#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #ITALY #SICILIA #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) #Italy #Sicilia Libertaria November 22: special emanuele - On rights and penalties .. (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation].

 During the electoral campaign, which brought the right back to power - so to

speak, given that they have never abandoned it in the last thirty years - the
well-founded fear of a worsening of acquired rights emerged strongly. fatigue in
these long years of social and political collapse. There are fears of a
limitation and even the cancellation of laws on termination of pregnancy and
civil unions, as well as the cancellation of existing measures to reduce the
problems produced by poverty. It is well known that the right-wingers carried on
an idea of a traditional family or, on this claim, considered "natural", just as
they are convinced that poverty is an individual problem and not a structural
one, underlining, as Meloni did in her speech programmatic in the House, that
certainly those who cannot work must be helped, but the others must shake up from
the abolìa produced by the citizenship income and go and look for a job, word
more, word less! The explicit idea behind these considerations is that money must
be given to businesses and they will create jobs and therefore well-being will
extend automatically. This interpretation, more ideological than economic, which
clearly allows the usual suspects to enrich themselves behind the state, has a
long history, being even shared by the left, albeit in a less crude version: it
is the ancient idea that the struggle of the proletariat it would automatically
include the liberation of women, as Engels himself had argued and Lenin put into
practice. From the alleged difference between structures and superstructures,
they derived that the revolution should concern the means of material production
of the existing, since all the problems of the so-called superstructures came
from there, from the right to education to the discrimination of women. As we
know, women's rights were not respected, as continues to happen in the capitalist
world, so much so that Emma Goldman already stated in her 1906 essay "The tragedy
of women's emancipation": "Now women face the need to emancipate themselves from
the emancipation movement if it wants to be truly free. This may seem
paradoxical, however it is the truth ".

However, one wonders, going beyond common sense, what is a right and what gives
it value? In the history of the West, the Christian god was the reference for
defining the value of the individual: if everyone is a child of God, then
everyone has the right to his inheritance: the earth and its fruits. As we know,
this principle was valid in a theoretical way, since the church, representing the
divinity on earth, paid little attention to the equality of the children of God,
coming to justify not only its own wealth, but also that of the rulers of the
moment. Somehow these religious contents enter into crisis at the beginning of
the era we call modern, especially with the advent of industrialization and its
corollary, the Enlightenment. However, the reference to the equality of
Christianity remains alive, even if it is progressively secular. See, for
example, the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, where
Thomas Jefferson wrote at the end of the eighteenth century: "We consider it
evident truth that all men were created equal and that their creator blessed them
with certain rights. inalienable, among these life, freedom and the pursuit of
happiness ". Hence, the secular leap: first by replacing god with nature, as in
the case of natural law, which already postulated in the eighteenth century, but
with roots in Greek philosophical thought, that fundamental human rights were
based on universal "human nature" , for which they were superior even to the
laws; then, legal positivism, which founded the law on human action, in the
historical relationships between individuals and groups, ending up by theorising
the "social contract" as the origin of law.

This "contract", already in a mass society, needed a guarantor: where in the
societies of the Old Regime this "guarantee" was represented by the king (whose
powers derived from God), in the new modern society this function will be carried
out by the state, with its endowment of written legal norms. And since the
"contract" depends on the relations of force between the social groups that make
up a society, the rights to be guaranteed will change according to these relations.

Political rights, social rights, civil rights ... they will reduce or multiply
according to the sensitivity of the various social groups that intervene
politically (since the renewal of the contract is given through electorally
decided rules), but also through less violent struggles pushed so much by the
groups dominants of the social system to maintain the status quo (through, for
example, ideological and repressive state apparatuses), as well as by subordinate
groups that struggle to have their rights recognized, are those contemplated by
the founding charter of the state (the Constitution), they are other products in
an autonomous way, according to the evolution of feelings and the cultural
changes that have occurred in the meantime.

The path that we have quickly outlined allows some conclusions: when it comes to
rights, in legal terms, the typology has become so complex that it cannot be
handled by non-experts, so much so that a good lawyer can influence any judgment
in court. Evidently, this is an old problem generated by the implicit complexity
in a complex society, both numerically and institutionally. However, it seems to
me that it is worth the suspicion that the multiplication of laws also serves
excellently to skip the rules in favor of those who can pay for a good defender.
However, there is also another problem: types of rights are being created
categorized in hierarchical terms, for which some would be more important than
others. Evidently, if we relate rights to needs, we can differentiate them into
primary and secondary; eating is obviously more important than being able to
express oneself. However, if we follow the controversy over citizenship income or
the increase in poverty in Italy, we discover that even the right to feed and own
a home, take a back seat, in favor of strategies for maintaining privileges and
perhaps with justifications based on the alleged difference between social rights
and civil rights, where the former would be the prerogative of the state, while
the latter would belong to the private sphere (even if the constitution includes
both).

I conclude by returning to the denial of women's rights, but the discourse also
applies to other discriminated social subjects: if rights are neither natural nor
universal, then they cannot be perceived as a quality of individuals. To put it
explicitly: women do not have rights per se, but they do have them to the extent
that the society they live in recognizes them and if this does not happen, they
have to fight for it to happen. But if the laws of the state are discriminatory,
in the sense that the political "contract" justifies their status as subjects of
second importance, all that remains is to transgress and fight to change the
rules of the game, both with political actions within the system and with actions
that put him in crisis from the outside and in his totality. He pointed to Emma
Goldman in a speech in Union Square in 1892: "Protest in front of the palace of
the rich: ask for a job; if they don't give it to you, ask for bread; even if
they deny it to you, take it. It is your sacred right ".

Emanuele Amodio

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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