Perpetual Suffering, Oppression and False Hope

Perpetual Suffering, Oppression and False Hope The Structures of Violence, Development and Human Rights Independent Project Professor David Blaney Ezequiel Jimenez Ezequiel Jimenez Independent Project Essay Two “The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way. Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper. The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them”. Eduardo Galeano, “The Nobodies”1 Introduction: Trampled Human Rights in the Age of Affluence Back in the late 1940s, the international community gathered around horror and suffering to promise humanity a compelling and strong resolution guaranteeing basic human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was indeed a revolutionary document that created hope, salvation and expectation. The cruel heritage from the Nazi Regime was seen dismantled as the world recognized inalienable rights, equality and dignity to the whole of humanity. Much of the expectation created, soon was diluted in bureaucratic nightmares and imbalances of power between nations. Human Rights ideology was substantially used as a matter of economics and an excuse for market vitality. Dignity, equality and peace became, again, dreams. The history of the Development machine is not awfully different. Indeed, quite similar: a promise systematically broken perpetuating oppression, violence, preventable deaths and misery. Much of suffering coming from human rights inequalities is created by the same stagnant and narrow vision of the world. Leaders and technocrats base their interpretation of reality on charts, numbers, reports and executive decisions, but never on what the nobodies constantly cry for: dignity. Development projects are used as tools to perpetuate the same fictional promise the UDHR made to the world; the chance to better peoples’ quality of life. Those deceiving structures in place are in charge of simulating hope while enforcing the same mechanism that destroys it. Those same systems of oppression and misery are responsible for empowering corrupt governments through unaccountable foreign aid flows, failed states with poverty and war, crashed economies with neoliberal prescriptions, preventable deaths with pharmaceutical business and destroying future generations with stubborn blindness. Human rights violations and failed development project resort in poverty, and further, poverty is not merely an accident of planning or execution, but a calculated and well‐inflicted strategy to maintain the status quo of the oppressed by the oppressor. For development to be recuperated as force of change and conducive for human rights (including cultural variations), we must dismantle the structures that perpetuate violence. For development to rescue its goodness in bringing resources in partnership with local knowledge, the structures of violence must be eradicated, leaving space for new institutions dedicated to the poor, to the nobodies, to the many without hope. Therefore, as a critique of the development machine, I will discuss how hope can be recuperated for multiple actors while arguing for 1 2 (Farmer, 2005) page 1 Ibid, page 6 2 Ezequiel Jimenez Independent Project Essay Two the complete destruction of the structures of violence that make the nobodies not even worth the bullet that kills them. In order to advance this argument the paper is constituted in two parts. First, the paper will address Paul Farmer’s explanation of the structure of violence and the types of oppression it perpetuates. I will analyze how neoliberal assumptions, unfreedoms and foreign multilateral aid are part of the structure of violence dedicated to keep governments and individuals in misery. The second part of the paper will look to address these challenges with solutions. I will look at how dependency circles can be broken in order to create autonomous spaces for creativity, solidarity and community‐based solutions. The Structures of Violence and Types of Oppression Human rights theory is inherently a liberal creation recognizing a set of inalienable rights every human being possess. Paul Farmer in his book Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor, questions critically why is it then, that “liberal” governments impose certain economic, cultural and political burdens on poor countries. He questions how if liberal states are to protect the very notion of dignity, they impose mechanisms of market‐driven policies or economic embargos that restrain the potential growth of nations. The liberal agenda “has rarely included the powerless, the destitute, the truly disadvantaged. It never concerned itself with those popularly classified as the “undeserving” poor: drug addicts, sex workers, illegal “aliens”, welfare recipients or the homeless”2 to name a few. Human rights issues have revolved around international conventions and hypocritical promises with insulting treaty reservation by states to guarantee their well and calculated influence over the poor. The liberal state has only been concerned with human rights for the elite and the few that can afford dignity in the name of progress. On this vein, Immanuel Wallerstein argues that “liberals have always claimed that the liberal state –reformist, legalist, and somewhat libertarian‐ was the only state that could guarantee freedom. And for the relatively small group whose freedom it safeguarded this was perhaps true”3. Liberation theologians are among the few who have dared to underline, from the left, the deficiencies of the liberal human rights movement. As Farmer explains, “the most glaring of these deficiencies emerges from intimate acquaintance with the suffering of the poor in countries that are signatory to all modern human rights agreements. When children in poverty die of measles, gastroenteritis, and malnutrition, and yet no party is judged guilty of a human rights violation, liberation theology find fault with the entire notion of human rights as defined within liberal democracies”4 The wealthier of the world, equally protected by human rights treaties, rarely call on human rights safeguards to protect their dignity. Instead, people from the Third World, who are equally protected by human rights, only make the numbers of deaths and newspaper headlines. Thus, how is it that we have 2 Ibid, page 6 Ibid. 4 Ibid, page 143 3 3 Ezequiel Jimenez Independent Project Essay Two shifted the understanding of human rights from human beings to the few of the elite? Farmer, following liberation theologians, argues that states, corporations, multilateral organizations and powerful individuals monopolize the creation of transnational structures to inflict well calculated suffering to keep the status quo, where their power comes from. These structures of violence, as Johan Gultang argues, are responsible for massive human rights violations. They create, in Farmer’s words, “a host of offensives against human dignity: extreme and relative poverty, social inequalities ranging from racism to gender inequality, and the more spectacular forms of violence that are uncontestedly human rights abuses, some of them punishments for efforts to escape structural violence”5. Amartya Sen in Development as Freedom has recognized the detrimental effect of the structure of violence and called its destructive forces “unfreedoms”. Sen points at “poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance or over‐activity of repressive states”6 as major sources of unfreedoms. Structures of violence perpetuate unfreedoms with the objective to deny costly changes. For example, social and economical rights cannot be protected when market‐driven policies encourage disloyal competition. Change is not the aim of the structures of violence. Farmer, a first row witness of massive human rights deprivation, argues that “human rights violations are not accidents; they are not random in distribution or effect. Human rights violations are, rather, symptoms of deeper pathologies of power and are linked intimately to the social conditions that so often determine who will suffer abuse and who will be shielded from harm”7. In this way, discrimination, arbitrary executions, AIDS/HIV epidemic and political persecutions are part of the structure of violence. Finally, in Liberation Theology we find some answers in order to dismantle the structures of violence. Liberation Theology intents to identify and explicate the same structure from where suffering is produced. Leonardo Boff has extensively argued that liberation theology “moves immediately to the structural analysis of forces and denounces the systems, structures, and mechanisms that create a situation where the rich get richer at the expense of the poor, who get even poorer”8. Mechanisms or types of oppression, such as neoliberal assumptions, unfreedoms and multilateral aid are interconnected elements in the structure of violence. Types of Oppression: Narrow Assumptions and Prescribed Solutions According to liberation theology, progress for the poor is not likely to ensue from development approaches, which are based on a “liberal” view of poverty. Both Paul Farmer and Albert O. Hirschman have identified narrow conceptions explicating poverty by critiquing neoliberal economics and its assumptions promising better quality of life. In fact, both these authors have claimed extensively how 5 Ibid, page 8 (Sen, 1999) page 24 7 (Farmer, 2005) page 7 8 Ibid, page 41 6 4 Ezequiel Jimenez Independent Project Essay Two these assumptions actually create poverty and misery respectively. I will address in this section how narrow capitalist assumptions reject the importance of innovation, experiential knowledge and acquiring an understanding of local culture before applying an interventionist paradigm that perpetuates the structures of violence. Liberal views of development, according to Farmer, “place the problem with the poor themselves: these people are backward and reject the technological fruits of modernity. With assistance from others, they too will, after a while, reach a higher level of development”9. Farmer’s “assistance” argument is indeed the full functioning of the structures of violence in the form of interventionist reforms. Latin American states have suffered (and still do) from the narrow notion of development assuming that poverty reduction depends on the expansion of wealth. For neoliberal economics, higher income results in achieved development; while at the same time negating the range of social and economic rights violated by the same notion. Within this doctrine, individuals in society are viewed, if viewed at all, as autonomous, rational producers and consumers whose decisions are motivated primarily by material concerns. Farmer argues that “neoliberal policies and ideologies have generally called for the subjugation of political and social life to a set of processes termed market forces”10. Access to education, health care, social security and dignity has become luxury goods only available for the rich. However, the notion of marker forces is not new. The structure of violence that reduces social rights to wealth accumulation comes directly from Adam Smith’s thinking. Albert O. Hirschman has heavily criticized how self‐interest restricts social solidarity. The notion of accumulation of wealth and private‐driven interests, according to Hirschman, is largely accepted and supported by Smith’s Invisible Hand principle: “the general welfare is best served by everyone catering to his private interests, legitimating total absorption of the citizens in their own affairs”11. Pursuing one self‐centered interest apparently becomes a rational calculation serving for the general welfare. The construction of the self‐interested isolated individual who chooses freely and rationally between alternative courses of action after computing their prospective12 is usually taken as the modus operandi of neoliberal economic behavior. According to this doctrine, “passions” which characterized Feudal societies, such as virtue, honor, respect, friendship, trust and loyalty are completely undermined by neoliberal interest‐driven societies. Current neoliberal policies support individualistic accumulation of wealth leaving aside every social responsibility for how that wealth is obtained and accumulated in the first place. Processes of exploitation, misery and poverty are involved extensively in wealth accumulation through neoliberal assumptions. In this regard, Eduardo Galeano asks: “Where do people earn the Per Capita Income? More than one poor starving soul would like to know. In our countries [Latin America], numbers live better than people. How many people prosper in 9 Ibid, page 155 Ibid, page 5 11 (Hirschman, The Concept of Interest: From Euphemism to Tautology, 1992) page 37 12 (Farmer, 2005), page 36 10 5 Ezequiel Jimenez Independent Project Essay Two times of prosperity? How many people find their lives developed by development?”13 Galeano is indeed questioning the root causes of structural violence. In this vein, Hirschman, throughout his writings, fought against simple and limited capitalist assumptions. The danger of reducing human behavior to a set of assumptions undermines the importance to work with the unexpected consequences fostering innovation, creativity, critical thinking and consciousness. Furthermore, it assumes the incapacity of the poor to decide on their future. The lack of opportunities to participate in fixing structural problems of poverty is one direct consequence of the interventionist paradigm. However, neoliberal policies or ideology is not the only precursor of the structures of violence, what Amartya calls “unfreedoms” also play an important role in explaining systems of oppression. When basic social, economic, political and cultural rights such as economic opportunities, political freedoms, social facilities, transparency and security are deprived massive human rights violations are likely to occur. Unfreedoms, Inequalities and Capabilities According to Sen, most indicators measuring poverty mistakenly use income levels to decide whether or not countries make progress. As we mentioned before, wealth accumulation is an inexact picture of reality where structures of violence allow the rich to become richer and poor to become poorer. Sadly, development does not escape from the income‐inequality framework. In Development as Freedom, Sen unveils the detrimental effect of poverty as a result of unfreedoms and deprived capabilities, rather than an issue of income. This view transcends what most economists would argue about poverty reduction. Sen gives relevance to civil and political rights as well as education, health and women’s empowerment by putting them in the center of the debate over development bettering people’s quality of life. Recalling Boff’s denunciation of forces acting within the structure of violence, there is great value in Sen’s argument because it provides strong evidence on how for so many years the structures of violence used wealth calculations to promise hope and progress. Amartya Sen uses the term “capabilities” to illustrate actions, opportunities and lifestyles which every individual assigns value to. Rights and opportunities raging from educational, political and cultural are central for capabilities to fully develop. If systems constantly restrict one’s freedom to be part of a community, or reject freedom of speech or to have a decent job (irrespective of income level) the quality of life substantially decreases. Thus, Sen argues that “an adequate conception of development must go much beyond the accumulation of wealth and other income‐related variables”14. By taking freedoms and capabilities as an approach “we have reason to value not only what makes our lives richer and more unfettered, but also allows us to be fuller social persons, excercising our own volitions and interacting‐ and influencing‐ the world we live in”15. Sen’s analysis moves forward what liberation 13 Ibid, page 29 (Sen, 1999) page 14 15 Ibid, page 15 14 6 Ezequiel Jimenez Independent Project Essay Two theologians have denounced: from recognizing forces perpetuating suffering and oppression, Sen advocates to enhance quality of life by also denouncing but at the same time reconfiguring the beaten and silenced freedoms inside the structures of violence. In addition, having greater freedom to act, one has reason to value oneself which is “important in fostering the person’s opportunity to have valuable outcomes”16 raising the person’s dignity and morale. Thus, shifting from exclusive income accumulation to a more inclusive idea of capability deprivation, we can better understand poverty and suffering. Moreover, measurements of income levels can deceive and misrepresent reality. Sen argues that “there are good reasons for seeing poverty as a deprivation of basic capabilities, rather than merely as low income”17. Deprivation of basic capabilities gives a more accurate picture of poverty and misery. Both Farmer and Sen agree on the importance of access to education, health, political and economic opportunities as well as reflecting how premature mortality, significant undernourishment, persistent morbidity, widespread illiteracy and gender inequality affect the poor, despite wealth accumulation. In addition, following capabilities deprivation rather than income levels, suffering and misery of the poor can be found both in underdeveloped countries as well in affluent societies. Suffering and misery goes beyond wealth, and Sen’s analytical model accounts for acknowledging dignity over numbers. By guaranteeing basic capabilities, we put faces on the nobodies, who according to Galeano “are not human beings, but human resources. Who do not have names, but numbers”18? However, it is important to highlight that deprived capabilities depend on a range of different variables with distinct political, economic and social agendas. According to Hirschman and Dambisa Moyo, multilateral aid promising enhancing Sen’s capabilities actually enforce neoliberal assumptions by funding corrupt governments, utilizing prescribed solutions instead of local knowledge and conditioning aid in the form of obscure agreements that perpetuate the structures of violence. Conditional Aid, Political Agendas and Democracy The notion of foreign aid was created with the Marshall Plan in the post‐World War Two. Reconstruction of bombed cities helped to foster economic growth both in the United States as well in European countries. The model of financing critical infrastructure was in fact successful to bring hope in Europe. It was then thought that similar strategies could apply in other parts of the world, especially in the Third World. However, issues related to practicality and implementation were set aside. Multilateral aid became the prescription for the reconstruction while putting in place structures of violence through corruption, free‐market myths and façade democracies. The consideration of multilateral aid as an extension of the donor’s foreign agenda has damaged countries when aid is not directed wisely. Albert O. Hirschman in 1971 wrote: “foreign aid is as Janus‐ 16 Ibid, page 18 Ibid, page 20 18 (Farmer, 2005) page 1 17 7 Ezequiel Jimenez Independent Project Essay Two faced an institution as can be found. It redistributes income from the rich to the poor and this can serve to speed the latter’s development. At the same time, in a world of sovereign nations foreign aid is an instrument of national policy which can be used by the rich to acquire influence and to increase their power”19. Nonetheless, uncontrolled aid has rarely accomplished its goals in development. Most aid is attached to a number of requisites that precludes the state’s capacity to use the resources for projects considered priorities. These dangerous assumptions create heavily animosity between donors and sovereign countries. Furthermore, conditional aid has to be repaid in sums that exceed the initial amount of aid given. Dambisa Moyo in her book Dead Aid argues that “African countries have, over time, received loans, and not grants, to finance public investment that they became so heavily indebted that aid has not helped them reach their development objectives”20. Aid has become a burden for countries trying to develop. The constraints attached to loans and grants have made impossible for progress without foreign intervention of some sort. Conditional aid can present itself in various ways such as political incentives, military occupation, international agendas and tax breaks for corporations. I will, however, concentrate on three types. The first one is often tied to procurement where “countries that take aid have to spend it on specific goods and services which originated from the donor countries, or a group selected by them”21. Second, the donor has the capacity to decide or “preselect the sector and/or the project that their aid would support”22. Third and most dramatic, “aid flows only as long as the recipient country agrees to a set of economic and political policies”23. According to Hirschman, the commitment a country undertakes in connection to multilateral aid is typically of the following kind: “to increase investment and decreases consumption, to increase the share of the private sector and decrease that of the public sector, to devaluate the currency and thereby alter relative price relationships within the country, to throttle inflation”24. In other words, neoliberal frameworks must be put in place for aid to be released. Having in the critiques of simple models of supply and demand put forward by Farmer, aid systematically perpetuates structures of violence by imposing conditions on the poor while violating their human rights. Indeed, Farmer confesses that “as a physician who has worked for much of my adult life among the poor of Haiti and the United States, I know that the laws of supply and demand will rarely serve the interest of my patients”25. However, politically‐tied aid has served as cash‐pots for dictators around the world. Corruption, according to the IFM and the World Bank must be fought with stable and transparent government policies embracing a democratic system since “democracies pursue more equitable and 19 (Hirschman & Bird, Foreign Aid: A Critique and a Proposal, 1971) page 197 (Moyo, 2009) page 8 21 Ibid, page 38 22 Ibid, page 39 23 Ibid. 24 (Hirschman & Bird, Foreign Aid: A Critique and a Proposal, 1971) page 201 25 (Farmer, 2005) page 5 20 8 Ezequiel Jimenez Independent Project Essay Two transparent economic policies, the types of polices that are conducive to sustainable economic growth in the long run”26. However, as Keynes said27, in the long run we are all dead. Instead of believing in democracy as the ultimate remedy for stagnation, Moyo argues that “western donors and policy‐makers have essentially chosen to ignore the protests of those who argue that democracy, at the early stages of development, is irrelevant, and may be even be harmful”28. In fact, it is further argued that democracy is a matter of timing since in the early stages of development in matters little to a starving family whether or not they can vote or not. The structures of violence that persist with neoliberal policies in places where liberalism is not considered native can be easily interpreted as a neo‐colonial project. These types of oppression try to denounce the offensives of neoliberal assumptions; unfreedoms and multilateral aid have against human dignity. These structures of violence are responsible for extreme and relative poverty, social inequalities ranging from racism to gender inequality, and the more spectacular forms of violence that are uncontestedly human rights abuses. Nonetheless, escaping from these systems of suffering is possible if hope is not lost. Paul Farmer engages with topics of human rights violations and gives account on possible and ideal solutions. Conclusion: Tearing Down the Structures of Violence The task of dismantling the structures of violence is a major one. When geopolitics takes most of the space in debates about development, poverty and suffering, the outcomes are quite predictable and the official silence on poverty issues redundant. The structures of violence that perpetuate misery are well represented by powerful governments and bureaucracies. The dependency on their aid budget has constantly impeded progress in safeguarding human rights globally. Many of the chief donor nations are themselves major violators of international covenants themselves advocate for. The cruelty how the system decides who will suffer and who will be protected from violations, disgustingly calls for equality and democracy as required solutions for progress. Independence from the perpetrators is probably not achievable, but it is the solution. Albert O. Hirschman called his solution “possibilism”29. Hirschman’s possibilism proposes fundamental changes in institutions without prescribing how those changes should appear, by categorically rejecting assumptions or impositions on how to reach tangible change. However, is through multiple examples of partnership among members of the same community that Hirschman chooses to illustrate possibilism. Cooperatives are an example of his call for institutional change rooted in loyalty, solidarity and common struggle. Cooperatives as grassroots development institutions, Hirschman argues, have arisen in good measure from a revulsion against the worship of the gross national product as unique arbiters of economic and human progress and assumptions limiting communal participation. If structures of violence could be dismantled by cooperative strategies giving 26 27 (Moyo, 2009), page 41 A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923) Ch. 3. 28 (Moyo, 2009), page 42 (Hirschman, Political Economics and Possibilism, 1971) page 28 29 9 Ezequiel Jimenez Independent Project Essay Two meaning to local knowledge, solidarity and a critical approach to the markets, independence from bureaucracies could ease some of the suffering. However, this journey has not began yet as we see new promises of false hope such as reaching a substantial poverty reduction by 2015. Therefore, the task of bringing down structural violence screams for a paradigm of development and human rights based on trust, solidarity and belief that those who need to make progress, can do it themselves. As a way of concluding, therefore, we must be aware that, “The best time to plan a tree is twenty years ago. The second‐best time is now”30 African proverb Bibliography 30 • Farmer, P. (2005). Pathologies of Power. Los Angeles: University California Press. • Hirschman, A. O. (1983). Getting Ahead Collectively: Grassroots Experience in Latin America. New York: Pergamon Press. • Hirschman, A. O. (1971). Political Economics and Possibilism. In A. O. Hirschman, A Bias for Hope (pp. 2‐39). London: Yale University Press. • Hirschman, A. O. (1992). The Concept of Interest: From Euphemism to Tautology. In A. O. Hirschman, Rival Views of Market Society (pp. 35‐55). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. • Hirschman, A. O., & Bird, R. M. (1971). Foreign Aid: A Critique and a Proposal. In A. O. Hirschman, A Bias for Hope (pp. 197‐224). New Haven: Yale University Press. • Moyo, D. (2009). Dead Aid. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. • Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. New York: Anchor Books. (Moyo, 2009) page 155. 10