Coloniality of Power and Human Rights: An unpublished paper by Zafaryab Ahmad

The concept of human rights is a construct based on a notion of relationship between an individual and society, but of a legally circumscribed individual: An individual whose action is limited to conform to the needs and practices of the bourgeois social order. These were defined in the eighteenth century Europe. The juridical ideology defined the domain of this juridically defined subject, the citizen, as of equality before the law and in the market, in an unequal structure of economic and power relations.

This understanding of a legally defined subject is primarily abstracted from the act of exchange which takes place in the market. It was necessitated as relations between labor power and capital had to be contractual with the institutions of modern state as a

sanction behind this contract. The whole history of capitalism testifies the fact that conformity is by no means an automatic process.

The separation of the laborers from the means of production does not automatically produce, by the mechanism of the market alone the individual required for socialized production process. The individual who is legally empowered to dispose over his labor power is surveilled to ensure that he fulfills the tasks and responsibilities of a legal subject. This legal circumscription of the individual defines individual behavior as a subject of the law.

The exchange of commodities forms the basis of the juridical definition of commodified individual based on the canons of Roman Law. Marx points out in Grundrisse in relation to Roman Law, “although this legal system corresponds to a social state in which exchange was by no means developed, nevertheless, insofar as it was developed in a limited sphere, it was able to develop the attributes of a juridical person, precisely the individual involved in exchange, and thus anticipate (in its basic aspects) the legal relations of industrial society and in particular the right which rising bourgeois society had necessarily to assert against medieval society.”

In the same pages Marx argues, “The general interest is precisely the generality of self seeking interests. Therefore, when economic form, exchange, posits the all sided equality of its subjects, then the content, the individual as well as the objective material which drives towards the exchange, is freedom. Equality and freedom are thus not only respected in exchange based on exchange value but, also, the exchange values is the productive, real basis of all equality and freedom. As pure ideas they are merely the idealized of this basis: as developed juridical political, social relations, they are merely a basis of this high power.”

Hence, the structures of power relations/state apparatuses based on appropriation and expropriation of surplus to continue cannot but violate this legally defined equality that the bourgeois order pronounced to be its cardinal principles. These violations were protested and theorized at various levels but always from an antagonistic political position. The tensions that it gave birth were seen as ring the death bell of the system. These were rejected as idealistic or hostile propaganda against the capitalist system.

This situation could not continue after the social and economic crises and corresponding mass upheavals during the period between two world wars. The global tensions that the surplus accumulation and labor control that had emerged had their worst manifestation in the rise of so called fascism in Europe. The leaders of the world capitalist system realizing that creation of new markets and free flow of goods (one way though) was the need of free market drew a charter of human rights and there took birth institutions like the United Nations, World Bank and the International Monetary Fund with the ostensible

objective to construct a world based on peace, justice and free of misery.

There were no hesitations for the United States, like in the case of League of Nations a couple of decades ago, particularly, when it was replacing Great Britain as world hegemon. The transfer of hegemony necessitated that the US as the world power ostensibly stands for democracy, human rights justice and legal equality in the world – not in the US though. To be the new hegemon also necessitated the end of the British empire as it was essential to free the British colonies to open the world for its commodities. The situation was so volatile that even the charter of a monstrosity like the World Bank was messianic and even today its mission statement is to create a world free of poverty. This self professed messianic mission however as based on a division of the world into rich and the poor as fait accompli, hence civilized and uncivilized.

It was otherwise not possible, as the accumulation of capital at the world scale and consequent global division of labor had created a structurally unequal world. The idealogues of the capitalist regime divided the world into rich and poor countries: The latter with inherent structural conditions to be poor. Poverty of the majority of the people of the world, however, as we would see, is an essential condition of the existence of capitalist relations production and accumulation of capital at global scale. This division of the world into a world of rich and of the poor brings in the fundamental question of coloniality of power i.e, organization of the society both at the local and international level around the axis of power of the capital, based on discrimination and organization of labor at world scale.

Colonialaity of power as we understand is a structure of relationship organized around different forms of labor control. This labor control is a coercive relationships. To use coercion legally, the bourgeoisie society, circumscribe an individual into a being who can be coerced. It not only created institutions of coercian and also created ideologies to justify and legitimize coercion. We also believe that social systems do not evolve in isolation, they evolve in a dialectical interaction between the individual and the society in a nexus of various forms of power relationships, in response to corresponding class struggles.

Anibal Quijano the main exponent of the coloniality of power while analyzing the concept of citizenship maintains, “In societies called modern, citizenship is an institution of the political sphere of power. But it is constituted from all others… in all instances of power, economic, social cultural and political … is based on the formal juridico-political equality, of people who are unequal, economically, socially and culturally… We cannot admit and less so practice their juridico-political equality, without achieving equality in other spheres as well…”

The notion of equality however is circumscribed in a predefined structure of power relations and this juridico-political equality and is not possible to achieve within the existing structure of power relations. The democratic pretense of the capitalist system provides space to be critical of the effects of accumulation of surplus at global level in the form of universal human rights but it has commodified these spaces. It cannot otherwise survive. Today, there has developed a human rights industry and a market. This market thrives on the name of alleviating human miseries that the global accumulation of capital itself accentuates and creates.

In the volume one of the Capital Karl Marx elaborates, “…that within the capitalist system all methods of raising social productivity of labor are put into effect at the expense of individual worker: that all means for the development undergo dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into torment; they alienate… from him intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as independent power; they deform the conditions under

which eh work, subject him during the labour process to a despotism more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life time into working time, and drag his wife and children beneath the juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus value are at the same time methods of accumulation, and extension of accumulation becomes, conversely a means of development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker be his payment high or low

becomes worse. Finally, the law which always holds relative surplus population or industrial reserve arm y in equilibrium with extent and energy of accumulation rivets the worker to the capital… It makes an accumulation of misery a necessary condition,

corresponding to the accumulation of wealth.

Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.”

Production of commodities as we have seen is a power relationship: Power of capital over labor through the medium of money with the sanction of repressive apparatuses of the state. The emergence of the modern state to establish its impersonal control over a vast majority of people entails a guarantee their many rights: Promises which the state while organizing the labor process itself violates.

Elaborating the concept of coloniality of power and subsumption all various preexisting forms of labor under the reign of capital Anibal Quinjano, argues,”Unique, original, new historical world emerged with the discovery of Americas. All the forms of labor, production and exploitation – slavery, serfdom, petty commodity production, reciprocity and salary – were subordinated to capital and the world market”. Each and every form of this ensemble around, the axis of capital was not an extension of its historical antecedent. These,” were historically and sociologically new both in themselves and their relation with each other, because they were articulated in a new pattern of power structure.”

Elsewhere, Anibal Quijano maintains, “At the same time, in the same historical movement, and for the first time in the history of humankind along with America there was produced a new mental category to codify the relations between conquering and conquered: the idea of race as a biologically structural difference between the dominant and dominated and these relations of domination came to be considered as natural in the enlightenment. This differentiation was meant to explain just not the physiognomic differences between dominant and the dominated but also mental and cultural differences and codified them as superior and inferior.”

The advent of the European colonial rule in different parts of the world plugged in the colonized economies into a relationship of domination and subordination and to maintain this relationship, the colonial governments instituted an infrastructure for the purposes of control. These infrastructures were symbols of superiority of the colonizer, ” the bourgeoisization of the European capitalist groups was not just a European matter. It was part of the process of Eurocentrification of Colonial/Modern Capitalist world : the division of the world into core and periphery, though the concentration of commodified

labor and industrial production, the social classification of people between ?Europeans’ or ?whites’ … and the classification of Europeans only among the pattern of capital social relations, and not along the pattern of entire world capitalist power structure,” argues Annibal Quijano while exposing the coloniality of power and its institutions.

Independent economic growth in the colonies was thwarted and these countries were being impoverished by the capitalist accumulation in Europe. Instead of contextualizing the situation historically and structurally as essential creation of world colonial economy viz, capitalist economy we have seen the colonized countries were ?codified’ as products of an inferior culture. Today, Eurocentric conceptualization of poverty instead of looking at it as structural to the capitalist relations of production defines it as globally quantifiable and comparable economic category. This was at the end of the World War II that this conceptualization gained currency.

In the official economic parlance poverty is a simple index of comparison between per capita incomes in the US and the rest of the world. Once the scale of incomes was established, diverse people with diverse colonial backgrounds from Latin America, Asia, Africa, were classed together like the Indians and the whites; a comparison to the “rich” nations demanded relegating these countries and people to a position of almost immeasurable inferiority. In this way, “poverty” defined people, not according to what they are and want to be, but according to what they don’t have or were deprived of.

The case of child labor is a point in hand where the resource of cheap labor is being relegated to a trait specific to the economy of the developing countries/inferior people as if these economies function independent of the global economy. Ironically, high levels of per capita income does not mean absence of a significant size of poor in the so called rich countries either.

We have seen Marx in his analyses of the capitalist mode of production shows that poverty under the rule of capital is a product of social division of labor and repressive structures of power relations, local level, national and global level, that defined humankind as inferior and superior. Hence human misery in forms of unpaid labor defined as poverty is a product of accumulation of capital at global level/ a by product of commodity production/ to cover it Michael Maren, who has spent much of his last twenty

five years in different parts Africa first working for NGOs later as a journalist in his harrowing account, The Road to Hell, gives a picture how this market function:

“In June1981, CARE, the American NGO, was hired to distribute food. They were experts at it. In fact, it was practically all what they did. Even today, half of Care’s budget come from the distribution of surplus US commodities.

“To run the program they brought people from India – hardworking, meticulous, efficient, and most of all cheap. They seized the ports and started trying to keep records. “Within few months the record books looked better. The reality however was that the WSLF( Western Somali Liberation Front and the army still ended up with food. The National Refugee Commission was still pocketing millions of dollars, and there were far fewer refugees than food was being supplied for.”

The United Nation’s guideline a book entitled, How to do Business with the United Nations is another testimony of the commodification of human rights and humanitarian efforts. The guide, which sells for $295, tells you how to get a piece for that action that help you to navigate the Byzantine UN bureaucracy and obstacle course of multiple procurement divisions. It tells you of a four steps approach (market research, establishing relationships, bidding process, performing the contract) The provisions of corporate membership in the UN Association of the USA – a kind of boot camp for executives looking for multimillion dollar contracts. Membership range from $1500 to

$2500o a year and of course benefits accrue proportionately. Once registered members get field trips to peace keeping operations and lunches with ambassadors, which are exclusive series of private conversations with leading public figures around the world, senior UN officials and other international decision makers… Business leaders who participate these trips gain valuable knowledge about product requirements for peace keeping”. The United Nations Association of the United States of America (UNA-USA) is the nation’s largest grassroots foreign policy organization, and the leading center of

policy research on the United Nations and global issues. UNA-USA carries out its action agenda through a combination of public outreach, policy analysis, and international dialogue.

Michael Marren further recounts his experience in Somalia, “After checking ledgers at refugee camps figured most of the relief food was sent to the region – probably about two thirds -was being stolen . . .Sometimes entire trucks would leave the post and vanished for ever. Most of it disappeared from the camps and sold by camp commanders who mostly Somali military men or guerillas of Western Somali Liberation Front. Soon after I arrived Beledwyne, the town began to fill up with NGOs. Each group rented a walled compound with plenty of room to park Land Curisers, and with houses large enough to house the expatriate staff. Everyone hired a watchman a cook and a maid.

“A Canadian group arrived looking for orphans. They checked into the local office of the National Refugee Commission and were given permission to collect whatever orphans they could collect. Of all the problems that had sprung up in the refugee camps, I was never aware that orphans was one of them. The tight knit clan structure meant every child had a relative around … (who would) gladly raise the child… But nonetheless thirty or forty children were gathered together and loaded onto to truck and carted

of …”

“…One NGO sent a recent graduate from a forestry program to look into planting tree in Somalia. Yet submitted a proposal for more than $100,000. Later I brought her out to Shebelle River where she was to plant trees. I pointed out to her that in much of the area the subsoil was limestone…

“In the post Vietnam world, Peace Corps offered us an opportunity to forge a different kind of relationship with the Third World, one based on respect. Vietnam had sowed in us enough suspicion of our own culture to have us looking for problems in other cultures.” But the reality was that the colonial experience of the European powers had taught us how to view Africa. This new Africa of a body of revolutionary heroes was, in retrospect, just another chapter in Western Mythology that gave us Tarzan and further evidence of patronizing relationship between the powerful and the powerless.”

This nostalgia played perfectly into my experience of with Africa shaped by films like Khartoum, Beu Geste, The African Queen, Casablanca and a selection of Tarzan movies.” Interestingly, Maren points out that these were “not urbanites forced to live in tents. These people were nomads who had spend their entire lives outdoors. For the most part , they could handle themselves..”

What we have briefly tried to show in the preceding lines from various works is that how human misery is an essential condition of capitalist relations of production and of that of accumulation of capital at global level; That today there has developed a whole human rights industry around these deprived/inferior people who constantly suffer from famines and floods besides the misery inflicted on them by the inhuman accumulation of capital at world scale and are castigated as unable to manage their own affairs; That how Anibal Quijanos understanding of coloniality of power gives a specific meaning to all the various practices of the capital accumulation. How a juridico-legal-political understanding of individual helps capitalist system to perpetuate its rule. How ideologies like human rights and poverty alleviation are just means of accumulation of capital and exchange of commodities.