Reading: Social Rights: The Idea Whose Time Has Come? By: Robin Wilson / 21 March 2026
How do Europe’s fraught governments navigate their way beyond an ever-intensifying [accumulation] of crises threatening to overwhelm them? They feel pummelled from all sides: by the cost of living and rising inequality, by technology-assisted precarisation of the labour market, by climate change and extreme weather events, by brutal wars in Ukraine and the Gulf.
Governments can't feel anything. They aren't people. They are made of people, and those people do not feel pummelled from all sides because they are the ones pummelling their citizenry from all sides. We are being pummelled by inequality, we are being pummelled by being made precarious, we are being pummelled by climate change, and we are being pummelled by the wars they refuse to end.
Governments require no empathy. They are not people, and they are largely made up of people who have no empathy for anyone they deem as unworthy.
Yet if government is back in the frame, growing public mistrust enfeebles its efforts.
Growing public mistrust is what every government deserves considering how often they show us what we're worth to them (nothing).
That is exploited by populist parties which, as in the 1930s, offer nostalgic national myths as snake-oil ‘solutions’ but find an audience among the socially insecure for their assaults on universal norms. And the rules-based international order which might help Europe’s governments calm this perfect global storm has been brought to the brink by that odd couple of far-right leaders, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin—united only in their determination to turn history backwards and to put collective Europe back into national containers.
I'm sorry, but what is this bullshit? First and foremost, populist parties might be able to exploit the “down and out,” but it's less often the actual down and out supporting them and a bunch of the middle-class and higher collaborators who get shit out of it. We do not need this kind of empathy for the people who might join the nazis. If they are willing to be a nazi to save themselves, they aren't worth much to the rest of us.
Moreover, this notion gives Europe a new way to set a moral compass for, and regain its legitimacy among, the wider world. It is the idea of social rights.
Europe didn't come up with this idea, and Europe wouldn't be legitimate even if they implemented something so minimal as to be a bandage to the gaping wound it's created in the world.
‘There is no democratic security without social rights. At a time of war, economic shocks and rising inequality, delivering on the European Social Charter puts social justice where it belongs—at the centre of democratic stability.’ Speaking of ‘a world in rupture’, he said: ‘Moments of rupture force choices.’
Prediction: None of these social rights are going to do shit other than reinforce Europe. It's still going to harm people, especially refugees and other migrants.
It was ‘profoundly worrying’, she said, that ‘the social rights of many have been squeezed to breaking-point’. Added to this was the ‘democratic crisis in Europe’ associated with ‘real and perceived failures’ by governments to deliver social inclusion. The link between democratic stabilty and social rights had been ‘never more urgent’ and the charter ‘never more important’.
You don't get “perceived” failures without them actually being real, unless you're referring to things that aren't failures (e.g., helping refugees) that a bunch of racists think is a “failure” of society. This is all vague bullshit, if we're honest. Democratic and social rights have never truly existed in Europe, and there is no way that the people eroding what little people fought to secure will grant them in any capacity.
The United Nations rapporteur on extreme poverty, Olivier de Schutter, who is also a member of the ECSR, pointed to research showing that for every percentage point increase in the Gini coefficient of income inequality there was a roughly identical increase in support for far-right parties.
By whom, Olivier? Because multiply marginalised people who far-right parties target who are often even more poor than the people targeting them with bigoted vitriol? Do not share the same views in the same numbers. So who is supporting the far right with your correlational metric?
Measures introduced by mainstream parties in government, such as tightening eligibility and rendering harsher conditions for welfare benefits, had fuelled ‘distrust and disenchantment’ amid increasing precarity, weaker unions and a declining labour share in economic output. The ‘fight against poverty’ was thus ultimately a ‘fight for democracy’, he said.
Who allowed that precarity? Who weakened the unions? Who has been making people jobless with no recourse? WHO? Say it. Be very open and honest about it. Because it's the same people pulling austerity bullshit on everyone who is eligible for those welfare benefits (which often excludes immigrants, so you're still talking primarily about citizens and ignoring an even more precarious population within your varying borders).
As speaker after speaker from among the member states—as well as the professional experts and the non-governmental organisations—went on to reiterate, inequality and exclusion foster insecurity and mistrust, which in turn feed democratic backsliding and international conflict.
I don't believe this to be fully true. I don't deny that it looks that way, but I'd like them to look at who is responsible for the insecurity that people feel and who has actually been engaged in the “democratic backsliding.” If I use my country of origin as an example, Barack Obama had ample opportunity to follow through on the promises that got people to vote for him in his first term. This would have included massively reworking the student loan system (as one example). He could've done it in is second term. Joe Biden could've done it when he took office. Neither of them ever did this, despite the obvious benefit to millions of people in the US (because they support the financial institutions).
The liberals who keep claiming to save us do not, and they will not because that's not in their best interest. And this is also why these people, who think we need a charter of social rights when we actually don't, are pretending it will save us and that they can save us. They are part of the problem. They have helped enable it.
These patterns play out everywhere time and time again, and they hope we constantly forget.
A key intellectual link in this narrative is the concept of ‘social investment’ developed in recent years by the welfare-state expert Anton Hemerijck and colleagues. What the market fundamentalists dismissed as the welfare ‘burden’ on the taxpayer, fostering ‘dependency’, has been re-presented as a win-win formula for social inclusion, gender equality and fiscal stability—for instance through providing universal childcare, with its enduring benefits for women’s career development and the prospective life-chances of the child.
Let's stop and think about this for a moment. Market fundamentalists do indeed talk of these programs like this, but can we actually consider why it is that “universal childcare” is a right that needs to be given? Why do we make parents work while they have young children? Why don't we have multi-generational spaces for adults and children to be together? Why don't we foster actual communal care? We wouldn't need “universal childcare” (which, by the way, starts aiming towards pushing younger and younger kids into school—something that is actually quite traumatising for many, does not safe to many of them, and does provide further propagandistic support and further indoctrination of people) if we actually made our communities healthier in this way. If we created genuine learning spaces for all people to share, we wouldn't need to rely upon the state to do this for us.
Dependency is actually correct, but the market fundamentalists talk about it as leeching off the state. That's disgusting. But building dependency on the state is still bad because it builds reliance on something that is fundamentally against you. It creates and is indicative of an abusive relationship, one where the things you need can be snatched from you without your consent.
How will social rights guard against that? (Note: “Social rights” hasn't really even been defined here. It's just a catchphrase with no meat.)
This is all rubbish, and I don't know why an anarchist pushed it on my timeline as if it was a good idea in any capacity.