Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile: The Dethronement of Politics 1 страница
The Morals of the Market. Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism
Contents
Introduction: The Morals of the Market
1 ‘The Central Values of Civilization Are in Danger’
2 There Is No Such Thing as ‘the Economy’: On Social and Economic Rights
3 Neoliberalism, Human Rights and the ‘Shabby Remnants of Colonial Imperialism’
4 Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile: The Dethronement of Politics
5 Powerless Companions or Fellow Travellers? Human Rights and the Neoliberal Assault on Post-Colonial Economic Justice
Afterword: Human Rights, Neoliberalism and Economic Inequality Today
Introduction: The Morals of the Market
Any free society presupposes, in particular, a widely accepted moral code. The principles of this moral code should govern collective no less than private action.
Draft Mont Pèlerin Society Statement of Aims, 1947
In the wake of 2017’s devastating Grenfell fire, the leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, sparked outrage by calling for the requisitioning of empty investment properties to house survivors of the incinerated apartment block. As the survivors slept out in churches, mosques and local halls, Corbyn’s call to appropriate ‘land-banked’ houses challenged the sanctity of private property. Writing in The Times a month later, Conservative Party peer Daniel Finkelstein cited these events as reason to support the Human Rights Act. Comparing Corbyn to the former Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, he argued that this was ‘exactly the reason we have human rights protection’ – so people can ‘secure their individual liberty – in this case their right to property – when the popular will is against them’.1 For this wealthy lord, human rights were not for Grenfell’s survivors, among them undocumented migrants who, as Hannah Arendt noted long ago, should have been the exemplary subjects of human rights.2 Rather, human rights were necessary to protect a weak minority, Kensington’s absent property-owners, from the passions of the masses.
At least seventy-one people burned to death in Grenfell Tower. For the survivors, its burnt-out remains must be a bitter reminder of loved ones, family members, friends, neighbours. But Grenfell was not only a private catastrophe; it was also a deeply political, public one. Not only does it tell a contemporary ‘tale of two cities’, as Corbyn put it, referring to the mansions jutting up alongside neglected social-housing towers in the highly unequal borough; it also reveals the racialisation of poverty and vulnerability in a neoliberal period in which racial segmentation occurs as much through the impersonal, ‘colour-blind’ operation of the market as through direct racial discrimination. The fire was not only a result of what the Grenfell Action Group had previously warned was the dangerous ‘ineptitude and incompetence’ of the council, which had failed to install a sprinkler system or repair blocked fire-exits. The council’s decision to clad the building’s façade to improve its appearance when viewed from wealthy surrounding areas – and then to cut costs by opting for cheap, flammable cladding – also played a role, as did the privatisation of fire-safety assessments and cuts to the fire service.3 Grenfell embodied a ‘neoliberal urbanism’ characterised by the downgrading of social housing, the flouting of regulations, and the outsourcing of renovations to the lowest bidder, in a context of gentrification and the erosion of the supply of social housing.4
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Faced with such inequality and neglect, it would be easy to dismiss Finkelstein’s invocations of the human rights of investors as pure cynicism. Human rights, it is commonly supposed, embody a concern for human dignity that is deeply at odds with the imperatives of wealth accumulation, and are among the few weapons the most marginalised still have. Indeed, in the wake of the fire, a United Nations envoy announced that the UK might have breached its obligation to provide a human right to housing, and the independent Equality and Human Rights Commission appointed a panel of legal experts to examine whether the government had violated its obligations under the Human Rights Act. One year on, with little affordable housing in the borough, only 82 of the 203 households who lost their homes in the fire had been permanently re-housed.5
However easy it is to dismiss the idea of Kensington’s absentee investors as the subjects of human rights, it is more difficult to demarcate a ‘true’ human rights discourse from cynical appropriations of it. The ‘human right to dominate’ exists alongside the human rights of the dominated, and human rights have often proved more useful in protecting the wealthy and legitimising the interventions of the most powerful states than in protecting the powerless.6 Rather than being an isolated instance, Finkelstein’s argument for the human rights of property owners has a long lineage among neoliberal politicians and thinkers. When former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher began privatising council housing in the 1980s, she justified it as a way to secure human rights. Evoking a deep connection between liberty and property, Thatcher argued that ‘countries which deny private property rights also deny other human rights’.7 The claim that property rights are an ‘essential foundation for other human rights’, as the Chicago School economist Milton Friedman put it, provided a political justification for the neoliberal counter-revolution of the late twentieth century.8
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The language of human rights is notoriously slippery, marked by a ‘tactical polyvalence’ (in Michel Foucault’s words) according to which the effect of identical formulations differs ‘according to who is speaking, his position of power [and] the institutional context in which he happens to be speaking’.9 Nonetheless, to recognise that human rights lack a single meaning – that they are contingent political discourses, not unchangeable, metaphysical attributes of human nature – is not enough to explain the ease with which human rights discourses have been mobilised in defence of wealth and power in the period of neoliberal hegemony. Nor does it explain why it was that a distinctive politics of human rights became prevalent in the period of neoliberal ascendancy and flourished alongside the retrenchment of the welfare state. It does not help us explain why, as the neoliberals instituted a closure of the political imagination by insisting that there was no alternative to endless austerity, human rights defenders disparaged revolutionary politics as totalitarian. For some of their most prominent defenders, the role of human rights was ‘not to open the gates of paradise, but to bolt the gates of hell’ (in the French ‘New Philosopher’ André Glucksmann’s words).10
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This book is an investigation of the historical and conceptual relations between human rights and neoliberalism. It has often been noted that the embrace of the language of human rights by leaders of Anglo-American and European states, and by a new generation of international human rights NGOs, took place in the late 1970s, just as governments also began to embrace neoliberalism.11 Attesting to this convergence, the award of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Economics to the Chicago School’s Milton Friedman was followed the next year by Amnesty International’s 1977 Nobel Peace Prize. This book seeks to explain why these two revivals and reinventions of liberalism took place at the same time, and why their trajectories have been so intertwined ever since.
In attempting to understand this convergence, I follow the lead of many thinkers who have pointed to convergences and compatibilities between neoliberalism and human rights. Upendra Baxi’s pioneering work on ‘trade-related market-friendly human rights’ traced attempts by major corporations to mobilise the normative force of human rights to defend the rights of capital.12 Makau Mutua has long argued that the failure of human rights NGOs to pay attention to ‘economic powerlessness’ has helped to naturalise capitalist markets and subordinated labour relations.13 Costas Douzinas has similarly argued that negative freedom, which he frames as a euphemism for rejecting state regulation of the economy, has ‘dominated the Western conception of human rights and turned them into the perfect companion of neoliberalism’.14 For Wendy Brown, the politics of human rights not only ‘converges neatly with the requisites of liberal imperialism and global free trade’, but also serves to legitimise them.15 And Susan Marks has suggested that the more recent turn to examining the ‘root causes’ of human rights violations has in fact shielded the structural context in which violations of human rights are systematically reproduced.16
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In order to extend these observations, this book returns to another parallel history. Less well noted than the simultaneous rise of neoliberal and human rights in the 1970s is the fact that, in 1947, when, the UN Commission on Human Rights met for the first time at Lake Success to begin drafting an international bill of rights, a group of economists, philosophers and historians were gathered across the Atlantic in the Swiss Alpine village of Mont Pèlerin to consider the principles that could animate a new liberal order. The efforts of the first group resulted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which was conceived as ‘a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations’. The latter grouping founded the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS), which has been aptly described as the ‘neoliberal thought collective’.17
While most existing accounts of the relation between human rights and neoliberalism begin in the 1970s, I return to the 1940s to trace the development of neoliberal human rights thinking in the decades prior to the neoliberal ascendancy. In 1947, the divergences between those who drafted the UDHR and the neoliberals of Mont Pèlerin were more significant than their convergences. While both were concerned with threats to human dignity and liberty in the wake of World War II, their solutions differed markedly: the human rights delegates adopted an extensive list of social and economic rights, while the neoliberals depicted state welfare and planning as totalitarian threats to ‘Western civilisation’. My focus is on the ways in which neoliberal thinkers viewed the rise of human rights, and then mobilised and developed the language associated with them for their own ends. I suggest that a better understanding of the role of human rights in earlier neoliberal thinking can help us to understand their later convergence.
When a distinctive and powerful version of human rights began to be advocated by NGOs and the US state thirty years after the adoption of the UDHR, earlier attempts to enshrine rights to housing, food, education and medical care were supplanted by a narrow focus on civil and political rights. This version of human rights became hegemonic alongside neoliberal assaults on both the welfare state and postcolonial attempts to restructure the international economy in the interests of global equality. Human rights became the dominant ideology of a period marked by the demise of revolutionary utopias and socialist politics, succinctly encapsulated by Thatcher’s insistence that ‘there is no alternative’.
The economic transformations of this period were stark, from the rise of austerity and the retrenchment of state welfare provision to the commodification of public services, the deregulation of the finance sector and growing indebtedness. Consequently, critics of neoliberalism have homed in on its economic agenda. Nonetheless, I contend that we cannot understand why human rights and neoliberalism flourished together if we view neoliberalism as an exclusively economic doctrine.
Neoliberalism Against the Economy
Neoliberalism is commonly understood as an amoral economic ideology that subordinates all values to an economic rationality. In a powerful instance of this critique, Wendy Brown argues that neoliberalism’s ‘economization’ of life configures the human ‘always, only, and everywhere as homo economicus’.18 Elsewhere she argues that, despite its pragmatic reconciliation with neoconservatism in the United States, neoliberalism is ‘expressly amoral at the level of both ends and means’.19 This form of criticism is not new, and nor is it confined to this neoliberal form of capitalism; it resembles nothing so much as The Communist Manifesto’s awe-struck descriptions of the bourgeoisie, which leaves ‘no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”’.20 Although the argument that capitalism drowns all values in the ‘icy water of egotistical calculation’ was borrowed from capitalism’s earlier conservative critics, Marx and Engels were without nostalgia for feudal bonds cemented by religion and sentimentality. Contemporary critics, while largely agreeing that neoliberalism reduces all values to cash value, have been similarly divided about whether this is cause for celebration or denunciation.
For Michel Foucault, lecturing in 1979, the newly ascendant neoliberalism seemed to offer a refreshing break with the punitive moralism of earlier liberalisms.21 In the ‘purely economic analysis’ of the Chicago School’s human capital theorist Gary Becker, Foucault saw a fundamentally amoral account of the criminal as a homo economicus, who acts expecting a profit and bears the risk of penal sanction. From this perspective, Foucault notes, ‘there is no difference between the infraction of the highway code and a premediated murder’.22 Consequently, a neoliberal penal policy would merely adjust penalties and rules to reduce the supply of crime, while eschewing the attempt to discipline the criminal and cure her of an assumed pathology. Foucault speculated that a neoliberal society would not be a moralising society of normalisation and exclusion, but one in which ‘minority individuals and practices are tolerated’.23 Although he was simultaneously engaged in promoting a new interventionist politics of human rights as a means to open up spaces of freedom for the governed, Foucault seems not to have considered the relation between this new moral politics and the seemingly amoral neoliberalism he so astutely analysed.24
For Brown, who is more attentive to the impact of neoliberalism on politics, the rise of neoliberal economism is a fundamental threat to democracy and rights.25 Neoliberalism constitutes subjects who are indifferent to democratic political values and positively antagonistic to egalitarianism, she argues. Consequently, political problems are transformed into individual ones with market solutions, while civil liberties, the rule of law and fair elections are ‘wholly desacralized’.26 Paradoxically, she argues, this provides fertile ground for neoconservative attempts to bolster the foundations of family, religion and state, partly through a civilisational discourse that moralises ‘a certain imaginary of the West and its values’.27
If neoliberalism is understood in such amoral terms, then international human rights NGOs, with their focus on individual liberty, human dignity, freedom of conscience and bodily integrity, seem an important antidote to the unrelenting economisation of life. Despite her own trenchant criticisms of rights and liberalism in previous works, Brown’s indictment of neoliberalism leads her to a surprisingly sympathetic account of the liberal-democratic political model she believes we are losing: ‘We are no longer creatures of moral autonomy, freedom, or equality’, she writes; ‘We no longer choose our own ends or the means to them.’28 Although Brown provides a compelling account of the economisation of rights in a neoliberal era, the assumption remains that older ideals of dignity, rights and ‘even soulfulness’ have been sacrificed upon the altar of an unrelentingly economistic dogma.29
From the perspective of this book, these accounts of the amoral economism of neoliberalism miss the distinctive morality that was central to its rise. What distinguished the neoliberals of the twentieth century from their nineteenth-century precursors, I argue, was not a narrow understanding of the human as homo economicus, but the belief that a functioning competitive market required an adequate moral and legal foundation. As Foucault recognised of the German ordoliberals, neoliberal thinkers aimed to establish (or revive) a set of moral values that would secure social integration in a context of market competition. The founding statement of the Mont Pèlerin Society makes this clear: diagnosing a civilisational crisis characterised by the disappearance of the conditions for ‘human dignity’ and threats to freedom of thought and expression, it states that these developments ‘have been fostered by the growth of a view of history which denies all absolute moral standards’.30 Rather than an external supplement, or a pragmatic partner, social conservatism, including explicit appeals to family values, Christianity and ‘Western civilisation’, was foundational to the consolidation of organised neoliberalism in the mid twentieth century.31
Far from reducing all of life to economics, I show that the neoliberals of the mid twentieth century were deeply suspicious of the very idea of the economy. In his polemical 1944 critique of socialist planning, The Road to Serfdom, the founder of the Mont Pèlerin Society, Friedrich Hayek, complained about his contemporaries’ preoccupation with economic concerns. The values that rank lowest today and are dismissed as nineteenth-century illusions, he argued, are the ‘moral values’ – ‘liberty and independence, truth and intellectual honesty, peace and democracy, and respect for the individual qua man instead of merely as the member of an organized group’.32 Around the same time, the German ordoliberal Wilhelm Röpke criticised the ‘economism’ that ‘judges everything in relation to the economy and in terms of material productivity, making material and economic interests the center of things’.33
No doubt there are aspects of neoliberalism that support the charge of economisation. From the Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises’s argument that the market is a permanent election in which each dollar counts as a ballot, to the US public-choice theorist James Buchanan’s reconfiguring of politics as a sphere of self-maximising individual competition, to the Chicago School economist Gary Becker’s contention that a marriage is a two-person firm and children are household-produced commodities, neoliberalism appears to be the extension of economic rationality to all areas of life.34 Yet, drawing on the ancient Greek origins of economics in oikonomia – the management of a household – the early neoliberals worried that conceiving of the overall market order as an economy licensed the belief that this order was governed by collective solidarity and had a single set of ends that could be managed by Keynesian or social-democratic planners. This, they argued, was the very definition of totalitarianism, and a threat to the individualistic social order of ‘the West’. The competitive market they sought to revive was not simply a more efficient means of distributing resources; it was the basic institution of a moral and ‘civilised’ society, and a necessary support for individual rights.
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