Human rights

"Achieving human rights is an ongoing struggle - in fact a collective struggle. Even though the progressive realization of human rights for all depends on international, national, and local laws, human rights are realized on the ground, in praxis and reciprocally, which is to say, in deeply democratic communities and societies." "The logic of human rights and the logic of capitalism and profit-making have always been somewhat at odds with one another because self-interest rests somewhat uneasily in the realm of solidarity and collective struggle, but the advent of market fundamentalism in the 1980s put these two logics in dramatic opposition with one another. When Prime Minister Thatcher stated, "there is no such thing as society," what she really meant was societies are obstacles to the operation of unencumbered financial, commodity, labor, and land markets. Since the mid-1980s, the world economy has increasingly been dominated by voracious multinationals that exploit workers and the environment and, with the assistance of international agencies, exploit national and local governments." "As opposed to the logic of profits, the logic of human rights relies on social solidarity, whi