Human rights, livelihoods and Ubuntu for the 21st century

The celebration of Human Rights Day across the world will be meaningless without interrogating the significance of peoples’ rights in relationship to human livelihood and peaceful co-existence among humans and between humans and planet earth in the 21st century. Such interrogation should be geared towards unravelling the implications of new phenomena for our collective humanity in the 21st century. These phenomena include the Western conception of human rights based on exclusions and hierarchies, biotechnology and robotics revolution, genetic perdition and cloning, capitalist plundering of the earth, as well as the dehumanisation of human beings by neo-liberal capitalism.

Following the devastating war associated with the capitalist depression of 1929-1945, an international organisation, the United Nations, was formed with a mandate to promote world peace. There were four salient objectives outlined in the UN Charter: 1) to maintain world peace and security; 2) to protect the fundamental human rights and uphold the dignity and equality of all humans; 3) to create a forum for cooperation in solving international problems and in providing respect for international law; and 4) to promote freedom, advance human progress and achieve better standards of living.

In 1948, the UN agreed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which codified a common universal standard for the upholding of human dignity. Today, 10 December 2010, 62 years after the declaration, it is important for all people to reflect deeply on the meaning of human dignity in the 21st century. We want to remind our readers that the challenges of the moment demand that, in tandem with the ideals of Ubuntu, we elevate the new principle of the collective rights of human beings in the 21st century. The principle of Ubuntu which is now emerging as a core organising principle links humans to each other, to nature, and to the universe. It is this concept of shared humanity that we want to reflect on today so that we can promote an inclusive concept of peace, human dignity, and human rights.

THE UN DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS

The idea of an international organisation such as the League of Nations had been shattered by military aggression, racism and xenophobia in Europe. Just as the US is now making mockery of the UN Charter, so the Germans and the Italians scuttled the idea of respect for national sovereignty and mutual respect. Africans remember vividly the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and the use of chemical and biological weapons against Africans by the fascist Benito Mussolini of Italy. The attempt to create an international organisation to settle disputes among nations took shape only after the debacles of fascism, war, capitalist depression, the Nazi Holocaust, and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The genocide and mass killings of the Second World War had emanated from the genocidal mindset that had been celebrated as ‘development and progress.’ During the carnage of war the international momentum for peace gained force in the UN Charter, the Convention on Genocide, and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR). Despite the limitations of the implementation of the core elements of this declaration, it is important to state that oppressed peoples recognised the UDHR as a mobilising tool for the expansion of human and people’s rights. In the present environment of torture and the so-called global war on terror, the onslaught of austerity measures against people’s economic and cultural rights, and the general conflation of human rights with the rights of capitalists, it is important to expose the hollowness of Western human rights campaigns. Hence, we want to restate the importance of all the articles of the UDHR, but especially articles 1, 5, 22, and 25.

NO ONE SHALL BE SUBJECTED TO TORTURE

Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: ‘No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.’ Yet, capitalist torture is visited upon the majority of the citizens of the planet. Capitalist torture stretches from the sweatshops of Asia and the illegal mining fields of Eastern Congo to the toxic environmental pollution in the Niger Delta and the cancer alleys of New Orleans, as well as the threat of human incineration and denial of livelihood through global warming and biological colonisation of peoples of the Third World. To quote the former Irish president Mary Robinson, climate change now constitutes ‘the biggest human rights issue of the 21st century.’ International institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO and their capitalist allies lobby against the collective rights of working people as much as they do against governments’ collective will to solve such pressing problems as global warming. They align with governments to violate labour laws and prevent environmental protection that could guarantee ordinary people’s rights to habitable environments.

This torture is supported by an information war to insure that citizens are dumbed down so that they do not get up and stand up for their rights. The right to information as a basic right is now being highlighted by the intense campaign against Wikileaks. This campaign against information freedom and democratic access to information underlines the vulnerability of the ruling classes and the reality that they are now retreating from the basic liberal principles of the system of capitalism. In order to maintain this social system, a vast military machinery has been deployed by the USA to prop up dictators and torturers around the world. This international support for torture and inhuman treatment has meant that the leaders of the USA openly celebrate torturing humans. In his book, ‘Decision Point’, former US President George W. Bush boasted of giving orders for water boarding. Water boarding is torture. Torture is a violation of international law. But George W. Bush was simply giving voice to the opposition of the principles of the rights of human beings. It is the same US government that spends millions of dollars hypocritically promoting human rights and fighting terrorism.

This celebration of the dispensation of torture and inhuman treatment in the 21st century by the same government that had violated Africans’ human and people’s rights in the name of fighting communism in the 20th century underlines the reason why all of the governments of Africa (except one) oppose the establishment of the US Africa Command. This hypocrisy of the US must be denounced on this international day for human rights.

Western concept of human rights and democracy has been premised on the liberal concept of property rights, which for centuries included the right to own, dehumanise, and exploit fellow human beings. In the United States the liberal agenda of the rights of individuals has been to reinforce and extend the right of absolute private property. This meant that those who had the right to absolute private property could dehumanise others and designate them less than human. It was for this reason that the USA designated African peoples as three-fifths of human. It required a major war for the US constitution to recognise Africans as full humans.

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.’ This article no doubt was framed with the understanding of the Western concept of property rights which had legalised enslavement and claimed slaves were not equal humans with their European slave holders. The slave holders owned and commercialised the rights of enslaved persons, including their right to life. This is not only a question of the past. Those who want to patent life forms in the 21st century seek to give the right over life to profit-driven corporations. As sought by the intellectual property rights regime of the World Trade Organization, just about everything will be made into a commodity and corporations should have the right to patent life forms. There will be a new hierarchy of humans. In this context, select individuals and corporations would exercise the right to own the abstract and biological properties of things, such as genetic materials. They would monopolise the right to exclude others humans from freely using the products of the corporations’ patented genetic materials.

Digital technology now permeates the world with major implications for the concept of human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written before the era when biotechnology rapidly moved from a purely academic field for research to a corporate forum. This year, Craig Venter announced that he had produced ‘synthetic’ life. For more than two decades the legal infrastructure of the USA has been preparing humans for this moment when capitalists could play God. In 1987, the Patents and Trademark Office (PTO) of the USA laid the basis for transnational corporations to grab new powers when the PTO decided to reverse its position regarding patenting and issued a ruling that all genetically engineered multi-cellular organisms (including animals) could be patented. The ruling excluded human beings however, due to the fact that the 13th amendment forbids human slavery. But the invention of ‘artificial’ life raises new issues for our common humanity. Jeremy Rifkin had reflected on this challenge when he noted, ‘genetically altered human embryos and fetuses as well as human genes, cell lines, tissues, and organs are potentially patentable, leaving open the possibility of patenting all of the separate parts, if not the whole, of a human being.’

Thus, the international human rights day should be seen as an opportunity to strengthen the articles of UDHR and all local and international legal tools that could be used to confront the challenges posed by property rights rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Samir Amin in his book, ‘The Liberal Virus’, demonstrates how the intellectual property rights regime, especially in the field of agriculture could lead to the decimation of a billion poor people. This magnitude of this challenge reinforces the question of what constitutes human rights in the 21st century.

EVERYONE HAS A RIGHT TO SOCIAL SECURITY

Article 22 of the UDHR states that: ‘Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.’ Though this article was not gender sensitive enough as evident in the use of ‘his’ in reference to men and women, the main point we want to highlight here is that the economic and social-cultural dimensions of rights are as important as the political rights. But in the dominant Western conception of human rights, the individual rights of capitalists to accumulate wealth (at the expense of the economic, social, and cultural wellbeing of human beings) are touted as though those were the essence of the totality of human dignity, peace, and freedom. This is especially evident in this era of capitalist depression when austerity measures are being imposed by the IMF, undermining the rights of workers and ordinary people to defend their socio-economic wellbeing. Today, the right to organise by women, students, workers, ordinary folks, and same gender loving persons remain core elements of international human rights agitation. One part of the commitment that could be made on this day of the celebration of international human rights is to study and expose these capitalist corporations instead of diverting attention through window-dressed studies on poverty alleviation that do not get to the roots of the problem.

At this juncture, we want to highlight article 25 of the UDHR. The first part of this article states that: ‘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.’ Only the effects of the austerity measures as a response to the crumbling capitalist mode of economic organisation/re-organisation say it all: article 25 cannot be realised under the present mode of economic organisation. Realising the social and economic rights of humans requires a new social system in the 21st century.

The ruling classes are vulnerable on so many fronts, so they want people to forget the articles of the UDHR. The task of organising, educating, and mobilising people to this reality is becoming urgent but is confronted with the sophisticated propaganda machine that has been deployed by the generals and high priests of capitalism who make people fight against their own economic and social rights through the demonisation of the ideas of social collectivism.

EXTENDING RIGHTS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

In Africa, working people supported the UDHR as a document to use for mobilisation. In 1948, when this document was written, most African countries were under colonial rule. In the process of achieving their independence, Africans wrote their own Charter on Human and People’s Rights. Throughout the anti-colonial struggles, African intellectuals and human rights activists refused to accept the Western concept of human rights that excluded the question of self determination. These activists exposed the intellectual deformity that was manifest in the international campaign of powers that supported apartheid while championing human rights.

The African Charter on Human and People’s Rights which came into force in 1986 recognised that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not cover people’s collective rights, especially the right to self determination. The limitations of the UDHR were even clearer in terms of the rights of women. In 1979 the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) was instituted as an attempt to repair one of the limitations of the UDHR. Thirty-one years after this convention, the US remains a non-signatory to it. The reproductive rights of women and their right to bodily integrity have taken the question of human rights beyond the state, church, patriarchal family forms, and conservative women. The battles over reproductive rights have brought into focus the fact that human rights cannot be separated from the rights of women and the right to healthcare. This is even more so in the context of the debate over the provision of universal health care in the United States. The healthcare industry and their allied politicians have so commercialised healthcare that not only was government intervention to provide universal healthcare coverage for tens of millions uninsured Americans denied, the over 200 million citizens who have health insurance are tied up in rigorous procedural complications designed to deny them access to the coverage they pay for while maximising profits for the health insurance companies. It is on the question of the reproductive rights of women that religious fundamentalists have now emerged as negative forces in the struggle for human rights. These fundamentalists mobilise ideas about tradition to reinforce patriarchal domination over women. The oppression of women is also linked to the oppression of same gender loving persons. Even some of the leading human rights advocates in Africa have been silent on the extreme anti-human statements that have been propounded by so-called ‘radical’ leaders in Africa. Within the rank of religious organisations, the most profound work is needed to challenge the anti-human position of those who would oppress same gender loving persons. Human rights in the 21st century must be extended to protect all human beings against all forms of torture and dehumanisation, whether in the name of religion and tradition or through the invisible hands of capitalism and neo-liberalism.

UBUNTU AND 21ST CENTURY HUMAN RIGHTS CHALLENGES

Those who organised for the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights worked hard to oppose dictatorship yesterday. Today, the new tasks require new thinking and new forms of organising. The task of re-humanisation and healing are linked to new modes of thinking and new forms of consciousness. At the time of the 1948 human rights declaration, Western governments gave themselves the prerogative to decide who is human and what is right. This was most evident in South Africa, where in the same 1948; the principles of apartheid were entrenched. Since the end of formal apartheid in 1994, international capitalism has sought to entrench a new global apartheid based on the kind of class structure that defends 1 or 2 per cent of the population. The towering challenges that confront humanity in the 21st century – environmental crisis, the crises of the capitalist mode of economic organisation, militarisation of the earth, and crises arising from the binary and hierarchical conception of human being – are now enough to take the veil of Western ideation of human and property rights off the face of our collective humanity. One of the central ideas I put forward in my book, ‘Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics’, is that a new concept of social collectivism (Ubuntu) must be the basis of economic, social, and political organisation if humans are to survive the challenges of the 21st century. As we celebrate international human rights day, we want to reiterate here that we cannot separate the question of human rights and Ubuntu – our linked humanity and our peaceful coexistence with planet earth – in the 21st century if we must have international peace and security.

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* Horace Campbell is a teacher and writer. Professor Campbell's website is http://www.horacecampbell.net. His latest book is 'Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the USA', published by Pluto Press.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.