Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile: The Dethronement of Politics 10 страница
But neoliberalism, as scholars like Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plewhe remind us, is not simply a North American phenomenon. Rather, it was a transnational movement from the beginning.63 Social conservatism was not an external supplement to the development of neoliberalism. Conservative moralism, including an explicit defence of religion and family values, was foundational to the neoliberal attempt to reinvent the liberal project beyond laissez-faire. It was the German ordoliberals who paid the most attention to the moral breakdown they saw as endemic to the revolt of the masses. Röpke, in particular, formulated a distinctive account of the rise of the masses and its implications for freedom, morality and family life. His argument that the competitive market required a moral foundation and the re-establishment of strong families to promote self-reliance and ‘dignity’ would go on to exert a significant influence on the neoliberal critique of the welfare state – including in the United States.64
In July 1936, Röpke participated in a conference organised by the Rockefeller Foundation to consider the problem of economic stabilisation, alongside future members of the MPS, including Ludwig von Mises, William Rappard, Lionel Robbins and Gottfried Haberler. Wary that the Rockefeller Foundation’s proposal to establish a central observatory to gather and coordinate economic data would result in an unnecessary bureaucracy and economic interventionism, the participants decided instead to fund several research projects, including one by Röpke on protectionism. Eschewing a narrow economic analysis, Röpke argued that the rise of the masses threatened the economic integration enabled by nineteenth-century liberalism and its standards of civilisation. Drawing on Ortega y Gasset’s work, he coined the term Vermassung (‘enmassment’) to define the levelling process he believed threatened the survival of the world economy and Western civilisation.65 ‘Capitalism, liberalism, individual initiative and responsibility, competition and adaptability are to-day at a heavy discount’, he wrote; ‘they are old-established rulers against whom a mass rebellion has broken out’.66
Röpke’s was a deeply conservative critique aimed at the uprooting effects of capitalism, the loss of hierarchal order, the ‘diminished differentiation in the social status’ and the ‘emancipation from natural bonds and communities’.67 He depicted the rise of the masses as a phenomenon of proletarianisation, which deprives large sections of the population of property and the liberty it provides, rendering them dependent. For Röpke, factory life was at the root of mass demands for the reorganisation of society. The revolt of the masses led to the ‘progressive displacement of spontaneous order and coherence by organization and regimentation’.68 This critique of massification drew on a Roman model of independence, associated with property ownership (including ownership of slaves) and the possession of legal personality. Independence was a status constituted in opposition to the dependence of those who worked for someone else for a living, and therefore lacked legal personality. With the rise of industrial capitalism, this model of independence was increasingly claimed by white working men, whose new-found freedom and juridical status contrasted with the subordination and lack of personality of a new series of ‘dependents’: women, paupers, colonial subjects and slaves.69
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Röpke regularly used racial tropes and metaphors of primitivism and barbarism to characterise these dependent proletarian masses. He shared this with Hayek, who found evidence in Ortega y Gasset’s work that ‘the first attempt to emerge from the tribal into an open society’ failed because individuals were employed in regimented organisations before they ‘had time to learn the morals of the market’.70 For Hayek, the revolt of the masses represented the failure of the ‘taming of the savage’.71 For Röpke, newly proletarianised peasants from the countryside were a culturally alien force and a threat to a civilised society. In language that has since become all too familiar on today’s anti-immigrant right, he complained that ‘the country of Goethe, the Humboldts and even of Nietzsche’ had been ‘swamped by countless millions which came too quickly and in too great numbers to be absorbed culturally’; a ‘nation’, Röpke warned, ‘may beget its own barbarian invaders’.72
This racialisation of independence was particularly intense in a slave society like the United States, where ‘liberty, property, and whiteness were inextricably enmeshed’.73 Faced with the gap between republican ideals of freedom and independence and the realities of wage labour, white workers, ‘disciplined and made anxious by fear of dependency’, struggled to distinguish themselves from dependent and right-less slaves by configuring independence as a property of whiteness.74 The racial refiguring of the masculine ideal of independence in a white-supremacist key obscured the wage-dependence and labour discipline of industrial capitalism. It also rendered invisible the dependence of white male workers on white women’s domestic labour, and the dependence of the capitalist social order on slave labour and colonial exploitation.75 Independence formed a powerful myth that bolstered the political standing of white working men, fused property ownership and legal personality, and relegated those construed as ‘dependent’ to a sphere of diminished rights.
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It was this myth that Ronald Reagan would draw on decades later when he used the term ‘emancipation’ to refer to ‘freeing’ poor families from welfare dependence.76 At stake in this emancipatory language was an attempt to mobilise the republican valorisation of freedom and independence against a welfare system that was implicitly racialised and aligned with slavery, blackness and dependence. But the centrality of this myth of independence to neoliberal attacks on welfare goes back much further than Reagan, as does the association of state welfare provision with moral hazard and family breakdown. For Röpke, the most serious symptom of the revolt of the masses was the decline of the family. As the family is ‘the natural sphere of the woman, the proper environment for raising children and indeed the parent cell of the community’, the German neoliberal argued that women were the real victims of a welfare state that prevented them fulfilling their ‘vital functions’.77
Women may have been the primary victims of the welfare state, from this conservative perspective, but this did not mean that men benefited from it. Röpke regularly cited the remark of the nineteenth-century French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, whose 1835 text Democracy in America warned that, in a democracy, individuals would entrust their private needs to an ‘immense tutelary power’ that would reduce them to ‘a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd’.78 Writing a decade after World War I, Röpke argued this threat had been realised by the welfare state, which ‘takes care of the sort of comfortable stall-feeding of the domesticated masses’.79 Röpke sought the measure of ‘respect for human personality’ in the masses’ responsibility for their own welfare, remarking that it is hardly progress to treat increasing numbers of people as ‘economic minors’ under the ‘tutelage of the state’.80
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Such views were already common among neoliberals by the 1938 Walter Lippmann Colloquium, where the French philosopher Louis Rougier used his opening address to warn: ‘The masses are willing to abandon their freedom in the hands of the one, chief or messiah, who promises them security.’81 A year earlier, Rappard had given his own twist to the idea of the welfare state as a strictly gendered household. In the midst of the mass unemployment and desperate poverty of the Great Depression, he argued, quite extraordinarily, that the individual in all the countries that experienced modern revolutions now resembled a ‘pampered old bachelor who has a very faithful cook’ and has come to depend on her. Singling out the United States of the New Deal, Rappard argued that the individual had ‘jeopardised his possession of that freedom for which his ancestors fought and bled’.82 By the time Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom, he complained that it was ‘no longer independence but security which [gave] rank and status’, and that a man was now considered eligible for marriage not because he had the capacity to provide for a family, but because he has ‘the certain right to a pension’.83
It was Röpke who distilled the tone of the neoliberal discussions of the mid twentieth century: while the desire for security is natural, he argued, it can become an obsession ‘which is ultimately paid for by the loss of freedom and human dignity’.84 The human dignity that the MPS statement of aims warned was disappearing was threatened, first of all, by the welfare state. This neoliberal critique of welfare would continue to resonate for decades, before ultimately being adopted by governments in the 1970s and 1980s. The neoliberal argument against state welfare was not confined to the economic threat it posed to a free-enterprise system. Rather, neoliberals like Röpke positioned the welfare state as a political threat to a social order founded on the nuclear family and racial hierarchy, and as a moral threat to the values of self-reliance, independence, responsibility and human dignity. From this perspective, while the drafters of the UDHR also dedicated themselves to human dignity, their commitment to social and economic rights would ultimately be its ruin.
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‘Himself and His Family’: The Subject of Social and Economic Rights
From a neoliberal perspective, the UDHR’s adoption of social and economic rights seemed evidence of a desire for security, which would enable the state to usurp the traditional role of the family. But many of the UDHR’s drafters were concerned to uphold the family as what its Article 16 (initiated by Charles Malik) calls ‘the natural and fundamental group and unit of society’. The pacifying, governmental approach of Roosevelt’s New Deal deeply informed the social and economic rights in the declaration. Just as Roosevelt sought to avoid ‘talking politics’, the drafters sought to detach social and economic rights from political challenges to the exploitation of labour, the existing division of labour and the reproductive role of the nuclear family, and transform them into minimalist guarantees for the most needy.
The struggle over social and economic rights came to a head during the drafting of what is now Article 25 of the UDHR. In its final form, Article 25 reads as follows:
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
Article 25 reveals the gendered social vision underpinning the declaration’s social and economic rights. This social vision resists easy dichotomies between questions of wealth redistribution, on the one hand, and juridical status and subordination on the basis of gender, race and sexuality, on the other. The ‘economy’ was not an autonomous realm divorced from the gendered and racial regimes in which labour is ordered, and in which wealth (and increasingly debt) are accumulated and handed down from one generation to the next.85 And the subject of social and economic rights was emphatically not an abstract, universal subject. Rather, race and gender marked the borders of entitlement, and designated this subject as a white, male, heterosexual, ‘breadwinner’ or head of a family.
The explicitly masculine subject ‘himself’ appears twice in the declaration, as the subject of social welfare (Article 25) and as the subject of the right to work (Article 23). Previous scholarship has tended to explain away what one historian calls this ‘oversight involving a worker and “his family”’ as an aberration from the universalist thrust of the declaration, whose social and economic rights could just as easily have been expressed in ‘neutral, nonsexist terminology’.86 Such explanations obscure the delegates’ shared commitment to the family as the primary site of welfare and social reproduction. The centrality of unwaged women’s labour to the Fordist settlement in the United States was matched by the Soviet Union’s dramatic reversal of post-revolutionary policies such as easier divorce, equal rights for women in marriage, and collective cafeterias and childcare centres designed to free women from housework.87 In stark contrast to the Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai’s argument that ‘communism liberates woman from her domestic slavery and makes her life richer and happier’, the Soviet delegates at Lake Success emphasised the ‘protection which the State must give the home’.88
The Latin American delegates, who did most to advance the declaration’s social and economic rights, were also fierce defenders of the family. Challenging the neoliberal dichotomy between state and family responsibility, they nonetheless argued, as the Chilean delegate Hernán Santa Cruz’s draft article suggested, that the state had a duty ‘to assist parents in the maintenance of adequate standards of child welfare within the family circle’.89 Santa Cruz was perhaps an unlikely defender of familial responsibility: ‘on one occasion while his family was out of town’, the US State Department noted, he ‘sold the entire household effects, including his wife’s clothing, and gave the proceeds to his mistress’.90 Nonetheless, the familial model of welfare was widely shared. Even the Commission on the Status of Women, which fought bitterly to remove all references to ‘man’ and ‘men’, did not challenge the ‘historically specific gender norms’ reflected in the male-breadwinner model.91 In inscribing this social model in a declaration of the rights of ‘all members of the human family’, the drafters presented the nuclear family as the civilised endpoint of social evolution, and as a model for the world.
‘Organization Thinking’: The International Labour Organization and the Right to a Standard of Living
The initial draft of the Universal Declaration’s Article 25, with its reference to ‘himself and his family’ was prepared by the International Labour Organization (ILO), which drew on its own long history of promoting a family-based welfare system. When Hayek later criticised the UDHR, he argued it was ‘couched in that jargon of organization thinking which one has learnt to expect in the pronouncement of trade union officials or the International Labour Organization’.92 The pacifying vision of social order expressed in the UDHR did owe much to the ILO’s founding premise that labour conditions involving ‘injustice, hardship and privation to large numbers of people’ would lead to ‘unrest’ and imperil the ‘peace and harmony of the world’.93 The foundation of the ILO, and its commitment to social justice, were a recognition of the threat that demands for equality and economic rights posed to social peace and to the ‘political integrity of existing empires and states’.94 Comprising representatives of governments, employers and workers, the ILO was formed to set standards, with the assistance of labour statisticians, and secure social progress and class compromise, rather than conflict.
In the early 1920s, soon after its establishment in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles, the ILO prepared a major report on ‘Family Allowances’ that laid out arguments for ensuring men could support their families; family allowances, the report suggested, would secure a better distribution of the nation’s wage bill by directing more to men with dependent families.95 The social benefits would include reduced infant mortality, improved child health, and the development of the physical and intellectual capacities of a future generation of workers. Family allowances would ensure there was ‘less need for the mother to go out to work, and thus she has more time to give proper care to her children’; recognition of the value of mothers would lead in turn to the ‘raised status of women’.96 The ILO stressed the benefits of this social model for both state and capital: family allowances would promote the health of the population and ensure social stability, the report argued, as men who supported families at home would be more reliable workers (and presumably less likely to go on strike.)
Decades later, this vision still informed the drafting of the UDHR. Much of the early drafting debate concerned whether the language of a right to ‘a standard of living’ provided by the ILO draft was sufficient, or whether it was necessary to specifically mention rights to medical care, housing, food and clothing. The language of the standard of living was a key aspect of what Hayek correctly identified as ILO ‘jargon’; and as he recognised, there was more at stake in this language than a question of semantics. The real conflict was over whether social and economic rights entailed corresponding state duties or could be secured through private consumption. Speaking as the representative of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt stated that the ILO text was ‘both complete and adequate’.97 Despite her own personal commitment to social welfare, Roosevelt represented a country in which the consensus that underpinned the New Deal was giving way in the face of the anti-communism of the nascent Cold War. She was receiving instructions from US Undersecretary of State Robert A. Lovett, who was reportedly ‘confused’ by the UN’s work on human rights, and particularly concerned by social and economic rights.98 In a memo of March 1948, Roosevelt was informed that Lovett ‘felt that if these were expressed they could far better be expressed in terms of ‘better standards’ rather than a right to a “decent living”’.99
In contrast to rights, which are (at least in theory) absolute, standards are relative and variable, and so enable flexibility and compromise. To speak of ‘better standards’ is to eschew absolutes. Like the term ‘standard’ – which can refer both to the ordinary (‘bog standard’) and to a standard of measurement (‘the gold standard’) – definitions of the standard of living oscillated between bare subsistence and aspirational opulence. Accounts of social and economic rights similarly moved between these two poles: for some, they ensured the bare minimum necessary for survival; for others, in a more republican key, social and economic rights freed people from the demands of necessity and enabled collective freedom. This gap was reflected in the distance between the original draft of the UDHR, penned by the Canadian socialist who headed the UN Secretariat’s human rights division, John Humphrey, and the original US submission. Humphrey’s draft went far beyond securing the conditions of mere survival to articulate rights to ‘good food and housing and to live in surroundings that are pleasant and healthy’. The US submission, in contrast, outlined a ‘right to enjoy minimum standards of economic, social and cultural well-being’.100 The language of the standard of living served to temper the utopian aspiration to a good life expressed in the rights Humphrey borrowed from various Latin American constitutions. In emphasising minimum standards, the US delegation sought to detach social and economic rights from egalitarianism, reconciling them with a privatised and consumerist conception of welfare.101
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