Abstract
As is widely recognised, human rights have an individual dimension (political rights , fundamental freedoms) and a collective one, like the right to self-determination or the cultural rights of indigenous peoples. Nonetheless, the individual rights also have an economic and social dimension that has to do with the right to work, health or education , among others, and that explains why human rights , in their entirety, must be considered in their integrated form and are also strongly related to the human needs theory (Maslow 1982) as well as to the human development paradigm (Neef/Elizalde 1986) and the UNDP Reports on Human Development. Therefore, if every human being has a need for affection, participation, subsistence, protection, understanding, leisure, creativity, freedom, identity and so on, these needs require the implementation of basic satisfiers through public policies implemented by the State, which is the basis of the second generation of social, economic and cultural rights .
Ambassador Prof. Dr. Luis Alberto Padilla, Ph.D. in Social Sciences (Paris-Sorbonne University), professor at Rafael Landivar University (Guatemala), founder and president of the International Relations & Peace Research Institute (IRIPAZ), former General Secretary of CLAIP and career diplomat, currently director of the Diplomatic Academy.
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- 1.
The first generation of human rights is the individual ones. Both generations of rights are officially recognised by governments that have signed and ratified the 1966 UN Conventions on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, among them all Latin American countries.
- 2.
Human development as it has been defined by the United Nations (see Padilla 2009: 243–251).
- 3.
As defined by the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the United Nations 2030 agenda.
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Referring to ‘his own theoretical position’, Sousa Santos argues that we are going through a period of postmodern transition and that he himself is considered in a ‘postmodern opposition’ because “the modern critical theory is subparadigmatic, that is, it tries to develop the potential of social emancipation within the dominant paradigm itself. On the contrary, the assumption from which the argument of this book starts is that the dominant paradigm has long since exhausted all its potentialities of emancipation, as manifested sufficiently by the voracity with which it transforms them into so many forms of social regulation. Critical thinking must, therefore, adopt a paradigmatic stance proper to a radical critique of the dominant paradigm from the point of view of an imagination, healthy enough to raise a new paradigm with horizons of emancipation. The radicalism of criticism is justified only insofar as it allows the formulation of radical alternatives to the mere repetition of ‘realistic’ possibilities” (Sousa Santos 2009a, b: 17–18).
- 6.
Citing investigations by Lansing in 1987 and 1991 and Lansing and Kremer in 1993, Sousa Santos (2009b: 190–191) also states that ‘This case illustrates the importance of the ‘precautionary Principle’ in dealing with the question of a possible complementarity or contradiction between different types of knowledge. In the irrigation systems cases in Bali, the incompatibility between two knowledge systems (religious and scientific), both suited in the same intervention (irrigating rice fields) result in an incorrect assessment based on the abstract superiority of scientific knowledge. Thirty years after the disastrous technical-scientific intervention, computer models – an area of the new sciences – showed that the water-maintenance sequences used by the priests of the Dewi-Danu deity were more efficient than any other conceivable system, whether scientific or otherwise’ (Lansing/Kremer 1993). “The ‘precautionary Principle’ consists of the preference in deciding the application of social policies; priority must be given to the form of knowledge that guarantees the highest level of participation to the social groups involved in their design, execution and control, and the greatest benefits of the intervention” (Sousa Santos 2009b: 190–191). Another interesting piece of research about this ‘ecology of knowledge’ appears in a book by the American social scientist Jared Diamond, who worked in the highlands of the island of Papua New Guinea, where the natives had a vertical system of irrigation which had been in use for thousands of years and was much more efficient than a ‘modern’ terrace system that some western ‘experts’ wanted to introduce (Cf.: Diamond 2005: 334–336).
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This tension between capitalism and democracy was ‘solved’ in Latin America and Africa thanks to the neoliberalism boom of the 1980s (somehow still in force), which in many countries led the State to abandon the policies of market regulation, liquidate mechanisms of social redistribution, and opt for what Sousa Santos calls a ‘low-intensity, elitist, procedural, and corrupt democracy’ (2016: 218).
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“Radicalising democracy means, above all, intensifying its tension with capitalism. It is a very conflictive process because, as I said before, at the beginning of this century, democracy, by beating its historical opponents, far from eliminating them, changed the terms of the struggle against them. The field of democratic struggle today is much more heterogeneous and, contrary to what happened in the time of Mariátegui, it is in its interior where fascist forces and socialist forces are confronted. Here lies one of the greatest challenges of our time: for how long and to what extent can the democratic struggle contain these antagonistic forces? After the historical defeat of communism, the socialist forces exploited, to the maximum, the possibilities of the democracy, because, certainly, they had no alternative. This cannot be said of fascist forces. It is true that the historical defeat of National Socialism weighs on them, but we cannot forget that, from the point of view of the capitalism reproduction, fascism is always an open alternative. This alternative will be activated when the representative democracy is irremediably considered, and not only temporarily, dysfunctional. That’s why I say that the trend of today’s progressive democracy is revolutionary. That is to say, the more significant the democratic victories are – the more effective the socialist forces are in the struggle for a greater social redistribution and intercultural inclusion – the greater the probability that the capitalist bloc will resort to the use of undemocratic means, that is, fascists, to regain the state power control. From a certain moment, undoubtedly difficult to determine in general, the democratic forces – pro-capitalist or pro-socialist – if they remain only within the institutional framework of democracy limits, will no longer be able to effectively deal with fascist forces. They will have to resort to direct action – not necessarily legal and possibly violent – against property, because human life is a superior unconditional good, perhaps the only one” (Sousa Santos 2016: 221).
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For Sousa Santos, the consecration of representative democracy was an important step in the democratisation of the world, although assuming it as the only legitimate form of democracy “… became an easy prey for the dominant social groups that perverted and kidnapped it to better serve their ‘interests’ and when this happened ‘it became an obstacle for democratisation of the world’. Therefore, what is imposed today is to transform political systems so that they combine representative democracy with participatory democracy, including in many cases the cross-cultural reformulation of each one of them, since “Without the most dense and committed participation of citizens and communities in the political life direction, democracy will continue to be hostage to anti-democracy, that is, interests that generate parliamentary majorities in its favour against the majority of citizens” (Sousa Santos 2011: 126–127).
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To understand the role played by Wall Street in recycling global financial surpluses by absorbing a very large percentage of the world’s demand for manufactured goods, without its huge trade and budget deficits affecting its monetary stability and maintaining the financial crisis, we recommend to read the book by former Greek finance minister, Varoufakis (2015).
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Even from the point of view of Marxist theory (which I don’t share), in Venezuela there is no revolution given the fact that the capitalist mode of production has not been changed. Therefore, the capitalist social structure determines class struggle and the nature of a social opposition movement (which cannot be called ‘fascist’ or ‘terrorist’) that conveys the protest against a government with authoritarian tendencies. From my point of view democracy has not been deepened or radicalised in Venezuela and that situation opens the door for human rights violations. In consequence, the lack of participatory democracy is one of the main causes of the ideological polarisation that explains the political crisis in that country.
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The social policies of conditional monetary transfers for poor people (as bolsa escuola) are not sustainable in the long term.
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Richards says that for him the concept of ‘epistemological rupture’ (from the French term coupure epistémologique proposed by Gaston Bachelard and refering essentially to a rupture inside the theory of knowledge) is a useful comparison with Thomas Kuhn’s term of ‘paradigmatic change’ (2012) because ‘a paradigm is always a concrete example of what science is (and should be) according to a particular scientific community.’ For Richards – on the contrary – an economy of social solidarity is not a concrete example but ‘An invitation to exercise an infinite creativity in the improvement of a great variety of material practices.’
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Padilla, L.A. (2018). Human Rights and Radical Democracy. In: Oswald Spring, Ú., Serrano Oswald, S. (eds) Risks, Violence, Security and Peace in Latin America. The Anthropocene: Politik—Economics—Society—Science, vol 24. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73808-6_16
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