Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile: The Dethronement of Politics 3 страница
If the market order is the real basis of all the declarations of rights and charters of liberties, as Mises contended, then ‘as soon as the economic freedom which the market economy grants to its members is removed, all political liberties and bills of rights become humbug’.77 Like their Marxist critics, the neoliberals saw human rights as intimately bound up with the rise of capitalism. Indeed, it is Marx who Hayek credits as the first to recognise that ‘the evolution of private capitalism with its free market had been a precondition for the evolution of all our democratic freedoms’.78 For Marx, the freedom and equality enshrined in declarations of rights expressed the formal equality of market relations, while also sanctioning the egoism and inequality of civil society. Noting this parallel, Fredric Jameson suggests that Marx, in his account of freedom and democracy, argues, ‘just like Milton Friedman, that these concepts and values are real and objective and are organically generated by the market system itself, and dialectically, indissolubly linked to it’.79 The central difference is that while, for the neoliberals, there is ‘no kind of freedom and liberty other than the kind which the market economy brings about’, for Marx, capitalist equality and freedom turn out to be inequality and un-freedom.80
In his early text, ‘On the Jewish Question’, Marx argued that the rights to equality, liberty, security and property enshrined in the eighteenth-century declarations amount to protections for the egoistic individual of civil society. In an article that challenges recent Marxist critiques of the complicity between human rights and neoliberalism, Samuel Moyn notes that the target of the young Marx’s criticisms was the abstraction of political emancipation within the nation-state, not the transnational, NGO-driven, legalistic human rights dominant today. When human rights came to prominence in the 1970s, Moyn argues, they broke fundamentally with the statist paradigm of the revolutionary rights of man that Marx criticised. This transnational politics of human rights may have come to prominence at the same time as neoliberalism, he argues, but human rights NGOs were merely ‘powerless companions’ of neoliberalism.81 Elsewhere, Moyn suggests that, while ‘the notion that individuals have basic rights was shaped by the political economy that always affects so much else in moral ideals and social relations’, this shaping was never complete, as human rights never reverted to their nineteenth-century role as protections of private property and freedom of contract.82
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I argue that human rights were not simply shaped by an underlying economic reality; they were a central component of the neoliberal attempt to inculcate the morals of the market. This does not mean that contemporary human rights are reducible to protections of private property and contract. Clearly, they are not. But, just as human rights are distinct from the rights of man, neoliberalism is not the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century, and it is not reducible to a defence of property and contract either. One of the clearest and most succinct descriptions of the distinctiveness of neoliberalism comes from a 1951 paper by Friedman entitled ‘Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects’. The ‘basic error’ of nineteenth-century liberalism, the young Chicago School economist argued, was to confine the role of the state to the maintenance of order and enforcement of contracts. Friedman framed neoliberalism as a reaction to this basic error: ‘Neoliberalism would accept the nineteenth-century liberal emphasis on the fundamental importance of the individual’, he wrote, ‘but it would substitute for the nineteenth-century goal of laissez-faire as a means to this end, the goal of the competitive order’.83 This entailed much more scope for state intervention to create the conditions for competition than nineteenth-century laissez-faire had countenanced.
For all their undoubted diversity, the neoliberals of the early Mont Pèlerin Society were largely united around the programme outlined in Friedman’s short paper. At the inaugural MPS meeting, Hayek argued that, while it is known that a functioning market relies on the ‘protection of certain rights, such as property and the enforcement of contracts’, it was only once this was accepted that ‘the real problem begins’.84 In The Road to Serfdom, he faulted previous liberals for neglecting the fact that a competitive market requires an ‘appropriate legal system’, and stressed that it was ‘by no means sufficient that the law should recognise the principle of private property and freedom of contract’.85 Human rights played an important role in the neoliberal attempt to develop an appropriate legal system and moral framework for a global capitalist market. The rights they formulated were not the rights of man that Marx had criticised. The correlate of seeing the competitive market as the sine qua non of peace, freedom and rights is that that neoliberal human rights exist not so much to protect the individual – even the egoistic individual – as to preserve the market order. To demonstrate this shift, let us look at how the neoliberals understood the four central rights that Marx criticised in ‘On the Jewish Question’.
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Liberty, Equality, Property and Security
In ‘On the Jewish Question’, Marx characterised the right to liberty as the right to do anything that does not harm others, and therefore as ‘the right of separation’ of a restricted individual. Liberty, or freedom, is the one value that neoliberal human rights would be expected to serve; but, examined closely, neoliberal freedom is largely indistinguishable from submission to what Mises called ‘the sovereignty of the market’.86 Unlike political sovereignty, the neoliberals saw market sovereignty as compatible with individual freedom. But they also maintained that the sovereign market requires individuals to adjust themselves to its imperatives, which means sacrificing egalitarianism and eschewing the project of collective freedom.87 They believed that adjustment to the demands of the market was primarily secured by price fluctuations – that is, by what Marx called the ‘silent compulsion of economic relations’.88
Writing about wages in an unregulated market, Mises contended that such fluctuations ‘penalize disobedience’ and ‘recompense obedience’ to the demands of the labour market. As this penal language makes clear enough, the market subject is not free in any expansive sense. The demands of the sovereign market, Mises states explicitly, ‘submit the individual to a harsh social pressure’ and ‘indirectly limit the individual’s freedom to choose his occupation’.89 But he suggests that this pressure leaves the individual ‘a margin in the limits of which he can choose between what suits him better and what less’.90 It is only within this predetermined margin that the neoliberal individual is ‘free to choose’. She may leave her home to pursue work in another city or stay at home and drive for Uber. She may not join a trade union, let alone struggle against the capitalist exploitation of waged labour. For Mises, ‘this amount of freedom is the maximum of freedom that an individual can enjoy in the framework of the social division of labor’.91 By pathologising mass politics as a threat to individual freedom, neoliberal liberty rights seek to confine human action within what I call the ‘margin of freedom’ offered by a liberal capitalist order. The neoliberal right to liberty is the right to do anything that does not harm the market.
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The right to equality, Marx argued, was the equal right to be a self-sufficient, egoistic monad. The neoliberals broke decisively with the conception of equality enshrined in the declarations of the rights of man. ‘Nowhere is the difference between the reasoning of the older liberalism and that of neoliberalism clearer and easier to demonstrate than in their treatment of the problem of equality’, Mises wrote in 1927.92 While eighteenth-century liberals’ proclamations of universal human equality were often undercut by their support for economic inequalities and colonial rule, the neoliberals dispensed entirely with the belief in human equality. Nothing is as ‘ill-founded as the assertion of the alleged equality of all members of the human race’, in Mises’s blunt formulation. ‘Men are altogether unequal.’93 Yet formal equality still played a central role in the neoliberal pantheon of rights. Equality before the law was central to their argument against state intervention; and the right to trade on equal terms played a key role in their argument against trade barriers and subsidies. As socialists demanded redistribution to secure greater economic equality, and anticolonialists invoked a new international law that would redistribute the fruits of colonial exploitation through ‘corrective or compensatory inequality’, the neoliberals argued that equality before the law made all redistribution impossible.94 A neoliberal right to equality is a right of everyone to preserve their unequal wealth and power in the face of political demands for redistribution.
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The right to security, according to Marx, was manifested in the police, who secured the universal egoism of civil society. With the global extension of capitalist social relations, neoliberal thinkers were met with the challenge of globalising this policing function. They believed that promoting a regime of rights would support the extension of the world market. ‘People without rights’, Mises warned, ‘are always a menace to social order’.95 They gave the state the role of protecting the competitive market from those who are unable to adjust themselves to its demands.96 Mises was typically clear about the role of the state in a ‘peaceful’ liberal market order: noting that the market itself is free of coercion and the state must not interfere with it, he wrote that, in a liberal order, the state ‘employs its power to beat people into submission solely for the prevention of actions destructive to the preservation and the smooth operation of the market economy’.97 A central function of neoliberal human rights has been to globalise this function, legitimising state violence aimed at the global dissemination of capitalist social relations. The neoliberal right to security is a right for states to beat into submission those who threaten the market order.
The right to property, which Marx described as the foundation of the whole system, was, in his view, a right to self-interest. For earlier liberals, such as John Locke, property was justified as a means to ‘improvement’. God meant the earth to be cultivated, and so gave it to the ‘industrious and rational’.98 Consistent with this justification, Mises bemoaned that much of the world’s mineral wealth was located in areas ‘whose inhabitants are too ignorant, too inert, or too dull to take advantage of the riches nature has bestowed upon them’.99 As in the vision of earlier neoliberals, the right to private property ensured wealth was put in the hands of those most capable of utilising it. But they went further than this, stressing the institutional conditions in which such rights would be secure. If the governments of areas rich in resources prevented ‘aliens’ from exploiting this wealth, or their arbitrary conduct of public affairs threatened foreign investments, serious harm would result to all as a consequence. Preventing such harm required the ‘right to keep foreign investments safe and to move capital freely across borders’.100 A neoliberal right to property is the right to impose ‘good governance’ and the institutional structures that private investment requires across the globe.
Humanity and Dignity: Neoliberalism and the Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s
Along with the rights to liberty, equality, property and security that contemporary human rights campaigns share with the older rights-of-man tradition, today’s human rights are often justified as necessary to protect two key principles: ‘humanity’ and ‘dignity’. For the young Marx, the split between the man and the citizen in the eighteenth-century declarations reflected the fact that the individual in bourgeois society leads a double life – a celestial life in the state (as an equal citizen) and a terrestrial life in civil society (as an unequal, egoistic individual).101 The problem of the relation between man and citizen has similarly preoccupied much twentieth-century criticism of human rights. Faced with mass population expulsions in the wake of World War I, Hannah Arendt argued that those who lacked citizenship and had no other status than mere humanity were deprived even of the rights of man.102 Many subsequent human rights defenders sought to overcome this gap between universal, humanist pronouncements and the territorial jurisdiction of independent sovereign states. Their efforts were central to the rise of a new, transnational human rights movement, which focused on securing the rights of those whose governments were ‘unwilling or unable’ to protect them.103 The recognition that those who lacked the protection of a nation-state were also deprived of human rights ultimately licensed new forms of ‘humanitarian’ intervention that rationalized the projection of military might beyond the borders of sovereign territories as a means to secure humanity.
Humanity played a central role in the neoliberal challenge to political sovereignty and collectivism. The ‘very concepts of humanity and therefore any form of internationalism are entirely products of the individualist view of man’, Hayek wrote in The Road to Serfdom, ‘and there can be no place for them in a collectivist system of thought’.104 The neoliberals mobilised this account of humanity against their own welfare states and postcolonial affirmations of sovereignty. In a world in which governments increasingly interfered with business, they argued, ‘the principle of each nation’s unrestricted sovereignty’ is a challenge to all other nations.105 When, later in life, Hayek formalised his account of the morals of the market, he argued that a ‘universal humanism’ required that we limit our moral obligations to others to the avoidance of harm.106 Hayek believed that thinking in terms of humanity precluded domestic redistribution, which he framed as a throwback to tribal loyalties. The market order was the only one that potentially embraced all of humanity, the neoliberals believed, so defending humanity required preventing harm to the international market.
The term ‘dignity’ did not appear in those eighteenth-century rights declarations Marx examined, yet today it has become synonymous with human rights. The preamble of the UDHR begins by recognising the ‘inherent dignity’ of ‘all members of the human family’, and major human rights NGOs describe their raison d’être as upholding human dignity.107 The founding statement of the Mont Pèlerin Society also begins with the warning that ‘over large stretches of the Earth’s surface the essential conditions of human dignity and freedom have already disappeared’.108 For the Lebanese delegate Charles Malik, who drafted the UDHR’s preamble, this reference to dignity reflected a Christian understanding of the human as a person, created in the image of God and requiring protection from the predations of mass politics and the state. Many early neoliberals had considerable sympathy with this Christian conception, and, for them too, upholding dignity meant restraining politics. Yet it meant more than this; for them, dignity retained some of the original sense of its Latin root dignus, which signified worth or desert. Just as dignity was originally a term of moral standing, the neoliberals believed that only the self-reliant and responsible could lead dignified lives. Seeking welfare from the state, from this perspective, was inherently undignified. For the neoliberals, dignity required a competitive order in which individuals were responsible for their own fates.
Throughout this book, I argue that the neoliberals of Mont Pèlerin reinvented human rights as the moral language of the competitive market. I show that they developed their own account of human rights as protections for the market order. This neoliberal vision of human rights was at its purest in the period of neoliberal ascendancy. It is clear in Margaret Thatcher’s simultaneous denial that ‘state services are an absolute right’ and championing of a ‘right to be unequal’, and in Ronald Reagan’s boastful statement, towards the end of his presidency, that ‘from Central America to East Asia, ideas like free markets and democratic reforms and human rights are taking hold’.109 It was taken up by the director of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Pascal Lamy, who declared exuberantly in 2010: ‘One could almost claim that trade is human rights in practice!’ Lamy argued that ‘human rights and trade rules, including WTO rules, are based on the same values: individual freedom and responsibility, non-discrimination, rule of law, and welfare through peaceful cooperation among individuals’.110
The liberal political theorist Michael Ignatieff expressed this vision clearly in 2001 when he argued that the civil and political rights of a ‘capitalist rights tradition’ are ‘the most we can hope for’.111 And Hayek’s student, the international trade lawyer Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann, defended it most emphatically when he argued for the interdependence of human rights and international trade law. Eight years before the WTO embraced the idea of a mutual relation between human rights and competitive markets, Petersmann argued that the globalisation of human rights relies on the open markets, prohibition of economic discrimination and ‘welfare-enhancing division of labour’ enforced by the WTO, while human rights promote economic integration by ‘protecting personal autonomy, legal and social security, peaceful change, individual savings, investments, production and mutually beneficial transactions across frontiers’.112
But the neoliberal human rights heritage was not only embraced by figures on the right. This neoliberal background can shed light on the apparent puzzle that the human rights politics of the late twentieth century, with its distinctive use of international advocacy to limit the power of the state, emerged, in Moyn’s words, ‘seemingly from nowhere’.113 I show that organisations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Médecins sans Frontières drew (explicitly in some cases, implicitly in others) on an account of rights developed by the neoliberals since the 1940s. For them, too, decolonisation had generated a desperate need for new standards to constrain postcolonial states. They focused their attention on what Hayek argued was the complement of the ‘taming of the savage’: the ‘taming of the state’.114 The attempt to discipline postcolonial states held a much larger place in the new politics of human rights than did the concerns with economic welfare and self-determination of previous decades.
Neoliberalism and the ‘Human Rights Revolution’ of the 1970s
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