Basic Needs and Human Rights

By Samuel Moyn

The age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. Even as state violations of political rights garnered unprecedented attention due to human rights campaigns, a commitment to material equality disappeared. In its place, market fundamentalism has emerged as the dominant force in national and global economies. In Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, Samuel Moyn analyzes how and why we chose to make human rights our highest ideals while simultaneously neglecting the demands of a broader social and economic justice. Moyn places the career of the human rights movement in relation to the disturbing shift from the egalitarian politics of yesterday to the neoliberal globalization of today. Exploring why the rise of human rights has occurred alongside enduring and exploding inequality, and why activists came to seek remedies for indigence without challenging wealth, Not Enough calls for more ambitious ideals and movements to achieve a humane and equitable world. Here is a brief excerpt.

The human rights revolution occurred almost ex nihilo in the 1970s. There had been talk and even treaty making in the United Nations since the 1940s, but it testified more to states colluding to protect one another. No serious move had ever been made to fulfill the organization’s promise in its charter to institutionalize not simply peace but justice too. The lone ex­ception of the increasingly outcast state of South Africa aside, human rights rhetoric at the governmental level had remained stillborn, and no state had a visible human rights policy. That changed in a series of stages, above all as new social movements of the 1960s were winnowed down and those movements defined in terms of human rights burst into consciousness across the next decade. Amnesty International, the first high­ profile human rights non­governmental organization in history, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977, the same year that the American president Jimmy Carter committed his country to a new human rights policy, in part to cleanse the stain of Vietnam from the national image.

Easily the most extraordinary fact about this human rights revolution, from the perspective of ideals about how to distribute the good things in life, is that, with some key exceptions, it unceremoniously purged attention to economic and social rights, to say nothing of a fuller ­fledged commitment to distributive equality. It was a striking contrast to the spirit of social rights in the era of national welfare, when they were not only integral to human rights overall but linked to egalitarian idealism and outcomes at the national scale. Now, as if the promise of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) had never been about national welfare, it was remembered as a charter meant to save the individual from the state’s depredations of civil liberties rather than to empower the state to make individual flourishing and equality a reality.

Given that economic and social provisions were canonized in the docu­ments and had been as central to the coming of the national welfare state as they were absent from the new transnational mobilization, it is surprising how easily the reversal was achieved. Perhaps two main reasons explain this shift. For one thing, especially in the global north, Cold War assumptions had long since damaged the 1940s communion of civil and political with economic and social rights, through the sheer force of insistence and repeti­tion. And then, the new visibility of human rights ideals occurred as activ­ists, disillusioned about the failures of socialism, the violence socialist poli­tics sparked, or both — including in socialism’s postcolonial forms — embraced their roles, conceiving of “human rights” as a morally pure form of activism that would not require the exaggerated hopes or depressing compromises of past utopias.

Graphic evidence of the turn away from socialism and the skepticism toward social rights comes from Peter Benenson and Aryeh Neier, the re­spective founders of the first prominent global non­governmental organ­ization and of the major American one concerned with human rights across the period. Despite having stood as a candidate for the Labour Party sev­eral times in his earlier life, when Benenson founded Amnesty International in the 1960s, he explicitly understood it as an alternative to socialism and set in motion a pattern that led the group to confine its attention to a narrow focus on political imprisonment. It added torture to its bailiwick in the 1970s and the death penalty in the 1980s, shifting to poverty only after the mil­lennium. “Look on the Socialist Parties the world over, ye mighty, and despair,” Benenson explained to a correspondent in justification of his emphases. Part of the reason for his depression was his own serial losses in election campaigns, but he also admitted, in the Christian idiom that frequently crept into his work, that “the quest for an outward and vis­ible Kingdom is mistaken.” For the founder, human rights activism was much more about saving the activist’s soul, rather than building social justice.

American Aryeh Neier founded Human Rights Watch in the 1970s with an exclusionary attention to political violations in left­ and right­wing re­gimes. Despite his early political awakening, thanks to the six­ time socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas, and his past as the president of the labor­ affiliated Student League for Industrial Democracy (which later became Students for a Democratic Society), Neier nonetheless chose a class­ free civil libertarianism as his definitive mode of politics. Given that the American Civil Liberties Union, over which he presided before co­founding Human Rights Watch, had ascended to prominence by departing from the class politics that originally birthed it, Neier’s Cold War stewardship of lib­erties and rights confined his attention to basics like free speech and a free press. Human Rights Watch functioned primarily to transfer such single­ minded civil libertarianism abroad, with funding from foundation grants that singled out state repression rather than pursuing a more contentious social justice. Through the end of his career in the organization, Neier fought bitterly with anyone who tried to make room for distributive justice, in­cluding as a matter of social rights, tirelessly invoking the Cold War liberal Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between negative liberty and positive self­ realization in his defense.

On a broader view, however, these representative developments within the two most visible northern human rights outfits allowed for many ex­ceptions, especially among the beneficiaries of the earliest transnational human rights politics in the 1970s, activists in Eastern Europe and Latin America’s Southern Cone. Attention in both areas focused overwhelmingly on state depredations to the right to life and to liberty of thought and ac­tion. While the coalitional basis of the strategy of indicting governments for betraying their own promises to follow constitutional and international law required socialists to mute or soft pedal their ideals of material justice, they did not simply abandon them.

For a long moment in the middle of the 1970s, in fact, a broad mush­ rooming of socialist groups embraced human rights, including in demo­cratic countries that had repressed leftist agitation. In France, “radicals had equated the struggle for rights as mere reformism, but by the early 1970s, state repression had compelled them to adopt democratic struggles as a fun­damental axis of their political work. This did not mean that these groups abandoned violent revolution, the overthrow of capitalism, or the dicta­torship of the proletariat as final goals, or that they confined their efforts to the narrow field of parliamentary politics.” In Colombia, something sim­ilar obtained, as revolutionaries such as the authors of El Libro Negro de la Represión (The Black Book of Repression), a documentation of state vio­lence, invoked human rights norms to highlight it, while claiming that the entire purpose of such ideals had always been for the sake of vast political transformation. From early modern revolution to the present, the aim was “to ‘popularize’ the contents of the Rights of Men for those who hold them, without evading the revolutionary consequences of such conscious­ ness, but actually seeking such effects.” The point is not to overstate how open socialists were to rights language. For example, the new liberation the­ology in Latin America building on the globalization of Catholic social thought of the 1960s turned against rights as it became more radical. And the allergy to framing social justice in terms of rights remained strong wherever Marxism endured as an intellectual or popular idiom. But this hardly meant that the human rights revolution of the era ruled out other possibilities.

In the Soviet Union’s Eastern Bloc and the Latin American Southern Cone, where dictatorship ruled, socialists saw no reason to abandon their socialism and no contradiction in joining broader coalitions of dissent, whether at home or as emigres. In the formation of the storied Czecho­ slovak dissident group Charter 77, the most prominent reform communist to join, Jiří Hájek, was quite insistent that human rights activism involved no relinquishment of his socialism. The Soviet Bloc countries had treated the Universal Declaration with ambivalence, Hájek wrote, but had partici­pated fully in drafting the human rights conventions and solemnly ratified them. (Hájek’s Czechoslovakia did so as they came into legal force.) Such facts “banish the doubts of the active socialist­ motivated citizens of the Warsaw Pact [i.e., Soviet Bloc] countries, and dispel any fear they might have that the implementation of . . . those documents might be viewed as falling outside the scope and framework of socialist society, or even regarded as hostile to it.” In fact, he added, “socialist society is far better equipped than any other society to realize this unity [of political and civil rights with economic and social rights] and sustain it.” The same was true of the group’s spokeswoman, Zdena Tominová, who agitated for right consciousness while calling for world socialism as late as 1981, during a trip to the West and before her expulsion from Czechoslovakia became permanent.

Opposition to communism in Poland became world famous in the summer and fall of 1980, as the smaller Worker’s Defense Committee (KOR), founded in 1976, exploded in prominence and size as “Solidarnósc.” It was no accident that this happened thanks to a self­ conscious workers’ movement engaging in classic strike activity at the Lenin shipyard in Gdańsk, even if its politics were “apolitical” and avoided outright challenge to the regime out of situational necessity and strategic choice. At the start, before the involvement of intellectuals and Solidarity’s transformation into broad­ based democratic opposition, its twenty­ one demands began by in­sisting on the now internationally guaranteed right to strike, and the rest concerned sufficiency guarantees and especially price controls in the midst of the era’s economic crisis and the regime’s rationing polices. For much of his suddenly global audience before the 1981 crackdown, electrician Lech Wałęsa was above all a workingman — albeit “a new kind of trade­ unionist, not only for Poland but also for the world in general,” as one contemporary explained it.

Broader egalitarian aspirations were likewise held by many Latin Amer­icans who fled repression in Chile and Uruguay after 1973 and Argentina after 1976, when coups occurred in each place. Besides those who arrived in more hospitable climates for socialism, there were examples even in fledg­ling American networks. The economist Orlando Letelier, former Chilean government minister under democratic socialist Salvador Allende, called for the restoration of human rights in his country after his government was toppled and he fled to the United States. But before his outrageous assassination in a car bombing in Washington, D.C. in 1976, Letelier also de­ cried the neoliberal policies pursued by junta leader Augusto Pinochet. Hired by the left­ leaning Institute for Policy Studies in the American capital, Lete­lier was in fact spearheading its project to support the NIEO at the time. Depending on the place, the contiguity of human rights and socialistic aspiration remained live for a while. It would have been appalling to Lete­lier, as to East European “socialists with a human face” who called for Marxist humanism, to learn that decades later it seemed most plausible that human rights had shared the same lifespan not with the renewal of socialism but with neoliberal policies and unequal outcomes almost everywhere. How that occurred is an intricate problem, but one prism is how human rights were connected with global distributional politics from the beginning through the romance of the concept of “basic needs” in development circles.