A Declaration of the Rights of Human Beings: On the Sovereignty of Life as Surpassing the Rights of Man - Softcover

Vaneigem, Raoul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1629631558 ISBN 13: 9781629631554

Publisher: PM Press, 2019

Synopsis

Sometimes playful or poetic, always provocative, Raoul Vaneigem reviews the history of bills of rights before offering his own call, with commentary, for fifty-seven rights yet to be won in a world where the “freedoms accorded to Man” are no longer merely “the freedoms accorded by man to the economy.” Readers of Vaneigem's now-classic work The Revolution of Everyday Life, which as one of the main contributions of the Situationist International was a harbinger of May 1968 in France, will find much to savor in these pages written in the highest idiom of subversive utopianism.

About this title

About the Author

Born in 1934, Raoul Vaneigem is a writer and a former member of the Situationist International and is a key theorist in the worldwide Occupy movement. His works include The Book of Pleasures, A Cavalier History of Surrealism, Contributions to the Revolutionary Struggle, and the globally influential text The Revolution of Everyday Life.

Liz Heron is a Scottish writer and translator living in London. Her many other translations include Artemisia: A Novel by Alexandra Lapierre; Infancy and History by Giorgio Agamben; and The Unseen by Nanni Balestrini. She has anthologized women’s fiction on cities in Streets of Desire (1993); published her own short stories as Red River (1996); and her latest novel is The Hourglass (2018).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A Declaration of the Rights of Human Beings

On the Sovereignty of Life as Surpassing the Rights of Man

By Raoul Vaneigem, Liz Heron

PM Press

Copyright © 2001 Raoul Vaneigem
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-62963-155-4

Contents

PREFACE TO THE NEW ENGLISH EDITION, 
I Critique of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, 
II Market Freedoms Prefigure but Negate Human Freedoms, 
III There Are No Rights Already Won, Only Rights Yet to Be Won, 
IV From Rights without Duties to the Creation of an Art of Living, 
V The Rights, 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, 

CHAPTER 1

Critique of the Declaration of the Rights of Man

1. The history of the freedoms granted to human beings has, up until now, been repeatedly confused with the history of the freedoms granted by human beings to the economy.

a) There is no reason for anyone to be surprised, upset or outraged because the freedoms bestowed on men should have been taken away from them, and, having been emptied of their meaning or negated through the use that is made of them, everywhere become inaccessible and illusory, and this even within the very principle of hope that nourished them.

b) The rise of the Rights of Man stemmed from the expansion of free trade. Their decline within democracies and their prohibition by despotic regimes complies with the defensive retreat of an economy whose dominant, time-honoured and static form was in danger of being supplanted by the emergence of a new and dynamic form formerly subordinate to it. It is always thanks to such crises that a society fights in the most radical way for its humanity and becomes most aware of the tutelary and repressive yoke that is the economy of exploitation.

2. The Rights of Man are no more than specific amplifications of a single right, which is the right to survive merely for the sake of working toward the survival of a totalitarian economy deceptively imposed as the sole means of sustaining the human race.

a) The price of the Rights of Man are duties set forth in an immanent social contract which compels individuals to pay for their aleatory survival by submitting to a superior power whose profits it is their role to increase.

b) The Rights of Man are a positive consecration of the negation of the rights of the human being. Man in the abstract is in fact simply the producer as a substitute for the individual who creates his or her own destiny by recreating the world.

It has nonetheless to be acknowledged that by proclaiming the need, over centuries of inhumane history, for everyone to enjoy some minimum level of subsistence, the Rights of Man, whether implicitly acknowledged or unequivocally demanded, have satisfied the needs of that survival instinct without which no life is possible. Until the moment, that is, when it became clear that the urge for survival would be converted into its opposite unless it led to a truly human life.

c) As the economy of exploitation has tightened its totalitarian grip on the whole world, it has arrived at a kind of autonomous survival which requires only the reproduction of speculative capital and which implies that ultimately men and women could be dispensed with. The overblown abstractness of a system, produced by humans, but which has slipped out of their hands and turned against them, now constitutes a deadly threat to the survival of the human race, of natural resources, of the planet, and of an economy destined as a result to implode.

3. Granted to anyone who earns it "by the sweat of their brow," he right to survival operates above all as a stay of execution and an appeal against the death sentence passed by the economy upon those who do not labour to reinforce its power.

a) It was the profit motive that decreed the first humanitarian law, namely the putting of prisoners of war to work. Previously they had been exterminated to save the trouble of feeding them and as a sacrifice to the Gods from whom the community sought favours. As a replacement for execution, slavery perfectly conveys the truth of a system that promises survival to those who serve it.

b) The organisation of the production and distribution of goods has turned the producer and the consumer into the beneficiaries of its advances and the victims of its constraints. The rights torn from power through social struggle have ultimately been conceded to man-in-the-abstract by means of a continual rejigging of the laws of profit, the sole fragile fence against the chaotic torrent that always threatens market rationality.

c) Whenever it takes self-protective measures against waste and turpitude, the commodity also protects manual workers against the arbitrariness of the brain workers who rule over them.

4. The humanisation of divine right reflected the withering away of the mandate of heaven which under predominantly agrarian regimes had been invoked to justify the authority of humans over their own kind. The setting up of an earthly mandate ratified the power of the State. It introduced a new kind of consciousness during the long and bloody march whereby a puny creature under the thumb of the Gods was replaced by a man — an abstract one of course, since he was torn from his living roots, yet one entitled, thanks to the title of citizen, to see himself as untouched by the grip of anything divine, and to place his own hopes in a society delivered at once from the tyrannical institution of religion and from monarchical power.

a) The legends of the Golden Age, as well as a good number of utopias, have been fuelled by the obscure memory of pre-agrarian civilisations whose gatherer economy allowed women such a prominent role that it fostered a society in symbiosis with nature where violence had no place other than an occasional recourse to the hunt. The very idea of a Golden Age opposes a radiant body to the all-conquering, well-muscled virility of the Bronze and Iron Ages, which inaugurated the rape of women and of the earth and gave birth to the toiling warrior race whose stunted remnants gave us, as the final chapter in their history, the infamy of concentration camps and the destruction of natural resources.

b) Under the aegis of a market logic, the commercial development of the Athenian republic produced a model of democracy which, for all its corruption, racketeering, discrimination, electoral mendacity, and subservience to money, still constitutes the greatest effort ever made to benefit humanity by virtue of dues paid to the commodity.

c) Except for certain peasant communities which seem originally to have practised some form of collectivist or clan democracy, the earliest freedom charters appeared during the ferment of communal uprisings which, from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, raised the ramparts of cities then in full commercial expansion against stagnant agrarian conditions presided over by a parasitic aristocracy. The air of freedom in the towns inspired the preindustrial bourgeoisie to institute a right of recourse against the arbitrariness of the feudal regime, whose predatory character was a broad hindrance to the free circulation of goods.

On June 15, 1215, England's Magna Carta proclaimed, "No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land." It thus testified to an economic development which banked on greater energy and profit from the free man selling his labour to the corporations than from the serf bound to the glebe and obliged to perform exhausting corvées.

d) The towns and the urban consciousness which arose from free trade long remained subordinate to the countryside, whose mentality continued to mould urban customs to its narrow outlook, reactionary prejudices and religious archaism. But contempt and hatred for peasant obscurantism and rustic timorousness persisted, and was sharply revived when "enlightenment" in the cities and proletarian consciousness took over from the old emancipatory bourgeois consciousness.

The monstrous outgrowth of the cities has since conveniently offered the industrialised business of food production the perfect opportunity to turn the decline of the old countryside to its advantage, and to render fields, pastureland and forests sterile on the pretext of feeding global populations. Inspired by the Sicilian Mafia, which came out of peasant divisions and rapacity in the nineteenth century, consortiums now exhaust the stocks of the oceans by labour-intensive industrial fishing, just as multinational petrochemical and pharmaceutical businesses ravage nature with overfertilisation and genetically modified organisms. Whereas the cities, in the grip of a parasitic capitalism, regress into ghettos where fear and hatred of the other emit as acrid a stench as any left by the old rural mind-set, whatever living forces still remain in the country strive to develop wholesome natural resources and to become the guardian of a human consciousness bent on forging a nonviolent pact with nature.

CHAPTER 2

Market Freedoms Prefigure but Negate Human Freedoms

1. Driven by greed, capitalism has resolved to call upon technical inventiveness to devise incomparably more perfect and docile instruments than its wage slaves. The liberty it grants to the serf-turned-proletarian stipulates by contract that it must be placed above all in the service of mechanical skills and aptitudes (the medieval Latin for a workman is mechanicus) and that it must not be dissipated or thwarted by any inclination that may deflect it from the straight and narrow path of toil. This is still the meaning embodied in the Habeas Corpus Act passed by the English Parliament in 1679, which provides guarantees against illegitimate lawsuit, arrest or imprisonment.

2. Drawn up by George Mason after the start of the War of American Independence, and proclaimed on June 12, 1776, the Virginia Declaration of Rights is the first to stipulate that "All men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety." This Declaration is defined by a generosity which gives too much credit to the intellect and paves the road to the hell of necessity with good intentions. The wish that all men be 'by nature equally free and independent' rightly casts doubt on the vile right of the old aristocracy to pass on privileges to their offspring. But the legislator showed that he well knew to what degree family background and social condition perpetuated inequality and dependence by referring to life and safety, pleasure and happiness as subject to the appropriation and possession of assets.

3. Whatever revolutionary and emancipatory notions were discernible in the article of the Virginia Declaration of Rights which stated "that all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people; that magistrates are their trustees and servants, and at all times amenable to them," have foundered on every reef of parliamentary democracy. When the representational system took its most radical turn by proposing to grant all power to the soviets, it immediately came to grief and lapsed into one of the worst tyrannies the world has ever known.

4. The techniques of advertising, propaganda, communication, information and the stage-management of lived experience, along with the impoverishment of thought, the degradation of consciousness, fearful self-censorship and the power of money, have all combined to do away with a freedom that was long a weapon against all tyrannies: that of the press, which the Virginia Declaration calls "one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty [that] can never be restrained but by despotic governments."

5. The successive governments supposedly freely chosen by the population of the United States are a good yardstick by which to measure the present-day value of the American Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, which held "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organising its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." Just as the Athenian democracy of ancient Greece did not conceive of opening the way to its freedoms for slaves and other races, the American Declaration implicitly excluded Indians and Blacks, whose full status as men is denied by that God of Calvin's who happens to be the source of the "inalienable right" to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

6. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was adopted by the French National Assembly on August 26, 1789, its principal drafters, Anson, Mounier and Mirabeau, being inspired by the ideas of Diderot, Rousseau and Montesquieu. It put a legal end to the Ancien Régime and ushered in an era when the freedoms it evoked would incessantly sow the seeds of a subversion which be crushed just as relentlessly by the economic expansion which had sparked it. The first part of Article 1 — "Men are born free and equal in rights" — rescinds forever the aristocracy's odious claims to privilege by birthright, and this alone justifies the document's glorious reputation. The legitimate use by both bourgeois and bureaucratic regimes of the second part — "social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good" — has also made it into a template for a shameful hypocrisy. Its radicalism had a specific outcome in the French Convention's decree of February 4, 1794, abolishing slavery, even though this came into force only in 1848, through the determined efforts of Victor Schoelcher. The legal slavery perpetuated by waged work has not to this day been abolished.

7. In deeming the Declaration of 1789 "the credo of the New Age," Michelet recognized a lay religion of the Rights of Man whose ritual was the duties it imposed. Sade, one of the first people in history to demand the abolition of the death penalty, was also the first person to depict that hedonism of the concentration camp which the apostates of an ascetic God would embrace, subscribing to an orgiastic cult of a God of Nature and turning hell into a paradise for themselves where their unnatural desires could be unleashed — and choke them. By returning to mankind the rights usurped by the Gods Sade instantly exposed the reality of the "laissez-faire" system promoted by commercial and industrial dynamism, in other words the freedom to oppress. "Natural" man does not, alas, behave like a wolf toward his own kind, but like a God. A fascination with horror and death results both from a powerlessness to humanise existence and from the economy's interest in treating life as nothing but a chaotic whirlpool where whatever is created self-destructs.

8. In 1790, Condorcet denounced the patriarchal character of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in his article "Sur l'admission des femmes au droit de cité" (On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship). In September 1791 Olympe de Gouges published her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen. Article 1: "Woman is born free and remains equal to man in her rights. Social distinctions can be founded only upon the common good." Article 3: "The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation, which is nothing but the union of woman and man; no body an no individual may exercise any authority which does not come expressly from it." Article 4: "Liberty and justice consist in giving back to others everything that belongs to them, so there are no limits to the exercise of woman's natural rights save the perpetual tyranny that man exerts against her; those limits must be reformed by the laws of nature and of reason." Article 10: "No one should be harassed on account of their opinions, even fundamental ones; woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum, provided always that her manifestations, as laid down by the law, do not disturb the peace." Article 13: "To the maintenance of the law enforcement and the cost of administration the contributions of woman and man are equal; she shares in all the hard labour, all the painful tasks; she must therefore share too in the distribution of positions, employment, offices, honours, and industrious activity." It would be almost two centuries before women were recognised, not as the future of mankind, but as worthy of suffering the same alienation as men without additional oppression. This relative emancipation of women owes a good deal, it must be said, to the development of a consumer economy in the second half of the twentieth century and to the special status that the market hastened to assign her, as likewise to children, who were given over with impunity to the ravages of advertising. The memory of the economic age has not deigned to recall Olympe de Gouges, beheaded on November 3, 1793, four months after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of Year One; the same goes for Claire Demar, who died alone after publishing Appel d'une femme du peuple sur l'affranchissement de la femme (Appeal of a Woman of the People concerning the Enfranchisement of Women) in 1833; and for Táhirih, assassinated by Islam for having burnt her veil in public in the Iran of 1840 and called upon women to reject their oppression by men.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: PM Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1629631558
• ISBN 13: 9781629631554
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 144