Rights claims by nature serve capitalism unless supplemented by acknowledgment of responsibility

Evidence

Woman is in the interstices of “Pterodactyl.” If the non-Eurocentric ecological movement offers us one vision of an undivided world, the women’s movement against population control and reproductive engineering offers us another. And here too Mahasweta shows us the complicity of the state. The bitter humor with which she treats the government’s family planning posters shows us that the entire initiative is cruelly unmindful of the robbing of the women and men of Pirtha of the dignity of their reproductive responsibility. All collective struggles for the right to sexual preference and pleasure, the right to equitable work outside and in the home, the right to equality in education, must be supplemented by the memory that to be human is to be always and already inserted into a structure of responsibility. Capitalism, based on remote-control suffering, is obliged to reject the model of the acknowledgment of being inserted into responsibility as unprogressive, in order to be able to justify itself to passive capitalist members of society. Demanding rights or choosing responsibility is more useful for its purposes. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2214

Categorization

• DEFINE: The pivotal distinction: ‘demanding rights’ (liberal, graspable by capitalism) vs ‘acknowledging insertion into responsibility’ (her corrective model), which capitalist logic finds ‘unprogressive’.
• XREF: This rights-vs-responsibility distinction is the ethical core she also applies to ethical singularity, and it marks the limit of strategic essentialism’s strategic rhetoric—collective rights-claims risk feeding the very system. — connects to: The legal form of subjective rights fits private liberties but not political obligations — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 87; Moral responsibility can compel insubordination to socially upheld principles — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 495; Neoliberals weaponized human rights language to protect private property and market order — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 76 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• The legal form of subjective rights fits private liberties but not political obligations #expands (0.85) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 87
• Rights function as instruments of governance, not just limits on power #corroborates (0.82)
• Moral responsibility can compel insubordination to socially upheld principles #responds-to (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 495
• Neoliberals weaponized human rights language to protect private property and market order #exemplifies (0.78) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 76