Grain reviews The Tyranny of Rights by Brewster Kneen, a book questioning political strategies that focus on ‘human rights’.
Excerpts:
” Kneen’s entry point in talking about rights is food – and for good reason. Over the years the term “rights” has assumed a more and more prominent place on the agricultural landscape. The most glaring example is of corporations now claiming property rights over seeds and strands of plant DNA. The age-old and open systems of sharing and cooperation that characterise both farmers’ seed systems and public plant breeding have been largely destroyed to make way for a corporate seed system that criminalises such practices in order to protect the “intellectual property rights” of corporations. One response to this attack has been to call for rights to be given to farmers.
Kneen has worked closely with many people and groups that support or have supported the concept of farmers’ rights. He probably once argued for them himself. But after a decade or so of getting nowhere with the concept, Kneen feels that it is time to question whether we are on the right path. As he now sees it, such “reactive claims” for rights are never going to work because they are, necessarily, appeals to states that are interested in protecting corporations not farmers. Plus, if you get right down to it, why should farmers all of a sudden need the state to protect their seed saving? Corporations need the state to stop farmers saving seeds, but farmers have never needed the state to help them to save seeds.
As Kneen points out, “Without the state there would be no Plant Breeders’ Rights, no copyrights and no patents. Farmers who select and save their own seeds neither have nor require such state ‘protection’ to go about their work.”
The problem, for Kneen, is not a lack of rights. Farmers’ rights are a distraction that takes us away from the urgent matter of abolishing patents over seeds and re-establishing the conditions for farmers to save seeds.
Kneen takes this same line of thinking into his discussion of the “right to food” – another rights claim emerging from the deep social inequities of the current food system. He likens it to an empty bowl: an abstract concept that avoids a clear political agenda for action. Like farmers’ rights, it is an appeal to the state when what we need are concrete plans on how to feed ourselves.
“A direct moral appeal to the public for the construction of an equitable and ecological food system”, he writes, “might, actually, be more politically effective and morally satisfying – though much harder – than appealing to governments for the right to food. Such a direct, public approach is captured by the term ‘food sovereignty’ which has rapidly gained usage around the world.”
Kneen goes on to explore how the rights framework feeds into a more generalised expansion of rights claims, which is clearly favouring corporations and the powerful. The global push for intellectual property rights, for example, is strangling our capacity for collective work and creativity, whether we be farmers, writers, musicians or software developers, and turning everything into commodities. Moreover, Kneen warns that the rights language provides a slippery slope towards military intervention. In a late chapter, he describes how rights, in this case the “right to intervene”, are being invoked to justify military invasions. He does not dispute that human rights violations are going on and need to be stopped, but for him the “right to intervene” creates a loose framework that is easily manipulated to serve power, overriding the long-standing notion of state sovereignty in the process.
All in all, the book is very effective in pointing at and illustrating the many weaknesses in the current discourse and use of the concept of rights. It clearly shows how the concept of rights is currently being used to justify the unjustifiable (such as the privatisation of life, water, air, and so on) and promote some sort of extreme individualism. It also provides some interesting and thought-provoking insights on how culturally determined the concept of rights is.
Kneen follows this line of critique to conclude that all fights for rights, whether they be for the right to food, water or seeds, ultimately support a narrow Western framework of human rights that is part and parcel of today’s globalised capitalism. For Kneen, the rights language inevitably privileges the individual over the collective and leads us away from other notions, such as responsibility and gratitude, which are central to many non-Western societies and which provide, in his view, a better footing for social transformation.
My conclusion is that social and individual justice is not furthered by the language of rights. Justice would be much better served not by making claims and demands, but by stating what is being done and what must be done by those that otherwise might be making a claim for the right to do something. … It is time to consider whether the language of rights actually serves the intents of social justice or has become just an illusion of intent – good intent, to be sure – behind which individualisation and privatisation are carried on unimpeded.”