Human Rights And Capitalism

Human Rights and Capitalism brings together two important facets of the globalization debate and examines the complex relationship between human rights, property rights and capitalist economies. Human rights issues have become increasingly important in this debate and their place as harbingers of justice or as an instrument of oppression is fiercely contended. Both sides of this issue are considered in the contributions to this book and the complex relationships between human rights, human dignity and capitalist economies are the themes running throughout the work. Appearing at a time when these issues are a subject of extreme controversy, this book is distinguished by its balanced and academic approach.

Human Rights or Global Capitalism examines the application of neoliberal policies from a human rights perspective and asks whether states, by outsourcing to the private sector many services with a direct impact on human rights, abdicate their responsibilities to uphold human rights and violate international law.

Considering only a few of the most significant aspects of human rights, Teeple (sociology and anthropology, Simon Fraser U.) assesses the fundamental ethics and ideological rationalization of contemporary capitalism. He argues that capitalism never could honor the rights it has claimed as its ideals, and that global capitalism has outgrown human ri

Much has been written about growing global disparities in wealth and resources, how global capitalism has adversely affected human populations and the environment, and the dangers that a unipolar world order poses to peace and global pluralism. After summarizing the evidence for these arguments, the authors develop two main themes: first, that there is a growing transformative peoples' movement that challenges global capitalism and the imperial superpower; and, second, there is an extraordinary worldwide shift underway in human consciousness that accompanies practical global interdependencies and connectedness. The authors provide evidence for an emerging foundation of what philosopher Peter Singer describes as a "one-world ethic," and they show how this ethic is closely connected with what is called the "human rights revolution." They compare the western, liberal conception of freedom with conceptions of freedom found in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Amartya Sen, and draw from Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition to clarify that freedom has both collective and individual dimensions. They build on these foundations to address the following topics: positive human rights, collective goods, cosmopolitanism, social and cultural pluralism, and they pose alternatives to capitalism and liberal democracy. The authors work in the tradition of critical social science, but go beyond that to encourage readers to engage in emancipatory projects and utopian thinking. The worlds' peoples face too many terrifying prospects not to engage such projects and thinking.

In The Corporation, Law and Capitalism, Grietje Baars offers a radical Marxist perspective on law, tracing the corporation from colonial times to the present multinational. ‘Corporate accountability’ is shown to be a red herring in the struggle for another world.

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.

Against a backdrop of seven hundred years of bourgeois struggle, eminent lawyer and educator, Michael E. Tigar, develops a Marxist theory of law and jurisprudence based upon the Western experience. This well-researched and documented study traces the role of law and lawyers in the European bourgeoisies's conquest of power and in the process complements the analyses of such major figures as R.H. tawney and Max Weber. Using a wide frange of primary sources, Tigar demonstrates that the legal theory of insurgent bourgeoisie predated the Protestant Reformation and was a major ideological ingredient of the bourgeois revolution.