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...