Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile: The Dethronement of Politics 11 страница
Prior to the drafting of the UDHR, the ILO and the League of Nations had been sites for conflicts between the standard of living, which was viewed as an ‘American obsession’ with materialism and individual consumption, and a European focus on a ‘manner of life’, characterised by non-market concerns with taste, quality and preference.102 Between 1929 and 1931, the ILO had done extensive work on determining an adequate standard of living, sponsored by the department store magnate Edward Filene and the Ford Corporation, which wanted to pay workers in its European plants wages equivalent to those paid in Detroit to secure what one Ford manager called ‘the maximum efficiency of the worker’.103 The ILO subsequently developed nutrition standards and calorie guidelines, and correlated wages with the cost of an average food basket. While Latin American members were strong advocates for this work on nutrition, the ILO resisted Peruvian and Chilean policies of price controls, which aimed to keep the price of food staples low, and state-run restaurantes populares to feed the poor.104
The language of the standard of living expressed the rising prestige of consumption as the path to working-class welfare and political inclusion. Embracing a position central to neoliberal understandings of the social, one Australian ILO delegate argued that consumption would ‘revitalize international democracy’, as the ‘consumer could articulate his or her preferences to the market, to governments and to international organizations’.105 This model of individual consumption and liberal improvement was the key US contribution to the UDHR’s social and economic rights. When questioned by her government’s committee on social policy about whether Article 25’s proposed rights to health, food, clothing and medical care implied ‘socialization’, Eleanor Roosevelt replied: ‘No, it merely sets standards, a flexible one’.106 The language of the living standard lodged the consumer at the heart of the UDHR’s economic and social rights, ultimately making them compatible with neoliberal welfarism. It was the seed of that minimalist focus on basic needs that would come to typify human rights in a later period of neoliberal ascendancy.107
It Is Not Enough to Talk About Standards of Living
During the drafting of the UDHR, both opponents and supporters of social and economic rights argued that they required more resources than civil and political rights. ‘Economic and social rights, in order to be fully realised, require material assistance to be furnished by the state’, France’s René Cassin argued.108 This assumption has since been challenged, both on the practical grounds that an effective justice system and political enfranchisement require material resources and state action, and on conceptual grounds, by those – notably Étienne Balibar – who have contested the very split between liberty and equality that underpinned the discourse of ‘old’ and ‘new’ rights.109 In the immediate wake of World War II, the difference struck most delegates as obvious. The Czech delegate echoed Cassin’s point: while a ‘purely legal and formal instrument’ would be sufficient for the implementation of civil and political rights, he argued, ‘to render the right to social security effective it had to have a proper basis – an economic basis without which there could be no social security properly so-called’.110
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The strongest supporters of social and economic rights contested the flexibility of the ‘standard of living’, arguing that the state should take responsibility for welfare functions that had previously been relegated to the home. The Chinese delegate P. C. Chang and the Soviet delegate Alexei Pavlov fought hardest to ensure that rights to food, clothing, housing and medical care in Article 25 were not subsumed under a right to a standard of living, but were turned into obligations on the state. When the UK delegate objected to these rights, Chang responded that he ‘did not see what possible objection there could be to that phrase when millions of people throughout the world were deprived of food and clothing’.111 While Chang often evoked the long lineage of a concern for welfare in the Confucian tradition, as the drafting took place he anxiously watched the advance of a Communist revolution that would ultimately overthrow the Nationalist government he represented. The promotion of labour welfare was seen as an important means ‘to legitimize the moderate, reformist policy of the Nationalist Government’ and compete with the growing influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).112 With a revolution in train in his own country, Chang’s vision of social welfare ultimately went further than the pacifying vision of the ILO’s ‘standard of living’.
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Rejecting the language of the standard of living in total, the Soviet bloc delegates sought to amend the ILO text to read that the state and community ‘should take all necessary measures, including legislative ones, to insure for every person real possibilities of enjoying all these rights’.113 The USSR’s position went beyond merely admitting a principle to stipulate that the rights in question would be guaranteed by legal measures. ‘It was not enough’, Pavlov argued, ‘to talk about standards of living and well-being.’114 Instead, they pointed to the model of the 1936 Soviet Constitution (the Stalin Constitution), which combined an enumeration of rights with discussions of their implementation. These constitutional protections have been described as ‘an analogue of socialist realism’, which presented an accessible representation of an idealised reality that did not exist in the present.115 The majority of drafters reacted strongly to the idea of a legal requirement of states to provide their citizens with food, clothing, housing and medical care. In conceptualising social and economic rights as flexible standards that would mitigate extreme poverty without challenging economic or status inequalities, they developed a model of social and economic rights compatible with a neoliberal approach to poverty management.
‘By Means Not Inimical to the Market’: Neoliberal Poverty-Management
In the wake of the Great Depression, the laissez-faire tenets of an earlier liberalism no longer seemed tenable to any but the most intransigent opponents of state intervention. Ludwig von Mises found himself largely isolated at the inaugural meeting of the MPS when he argued that all public relief should be abolished, as private charity was sufficient to ‘prevent the absolute destitution of the very restricted hard core of unemployables’.116 The majority of the neoliberals, in contrast, sought to avoid what Röpke called the false choice between the ‘social Darwinism’ of laissez-faire and a ‘cradle to the grave’ welfare system.117 The former, they believed, had neglected the conditions necessary to sustain a labour force and created a backlash against the competitive market. Against the latter, they revived a series of objections the ILO had canvassed back in the 1920s: the welfare state was a ‘foretaste of communism’ that would undermine the responsibility of workers to provide for their families, remove the incentive for wage labour, increase bureaucracy, and (in a Malthusian vein) increase the profligacy of the poor and the growth of the population.118 Rather than rejecting all state assistance, however, the neoliberals focused on the forms of welfare that would be compatible with a market economy. Among the areas for further study outlined in the inaugural MPS statement of aims was the ‘possibility of establishing minimum standards by means not inimical to initiative and the functioning of the market’.119
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The form that a distinctly liberal approach to poverty should take had preoccupied neoliberal circles since the 1938 Walter Lippmann Colloquium. There, Rougier had posed the opening question: ‘can economic liberalism meet the social demands of the masses?’ The neoliberals worried that it was the planned economy’s promise to guarantee a ‘vital minimum’ that ‘attracts the masses to the totalitarian states’.120 In The Good Society, Lippmann himself had argued that what the classical economists dismissed as ‘frictions and disturbances’ in the market order were, in the eyes of their victims, ‘cruel injustices, misery, defeat and frustration’.121 The success of the competitive market, he argued, required a social policy that would assist people to adapt themselves to the market’s demands. There could be no question of ‘taking from the rich and giving doles to the poor’; rather, social insurance should help people make choices within the margin of freedom the market allowed, by tiding them over while they learnt the skills for new occupations or moved elsewhere in search of work.122 The question for the neoliberals was whether providing a vital minimum could be compatible with a functioning competitive market.
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They determined that any state welfare provision must be what Walter Eucken called systemgerecht – that is, ‘in conformity with the whole system’.123 Eucken moved neoliberalism beyond earlier debates about intervention versus non-intervention by focusing on the style of intervention. Under his influence, Röpke and the other German ordoliberals drew a line between compatible and incompatible interventions – that is, between ‘those that are in harmony with an economic structure based on the market, and those which are not’.124 Compatible interventions secured the regulating function of the price mechanism; incompatible interventions paralysed it, and therefore required a cascade of further interventions. The paradigmatic incompatible intervention was rent control, which neoliberals argued prevented supply and demand from governing the distribution of housing, granted privileges to those with rent-controlled apartments, prevented property-owners from profiting from their own property, reduced investment in new housing, and led to housing shortages and unemployment in the building sector, necessitating further intervention. A state that intervenes in incompatible ways, Röpke argued, had ‘joined the battle with all the forces of the market which must be fought to the finish’.125
This theme was central to Röpke’s presentation at the 1958 MPS meeting at Princeton. Röpke spoke on a panel on the welfare state, which also included contributions from Jouvenel and from the US industrialist William J. Grede, the Cambridge economist Walter Hagenbuch, and the Finnish economist Bruno Suviranta.126 By that time, faced with weakening of the egalitarianism that had sustained the welfare state, the neoliberals had hardened their position. Allowing himself a hint of triumphalism, Hagenbuch noted that, while ten years ago people in Britain had believed everyone should receive a basic income from the state as ‘his social birthright’, this view had largely been abandoned.127 The turning point was the 1951 election, which saw the Conservative Party return to power, partly by mobilising middle-class women in ‘Housewives’ Committees’ that protested ‘the hardships that are being imposed on them’ – notably shortages of luxury goods, high taxes, and what one middle-class housewife called the gradual disappearance of ‘the things that made life gracious in the past’.128 In this climate, the neoliberals were in no mood for compromise.
That same year, Röpke published his major work, The Humane Economy, which included a blistering attack on the welfare state and proclaimed the need for ‘resistance to the destruction of dignity’ that it brought about.129 Röpke’s book also directly confronted the question of the ethical foundations of a market economy. Is a competitive market society amoral, ‘drowning all values in the icy water of egotistical calculation?’ he asked, citing Marx and Engels. Or, he asked, referring directly to the origins of the sweetness-of-commerce thesis: ‘can we still subscribe to that astonishing eighteenth-century optimism which made Samuel Johnson say: “There are few ways in which man can be more innocently employed than in getting money”?’130 Röpke’s own answer was that the morals of the market were neither those of saints nor those of the battlefield; echoing the sweetness-of-commerce thesis, according to which the cooler interests act to check the violent passions, he described market morality as ‘lukewarm, without passions’ and characterised by the following features:
Reliance on one’s own efforts, initiative under the impulse of the profit motive, the best possible satisfaction of consumer demand in order to avoid losses, safeguarding one’s own interests in constant balance with the interests of others, collaboration in the guise of rivalry, solidarity, constant assessment of the weight of one’s own performance on the incorruptible scales of the market, constant struggle to improve one’s own real performance in order to win the prize of a better position in society.
Referring back to the ‘distinguished ancestors’ of this market morality, including Montesquieu, Röpke argued that the central contribution of ‘bourgeois’ liberal philosophy was to teach that ‘there is nothing shameful in the self-reliance and self-assertion of the individual taking care of himself and his family’ without which our civilisation is unthinkable.131
When it came to welfare, system conformity was not simply a technical matter. What really mattered was ensuring that the provision of a vital minimum did not interfere with the moral and subjective qualities underpinning a competitive market order. In his contribution to the Princeton MPS panel, Röpke told his colleagues that, if they did not want to leave the individual entirely alone to face the ‘vicissitudes of life’, they must develop rules, principles and distinctions to ensure that concessions to state provision did not legitimise the welfare state, which ‘we are all convinced, is the ruin of a free and prosperous society and of the dignity of the self-respecting individual’.132 A compatible policy had to avoid the weakening of the family, individual responsibility and the will to work for a living.133
This theme was taken up in even stronger terms by Grede, a rabidly anti-union representative of the US Chamber of Commerce and a founder of the far-right anti-immigration and anti-civil rights John Birch Society. Grede, who was invited to the Princeton MPS meeting in an attempt to build stronger links between its members and US business, was representative of a broader convergence between free enterprise and right-wing religious conservatism. Grede argued that the superior economic development of the United States was due to its moral and religious foundations and its Bill of Rights, which protected individual freedom from government and, more importantly, from the masses. In contrast, he argued that cradle-to-grave welfare usurped individual responsibility and weakened the ‘moral fibre’ of a free society. By freedom, he clarified, he did not mean licence; on the contrary, a free society relied on the ‘moral pressures of people with deep religious convictions’. Grede charged the welfare state with weakening such pressure; ‘with loose morality comes loose law enforcement’, he argued, and consequently the breakdown of freedom.134
The neoliberals believed that a market-conforming social policy must not stifle the system of risks and incentives that produced familial responsibility and submission to the market. Concretely, this meant that any government payments must be minimalist (sufficient to prevent destitution, but no more) and targeted at the poorest citizens through strict means-testing. There could be no universal provision, no expectation of social insurance ‘as of right’, and certainly no use of welfare to redistribute wealth in the interest of greater equality.
As his more libertarian critics like to point out today, Hayek had already proposed such a minimalist, market-conforming welfare policy in The Road to Serfdom.135 In a relatively wealthy society, Hayek acknowledged, ‘some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and capacity to work, can be assured to everybody’; but security against ‘undeserved loss’ can never be. Although we may sympathise with someone who finds all his hopes disappointed through no fault of his own, he argued, we cannot remedy his situation without destroying the competitive market order.136 The risk of such loss was necessary to discipline individuals to submit to the market order and adapt themselves to its imperatives. To compensate those whose risks do not pay off would interfere with the feedback mechanism through which the market directs our activities where they are most needed.137 Hayek contended that the discipline of the market could only be escaped by a retreat to the security of the barracks. If we wished to maintain our (margin of) freedom, he averred, we must ask the state for nothing more than a minimum of subsistence. Anything more would be to set off along the road to serfdom.
Despite general agreement about minimalist welfare, Hayek noted that there remained difficult questions about the ‘precise standard’.138 Early neoliberalism was deeply sceptical about the statistical and standardising practices embraced by the ILO. They saw the attempt to ‘tame chance’ by using statistics and social surveys to calculate and insure against risks at the level of the population as hubristic.139 Hayek developed his critique of pretensions to knowledge in the course of the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s and 1930s.140 In the course of that debate, socialists, notably the Austrian economist and philosopher Otto Neurath, had proposed that detailed inventories of the standard of living (Lebenslage) would make it possible to assess social institutions and economic organisation according to the criteria of how well they improved people’s lives by increasing the availability of everything from food and clothing, to entertainment, leisure time and health.141
Against such projects, Hayek’s central contribution was to stress the superiority of the market in distributing dispersed knowledge. In so doing, he challenged not only socialist planning but also the positivism of neoclassical economics, telling both, in Michel Foucault’s words, ‘you cannot [act] because you do not know’.142 In his most influential article, The Role of Knowledge in Society (1945), Hayek distinguished between scientific knowledge of general laws and contextual knowledge of time and place, arguing that the specific knowledge possessed by individuals cannot be adequately aggregated or expressed in statistical form.143
Any attempt to achieve sufficient knowledge of individual needs to produce a uniform standard of living would override the diversity of individual preferences and prevent individuals from using their own knowledge to further their own best interests. Mises took this line of thought further in his major work Human Action, where he claimed that the very idea of a ‘physiological minimum of subsistence’ was an invention of ‘demagogues’. The claim that ‘a definite quantity of calories is needed to keep a man healthy and progenitive, and a further definite quantity to replace the energy expended in working’, was untenable, he argued. In the attempt to determine human needs, Mises saw an attempt to make humans the material of a despotic system of ‘breeding and feeding’ that deprived them of their margin of freedom.144 Not only did he conceive the attempt to develop nutritional standards as a politically motivated attempt to justify interference with the market; as Mike Hill and Warren Montag note, Mises also believed it would also ‘rob human beings, or at least those who labor, of their dignity and reduce them to the status of domestic animals’.145
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