15/11/2019 Human rights after October | 228 Spring 2017 | Jessica Whyte | Overland literary journal

ESSAY / RUSSIAN REVOLUTION / THE FUTURE

Human rights after October

By Jessica Whyte
228 Spring 2017

The language of human rights is under fire on the right and the left. While right-
wing authoritarian leaders frame civil rights and anti-discrimination agendas as
the exclusive concern of cosmopolitan elites, left-wing critics have argued that
the human rights movement has ignored economic inequality and legitimised
military interventions that further neoliberal ends.

Faced with mounting criticisms, human rights NGOs and advocates have
recently turned their attention to social and economic rights. In 2015, Philip
Alston, the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and
human rights, argued that extreme inequality should be seen as ‘a cause for
shame on the part of the international human rights movement’. He pointed to
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 by representatives
of forty-eight states, as having emphasised the key place of social and economic
rights – to food, housing, medical care and employment, for instance.

This renewed attention is heartening, but Alston’s proposals for securing such
rights are startling for anyone who sees a connection between spiralling
inequality and corporate power. Major corporations, he argues, should be
persuaded to oppose an ‘authoritarian, anti-rights, and anti-welfare future’, and
to ‘use their influence and power … for more human rights friendly approaches’.
Alston does not explain what would persuade the same corporations that lobby
for lower wages and corporate tax cuts to campaign for economic equality.

The drafting of the Declaration in 1947–8 reminds us of the conditions in which

social welfare came to be viewed as a human right. More than three decades on,
the spectre of the Russian Revolution still haunted attempts to determine what
was needed for human flourishing. When Eastern Bloc delegates from the Soviet
Union, the Belarusian and Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republics and Yugoslavia
travelled to upstate New York to participate in the drafting, Russia’s own
revolutionary days were a thing of the past. However much, though, the realities
of the Soviet Union had departed from the writings of Marx, or even Lenin, the
Soviet presence made both figures interlocutors in the drafting process, and
forced delegates to face their deep divergences over the social and economic
arrangements that each believed were necessary for securing human rights.

In contrast, when human rights once more came to prominence in the late
1970s, it was largely in opposition to both communism and the revolutionary
anti-colonialism in the previous decades that had circulated from Algeria to
Vietnam to Namibia, transforming international relations. Returning to the
Soviet contribution to the drafting of the Declaration reminds us of a different
lineage of human rights – one in which revolutions, rather than courts and
corporations, were its guarantors.

In a searing 1976 critique, the Austrian neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek

described the Declaration as an incoherent attempt ‘to fuse the rights of the
Western liberal tradition with the altogether different conception deriving from
the Marxist Russian Revolution’. Hayek saw the Marxist influence in the
Declaration’s extensive list of social and economic rights, including social
security; work and its ‘just remuneration’; the ability to form and join trade
unions; rest and leisure; and food, clothing, housing, medical care, social
security and education.

But the attribution of these rights to the revolution is only partly accurate.
Meeting in the wake of the Great Depression, the Declaration’s drafters were
acutely aware of what Hannah Arendt has termed ‘the terrifying predicament of
mass poverty’, and of the potential for this to lead in revolutionary directions.
The rise of socialism and communism had placed ‘the social question’ on the
political agenda, including at the United Nations – the concerns of workers
could be heard in the halls of international diplomacy
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could be heard in the halls of international diplomacy.

The early days of the drafting process saw bitter conflicts between supporters of
a minimal list of liberal rights (to freedom of speech, conscience and bodily
integrity) and those who believed the Declaration must reflect the gains of the
workers’ struggles of the previous centuries and include rights to social welfare.
The UK delegate Charles Dukes defended his own country’s draft, which
contained no social and economic rights, by telling the assembled delegates
that ‘the world needed freedom and not well-fed slaves’. In liberal societies, the
delegate of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Michael Klekovkin, shot
back, ‘Men are free, but are dying of hunger.’

The Russian Revolution no doubt influenced the climate in which hunger could
be a topic of political debate. Yet, the strongest advocates of the inclusion of
social and economic rights were not the Soviets but rather the Latin American
states, under the influence of the Mexican revolution and its socialist
constitution of 1917. It was from drafts prepared by Chile, Colombia and Cuba
that many of the social and economic rights in the Declaration were taken.

While the Soviet delegates supported such rights, they were sceptical about
their realisation in a system of private profit, and under no illusions that a
declaration of economic rights would heal class antagonisms or overcome
poverty. On this, they would have agreed with Hayek, who mocked the idealism
of those who believed it was possible to bring a state of affairs into being
simply by declaring it. ‘The conception of a “universal right” which assures to the
peasant, to the Eskimo, and presumably to the Abominable Snowman “periodic
holidays with pay” shows the absurdity of the whole thing,’ he scoffed.

The Soviet delegates argued along similar lines, positing that, in a capitalist
country, there would always be a ‘flagrant contradiction’ between what was said
in such a document and reality. The declaration of a right to rest, for instance,
‘had a hollow ring in a society in which a small group always rested, while the
overwhelming majority worked all the time’. In regard to a system based on
private enterprise and the profit motive, only drastically altering it would enable
the Declaration’s rights to be realised.

While the Soviets supposedly represented a communist society, their own

proposals for securing such rights tied the satisfaction of material needs to the
imposition of labour. When the UK delegate argued that the right to work was
difficult to achieve without compulsory labour, for instance, the USSR delegate
referred to Article 12 of the Soviet Constitution, which described work as ‘a duty
and a matter of honour for every able-bodied citizen, in accordance with the
principle: “He who does not work, neither shall he eat”’.

The underpinning principle, according to the Soviet constitution, was socialist:

‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.’ As Marx
argued in his Critique of the Gotha Program, this was still a principle of
‘bourgeois right’ that was, in every respect, ‘stamped with the birthmarks of the
old society from whose womb it emerges’. To make the rights of producers
proportional to their labour, Marx argued, is to proclaim an equal right for
unequal labour – it tacitly recognises the differences between individuals, and
who may be more or less capable of work as their natural privileges.

Equal right, which measures unequal individuals by a single standard, ignored

the fact that people had different abilities and needs and could thus only result
in inequality. ‘To avoid all these defects,’ Marx wrote, ‘right, instead of being
equal, would have to be unequal.’ Only then could ‘the narrow horizon of
bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners:
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’

While Marx criticised formal equality that cemented existing inequalities, Hayek
and his neoliberal followers celebrated it for precisely this reason. Treating
unequal people equally would entrench the inequalities between them, Hayek
argued, and ‘the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat
them differently’.

We can see this manifesting today: as individuals are made responsible for
fulfilling their own needs, the language of equal rights serves to block
redistribution, progressive taxation, social welfare, affirmative action and
reparations for slavery and colonialism.

The Marxist critique of formal equality is often mobilised against the abstract
language of human rights. Yet, without recognising the gender, racial and other
identity-founded hierarchies that have demarcated the sphere of formal equality
and rights, producing what the philosopher Charles Mills calls ‘subpersons’, such
a critique risks erasing a history of struggle against colonialism, slavery and
gender subordination. Formal equality remains an unfinished project.

It is common on the left to hear claims that non-discrimination is a liberal

principle and a distraction from the ‘real’ economic concerns of the working
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principle, and a distraction from the real economic concerns of the working
class (implicitly conceived of as white). Quite the opposite was the case for the
Soviet Bloc in the wake of the Second World War. Far from focusing on
‘economic’ rights at the expense of political ones, the Soviet delegation argued
from the earliest meetings that ‘one of the first principles’ of the proposed
declaration ought to be ‘the destruction of discrimination and inequality’. The
Soviets criticised those who spoke of equality while maintaining racial
discrimination domestically and in the colonies, and who refused to consider
married women as legal persons.

There was undoubtedly some cynicism in highlighting discrimination in the

early stages of the Cold War – a time when the United States maintained ‘Jim
Crow laws’ enforcing racial segregation throughout the South. Yet, there was
more than realpolitik at play in the Soviet championing of non-discrimination.
In the racial segregation and white supremacy that persisted in European
colonies and the USA, as well as in South Africa’s racial laws, the Soviet
delegates saw disturbing parallels to the defeated European fascism. ‘The
absurd theory current among colonial powers that there were superior races and
inferior races must be eradicated,’ one Soviet Bloc delegate argued forcefully. ‘It
was reminiscent of the defeated Nazi theory.’

Early in the drafting, the Soviet delegate, Vladimir Koretsky, rebuked the French
jurist René Cassin for his use of the phrase ‘civilised nations’ – a phrase that
Koretsky argued, in the words of a written record of one of the meetings, had ‘no
meaning at the present time’. Civilisational hierarchies were an anachronism
belonging to the pre-revolutionary age of the tsars, when age-old civilisations
of India and China had been considered uncivilised by the Western
establishment.

When the UK tried to retain this language by pointing to the long, established
lineage of civilisational hierarchies, it was forced to reckon with the delegate of
India, who knew well the historical consequences that had flowed from
European assumptions of superiority. India, which had won its independence
only the year before, was one of the few former colonies represented, and it
insisted that references to agreements between ‘civilized nations’ be replaced by
the more inclusive ‘Members of the United Nations’.

Much of the world’s population, however, still lived under colonial rule, and was
therefore excluded from UN membership and the drafting process. The most
significant Soviet Bloc contribution to the drafting was to insist that the
Declaration specify that all the human rights applied equally to the colonies.
This proposal fell short of the position advocated by Lenin prior to 1917: that all
revolutionaries must demand the end of colonial oppression. Yet in the world of
international agreements, the claim that colonial subjects had equal rights was
unprecedented.

This Soviet proposal deeply upset the metropolitan powers, which were drafting
a declaration that proclaimed the equality of ‘all members of the human family’
while presiding over empires whose very existence attested to a presumption of
inequality between peoples. Were colonial subjects self-evidently included in
the universal categories ‘all humans’ and ‘everyone’? Or did history teach caution
about the assumption that those subjected to colonial rule would necessarily be
included in emancipatory declarations of universalism?

Led by the UK delegate, who was under instruction to avoid any special mention
of the colonies, the metropolitan delegates found a defensive weapon in the
language of non-discrimination heralded by the Soviets. Anti-discrimination
provisions now proved double-edged, with the colonial powers seizing on the
argument that to mention colonised people as subjects of human rights would
be to discriminate and cast doubt on their inclusion in the universal category of
‘humanity’. Specifically mentioning the colonies, the French delegate argued,
seemed to imply that ‘the populations of these territories did not enjoy the
essential rights and freedoms on an equal footing with the population of the
metropolitan territories’. This colonial position prefigured what Eduardo Bonilla-
Silva calls ‘color-blind racism’ – a neoliberal racism in which entrenched racial
hierarchies are obscured by myths of individual responsibility and equal
treatment.

Such arguments drew a sharp rebuke from the Haitian delegate: his country,
which could speak for colonised peoples, ‘assured the Committee that they
would prefer such a slight to their pride rather than have their rights go
unrecognised’. The Haitian delegate indeed had a wealth of experience to draw
on. In his seminal study of the Haitian revolution of 1791–1804, CLR James
draws attention to the crucial role of the slaves of Saint-Domingue – as the
country was known prior to independence – in realising the universal
aspirations of the ‘rights of man’.

News of the French Revolution had carried to Saint-Domingue’s plantations,

James notes, and the slaves ‘had construed it in their own image: the white
slaves in France had risen, and killed their masters, and were now enjoying the
fruits of the earth.’ Such an impression was, of course far from accurate. And yet,
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p , y ,
James writes, ‘They had caught the spirit of the thing. Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity.’ It would only be after a five-year revolutionary war that the former
slaves of Haiti succeeded in winning their independence. Their descendants
knew not to take the inclusion of colonial subjects in universal categories for
granted.

Those who remained under colonial rule in the mid-twentieth century were
quick to heed this lesson. In its final form, the Declaration specifies that
everyone is entitled to all the human rights therein and that ‘no distinction shall
be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the
country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust,
non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty’. But the
contradiction involved in declaring equal political rights in ‘non-self-governing’
territories, as the colonies were euphemistically called, was too obvious to
remain unchallenged for long.

In the subsequent three decades, victorious anti-colonial revolutions across Asia

and Africa more than doubled the membership of the UN. By 1966, when two
legally binding human rights covenants were adopted, both declared the right
of all peoples to self-determination in their first article. Today, when sovereignty
is too often mobilised by wealthy nations as a code for restrictive immigration
controls, and when powerful states proclaim their ‘right to intervene’ in the
affairs of former colonies, it is often forgotten that postcolonial self-
determination represented a challenge to the civilisational and racial
hierarchies that underpinned the colonial world order, as well as a forceful
rejection of colonial rule.

An earlier generation of anti-colonialists were inspired by Lenin’s argument that

self-determination was an essential component of democratic revolution, which
must overthrow ‘national oppression and colonial plunder’. A later generation
would embrace his contention that self-determination belongs exclusively to
the realm of democracy, and that no reform on this level could abolish the
domination of capital.

It was in the struggle against what Kwame Nkrumah, the first post-
independence president of Ghana, called ‘neo-colonialism’ that the anti-racist
insistence on sovereign equality and self-determination was united with
Marxian attempts to transcend equal right in favour of substantive equality.

This unity culminated in the Declaration on the Establishment of a New

International Economic Order (NIEO), which was passed unanimously by the UN
General Assembly in 1974. The NIEO sought to overcome the remains of
colonial domination, racial discrimination and apartheid by reforming the
international economic order and compensating former colonies for colonial
exploitation. Debt relief, permanent sovereignty over natural resources,
technology transfers and the regulation of multinational corporations were the
means by which formal equality would be made real, its advocates argued.

In his manifesto Towards a New National Order, the Algerian legal scholar
Mohammed Bedjaoui, who played a key role in the NIEO, rejected what he
termed ‘the froth and veneer of decolonisation’, by which he meant the
combination of formal independence with neo-colonial economic structures
designed to prevent economic self-determination.

Decolonisation, he argued, had revealed what the ideology of imperial power

had rendered invisible: ‘universal exploitation, and the dichotomy between
poverty and affluence’. Just as the colonial powers had employed the language
of anti-discrimination in order to prevent the extension of human rights to the
colonies, Bedjaoui astutely noted, international law’s formalism and principles
of non-discrimination had permitted colonisation, exploitation and racial
domination, enriching wealthy countries at the expense of impoverished ones.
Moreover, claims that colonial hegemony had been replaced by mutually
beneficial trade relations only served to obscure the continuing exploitation of
former colonies.

Along with other proponents of the NIEO, he evoked a new international law
that would instead facilitate ‘corrective or compensatory inequality’ to promote
the development of the Third World.

Decolonisation, Bedjaoui argued, was to the international order what the

revolutions were to the internal orders of France and Russia. After the winning
of independence, there was a need for another decisive stage, which would go
beyond the limitations of equal right by eroding the privileges of the former
colonial powers through economic decolonisation – an agenda that would
include redistribution from North to South and permanent sovereignty over
natural resources.

For this, anti-colonialists had to go beyond the approach of the Soviet Union,
which Bedjaoui argued had contested the rules of international law but
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which Bedjaoui argued had contested the rules of international law but
nonetheless come to accept them without ‘radical upheaval’. The task facing
anti-colonial revolutionaries was more akin to that facing the protagonists of
the Russian Revolution: how to break with the rule of wealth.

Long after what Bedjaoui called the ‘strong wind of the Bolshevik Revolution in
October 1917’ had died down in Saint Petersburg, it continued to blow in what
was then called the ‘Third World’. It was the anti-colonialists who would finally
take up Marx’s critique of equal (bourgeois) right, in an attempt to go beyond
formal independence and to complete the unfinished task of the Russian
Revolution.

It was in the face of these demands for a New International Economic Order to
compensate former colonies for colonial exploitation that both neoliberalism
and the human rights movement came to prominence. The model of rights
upheld by human rights NGOs was explicitly non-revolutionary, and privileged
civil and political rights and equality before the law over robust political
challenges to economic inequality.

Today, as human rights advocates turn their attention to global poverty and
inequality and call for greater emphasis on social and economic rights – even as
they dismiss revolutions as violent folly – it is worth remembering the struggles
that brought such rights into being. As Leon Trotsky remarked in response to
British Fabian socialists who desired working-class welfare while denouncing
revolution, ‘[E]ven children’s picture-books teach us that if you want to have
acorns you must not dig up the oak tree.’

*All drafting debate quotes in this essay are taken from the summary records.
See William A Schabas, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: The Travaux
Préparatoires, volumes I, II and III.

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Jessica Whyte is a senior lecturer in Cultural and Social Analysis at the

University of Western Sydney. Her book on human rights and neoliberalism will
be published by Verso in 2018.

More by Jessica Whyte

© 2019 Overland literary journal

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