The Fallacies of Neoliberalism and the Emergence of Human Rights

Alberto Moncada

Translated by Louis Edgar Esparza

Introduction
How is it possible that an economic system that benefits merely ten percent of the populace is accepted by a plurality of the population?
How is it possible that well-regarded popular economists defend this system uncritically, especially now that there is an international reaction against it, translating into political transformations under the thumb of neoliberalism?

Neoliberalism is the ultimate and most extreme version of capitalism, begun by heads of state, Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States taking advantage of the moment of collapse of the communist system. This final version is accentuated by globalization.

But Globalization is the third chapter in the history of capitalism. The first was state capitalism, colonization, exercised by powerful states over other, weaker ones, to defend themselves against their own risks and to control their activity, generally preferring the use of force. This is the case between Spain and Latin America, between England and India, and between Belgium and the Congo. The protection of states against their own business enterprise will be the subject of the second chapter. The United States sends their Army to protect the interests of the United Fruit Company in Central America, founding the expression "banana republic." In another sense, this is the origin of the military coup in Chile and as usual, with the petroleum problem, with the crisis in the Middle East. In the third chapter, the protagonists are the multinational corporations that benefit from the protection of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and especially the World Trade Organization, to privilege their own interests over the interests of the states on which they are sitting upon. This chapter represents the moment of the most amount of liberty of capital, not so much to open up the borders to free trade, but more to impose upon those countries onto which the labor and environmental laws they exploit. This freedom allows an organizational reinforcement that goes from foreign direct investment to the creation of monetary paradises where they hide their money, leading to the overvalued financial sector and again, the exploitation of the countries in which this occurs.

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The Depression: A Long-Term View

by Immanuel Wallerstein

The depression has started. Journalists are still coyly enquiring of economists whether or not we may be entering a mere recession. Don't believe it for a minute. We are already at the beginning of a full-blown worldwide depression with extensive unemployment almost everywhere. It may take the form of a classic nominal deflation, with all its negative consequences for ordinary people. Or it might take the form, a bit less likely, of a runaway inflation, which is simply another way in which values deflate, and which is even worse for ordinary people.

Of course everyone is asking what has triggered this depression. Is it the derivatives, which Warren Buffett called "financial weapons of mass destruction"? Or is it the subprime mortgages? Or is it oil speculators? This is a blame game, and of no real importance. This is to concentrate on the dust, as Fernand Braudel called it, of short-term events. If we want to understand what is going on, we need to look at two other temporalities, which are far more revealing. One is that of medium-term cyclical swings. And one is that of the long-term structural trends.

The capitalist world-economy has had, for several hundred years at least, two major forms of cyclical swings. One is the so-called Kondratieff cycles that historically were 50-60 years in length. And the other is the hegemonic cycles which are much longer.

In terms of the hegemonic cycles, the United States was a rising contender for hegemony as of 1873, achieved full hegemonic dominance in 1945, and has been slowly declining since the 1970s. George W. Bush's follies have transformed a slow decline into a precipitate one. And as of now, we are past any semblance of U.S. hegemony. We have entered, as normally happens, a multipolar world. The United States remains a strong power, perhaps still the strongest, but it will continue to decline relative to other powers in the decades to come. There is not much that anyone can do to change this.

The Kondratieff cycles have a different timing. The world came out of the last Kondratieff B-phase in 1945, and then had the strongest A-phase upturn in the history of the modern world-system. It reached its height circa 1967-73, and started on its downturn. This B-phase has gone on much longer than previous B-phases and we are still in it.

The characteristics of a Kondratieff B-phase are well-known and match what the world-economy has been experiencing since the 1970s. Profit rates from productive activities go down, especially in those types of production that have been most profitable. Consequently, capitalists who wish to make really high levels of profit turn to the financial arena, engaging in what is basically speculation. Productive activities, in order not to become too unprofitable, tend to move from core zones to other parts of the world-system, trading lower transactions costs for lower personnel costs. This is why jobs have been disappearing from Detroit, Essen, and Nagoya and factories have been expanding in China, India, and Brazil.

As for the speculative bubbles, some people always make a lot of money in them. But speculative bubbles always burst, sooner or later. If one asks why this Kondratieff B-phase has lasted so long, it is because the powers that be - the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and their collaborators in western Europe and Japan - have intervened in the market regularly and importantly - 1987 (stock market plunge), 1989 (savings-and-loan collapse), 1997 (East Asian financial fall), 1998 (Long Term Capital Management mismanagement), 2001-2002 (Enron) - to shore up the world-economy. They learned the lessons of previous Kondratieff B-phases, and the powers that be thought they could beat the system. But there are intrinsic limits to doing this. And we have now reached them, as Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke are learning to their chagrin and probably amazement. This time, it will not be so easy, probably impossible, to avert the worst.

In the past, once a depression wreaked its havoc, the world-economy picked up again, on the basis of innovations that could be quasi-monopolized for a while. So, when people say that the stock market will rise again, this is what they are thinking will happen, this time as in the past, after all the damage has been done to the world's populations. And maybe it will, in a few years or so.

There is however something new that may interfere with this nice cyclical pattern that has sustained the capitalist system for some 500 years. The structural trends may interfere with the cyclical patterns. The basic structural features of capitalism as a world-system operate by certain rules that can be drawn on a chart as a moving upward equilibrium. The problem, as with all structural equilibria of all systems, is that over time the curves tend to move far from equilibrium and it becomes impossible to bring them back to equilibrium.

What has made the system move so far from equilibrium? In very brief, it is because over 500 years the three basic costs of capitalist production - personnel, inputs, and taxation - have steadily risen as a percentage of possible sales price, such that today they make it impossible to obtain the large profits from quasi-monopolized production that have always been the basis of significant capital accumulation. It is not because capitalism is failing at what it does best. It is precisely because it has been doing it so well that it has finally undermined the basis of future accumulation.

What happens when we reach such a point is that the system bifurcates (in the language of complexity studies). The immediate consequence is high chaotic turbulence, which our world-system is experiencing at the moment and will continue to experience for perhaps another 20-50 years. As everyone pushes in whatever direction they think immediately best for each of them, a new order will emerge out of the chaos along one of two alternate and very different paths.

We can assert with confidence that the present system cannot survive. What we cannot predict is which new order will be chosen to replace it, because it will be the result of an infinity of individual pressures. But sooner or later, a new system will be installed. This will not be a capitalist system but it may be far worse (even more polarizing and hierarchical) or much better (relatively democratic and relatively egalitarian) than such a system. The choice of a new system is the major worldwide political struggle of our times.

As for our immediate short-run ad interim prospects, it is clear what is happening everywhere. We have been moving into a protectionist world (forget about so-called globalization). We have been moving into a much larger direct role of government in production. Even the United States and Great Britain are partially nationalizing the banks and the dying big industries. We are moving into populist government-led redistribution, which can take left-of-center social-democratic forms or far right authoritarian forms. And we are moving into acute social conflict within states, as everyone competes over the smaller pie. In the short-run, it is not, by and large, a pretty picture.

SSF Interview Series with Mark Frezzo

Shulamith Koenig

On behalf of Sociologists without Borders (SSF), Mark Frezzo interviewed Shula Koenig—founder and president of PDHRE, the People’s Movement for Human Rights Learning and recipient of the 2003 United Nations Award for Outstanding Achievements in the Field of Human Rights. Designed to develop and advance pedagogies for human rights learning and dialogue relevant to people’s daily lives in the context of their struggles for social and economic justice, societal development and democracy,” PDHRE includes activists, community organizers, NGO representatives, UN officials, and scholars (PDHRE). Upon establishing PDHRE in 1988, Ms. Koenig worked with the UN Human Rights Center and the UN Commission on Human Rights, participated in the Vienna Human Rights Conference in 1993, and pushed tirelessly for the UN Decade of Human Rights Education (1994-2004). In recent years, Ms. Koenig and PDHRE have pursued the Human Rights Cities Program. Emphasizing popular participation in decision-making, a human rights city is “a community based on equality and nondiscrimination” .

Frezzo: Let’s begin with a few reflections on your work as a human rights educator. Interestingly enough, your writings and lectures reflect a taste for religious imagery. For example, you often use the term “evangelist” to characterize your role as an advocate of human rights. In addition, you often allude to the Bible and other sacred texts in demonstrating that the concept of human rights is rooted in a sense of dignity. Finally, in a manner characteristic of a “secular religion,” you offer a totalizing vision of human rights that encompasses morality, law, politics, social life, and culture. In a way, your reference to religion has the effect of de-emphasizing the role of the European Enlightenment in codifying and propagating human rights. Tell us more about your vision of human rights.

Koenig: As the psychologist Alfred Adler established, human culture is rooted in the desire for dignity and belonging. Notwithstanding their contributions to the canon of human rights and their occasional appeals to universality, the world’s major religions are by definition exclusionary. They impose conditions of belonging on their adherents. In contrast, the political ideology of human rights is intrinsically and irreducibly inclusive. By definition, all people are included in the framework of human rights. Since I was trained as an engineer and worked on water distribution and irrigation , I like water-related allegories. Human rights can be seen as the banks of a river. Life flows freely between the banks. In times of flooding, as the water levels rise, people strengthen the banks to protect themselves.

Frezzo: The image of levies as concretized human rights is especially poignant in light of the humanitarian disaster in New Orleans in 2005. In revealing the total erosion of the social compact, along with enduring inequalities of race, class, and gender, the disaster in New Orleans had the effect of inspiring sociologists to “go public,” so to speak, with their advocacy of human rights. Perhaps this will lead to greater collaboration among scholars, NGOs, movements, and community groups. This points to the mission of PDHRE—namely, the promotion of human rights education. What are the major principles of human rights education?

Koenig: In actuality, I prefer the term “learning” because it suggests an active participatory position, whereas the term “education” often suggests a passive one. In my work with PDHRE, I operate from the following premise: although all people are bearers of human rights, many people are not aware of their human rights. Thus, the purpose of PDHRE is to facilitate program that enables people to be aware of their human rights and own them as a powerful too for action. This has the effect of mobilizing people to empower themselves guided by the holisitic human rights framework..

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Working women work harder than men?

A new study has found that
women feel they have to work harder than men in a workplace.

Sociologists Elizabeth Gorman of the University of Virginia and Julie Kmec of Washington State University carried out five different surveys given in different years, to different groups of men and women in Britain and the United States.
They discovered that a gender gap persisted in ratings of the statement: "My job requires that I work very hard,” with women significantly more likely to say they strongly agreed.
“Between a man and a woman who hold the same job, shoulder the same burdens at home and have the same education and skills, the woman is likely to feel she must work harder,” Elizabeth said.
The paper, 'We (Have to) Try Harder: Gender and Required Work Effort in Britain and the United States' says, "We argue that the association between sex and reported required work effort is best interpreted as reflecting stricter performance standards imposed on women, even when women and men hold the same jobs."
"This is what women are up against. They have to prove themselves," Elizabeth added.
Controlling for physical and mental demands of the job and whether family responsibilities drained energy, Elizabeth and Julie found that neither group of factors explain the different findings about work effort. The only interpretation that held up was that women were held to higher performance standards.
In looking for another potential reason, the sociologists considered whether domestic responsibilities outside of work, including child care and housework, made women feel more fatigued and that they had to work harder to keep up, but that did not emerge as the answer either.
"Marriage and parenthood had the same effect on reports of required effort for women and men. In the U.S. sample, the researchers were able to match workers on the number of hours they spent on childcare and housework," Elizabeth Said.
Between men and women who performed the same amount of child care and housework, women were still more likely to say their jobs required them to work very hard,” Elizabeth added.
“We know that people give lower marks to an essay, a painting or a resume when it has a woman’s name on it. And when a man and a woman work together on a project, people assume the man contributed more than the woman did. In light of this previous research, it makes sense to conclude that women have to work harder to win their bosses’ approval,” she said.
See:: The Times of India

moveoncities

MoveOnCities.org

by Judith Blau

I feel we need to coin a phrase. ‘MoveOnCities.org’ might serve the purpose, because just as MoveOn.Org incorporates Americans into the national political process, the new city movement incorporates Americans into related grassroots processes that fundamentally transform their cities.

It is a city movement because the main tool that Americans have discovered for effective change is the City Ordinance, and four have been central: Nondiscrimination, Human Rights, Fair Trade, and Anti-Sweatshop Ordinances. These are not as distinct as they might appear since each draws from a human rights framework.

Take San Francisco. In 1998, responding to a broad based coalition of groups, the City of San Francisco passed an Ordinance to adopt into law, the International Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). (Do note that the US is not a state-party to CEDAW.) Much credit for relentlessly campaigning in San Francisco goes to the Women’s Institute for Leadership Development for Human Rights (WILD). WILD is now pursuing other human rights objectives for San Francisco: universal health care, minimum standards for the protection of prisoners, affordable housing, and standards for employment.

Take Austin, Covington (KY), East Baton Rouge, Fort Worth, Ithaca, New Orleans, and Peoria. All have recently passed legislation that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, just a tiny number of cities that already have, according to Human Rights Campaign.

Take New York City. Energized by the success of the 2002 statewide anti-sweatshop campaign for legislation that ensures ethical procurement practices, an amazingly ambitious coalition emerged in New York City: the New York City Human Rights Initiative (NYCHRI) Formed in 2002, NYCHRI is a coalition of 90 groups, including such heavy weights as ACLU and Amnesty International, as well as smaller community based organizations. NYCHRI’s position is that New Yorkers should be protected by international human rights laws, and is campaigning for the city to adopt provisions from international treaties, much the same way that WILD is in San Francisco.

Take Eugene, Oregon. On the verge of becoming a Human Rights City, the objective will be to filter city programs through international human rights laws. Already in North America Edmonton has declared itself to be a Human Rights City, and is affiliated with the international network of human rights cities, Peoples’ Decade for Human Rights Education (PDHRE). Edmonton has committed itself to closing gaps in access to healthcare, employment, social services, and housing, to ending cycles of discrimination, and to ensuring an inclusive, pluralistic community. PDHRE, headquartered in New York City, provides resources for Human Rights Cities around the world.

Take Media (PA) and Mountain View (CA), cities that have each passed a Fair Trade Resolution: , which means in practice that the towns serve only Fair Trade coffee and tea at receptions and social gatherings, and that nonprofit organizations and private enterprises commit to work to ensure these commitments.

Take Amherst, Boston, Chicago, Brattleboro (VT), Los Angeles, Portsmouth, Seattle, Las Vegas, New York City, San Diego, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, and Washington, DC., among other cities with Fair Trade Coalitions: They conduct educational campaigns, both with merchants and consumers, and lobby city agencies to adopt fair-trade procurement practices.

It seems evident that the federal government is not providing the moral leadership on any of these issues. That’s because human rights generally are a thorny topic in Washington. As Kenneth Roth, Director of Human Rights Watch, clarifies, the US, through legal obfuscation, exempts itself from all international human rights treaties. Let us imagine, however, through some amazing transformation of national policy that the US made a complete U-Turn and became a good citizen in the international community and at the same time pledges to Americans that it would uphold human rights treaties, and strive to protect Americans’ rights.. In theory this would involve treaties currently in force: 1) Civil and Political Rights; 2) Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; 3) Elimination of Discrimination against Racial Minorities; 4) Elimination of Discrimination against Women; 5) Rights of the Child; 6) Rights of Migrants; and 7) Prohibition of Torture.

Even were the US to make that U-Turn and to make a commitment to uphold human rights, it would not be enough. Human rights need to be embedded in daily practices, social interaction, local norms, local opportunities and upheld in local laws. Its only in communities where people can practice deeper forms of democracy, foster egalitarian values, and uphold norms of mutual respect and solidarity.

If we are lucky the US will make that U-Turn and if we are very, very lucky, MoveOnCities.Org is on the move.

Judith Blau (jrblau@email.unc.edu) writes on human rights, often with Alberto Moncada, is president of Sociologists without Borders , and blogs at http://www.humanrightsnow.net/

See::::: http://www।commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/24/7864/