Thursday, December 10, is International Human Rights Day. Seventy-seven years ago, on this date, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the UN General Assembly as a universal and binding document. Although many states today recognize the Declaration and have even incorporated parts of it into their constitutions, human rights continue to be violated in most countries around the world.
Among them, the Islamic Republic of Iran is one of the leading violators of human rights globally. According to documents and resolutions published annually by the United Nations regarding human rights violations, the Islamic Republic consistently appears at the top of systematic violators of these rights. This is despite Iran itself being one of the signatories of the Declaration. In reality, however, the scope and depth of the crimes imposed on the people of Iran during more than four decades of Islamic Republic rule far exceed the limited accusations raised against it in UN Human Rights Council sessions.
Although the Universal Declaration of Human Rights cannot answer the fundamental social problems, its articles are the result of the struggles of workers and freedom-seeking people worldwide. Every retreat made by the capitalist system in regard to the basic rights contained in the Declaration has only been achieved through sacrifice and great costs. Eventually, the global bourgeoisie was forced to accept it, after adjusting it with its own interests and register it in its own historical record.
Even though the Declaration does not question the foundations of the capitalist system and essentially respects the exploitation of humans by humans, even in the most advanced capitalist societies, full implementation of its articles still requires continuous struggle. In many countries, the most basic human right, the right to life is openly violated. The violation of human rights in the form of famine, hunger, pandemics, sex trafficking, drug trafficking, and others, is not even mentioned in the Declaration.
The criterion for respecting human rights in any society should be measured by the equal access of human beings to the achievements and benefits of human civilization. A capitalist society, by its nature founded on class divisions cannot be a true defender of human rights. Human rights will be fully realized only when no class divisions exist and when human beings are able to live with full equality and well-being. In a society based on the exploitation of humans by humans, in which production aims not at meeting human needs but at generating profit, such rights are not guaranteed.
From the perspective of economic justice and real equal opportunities, the Universal Declaration has several major weaknesses and contradictions:
It speaks about equality of rights, yet remains silent in the face of the class system. It speaks of “people” and “individuals,” but nowhere mentions the working class, capitalist class, or the ownership of the means of production, the real roots of inequality. Inequality and poverty therefore appear only as problems of “unequal distribution” or “violation of individual rights,” not as the natural outcome of a class system.
It appears as if the right to vote and the right to freedom of expression are enough to solve the problem, while in reality the deprived majority, even with the right to vote, remain under the dominance of property relations and economic power. Thus, human rights as defined in the Universal Declaration are limited to civil liberties, without addressing the system that produces structural poverty and injustice.
The Declaration generally refers to property rights, but within capitalism this is transformed into the right of capitalists to own the means of production. Workers may “freely” sell their labor power, but have no real decision-making power over the wealth they produce.
Although the Declaration mentions equality, educational opportunity, and personal development, in practice equal opportunity requires equal access to education, healthcare, housing, nutrition, and job security. A working-class child growing up in an underserved urban district without proper nutrition or education can never have the same opportunity as a child raised in an affluent family with private schooling.
The hard reality is that the root of inequality lies in the exploitation of labor by capital and the appropriation of surplus value. Workers work more than needed for reproducing their lives, and the capitalist claims the surplus. The Declaration remains silent on this.
The Declaration calls itself “universal,” yet says nothing about the right to development, liberation from poverty, equal access to global resources, or the role of multinational corporations, global banking systems, the IMF, and other capitalist institutions. It assumes that states and capitalist states in particular are neutral actors responsible for protecting rights instead of representing specific class interests.
It speaks of the right to political participation, but says nothing about democracy in the workplace, workers’ rights to co-management or democratic control of enterprises, workers’ councils, or collective participation in economic decision-making.
In reality, a “rights-bearing individual” may cast a ballot in politics but remains subordinate at the workplace to managers and shareholders, without any genuine say in what is produced or how it is used. The Declaration clearly defines civil and political rights but remains silent regarding economic justice.
The owning class can easily use the Declaration to legitimize civil liberties, elections, freedom of expression, and so on, while keeping intact the structures of ownership, concentration of wealth, labor exploitation, and global inequality.
The propertyless class, if it confines itself to the rights within the Declaration, may abandon the struggle for transforming ownership relations, abolishing the power of capital, and establishing economic democracy and social ownership of resources. At best, its struggle becomes limited to reform.
Even from the perspective of workers and the oppressed, the Universal Declaration can be seen as an important step against fascist barbarism and naked dictatorship. Yet its content remains inadequate for achieving economic justice, real equality of opportunity, and liberation of the working and oppressed classes from exploitation. It represents, in many ways, an attempt to preserve the interests of the capitalist system.
Real human rights can only be achieved when both individual and political freedoms are guaranteed and expanded, and when the structures of exploitation, class inequality, and capitalist domination are transformed. These two dimensions are not contradictory, they are necessary conditions for one another.
