The following is a review of the book:
L'esprit de Philadelphie: La justice social
face au marché total
The spirit of Philadelphia: social justice
vs. the total market
Alain Supiot
Seuil 2010
ISBN 978-2-02-100776-3
The spirit of Philadelphia: social justice vs. the total market
The ILO 1944 Declaration of Philadelphia[i]
marked a historical moment for the international community enshrining the
lessons learned after long years of wars and aiming to establish lasting peace
and justice for all human kind, a pioneer text at its time that elevated social
justice to be the foundation of the international legal order. Over half a
century later, Alain Supiot looks at the declaration in light of the
ultra-liberal ideology dominating our world today; he argues that the
declaration is still relevant today more than ever and demonstrates how we are
drifting away from the hard lessons learned in the first half of the 20th
century under illusory promises of free markets, unjustifiable over-dependence
on economic and financial indicators and falling into what he calls normative
Darwinism.
The book starts by repainting the history of the
declaration, the years of war, the exploitation of working class as well as the
less developed nations, the resurfacing of the “social question” of the
nineteenth century again and the quest for justice and peace. Those were the
times when FDR gave his state of the union speech of the four freedoms[ii],
when the Atlantic Charter was drafted and the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights[iii].
The political changes of that moment define the spirit of Philadelphia which
reaffirms the will of the world powers to build together an order of justice
and learn from the lessons of the barbaric experience of the war, to establish
law as the instrument to protect the human being, to cherish the human dignity,
its freedom and security equally and to refuse any attempt to diminish freedom
on the account of security or vise versa. The same spirit also refuses to
subordinate social justice to economic organization or financial claims.
According to Supiot, the real innovation of the Declaration of Philadelphia is
building on the idea of social justice as a mean to achieve long lasting peace
in the ILO Constitution of 1919 first by defining what social justice is: “all
human beings, irrespective of race, creed or sex, have the
right to pursue both their material well-being and their spiritual development
in conditions of freedom and dignity, of economic security and equal
opportunity” (Art. II a) and second by placing the attainment of social justice
as central in any national or international policy or measure especially of
economic or financial nature (Art. II c), hence, the Declaration sees economy
and finance as means in the service of the human dignity and not aims in
themselves.
Supiot then presents the departure from the
declaration since the 1980s in favor of an ultra-liberal ideology that places
the free market above social justice. He argues that this departure is
intentional and calls it a counter-revolution led by the political powers of
the eighties mainly the United States and United Kingdom inspired by the work
of Friedrich Hayek with the aim of deconstructing the welfare state. He
highlights how the principles of neo- and ultra-liberalism are opposed to the
Declaration of Philadelphia in the way they perceive human injustice as a
motive for better productivity. This ideology gained support in the nineties by
the European Commission too despite its long history of faithfulness to a
social Europe and to the declaration. The expansion of the Union in the
nineties turned into a wasted opportunity to present a social model as an
alternative. The ex-communist countries further elaborated by pushing the
concept of privatization of the state, replacing rule of law by rule by law,
legalizing the neo-liberal policies and creating a dictatorship of markets. The
reach of the “counter-revolution” extended beyond national laws to form an
international order imposing their ideology as the only credible, almost
divine, one: the total market.
The book describes total market as a world revolving
around economic growth where environment, humans and laws are simply
merchandises. The rupture with the Declaration of Philadelphia is translated in
pursing economic growth as an end of itself and not for the improvement of
humans and the protection of their security and dignity. Competition is no
longer based on the law, rather law's purpose has become to protect competition
and free trade. In an open world of the total market, laws are in competition
among one another to better serve free trade, and laws with social aims are
losing that competition to ones that better serve the needs of investors and
financial markets; what is referred to as normative Darwinism. This quest for
economic growth and free trade is combined by a fierce competition for
improving economic indicators that are often disconnected from the individuals'
lives and from the specific conditions of many non-developed nations, this is
translated in turn in a race to the bottom in norms and standards addressing
inequalities and workers' lives. The free market has, according to Supiot,
fallen into the trap of self-reference by imposing its ideology as the only
correct one, suggesting indicators that serve this ideology and evaluate the
success of this ideology based on those indicators. This is leading to efforts,
laws and policies focusing on improving those indicators and not addressing the
actual economic or social situations.
Global economic crisis are one manifestation of the
weakness of the neo-liberal ideology in facing the realities of markets. However,
neo-liberal enthusiasts claim that markets tend to regulate themselves and
hence, they refuse to see the issue as a need for political and legal
engagement to restore the order by redefining goals and means and
distinguishing between real needs and economic and financial organization.
Supiot calls for “reform” under the ultra-liberal dogma by recourse to the five
senses; the sense of limits, of measure, of action, of responsibility and of
solidarity:
1. With the quasi-disappearance of the notion of national
market to the favor of transnational and global market, the notion of national
legal order governing the market is also disappearing and the ultra-liberal
international order is taking over that role. The world is managed as a
collective of quantifiable resources[iv].
No distinguish in the economic sphere is recognized other than monetary ones,
making any social, cultural or human characteristics irrelevant. The abolish of
restrains on the movement of capital is accompanied with restrictions on the
movement of people which results into many being trapped in situations of
misery in the service of the total market. The state no longer interferes to
fix such unjust situations and a new form of feudal system is born based on the
unequal powers in the so called freedom of contract model. According to Supiot,
the sense of limit can help building international as well as national legal
and institutional systems that push competition among companies and not among
legal systems which in turn will lead to re-defining appropriate limits for
competition, and put global trade in the service of social justice.
2. In the sense of measure Supiot further elaborates
the idea that a need to focus on the human shall be the essence of any system
of evaluation of economic performance and explains that the total market
indicators are not necessarily measuring the performance of the legal system.
He suggests that the unit of measurement of any performance evaluation shall be
related to advancement of social justice globally while attention shall be made
to the local conditions of different countries when defining norms and human
development indicators.
3. Free markets have liberated transnational
enterprises from the national and local legal systems while the freedom of
association and the right to strike are still imprisoned within national
systems. This is creating a handicap in the traditional labour law system that
is based on the three pillars of organization, action and negotiation. The
unequal negotiation between local actors with limited reach of actions and the transnational
companies is restricting the advancement of labour laws and again reducing
humans to a figure and a resource in the total market. Until the ability of
states to act is restored, the deficiency affecting social and labour rights
will remain.
4. The mere existence of Corporate Social
Responsibility codes of conduct is just a symptom of the total market in which
burden of responsibility for action is vague, Supiot argues, however, that this
burden is not as complex as claimed by neo-liberal. He cites the example of
patent and intellectual propriety that total market succeeded in protecting and
made possible the identification of the real responsible for production despite
the complex value chain by enforcing laws that oblige companies to define where
a product is produced. The same can be achieved in protecting social and
fundamental labour rights by identifying responsibility along the chain, the
only difference, according to the book, is that
social rights and human beings are not the aim of ultra-liberalism, while trade and competition
protection are.
5. Supiot considers that total market is promoting
less solidarity for letting companies breach their duty of respecting workers
dignity or the environment. He emphasizes that freedom of others shall not
diminish the responsibility of each individual, that solidarity and dignity are
legal principles from which rights and duties flow. Letting someone, be it
physical or moral person, escape the duty of solidarity shall be considered a
breach of human rights. Again, this lack of solidarity is a byproduct of
putting legal systems in competition to protect total market values instead of
protecting the individual.
Supiot's book is a call to revive the spirit of
Philadelphia lost to the total market today. The first step is to rearrange the
means and the goals and giving social rights and social justice their central
place in the national and international legal systems. This in turn shall give
the legal systems their vigor instead of being tools competing on how best to
serve financial markets and ultra-liberal indicators.
[i] Text of the declaration
can be found at http://www.ilocarib.org.tt/projects/cariblex/conventions_23.shtml
last visited on June 9th 2014
[ii] President Franklin
Roosevelt state of the union speech of 1941: the four freedoms are freedom of
speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear
[iii] Text of the declaration at http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
last visited on June 9th 2014
[iv] Supiot 2010 "Dans un monde géré comme un ensable de ressources
quantifiable, l’égalité ne peut en effet être pensée autrement que comme une
indifférenciation, et la différence comme une discrimination."
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