What’s Wrong With Rights ? Radha D’Souza in Conversation,
by Zahra Moloo, le 15 aout, Warspaces
▻http://www.warscapes.com/conversations/what-s-wrong-rights-radha-d-souza-conversation
There is no such thing as derivatives, it is a completely legal fiction. Or hedge funds. Or insurance which is property and it’s very much part of property rights. Or trade in debt. Property itself has become intangible – that’s one part of it.
Teacher-student relationships were considered a very privileged, responsible, socially important relationship. Now universities regularly say that students are our consumers, they have a right to education, and we are service providers.
As every aspect of life becomes commodified, you have rights coming in because without rights, there can’t be commodification.
When the UN was established, there were some thirty odd rights, twenty-eight I think. Now there are about 300 rights. Do people have more rights than in 1945? I mean, it’s open to question.
the farmer is not the only person claiming rights. The farmer is saying I have right to water, to food but so is Monsanto. It’s a fundamental feature of our legal and social system that a corporation is a person like a natural person. In law, both of them are entitled to human rights.
I think it’s this inability to see how corporate persons and natural persons work that gets us into all this kind of tangle.
There is nothing indigenous about an indigenous company other than the faces of people that run it.
What liberalism does is project a merchant’s world view and understanding of the world as the human world view, and as something that is universal to all humanity. Anything that has a transactional or exchange value becomes something with value. When we start extending that to everything – to land, to forest, to all sorts of things in life, then it becomes problematic.
What does democracy promotion mean? It means that there are certain international, so-called mature democracies, which are invariably, the G7 countries, the former colonizing countries who supervise elections, who fund elections, who tell them how to write the electrical rules and who then certify the elections that are right, democratic, and so on. Now my question is, where is the social contract here?
Cambridge Analytica emerged as one of those companies that provided election services to third world states. Much before they got involved in Trump election, they were involved in elections in Kenya and in India.
We are in the situation we are in because we have forgotten some of the histories of our struggles. That’s an important reason why we are not able to imagine a way of articulating our demands, a way of reconceptualising struggles and strategies. We have really forgotten that history and we are left with this idea that the only thing left is rights.
Why have we lost the courage? I think we are kind of trapped in this whole discourse of rights as the only way to imagine freedom, so much so that we are not able to imagine what real freedom will look like. And that’s the big difference between anti-colonial movements and our times now. [...] we are not able to re-imagine this because we have forgotten our histories.