Reading group on rights, freedoms, privileges Event

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Privileges and Identities: Rights and Property

“Since the enlightment and the formation of the nation state parallel to the move from feudalism to capitalism, rights and property, which were no longer God given, have become the major paradigm and the locus for bitter struggle, from the American and French Revolutions, the Communist Revolution in Russia, anti-Colonial straggles, through local labor and civil struggles and in the 90’s the struggle for democracy in Eastern Europe. The state is the institution guaranteeing and distributing rights, by some theories in return for the power that is given to it by the individuals it governs, and by other theories in the name of public, common and universal good. Although through the 20th century ordinary citizens through mass civil struggle gained many freedoms and privileges, today the neo-liberal global regime of austerity, grants the state with limited resources and limited sovereignty. This liberal political economy of identity creates atomized interest groups in society that fight the state and each other for gaining democratic privileges i.e. political power and control over resources, through the paradigm of rights. These struggles include: national majority rights – sovereignty; national minority rights – self-determination and cultural autonomy; immigration rights for free movement; the right to life – refugees; gender rights; the right of expression and for information; physical and intellectual property rights; as well as labor rights; the right to housing and education; and more. However, even with the assistance of international institutions as the UN and the various international courts (International Criminal Court or the European Court for Human rights) we see a drastic decrease in the progress made for ordinary citizens in gaining rights. Property rights are a special category since rights are a social contract, a construct, having rights in itself is a kind of ownership, and therefore property-rights are both included in and include rights as such. In a political society formed after the French Revolution the ownership of rights replaced the ownership of land or gold as the threshold for political representation. As ownership is that which divides the working and middle and ruling classes, so socio-economic rights (labor, housing and education) are often excluded from the corpus of (human) rights, at most they are considered second generation human rights. Labor rights are even considered by some an oxymoron.