Human Rights, liberal economy, and the ruthlessness of capital

A short article by Khaled Saghyeh made the parallel between two ‘minor’ events, the kind that usually occupies, if anything at all, a corner in the ‘other news’ section. The first one is about a certain Khalil Zwein, an elderly man who had been the barber and the newspaper salesman of Gemeyzeh for decades. His shop was evicted by the forces of development, the ambitious Lebanese State who is trying to keep up with the world progress. He shot himself in the head with a 9mm gun.

The second event takes place in Egypt, in a town called Kom Hamadeh. The forces of the State were on one of these missions to liberate occupied territories. In other words the police was going to evict a family which had constructed a house 20 years ago on a land that was owned by the State. The tools by which this act of progress will be carried out are the famous bulldozers. One cannot fail to see the parallel between the Egyptian State’s use of bulldozers to destroy their citizens’ homes and the same famous tradition in Israel. Certainly, those who wrote the Arab Peace Initiative were smiling when – and if – they saw this incident. A family stood in the way of the bulldozer pleading and crying. The bulldozer wiped out the house taking with it a mother and her child. If it wasn’t for the headline saying this story takes place in Egypt, anyone would have thought it was in Israel.

Who said progress is humane? Progress is merely human. The common confusion of two shifts in human life is erroneous. On one hand we have the abstract notion of moral progress that many like to believe achieved its highest goal with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and on the other we have liberal economy and the power of capital. The problem is that the two are in fact linked. If anything the human rights declaration gives the very justification of its violation. It is not a defense of human rights as much as a new system of values that is directly linked with the new system of power. One has to separate the ideal notions of morality that can be found in any text (religious for instance) and the structures of power relations that these notions entail. In other words, one can look at Christianity either as an innocent and virtuous message that pushes people to love each other or as the foundation of the Church which would be the representation of how such ideal notions are applied in terms of domination and power. The same goes for any system of values, from religious texts to political utopias. This is in short the inverted – real – meaning of Human Rights; it is not the right of those who have none, but the right of those who already have them, to control those who don’t.

The very idea of progress has been a haunting one for human civilization and thought. It might be more characteristic of that era called “Modernity” expressed more clearly in the discourse of “Enlightenment” where we clearly see a claim of progress accompanied by pretences of a universality of values, morality, and truth. The apex of these claims was its application in the context of colonialism, what the French – one of the leading centers of Enlightenment thought – called “Mission Civilisatrice”. The Dynamics of power and economy were equally playing a central role in this process of universalizing the Other. However, it was at the same time that the European Enlightenment model collapsed – when the Second World War broke – that another universal framework had to be put in place: The Universal (sic) Declaration of Human Rights.

Whether liberal economy and the Universal Rights of Capital are now the substitute of those of the Human, is a debatable assertion. However, when we look at events such as those described at the beginning of this text, the issue becomes more lucid. The conception of human rights which as Hanna Arendt so pertinently remarks is “based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships – except that they were still human.” (The Origins of Totalitarianism p.297). In other words human rights once met by those who were only human – who had lost all other means of existence, the refugees – collapsed. These humans, stripped to their “bare life”, or as Agamben calls them Homo sacer were precisely those who were not treated as humans.

As Zizek puts it, in his Parallax View (341):

“So, to put it in Leninist terms: what the “Human Rights of suffering Third World victims” actually means today, in the predominant Western discourse, is the right of Western powers themselves to intervene – politically, economically, culturally, militarily – in Third World countries of their choice on behalf of the defense of Human Rights. A reference to Lacan’s formula of communication (in which the sender gets back from the receiver – addressee his own message in its inverted – that is, true – form) is absolutely relevant: in the reigning discourse of humanitarian interventionism, the developed West is, in effect, getting back from the victimized Third World its own message in its true form. And the moment Human Rights are depoliticized in this way, the discourse about them has to resort to ethics: reference to the prepolitical opposition of Good and Evil has to be mobilized. Today’s “new reign of Ethics”, clearly discernible in, for example, Michael Ignatieff’s work, thus relies on a violent gesture of depoliticization, of denying the victimized other any political subjectivization. And, as Rancière pointed out, liberal humanitarianism à la Ignatieff unexpectedly meets the “radical” position of Foucault or Agamben on this depoliticization: the Foucauldian-Agambenian notion of “biopolitics” as the culmination of the whole Western thought ends up getting caught in a kind of “ontological trap” in which concentration camps appear as a kind of “ontological destiny: each of us would be in the situation of the refugee in a camp. Any difference grows faint between democracy and totalitarianism and any political practice proves to be already ensnared in the biopolitical trap.” (Jacques Rancière, Who is the Subject of the Right of Man)”