3. There are no universal human rights, but consensual extensions of liberties to individuals by the collectivity/polity enhance and deepen the potential for individual and collective/social human development in ways that promote the creation and sustainability of a new, aggressively entrepreneurial vision of communism.
Western criticisms on the lack of respect by government and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials for basic human rights are certainly not new. Pointedly, the Western reaction to the June 4, 1989 massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in Beijing represents the most significant episode of Western disapproval for Chinese policy with regard to democratic political participation, freedom of speech, and freedom to criticize the state. Further criticisms are evident on the incarceration of political prisoners, the prevalence of capital punishment, and the treatment of prisoners. It is not my intention here to dwell on any particular Western accounts attacking Chinese policies, especially when, with regard to the prevalence of incarcerations within the general population, the U.S. continues to incarcerate a larger percentage of the general population than any other country in the world (who is calling the kettle black?!). Rather, my purpose is to approach the subject of universal human rights from a Marxian perspective in order to evaluate the CCP's position that universal human rights are incompatible with the political heritage of China and, more specifically, with China's appropriation of Marxism.
In various posts on this blog (on gun control, on marriage equality, on U.S. Supreme Court decisions), I have attempted to make the point that there are no such things as universal, inalienable rights. In this sense, I refer to rights in the strictest possible terms as concerning unconditional guarantees of the liberty of action by individuals. I adamantly adhere to this position for several reasons. First, approaching from a partisan perspective that prioritizes collectivity and democratic political practices, the notion of rights, as absolute guarantees of liberty against social/state interference that inhere to individuals regardless of the contexts in which they are exercised, manifest irresolvable constraints on the capacity of the collectivity/polity to exercise its will as a democratic sovereign. At stake is the capacity of the state, acting in the collective interests of a democratic polity, to pursue those interests through legislative enactments that may impede the capacity of individuals to exercise their rights.
Critically, the litigal "rights revolution" in America over the last half century (including not only the Civil Rights movement, but movements for animal rights, for gun rights, for rights to clean air and water, for the rights of the mentally ill, for marriage equality, etc.) did not precisely operate under an absolute and unconditional conception of rights and, in many circumstances, the judicial enforcements of claims by individuals either to freedom from social interference with individual actions (negative rights) or to equal treatment in subject social contexts (a particular subset of positive rights) has had significantly progressive consequences (e.g. the current spread of rights to marriage equality). In important ways, we need to draw distinctions here between the extension of limited positive rights (i.e. demands for equal treatment in commodity markets or in the negotiation of contracts) and negative rights. However, in general, the juridical affirmation and enforcement of a right must place some tangible restrictions on the liberty of the state and of the polity in whose name the state acts to enact needed policies (e.g. enactment of sensible restrictions on the purchase and use of handguns in the interest of public safety). Approaching from another direction, the affirmation of rights by jurists forecloses any necessity to engage in the sort of public argumentation and institutional democratic consensus building in support of governmental constitutional or statutory enactments or, less formally, practical community support and extra-legal enforcement of respect for the subject of rights extension. Citizens, thus, lose some measure of civic responsibility to engage with other citizens in order to shape the general direction of their collective governance, at divergent levels of government. Moreover, judicial affirmation of individual rights is additionally important, in part, because establishments of rights through judicial pronouncement under particular constitutional interpretations may be withdrawn by subsequent jurists embodying alternative understandings on the meaning of constitutional provisions. Fundamentally, the best protection of individual liberties within a democratic polity is mass consensus on the value of such liberties and the necessity to secure their recognition over time through enforced state policy.
Individuals are not sovereign agents - sovereignty arises as a practical/contingent outcome of collective action/association. This proposition is, at least partly, consistent with a Rousseauean civic republican view in which citizenship and the liberties that extend therefrom must be undertstood as a fundamental outcome of a social contract between constituent members of a polity, surrendering all claim to categorical/unconditional rights in favor of consensually conferred and mutually respected individual liberties. Supporting such a view, I prefer to approach freedoms from social regulation of the actions of individuals not from the framework of rights (as unconditional, inalienable absolutes) but from the framework of mutual consent for individual liberties within a democratic polity, by a collective, democratic sovereign.
Moreover, at a more abstract level within the Marxian tradition, the concept of a right is ontologically incompatible with the concept of a universe of seamless interconnection between processes (a holistic Althusserian structured totality) insofar as it relies on the capacity of the individual, as the executor of a sovereign will to act, to proceed as if his actions were wholly disconnected from the constitution of every other individual, a position that, as a Marxist, I reject. Every act undertaken by an individual agent constitutes, in part, the conditions within which every other individual agent is compelled to act because every action holds consequences for the collective ecological context, at every conceivable scale (in the limit, as we acknowledge the infinite connectiveness of material processes across space-time, for the universe). Taking this ontological framework as the background for Marxist theorization, no space exists for the ontological centrality of the individual. Effectively, Marxism, in this understanding, goes a step beyond the liberal/individualist ontological foundations of Rousseauean thinking to cross out the existence of the primordial autonomous individual (in the state of nature) altogether, in favor of the continuous prioritization of produced ecology (society and nature as mutually connected, mutually constituted, and inseparably reinforcing fields situating each human agent in relation to the universe of all human and non-human agents).
In my view, notwithstanding possible minor semantic differences with Maoist ontological conceptualizations (Althusser did, after all, derive his understandings of overdeterminist ontology, in part, from Mao's theorizations on contradiction), the CCP's rejection of universal human rights is wholly compatible with Marxian theory as I understand it. Therefore, I cannot base my critique of the CCP's condemnation of universal human rights on Marxian ontological positions. Rather, my larger critique must be based wholly on instrumental questions. Most specifically, the question that I need to answer concerns the appropriate regime of individual liberties for maximizing the developmental potential of communist class structures, as the ultimate partisan goal of Marxian theory.
Approaching this question from an abstract level, economic development clearly demands a certain range of liberties, especially liberties with respect to the use and alienation of property. The English Common law principle sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas ("use your own property so as not to harm others in the use of theirs"), for example, simultaneously expresses the terms by which individuals might expect to be free in the use of their property and provides the basis for others to obtain relief for property uses that violate their liberty to enjoy their property. It, thus, provides basic guidance on the use of property with the polity's blessing, open to further narrowing or expansion in the polity's interest (e.g. reducing liabilities in specific uses of property in order to prioritize the development of specified sectors). Associational economic liberties, like those concerning the free entrance of individuals into contracts and market exchange relationships, may involve a certain interpersonal extension from basic allowances on the use of property, but they may also form a critical argument for non-economic associational liberties, like those involved in the formal partisan regulation of the state through democratic suffrage. In both economic and non-economic circumstances, the formative aspects of interpersonal interaction work to reshape autonomous/asocial individuals into members of a collectivity and, at least potentially, into democratic citizens. Ideally, they teach a certain degree of civility and deference to the desires and needs of others in the process of defining mutual interests served by an association between individuals.
Borrowing from liberal philosophical and juridical thought, the free communication of ideas within social contexts (e.g. public demonstrations, mass media, electronic forums, textbooks, and even marketing/advertising) constitutes a contribution to the metaphorical marketplace of ideas, within which individuals consume those ideas that seem most compelling and persuasive. In this sense, free speech constitutes a preeminent form of associational liberty and a vitual prerequisite to all other associational liberties. That is to say, the capacity of individuals to assemble, define their collective self-interests, and act on the behalf of these interests presumes the capacity of individuals to expressively articulate their ideas and the reasons why collective actions may serve their ends. This instrumental (utilitarian) argument for the virtue of free speech originates, to a significant degree with J.S. Mill's On Liberty, but it also plays an important role in U.S. Supreme Court Justice Holmes' early Twentieth century dissents favoring an expansion of First Amendment protections over the short term benefits of suppressing subversive political speech (see, especially, Holmes' dissent in Gitlow v. New York (268 U.S. 652(1925)) at: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=268&invol=652. In particular: "If in the long run the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.").
The formative aspects of free speech, moreover, cannot be limited to political speech (i.e. speech directed to transform state-political processes). They must likewise be implicated in communications of a purely commercial nature, where producers compete for market share by persuading potential customers of the superiority of their products. As such, marketing processes, as a subset of the larger production of cultural images in social contexts, demand a political environment unconstrained by social restrictions on communications. Moreover, beyond purely commercial and purely political speech, we have the full range of cultural communications generated as arts and sciences (theoretic and analytic materials, theater, music, dance, romance novels, sports, etc.). Taken as a totality, the codified or otherwise expressed ideas in a given social context forms the raw material through which human beings in particular places and at particular moments in history are shaped, through endless processes of formal/academic and informal/practical lifelong education, into fully social beings. Thus, to constrain the flow of communicated information to individuals means to close off certain ways of thinking about, seeing, and linguistically articulating lived reality and, therefore, to stunt particular modes of mental and/or emotional human development and to accentuate others. Such cultural processes of learning/socialization in turn shape the ways in which individuals come together with other individuals to articulate and resolve economic problems, expressing implicitly or explicitly their material needs and desires in order to steer the course of economic development from the most microscopic/microeconomic contexts through broader public policy debates on issues like health care or public education.
Taking these abstract reflections on liberty as a starting point, market-oriented distributive systems for use values (i.e. goods and services) do not strictly require a full regime of liberties. Marxian theory has been fairly consistent in arguing that market processes strictly require the liberty of individuals to alienate the particular forms of property to be exchanged, including labor power (i.e. the human capacity for productive labor). Moreover, notwithstanding a broad history of arguments to the contrary within Western liberal thought, there is nothing strictly correlative between the existence of market exchange institutions and the extension of a broader range of liberties. It might, thus, be axiomatic that markets demand a certain capacity for individuals to communicate information concerning the commodities in exchange, but liberalization of commercial communications need not lead to a broader institution of free speech, especially concerning partisan political discourse. If China's example teaches us anything, then it should be instructive on the capacity of authoritarian states to encourage free exchange of commodities while simultaneously constraining the capacity of citizens to actively engage in democratic state-political processes.
Furthermore, markets cannot be seen as naturalistic institutions - they are creatures of human developmental processes, through which the interactions of individuals produce particular institutions of mutually conducive exchange, define their social boundaries (e.g. defining what can be exchanged, when it can be exchanged, where it can be exchanged, etc.), and determine their relationship to state-political processes. The produced nature of market processes presumes the capacity of a polity to regulate such institutions through the state, and, as such, the associational liberties necessary to market exchange are always subject to regulation. Rather than simply imaging that market processes axiomatically lead to either a free market in ideas or to full blown liberal civic republican institutions (e.g. rule of law, limited government intervention in the lives of autonomous individuals), we need to respect markets for the limited freedoms that they do, at least potentially, facilitate. Under the appropriate (competitive) conditions, markets may convey greater opportunities for freedom of choice by consumers than other non-market mechanisms for the distribution of use values (e.g. "socialistic" centralized distributions of mass produced goods and services). More importantly, in my view, market-oriented systems appear almost indisputably to offer greater opportunities for entrepreneurial innovation and spontaneous development of new entrepreneurial projects than do non-market systems. If markets are structured to facilitate free entry at will by new entrepreneurs, then market institutions will maximize a decentralization of entrepreneurial initiative, driving the wider development of a given macroeconomic system.
With these thoughts in mind, communism, understood again as a class structure incorporating the collective appropriation and distribution of surplus labor by its producers, can function within a variety of distributive systems for use values, including market-oriented systems. In my view, communism, understood through the refractory lens of Western worker cooperatives that appear to achieve, in some measure, the collective appropriation and distribution of surplus labor by its producers, works better within market-oriented distributive systems. That is, communist producers/collective entrepreneurs appear more apt to succeed in distributive systems within which they are able to compete for market share in suitable scaled market contexts based on a variety of cost and niche/qualitative (monopolistically-) competitive advantages. Other, alternative non-monetary mechanisms, like localized barter-exchange networking, appear suitable for the development and sustainability of communist structures, but, if only because market mechanisms, making use of unified monetary means of exchange, are so ubiquitous, markets provide an easier path for the sustainability of collective entrepreneurial communist projects. Conversely, centrally structured distributive systems appear least suited to the sort of entrepreneurial innovation that I associate with the development of communist class structures. The difference here involves the selective injection of individual/collective and associative liberties with respect to the utilization and alienation of property apparent within suitably organized market contexts.
Concluding that market liberties are good for the development and sustainability of communism, as a partisan goal of Marxian theory and partisan activism, I am left to offer a final appraisal of the CCP's rejection of universal human rights, in view of China's recent record of market liberalization and its continued rejection of political liberties. As I have suggested here, there are no axiomatic linkages between the extension of market-oriented economic liberties and political liberties. There are evidently reasons for hope, however, in the progressive breakup of a national macroeconomy organized around exploitative, centralized state-capitalist enterprises. In large part, such entities are being replaced by exploitative private, market-oriented capitalist enterprises, largely under domestic ownership but occasionally under foreign ownership and direction. Clearly, there are possible spaces in the regional macroeconomies of the Peoples' Republic that appear quite conducive to the development of communisms. Most notably, in non-urban economies, the development since the 1980s of township-village enterprises (TVEs), represents a potential space for communist development. Over the last decade, many of these enterprises, under the ownership of local municipal governments, have been privatized. In their place networks of private enterprises have occasionally developed. Critically, I know very little about these developments or whether the collective appropriation and distribution of surplus value characterizes any enterprises emerging from the privatization of the TVEs. On the other hand, it appears to be a hopeful avenue to interrogate the development of actual communist enterprises in China. Beyond this, as a Western Marxist, committed, on the one hand, to communist development (as the democratization of surplus labor) and, on the other hand, to the expansion of a broad regime of individual liberties conducive to a broader democratic discourse, I hope that every moment of real communist development in China raises questions concerning the broader nature of the party autocracy and the unfulfilled promise of democratic spontaneity embodied in the Cultural Revolution.
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