Human rights

Lenin has posted an interesting article on Human Rights over at the tomb. Again, however, I think that there may be some, in my opinion, misconceptions and exaggerations going on.

The trouble with human rights, then. In itself, a codified set of rules about how human beings should be treated is both valuable and necessary.

I guess I might agree with this. But I would first point out that by the very notion of rights, we presuppose the legal form, which means we presuppose a particular set of material conditions. Which is why I'm not sure I agree with:

the reason it could do this is that it attempts to ground politics in something essentially apolitical.

Insofar as human rights are rights, i.e. the action of a being, interpellated through the legal form as a legal person they presuppose the existence of commodity producing society, this makes them deeply political, in fact their very structure is tied to a set of material relations. This being said, I suspect I have a slightly more positive view of human rights than Lenin, firstly:

Political contexts are eschewed, and instead shocking instances of brutality are interpreted as attesting to something constant in human nature that must be suppressed in various ways - usually be reducing the political sphere, since it is precisely in the domain of democratic possibility that governments can be beholden to 'special' interests rather than universal ones.

This division is surely premissed on the fact that political content cannot be expressed through the legal form. Yet, in fact, the converse is true. Every particular legal conjuncture is deeply political and hugely contestable. It does seem somewhat odd to privilige a particular 'political' sphere, especially when said sphere is structured around capitalism.

Wadham of Liberty argues that "Elected parliaments in this country and around the world have shown that, on their own, they are not able to protect human rights properly.". This lead him to call for removing the power to appoint judges from the elected government and place it in the hands of "an independent appointments committee".

This, in itself, has always been pretty problematic for me. Firstly, it seems that Lenin is exalting our 'elected government', this presumably is the same government who sent us to war in Iraq. Surely Lenin, following his namesake should ask the question: Who, whom? I think it is also worth noting that judges and their decisions are not entirely divorced from the sphere of the political, that is to say class struggle, would Lenin object to judges declaring the Terrorism Act incompatible with the Human Rights Act (the objection being based on the concept of a democratically elected government).

Human rights as an ideology is a potent mobiliser of support for imperialist interventions and, as mentioned, a formidable guarantor of legitimacy.

Correct, but with at least the possibility that human rights can be contestable.

The problem as I see it is thus:
1. What is the political? Although Human Rights movements insist on their apolitical nature we all know the truth, human rights are deeply political. If this is the case they are contestible, even if ultimately they need to be transcended.
2. If human rights can be political then this means that it is not necessarily true that their use is anti-democratic (although readers will know I have a serious problem with the legalisation of politics). Democratic politics, as taken as liberal democracy, are highly exclusionary insofar as they ignore the political dimension of the economic, would we say a strike was anti-democratic because it didn't involve formal political channels.

Ultimately I think I am of the view that human rights are a lot more complex than some people would like to admit. Firstly, they are obvious products of bourgeois society, inasmuch as the legal form is rooted in commodity exchange. This being said, and within the limited context I have previously outlined, with the growth of the legal form as primary social regulator, political dispute, regardless as to its progressiveness is expressed through the legal form. Although this is subject to a number of problems I have outlined it cannot simply be dismissed. The scope of a right is demarcated by particular material conditions.

China Miéville has shown that international law, is structured by the violence of imperialism (though I have my slight objections on this point). But human rights law is more difficult to pin down on this point. Because human rights law is related to legal human subjects it can be successfully appropriated by 'the people'. I mean, do any of us complain about the decision in Pinochet (notwithstanding the pathetic getout clause).

Whilst we should struggle to overcome human rights, I think our approached should be nuanced, Lenin writes (and quotes):

David Chandler, in his perspicacious book, (From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and International Intervention, Pluto Press, 2002), has a better suggestion. The active subject must be re-emphasised. Mass politics must be reinvigorated, and we must make the most of "people's capacity for autonomy and collective rational decision-making, a capacity denied by the proponents of ethical regulation from above".

The point here is that the two are not mutually exclusive. Mass politics is of course primary but that does not mean efforts should not be made to re-capture human rights law. Human Rights are also not a priori connected to regulation from above. One can imagine a situation where certain human rights are seized upon and used against the oppressors (remember also that some human rights are economic).

The important thing to remember is that the legal form is not just a product of someone's imagination, it is an objective form posited by a certain set of material relations. Therefore, whilst we attempt to transcend its narrow form we must also engage with it and push it to its limits, for change is never so stagist as to move from 'legal egoism' to selfless mass action, the new is expressed through the old, and then it transcends it.