ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a dialogue between critical political economy and critical human rights scholarship to show how, since they were first recognised, human rights have been challenged and transformed by the profit needs of the capitalist system. It argues that market and popular demands for justice are repeatedly co-produced and that pushing forward an emancipatory human rights agenda entails a confrontation with core capitalist interests. The chapter illustrates how a comprehensive understanding of the right to be healthy has been actively opposed by a reduced and commodified approach entailing a right to medical care. It demonstrates that confrontations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries between a social and an individual/biological understanding of health moved the international health agenda towards the pre-eminence of the right to medical care over the right to be healthy. At stake, then, is the tension between human rights and capitalism, characterised by threats, confrontations, and possibilities.
