against both assumptions.

There is force through arms–military coercion at the international level and police coercion at the national level (although the military may of course be used internally as well). However, Knox also points out that there is economic coercion and ideological coercion. International actors may also be organized workers across borders and not just nation-states or governments. Page 428:

Second, there is the argument that a concern with legitimacy and consistency might be manifested on the part of those interpreting the law. This position is perhaps best exemplified with the oft-quoted position advocated by E. P. Thompson in his Whigs and Hunters:

If the law is evidently partial and unjust, then it will mask nothing, legitimise nothing,
contribute nothing to any class’s hegemony. The essential precondition for the effectiveness of law, in its function as ideology, is that it shall display an independence from gross manipulation and shall seem to be just.

… Thus it may be that a particular interpretation of the law will not be taken, because it obviously favours a particular class interest, or is inconsistent with a stated ideological justification for a given course of action. It may be that in instances where such an interpretation is put forward, progressive social forces are able to seize on such inconsistency and mount an immanent critique of the interpretation. In response to such action, or in order to avoid it, forcemay ‘decide’ in a manner consistent with the wishes of progressive forces.

The Dangers of the Form of International Law for the Radical Left

The problems with which progressives are confronted – poverty, war, disease – do not simply just ‘happen’, they are manifestations of ‘background’, structural factors – be they political, economic, or ideological; ‘“moment[s]” in a larger structure of meaning that can be known, analyzed, and potentially defeated’. But legal argument is both too abstract and at the same time too specific to deal effectively with these problems. Legal argument frames its participants as abstract, self-contained individuals; as such it treats their actions, rather than the reasons for these actions, as decisive. Moreover, these actions become relevant only inasmuch as they form the content of a dispute or violation of the law. Legal argument therefore resolves the particular disputes of abstract individuals without ever touching on the logics which shape and condition their actions, and in this sense it is too abstract.

Law is also too specific in that its form of resolving problems often limits its applicability to very specific disputes. Page 430-431:

Although legal argument may be able to deal with effects, it proves incapable of dealing with causes; this is where legal argument proves too specific. Legal argument resolves specific ‘violations’, ‘disputes’, or ‘instances’, but it never questions the general structural logics that lurk beneath them, and so cannot fully eradicate the problems it addresses. This is not to say that those who adopt legal argument are unaware of the systemic logics that underlie particular actions, simply that in adopting a legal strategy they act as if they were unaware of such logics and so cannot address them.

Conclusion

Clarke, like much of the radical left (and indeed almost all of the social-democratic or social-reformist left), seems to be little concerned with taking into account references to human rights and international law when it comes to addressing the current genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. Radical leftists, though, would do well to think about the political implications of their invoking human rights and international law in relation to the creation of a socialist society. If they do not, their practices will likely not lead towards a socialist society but rather to a reinforcement of the present system characterized by the class power of employers and the economic, political and social structures associated with that power.