Posted by John, April 24th, 2010 - under Uncategorised.

Tags: Human rights

The Rudd Government has decided not to introduce a national Human Rights Act. Typically conservatives have welcomed the decision while liberals have condemned it.

Both misunderstand that we live in a world that not only restricts freedom; it is built on unfreedom. We are denied the freedom to be human in a society where we are forced to sell our labour power to survive.

As Rousseau put it, man is born free but he is everywhere in chains. Turning Rousseau on his head, those chains are not of the mind but economically determined – under capitalism production is organised for profit and based on wage slavery.

As Marx famously proclaimed in the Communist Manifesto: Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.

Human rights legislation does not at all challenge the fundamental inhumanity that is capitalism; it reinforces it. It is at its best a form of political emancipation, but it is not, and does not deliver, human liberation.

Human Rights Acts are an expression of systemic differences that reflect capitalist concepts like race, sexuality and gender. They are not their destroyer.

What human rights laws do is reinforce the idea we need protection from other people when in fact our humanity only finds real expression with and through other people.

Human rights legislation individualises and atomises us in a society where cooperation and community is in fact essential for production to occur. Human rights are a political mirror of the individual expropriation of value in the context of the socialisation of its production.

It is ordinary working people, in fighting for their basic economic and political rights, who have won real gains.

The right to vote, the overthrow of slavery, the destruction of the idea of women as the property rights of men and home carers, and the decriminalisation of homosexual activity were won through mass struggle, not parliamentary niceties.

And yet these victories, while steps forward, are not real human liberation.

Every few years workers get to vote for labour parties whose principal commitment is to the ruling class.

Women are massively under-represented in the leadership of companies and the public service. They are paid 17 percent less than men for work of equal value.

Racism is systemic in Australia, with many aborigines for example in the Northern Territory under occupation, and their life span up to 17 years shorter than non-Aboriginal Australians. The Rudd Labor Government locks up asylum seekers in concentration camps around the country.

Human rights legislation will not change that. In fact, given the lack of struggle in Australia today, the fight over human rights here is a battle between two wings of the bourgeoisie over how best to embed and reinforce the exploitative relationship between capital and labour – the carrot or the stick.

In Russia, as the Stalinist capitalist class cemented its brutal political power, it introduced the most liberal and freedom friendly Constitution on paper in history.

The reality of the gulags and the show trials gave the lie to emancipation and the concepts of freedom became subservient to the needs of the new Russian ruling class to drive peasants off the land and into the new factories and to expropriate the wealth Russian workers were creating.

The left can support the liberal wing of the bourgeoisie in its push for human rights. We do so because it opens up the possibility of struggle from below for real human rights.

Our task is to extend and deepen the milksop rights the bourgeoisie might want to grant.

But really the debate is a sideline to the main issue – are there struggles going on in the here and now against the repressive nature of capitalism? Yes.

There are campaigns against Labor’s Northern Territory invasion, against Labor’s freeze on refugees, against Labor’s attempts to jail Ark Tribe for attending a lunchtime union meeting, for same sex equality, even occasionally industrial action over wages and jobs.

Marx was once asked ‘What is?’ Struggle was his answer.

That’s where we on the left should concentrate our forces.