Sunday, May 22, 2011

Critique of liberalism and neo-liberalism in the Arab revolutions in Jadaliyya

Comrade Maya writes:  "Perhaps, in order to understand the phenomenon to which I am trying to draw attention, it is best not to approach it with overdetermined words such as “neoliberalism” or “liberalism” or “capitalism” in mind. No matter what the larger framework is called, it is undeniable that international human rights corporations such as Human Rights Watch are important agentive political bodies in Egypt and in Lebanon, for example. Similarly, other “international bodies” such as the UNDP (see the Arab Human Development Reports for examples of these "common sense" recommendations), the IMF and the WorldBank are actors in the reconfiguration of life worlds across the region. This reconfiguration does not come only through market adjustment, but also through World Bank and UNDP “recommendations” as to “optimal” fertility rates, systems of education that are needed, and the types of family structure (nuclear, urban, double income) thatshould be promoted in the name of development. These organizations and their local allies intervene in a connected economic/social sphere, and they play a role in the conditioning of subjects vis-à-vis global market processes. To put it bluntly, organizations such as the IMF and Human Rights Watch are uncomfortable allies in a global and ideological project to shape practices of life, economy, and of citizenship. In addition, the proliferation of the local-global NGO capital networks and their attendant languages and institutions translate questions of justice into questions of rights, a translation which ties a citizen ever more intimately to the state. Thus, the question of economic justice becomes one of economic rights, the question of gender justice becomes one of women's and/or gay rights, and questions of violence are transformed into calls for bodily rights. In this framework, states are posited as potential human rights abusers, yet only the state can ensure the redress of these rights. Hence, the paradox of human rights reports; after spending pages outlining how, for example, the state of Iran is abusing the human rights of its citizens, towards the end of the report “recommendations” are made to said author of those abuses. In these reports, invariably the state is asked to transform (or reform) itself from a human rights abuser into a human rights defender. The move from justice to rights, as authors such as Zizek and Fraser have argued, is a feature of late capitalism that depoliticizes inequality and posits the state as the arbiter of said inequality. Thus, the state is “good” or “bad” depending on how well it regulates the lives of their citizens or, as anthropologists have suggested, depending on how well they perform “good governance.” Such depoliticization should be understood as a political process that aims to separate the messiness of shared life into compartments such as “culture,” “government,” “economy,” “personal life,” and, my personal favorite, “civil society.” Once segregated into neat, independent packages, we, as liberal/neoliberal subjects, are told that our “political” involvement begins, and ends, as participants in “free”, “fair” and “transparent” elections."