Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais

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c i t i z e n s h i p a n d d i g i t a l n e t w o r k s
statement for our reflection: “Human rights will not make us bless capitalism”. 5 The
next excerpt explains and elaborates the idea: “A great deal of innocence or cunning
is needed by a philosophy of communication that claims to restore a society of friends
or even of savants, by forming an universal opinion as a consensus that can moralize
nations, States, and the market 6 .”
The criticism to Human Rights aims directly at the idea of a communication
that would work as the neutral instrument of implementation, through this new
rhetoric of power, of consensus around the sovereignty of the market.
Indeed, the criticism is directed against the liberal (and neoliberal) mystification
of the discourse on Human Rights and the eurocentric (western) humanism
embedded on it. In an affirmative manner, this means that it is not possible to think
about Human Rights without a critique of capitalism and the values that allow it to
impose the market as a universal form.
The universalization of Human Rights as a mere individualistic abstraction can
make only the market become universal, along with its property rights that, in fact,
contradict and cancel those rights.
The political consequences are known. Relegated to a purely formal existence,
Human Rights become a rhetorical element of legitimation for new forms of power
and exclusion — for instance when they accompany the planes of the imperial
armies that bombard Palestinians in the name of peace, or Afghans in the name of
fighting against terrorism, or Iraqis in the name of democracy, or ex-Yugoslavians in
the name of tolerance; and when they support police operations directed to maintain
poverty within its “democratic” boundaries, behind the walls of slums.
Here, the rhetoric of Human Rights is linked to the rhetoric of the End of History:
there are no motives or means to oppose its sovereignty. In those new forms of imperial sovereignty,
peace and war are mixed: the army becomes the police, as in the occupied territories
of Palestine and Iraq, and the police become the army, as in the slums at Rio de Janeiro.
In this new condition, the increasing importance of the Human Rights discourse
is accompanied by a growing number of human beings without rights. There
is no escaping to this paradox without transposing its bases: western humanism and
the liberal legal framework.
5. Ibid., p. 103.
6. Ibid.
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