Re: economics and class struggle behind legal victory

[g kohler <gko15@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

some further comments on *economic* human rights ?

(a) the recent fight led by Chavez/Venezuela can be understood as a fight
for economic human rights (the right to a decent standard of living)

(b) Canadians protesting against the killing of labour leaders by global
corporations are fighting for economic human rights (the right to have
labour unions)

(c) leftist interpretation of existing legal language: in the article on
property rights ?
Article 17 states:
?(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association
with others.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.?
Comment: (1) property is even protected in socialist states (they punish
thieves); (2) the expression of  ?arbitrary? is wide open to interpretation;
for example, in Allende?s Chile, who was arbitrarily depriving whom of his
(their) property? The global corporations the Chilean people or the Chilean
people the global corporations? (3)?everyone? obviously refers to natural
persons, but a corporation cannot claim to be a natural person

(d) theory of class interest ? a self-employed worker in a poor country who
makes a dollar a day and an American automotive worker who makes 70,000
dollars a year don?t have the same material interest. According to (a
petrified form of) Marxist theory, the American automotive worker is
exploited because he has an employer, whereas the self-employed worker in
the poor country is not exploited because he is his own employer. A fight
for *economic* human rights gets around this theoretical problem to some
extent.
GK