A Declaration of the Rights of Human Beings
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.
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Person
Born in 1934, Raoul Vaneigem is a writer and a former member of the Situationist International and was a key theorist in the worldwide Occupy movement. His works include A Letter to My Children and the Children of the World to Come, The Book of Pleasures, A Cavalier History of Surrealism, Contributions to the Revolutionary Struggle, and the globally influential text The Revolution of Everyday Life.
Content
- Front Cover
- Title Page
- Translator's Acknowledgements
- Copyright
- 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 selfunification
- 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
