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MacPherson (1962) explained, that when “human rights abuses” are evoked in the newspapers, it is only when governments can be seen as trespassing on some victim’s person or possessions—say, by raping, torturing, or killing them. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, like just about all similar documents, also speaks of universal rights to food and shelter, but __one never reads about governments committing “human rights abuses” when they eliminate price supports on basic foodstuffs, even if it leads to widespread malnutrition, or for razing shantytowns or kicking the homeless out of shelters.__
As an academic discipline, economics is premised on ‘the failure to recognize power relationships in society’, as Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson put it. Its exponents depict the capitalist economy as the result of a set of voluntary agreements between free and equal individuals, that is, as a sphere in which domination is excluded a priori. The economy is, in other words, defined by the absence of power from the very outset. __For economists, the expression ‘the free market’ is a pleonasm, whereas for Marx, it is a contradiction in terms.__
Mute Compulsion
Søren Mau
the anti-immigrant backlash since the late 1970s has led to specific policies that have outlawed bilingual education. At times, the bigots behind this backlash have used attacks on bilingual education to inch their cause into the political mainstream, thereby shifting the general political climate further to the right.
Education and Capitalism
Sarah Knopp;Jeff Bale
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