The 'invention' of human rights as an emancipatory concept: an analysis of the debate between orthodox Marxism and the New Left in Argentina

The history of human rights struggles in Argentina has generally focused on a period starting with the military coup d’Etat of 1976. This time framing has considerably prevented scholars from focusing on the intellectual connections between these struggles and the new revolutionary left that strongly impacted the country’s history before 1976, and is still omnipresent in human rights’ leaders’ discourse nowadays. Although a few attempts have been made to assess these connections, these works often tend to identify mobilizations supporting claims such as the freeing of political prisoners in the early 1970s with the human rights movement, without analysing the actual uses of the concept of “human rights” in these mobilizing discourses. The historical focus of this presentation is a conference that took place, in August 1972, among a group of lawyers who took the defence of political prisoners and were closely linked with the revolutionary elites and organizations of their time. One of the participants, Silvio Frondizi, kept an archive of this meeting, including a set of papers presented on this occasion. My presentation is based on the recollection and analysis of these documents. The main questions they discussed were the following: “What do “human rights” mean? Why and how should they be included in our mobilizing discourse?”. This debate saw the opposition of two stances: one arguing against the use of the concept from an orthodox Marxist perspective, the other defending it from a New Left nationalist perspective. The detailed analysis of formal arguments used in this debate shows a lot of incoherence: for it to be explained, it is necessary to look beyond the texts themselves. I argue that, as a contested concept, “human rights” cannot be defined by a simple list of rights (be it the list of 1789 or that of 1793 for instance): it is a label whose shared meaning is the product of interpretative struggles that connect it to other fields, in this case the field of politics. Therefore, the autonomy of human rights’ history is only relative: its evolutions can be related, at least partly, to the changing structures of political competition. For the Argentinean matter, it is indeed essential to assess the importance of the New Left to understand the emergence of the concept of human rights in mobilizing discourses in the 1970s. By combining a socio-economic Marxist perspective with an insistence on the political aspects of emancipation struggles (i.e. the importance of nationalism), this stance has enabled a reassessment of human rights as a positive concept among the Latin-American radical left. In the meantime, the orthodox Marxist critique of human rights, based on the critique of political liberation as a mirage in Marx’s Jewish Question, has tended to disappear as the influence of orthodox Marxism itself decreased, in the 1960s already, inside the Argentinean left. These “external” elements had a strong impact on the shape and the result of the argumentative struggle, as well as on the future uses of the notion “human rights” in that specific country.