From: Chris Burford Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 . . . snip> As for working people - working class and self-employed workers on the land - a more radical agenda of human rights is to their advantage, but there is a downside in that it ultimately tends to emphasise atomised individualised rights, . . .
Reply: Wouldn’t it make sense to campaign for *economic* human rights in order to gain ground in the legal sphere? Many of the economic human rights have already been catalogued in the 1948 UN Declaration, including the right to a decent standard of living, full employment, no child labour, no discrimination against women, and the right to a social order that facilitates those other rights. One could add the right of not being exploited. Since economic human rights can only be realized in a collective manner, the argument of “atomized, individualized” does not apply to economic human rights. Workers and poor people of the world unite for what? Could be: unite for your economic human rights. That sits also well with the theme of a common humanity, as raised by Lebowitz in a recent posting. GK
