Global Capitalism and Human Rights

NGOs are currently involved in attempts to bring International Financial Institutions (IFIs) in line with international human rights law. In this paper I argue that approaches to humanizing global capitalism are not doomed by the nature of capitalism as such (as Marxists suppose). Indeed, the cultural politics in which NGOs and those sympathetic to human rights within IFIs have been engaged over the last twenty years has made some difference to the policies adopted by the World Bank. However, the geo-political structures of the IFIs and the nature of capitalist competition make it legitimate, necessary even, for sovereign states to pursue their ‘comparative advantage’. The difficulties of reforming global capitalism are due to economic competition between states as much as they are to capitalism as such, and to the inadequacy of global institutions to manage it in order to make equitable economic policy for the world.