Socioeconomic Rights, Competition, and Systemic Neutrality: Approaching the Right(s) Contribution to Emancipatory Social Movements

Abstract

Abstract: Debate over the emancipatory potential of socioeconomic rights and their relevance to broader social movements is long-standing but is now picking up steam and taking on a life well beyond its traditionally legal disciplinary confines. This article contributes to the widening debate by emphasising the need for socioeconomic rights to be re-thought simultaneously outward (through deeper engagement with extant economic and political systems) and inward (by re-assessing various doctrines ingrained in their own construction). I pursue this 'two-track' methodology by first constructing a novel theory regarding the outward engagement of socioeconomic rights with competition law and policy, focusing on the collective agency of rightsholders pressing for social change through democratic means and the specifically neoliberal conception of competition. Crucially, following William Davies (The Limits of Neoliberalism) , I argue that this specific conception of competition is not just another aspect of neoliberalism but is instead the defining characteristic of the neoliberal system. The finding of incompatibility between socioeconomic rights and this conception of competition therefore implies incompatibility also with the neoliberal system, tout court. However, this systemic rejection provokes inward analysis of the surprisingly under-examined legal doctrine of systemic neutrality, positing that socioeconomic rights can be meaningfully realised in any political or economic system. Ultimately, it is argued that to have any real emancipatory relevance to broader social movements socioeconomic rights advocates, in general, must be far more forthright and logically consistent in what these rights both entail and exclude. The emancipatory promise of these rights is inherently bound to a rejection of their neutrality, legal, systemic, or otherwise, and an active, cooperative theoretical, and political engagement with more broadly emancipatory movements in a range of non-legal fields.