Fay William
University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia.
Int J Semiot Law. 2023;36(2):407-439. doi: 10.1007/s11196-022-09931-4. Epub 2022 Sep 5.
This article aims to contribute to scholarship regarding the critique of rights through the examination of the role of rights discourse in the furtherance of what is generally termed 'community organising'-in particular, tenant organising-in the social and political context of neoliberalism. Conceptions of neoliberalism advanced in the work of David Harvey, Michel Foucault, Wendy Brown, and Bonnie Honig are synthesised to explicate the material and discursive role of law in the maintenance and furtherance of the neoliberal project. The article assesses the left-legal critique of rights presented primarily through the Critical Legal Studies Movement alongside the role of legal practice and legal discourse in countering neoliberalism. The article argues that rights claims concerning collective organisation, such as those commonly afforded to workers and trade unions, present a unique exception to the left-legal critique of rights in providing the means by which oppressive social relations may not only be remedies, but overcome. The works of Chantal Mouffe and of Roberto Unger are instructive in this regard and are placed in conversation with theories of community and labour organising. The article concludes by sketching the application of this conception of organising rights to the problem of housing and tenants' rights under neoliberalism.
本文旨在通过审视权利话语在推动通常所谓的“社区组织”（特别是租户组织）于新自由主义社会和政治背景下所发挥的作用，为有关权利批判的学术研究做出贡献。综合大卫·哈维、米歇尔·福柯、温迪·布朗和邦妮·霍尼格著作中提出的新自由主义概念，以阐明法律在维护和推进新自由主义项目中的物质和话语作用。本文评估了主要通过批判法学运动呈现的对权利的左翼法律批判，以及法律实践和法律话语在对抗新自由主义中的作用。本文认为，关于集体组织的权利主张，例如通常赋予工人和工会的权利主张，在提供不仅可以补救而且可以克服压迫性社会关系的手段方面，是对权利的左翼法律批判的一个独特例外。尚塔尔·莫菲和罗伯托·昂格尔的著作在这方面具有启发性，并与社区和劳工组织理论进行了对话。本文最后概述了这种组织权利概念在新自由主义下住房和租户权利问题上的应用。
