Re: "the socialist transition about the role of rights, but it is not the
defining axis of socialism as such "
My socialism is about "creating the conditions for the free and full
development of each as the condition for the free and full development of
all." Is the Declaration?
Socialists have been asking and leaving pretty much unanswered the question
"What is to be done?"
I THINK THEY MEAN TODAY.
In practical terms we have to work today with what we have. As a Christmas
wish/request might I propose that members of the PE network (perhaps
particularly mainstream economists, if any are on the list) assure that in
their respective winter term courses that the UN Declaration and associated
covenants by discussed. The articles in the Declaration dealing with
economics start, as I recall, with #23.
Maybe the revolution starts in the class room.
By the way the votes on the Declaration in 1948 went as follows:
In favour: Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil,
Burma, Canada, Chile China, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Denmark, the
Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Ethiopia, France, Greece,
Guatemala, Haiti, Iceland, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Liberia, Luxembourg,
Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealnd, Nicarauga, Norway, Pakistan, Panama,
Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Siam (Thailand), Sweden, Syria, Turkey, United
Kingdom, United States, Uruguay. Venezuela.
Source: Year Book of the United Nations, 1948-40. p. 535.
Abstaining: Byelorussian SSR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Saudi Arabia,
Ukrainian SSR, Union of South Africa, USSR, Yugoslavia.
Source: Year Book of the United Nations, 1948-40. p. 535.
Bob Needham
(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just
and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for
equal work.
(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration
ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity,
and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the
protection of his interests.
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared,
and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast
association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political
character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized
power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its
contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances,
to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes
itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old
conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have
swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of
classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a
class.
In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class
antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of
each is the condition for the free development of all.