Declaration of the Rights of Human Beings

Raoul Vaneigem, Liz Heron

Description

“A declaration of rights is indispensable in order to halt the ravages of despotism.” So wrote the revolutionary Antoine Barnave in support of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789). Over two centuries after the Great French Revolution, Raoul Vaneigem writes that today, “in a situation comparable to the condition of France on the eve of its Revolution,” we cannot limit ourselves to demanding liberties—the so-called bourgeois freedoms—that came into being with free trade, for now the free exchange of capital is the totalitarian form of a system which reduces human beings and the earth itself to merchandise. The time has come to give priority to the real individual rather than to Man in the abstract, the citizen answerable to the State and to the sole dictates of God’s successor, the economy.

Sometimes playful or poetic, always provocative, Vaneigem reviews the history of bills of rights before offering his own call, with commentary, for fifty-eight 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.”

Every human being has the right, for example: to become human and to be treated as such; to dispose freely of their time; to comfort and luxury; to free modes of transport set up by and for the collectivity; to permanent control over scientific experimentation; to association by affinity; to bend toward life what was turned toward death; to the flux of passions and the freedoms of love; to a natural life and a natural death; to hold nothing sacred; to excess and to moderation; to desire what seems beyond the realm of the possible.

Readers of Vaneigem’s now-classic work The Revolution of Everyday Life will find much to engage with in this unique work of subversive utopianism.

Sujets

• Polemic
• Globalization
• Civil and political rights
• Situationism
• Society
• Aliénation

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629633275
• Langue: English

Extrait

Translator s Acknowledgements
My thanks are due to Raoul Vaneigem; also to Francoise Wuilmart and the Belgian translator s centre at Seneffe, which provided a hospitable environment for some of the work on this translation and for collaboration with the author. And thanks to Behrouz Safdari and Jalal El Hakmaoui for helpful discussions.
Liz Heron, 2003
A Declaration of the Rights of Human Beings: On the Sovereignty of Life as Surpassing the Rights of Man
Raoul Vaneigem
Original French edition: D claration des droits de l tre humain: de la souverainet de la vie comme d passement des droits de l homme. Published by Le Cherche Midi, Paris, 2001
Copyright Raoul Vaneigem, 2001
English translation by Liz Heron first published by Pluto, London, 2003. Copyright Liz Heron, 2003
This new edition published by PM Press, Oakland, 2019.
Revised by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Preface 2019 Raoul Vaneigem
Translation 2019 Liz Heron and Donald Nicholson Smith
This edition 2019 PM Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-62963-155-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016948153
Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
www.thomsonshore.com
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
Article 1. All human beings have the right to become human and to be treated as such
Article 2. All human beings have the right to life
Article 3. All human being have the right to independence
Article 4. All human beings have the right to knowledge
Article 5. All human beings have the right to happiness
Article 6. All human beings have the right to dispose freely of their time
Article 7. All human beings have the right to move wherever and however they see fit
Article 8. All human beings have the right of free access to the necessities of life
Article 8a. All human beings have the right to a home in keeping with their desires
Article 8b. All human beings have the right to healthy, natural food
Article 8c. All human beings have the right to health
Article 8d. All human beings have the right to comfort and luxury
Article 8e. All human beings have the right to free modes of transport set up by and for the community
Article 8f. All human beings have the right to the free use of natural resources and natural energy
Article 9. All human beings have the right to permanent control over scientific experimentation so as to ensure that it serves human beings and not commodities
Article 10. All human beings have the right to take pleasure in themselves, in others, and in the world
Article 10a(i). All human beings have the right to self-unification
Article 10a(ii). All human beings have the right to be themselves and to cultivate awareness of their own uniqueness
Article 10a(iii). All human beings have the right to authenticity
Article 10b(i). All human beings have the right to join forces with their fellows
Article 10b(ii). All human beings have the right to join together on the basis of affinity
Article 10b(iii). All human beings have the right to replace State governments with a world federation of small local communities where individual excellence will ensure the humanity of social life
Article 10c. All human beings have the right to an alliance with nature
Article 10d. All human beings have the right to reconciliation with their animal nature
Article 11. All human beings have the right to construct their own destiny
Article 12. All human beings have the right to creation and self-creation
Article 13. All human beings have the right to interfere and intervene wherever human progress is under threat
Article 14. All human beings have the right to steer toward life what is directed toward death
Article 15. All human beings have the right to improve their environment for the sake of a better life
Article 16. All human beings have the right to consideration for their sensitivities
Article 17. All human beings have the right to feel the movements of affection and disaffection inherent in the flux of the passions and the freedom of love
Article 18. All human beings have the right to a natural life and a natural death
Article 19. All human beings have the right to base the diversity of their desires on the multifariousness of life
Article 20. All human beings have the right to choose activity or repose
Article 21. All human beings have the right to be idle
Article 22. All human beings have the right to exert effort and to persevere
Article 23. All human beings have the right to a personal sense of beauty
Article 24. All human beings have the right to progress and to regress
Article 25. All human beings have the right to stray, to get lost and to find themselves
Article 26. All human beings have the right to vanquish terror and tame fear
Article 27. All human beings have the right to defy threats
Article 28. All human beings have the right to make mistakes and to correct them
Article 29. All human beings have the right to absolute freedom of opinion and expression
Article 30. All human beings have the right to criticise and contradict what seems most certain or passes for a fundamental truth
Article 31. All human beings have the right to hold nothing sacred
Article 32. All human beings have the right to change
Article 33. All human beings have the right to take their distance
Article 34. All human beings have the right to the pleasures of each stage of life
Article 35. All human beings have the right to reject suffering
Article 36. All human beings have the right to give and to give themselves without self-sacrifice
Article 37. All human beings have the right to escape frustration by replacing dissatisfaction with insatiability
Article 38. All human beings have a right to their doubts and their certitudes
Article 39. All human beings have the right to excess and moderation
Article 40. All human beings have the right to enjoy themselves
Article 41. All human beings have the right to dream and imagine in freedom
Article 42. All human beings have the right to anger
Article 43. All human beings have the right to bodily wellbeing
Article 44. All human beings have the right to adorn themselves as they see fit
Article 45. All human beings have the right to their lies and their truths
Article 46. All human beings have the right to open themselves up to, or close themselves off from, the world
Article 47. All human beings have the right to express their emotions, desires and thoughts, or to keep silent about them
Article 48. All human beings have the right to artistic expression
Article 49. All human beings have the right to be kind
Article 50. All human beings have the right to innocence
Article 51. All human beings have the right to rely on the violence of the life forces to keep the violence of the death forces at bay
Article 52. All human beings have the right to restore to the will to live the vital energy usurped by the will to power
Article 53. All human beings have the right to protect and be protected
Article 54. All human beings have the right have children for their own happiness and that of their offspring
Article 55. All human beings have the right to desire what seems beyond the realm of the possible
Article 56. All human beings have the right to govern their own moods, whims and obsessions without having to impose them on others or having those of others imposed on them
Article 57. All human beings have the right to the poetry of existence
Article 58. All human beings have the right to play and the right to sport with the actions and values of the old world
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Preface to the New English Edition
The freedom to live like a human being annuls the supposed freedoms of commerce and predation.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man arose from the demand for free trade by the bourgeoisie of eighteenth-century France in opposition to the monarchist totalitarianism of the ancien r gime.
The will to eliminate the stagnation and despotism of an agrarian economy that hampered the free exchange of goods created a code giving individuals the right to express their opinions freely and throw off the yoke of religion and aristocratic tyranny. By analogy with the free circulation of products, as decreed by economic liberalism, the Enlightenment philosophy exemplified in France by Meslier, Diderot, d Holbach, Rousseau and Voltaire championed a right to the free circulation of ideas in accordance with which the freedom of the individual (already proposed by Rabelais, Montaigne and La Bo tie) would become the foundation of a society able to progress and answer the vital aspirations of men and women.
We all know what became of the freedom that the economy of industrial capitalism thus stimulated: free trade itself morphed into a kind of totalitarianism, commercial freedoms engulfed human freedoms, and accelerating technologic