At the core of Struggles for the Human lies the struggle for human rights. Lara Montesinos Coleman dares ask the question that many a jaded critic has already relinquished: Does a radical potential remain in human rights, a system that has been widely acknowledged in its liberal Eurocentric legal form to have done little to nothing for the oppressed? In light of the current plight of the Palestinians, who have been largely abandoned on all possible registers (legal, human, organisational, institutional, political), one could be excused for thinking that there is nothing new to say about human rights. Not even the few humanitarian and development organisations and NGOs, once so keen to use the language of human rights, appear to be bothering in 2024. If they do, there appears to be a disturbing false equivalence portrayed in the reports, which insist on framing armed resistance of the Palestinians as human rights violations that might explain or even justify their elimination.[1] In the face of genocide against the Palestinians, we are not only struggling for the human; we are struggling for some semblance of humanity. And yet, Coleman does the seemingly impossible: She has written a book that not only presents an astute critique of human rights, but also offers a fresh look at the potential of human rights. It does so in a collaborative, conversational, and conspiratory manner. Let me explain what I mean by these three adjectives.
Co-labouring
Struggles for the Human begins with a sobering critique of human rights. We are reminded of its many failings. Human rights come with the baggage of liberal Eurocentric legal individualism:
‘They naturalize a concept of “the human” (sovereign, self-interested, and ruling over nature) that is inextricably linked to the rise of modern capitalism and shaped through the exploitation and dehumanization of colonized peoples’ (p. 2).
And yet, despite this, ALL OF THIS, Coleman invites the reader to consider a ‘fresh approach to the politics and ethics of human rights’ (p. 3). The focus of the book is the struggle between capital and labour. The site of the inquiry is peasant, worker, Black, and Indigenous movements in Colombia. The modus is ‘a political inquiryinto human rights as a vocabulary for resistance and an ethical inquiry concerned with human possibilities and political imaginations’ (p. 3). Coleman is careful to ensure that this is not read as a project of rehabilitation, but rather using human rights language as a means to highlight struggle. When it comes to law and ‘counter-legality’, Coleman considers ‘how social movements have made strategic use of law to highlight the colonial and capitalist underpinnings of dominant legal narratives while also using legal arguments as a site of normative innovation’ (108, my emphasis). Coleman urges us to read strategic uses of law not as instances of seeking ‘justice’ within the terms of the law, but rather as part of a struggle to ‘expose the violence of the legal order and to rethink legality “from below”’ (ibid). By considering specific corporate harm on workers, the possibility presents itself to ‘challenge the understanding of the human subject at the heart of modern law’ (ibid). For Coleman, this includes the necessity of holding onto humanism as a conviction that life is worth defending. Her hope is for an ‘insurgent humanism’ that is sensitive to the hierarchisation of life through relations of power and violence and ‘seeks to defend visions of life that are at odds with those of capital, the neoliberal rule of law, and the supervisory benevolence of international development nongovernmental organizations …’(174). In this reading, human rights, despite all the known shortcomings of its liberal individualising guise, can be employed as a ‘vocabulary of ethical commitment and solidarity with others’ (166). Coleman’s book is an appeal for co-llaboration (Latin, collaborare, ‘work together’).
The book is so beautifully written, and the accounts of workers’ struggles in Colombia are so personal and personable that the reader is willingly taken on Coleman’s journey of co-labouring for a radical vocabulary of human rights. After all, co-labouring is seductively ‘anti-disciplinary’ (p. 4), promising what Coleman calls counterlegalities (p. 5). This form of theory and praxis foregrounds lived dimensions of thought developed through struggle; it includes coffee breaks with workers and union members; it includes ‘conversations fuelled by beer, wine, or aguardiente’ (p. 20); at the foreground are friendships, meals, car journeys; it includes the recognition of personal struggles, like the restrictions on research and organising that come with being a solo parent (p.21). These are the methods of radical participatory politics.
However, human rights are not merely a vocabulary; as rights, we know that they are intrinsically tied to selective privileges, obligations, institutions, and the (capitalist) nation state. These aspects of human rights cannot be shaken off, cannot be considered to work outside of the system that made them flourish, and their force cannot be wished away. So, while reading, I found myself celebrating the co-labouring described in the book, but fell short of being recruited into co-labouring myself. Mostly, I couldn’t help but ask: what has human rights ever done for the workers’ movement that it should deserve this energy and reimagination?
Con-versing
For this co-labouring exercise, we might ask an additional person to con-verse (Latin, conversare, ‘keep company (with)’). We might, for example, consult the work of revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. Luxemburg was a political economist, agitator, and a badass. She was born into a Jewish bourgeois family in the Russian-occupied part of Poland, gained her PhD in Switzerland, and eventually became a central figure of social democratic politics in Germany at the beginning of the 20th Century. For a con-versation, these are sufficient grounds; but her thinking is so particularly instructive in thinking about capital and labour because she believed in the need for a proletarian revolution that was not dependent on rights. Luxemburg herself laboured for this – as a teacher in the Social Democracy party school, as a speaker and agitator, as a journalist, as an interlocutor of Lenin’s. She even went to prison for the cause. Several times. She was an anti-capitalist and part of the movement for social democracy – at a time and in a place where social democracy did not automatically align with the capitalist state (she lost the battle on this front). Rosa Luxemburg believed that the fate of democracy is ‘bound up with the fate of the labour movement’. Germany of the early 20th century, it should be noted, had a strong labour movement. What is instructive about Rosa Luxemburg is that she had an internationalist view of solidarity, a vocabulary for siding with the oppressed, a means to make sense of capitalist exploitation in the colonies – all without making use of the language of human rights.
Luxemburg was critical, even dismissive, of legislative reform/reimagining law because in a capitalist state, laws uphold the class interests of the prior revolution. In a bourgeois society (in which the bourgeoisie successfully overcame feudalism through revolution), laws uphold the capitalist class. ‘Revolution is the act of political creation while legislation is the political expression of a society that has already come into being’, Luxemburg stated in her famous pamphlet from 1900 Reform or Revolution. Those who choose law reform ‘choose to operate within the legal framework dictated by the old order instead of committing to establish a new one’ (ibid). On corporate power and the labour movement, Luxemburg warns against reformism that is directed towards ‘the suppression of the abuses of capitalism instead of suppression of capitalism itself’ (ibid). Rosa would insist that conquering political power by the worker is what is necessary. While reforms through parliamentary and trade union mechanisms could prepare the working class for seizing political power, as Lea Ypi notes about Luxemburg’s view, ‘the fact that these demands were inscribed in a liberal institutional framework made it impossible to overcome capitalism from within.’ Given Rosa Luxemburg’s views on bourgeois law, it is likely that she would have offered a similar critique of human rights as she did the ‘fad’ of bourgeois women’s rights.
What underlines this point is the nature of human rights as rights which are claimed vis-à-vis the state. This touches on a further aspect of Rosa’s work that is instructive, namely Rosa as a visionary of (socialist) internationalism. As Deborah Whitehall notes, Luxemburg’s internationalism came ‘before the domain of internationalism was the principle domain of states.’[2] Today, states ‘control the normative and political bases of international legal design’ (ibid); states continue to be the primary problem-solvers of global crises. In her prominent role and critique of the Second International (1889-1916), Rosa Luxemburg argued against national self-determination as understood as a tool of statehood. Nationalism, she feared, would increase the power of imperialist states, und undermine cross-border class struggle.
Is it possible, then, to at the same time show how law is complicit in death by capitalism and appeal to the law as a remedy against this complicity? The problem is that once you frame workers in labour disputes as the bearers of individual human rights that can be claimed against the state a recoding takes place. The individualism inherent in this is not only depoliticising; it is decollectivizing. The worker ends up being a liberal subject rather than a member of a certain class, who is embedded in those social relationships and has responsibility to others mediated through this social relationship.
Con-spiring
Even if the con-versing may lead to differences on co-labouring, what Struggles for the Human does is to draw in an audience for con-spiring (Latin, con spire, breathe with). Because what Coleman does brilliantly in the book is to map out law as a site of struggle. Con-spiring understood through its etymology can be ‘collective breathing’ in the sense of finding a common rhythm in a defined space that offers sustenance and energy for radical change. An immensely important contribution of Coleman’s book is to map out law as a site of struggle because ‘law is not just epiphenomenal to capitalist relations … It is part of the fabric of social relations … ‘ (p. 13).
Con-spiring with Coleman’s struggle for the human as a form of insurgent humanism has the potential to highlight the collectivity of struggle. Crucially, activist lawyering or strategic litigation animated by insurgent humanism no longer needs to be the moment in which struggle is demobilised and dampened as there is a moment of waiting for a court’s judgment – a frustrating phenomenon that many an activist has experienced. Rather, the introduction of legal arguments is the moment in struggle in which the political battle picks up pace. In fact, Luxemburg had a similar perspective on the possible mobilising force of law in her own trial of rupture. When she was put on trial in 1914 for slandering the German army (an offence she was accused of committing during public rallies against militarism), Luxemburg used her trial as an opportunity to invite hundreds of witnesses into the courtroom to speak to the abuses of the military. This mobilisation of the masses was an act of collective con-spiring for radical change. Against the background of imperial wars, Coleman urgently reminds us that this collectivity is key. Overall, then, Struggles for the Human is a magnificent, and much-needed, reminder of collective struggles and radical hope.
[1] Human Rights Watch, ‘Israel and Palestine. Events of 2023’, World Report 2024, available at: https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/israel-and-palestine.
[2] Deborah Whitehall, ‘The Reign of Order and the Rights of Siege According to Rosa Luxemburg’ in Immi Tallgren (ed), Portraits of Women in International Law: New Names and Forgotten Faces (OUP 2023).
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