In 2023, we began posting a series of articles and videos on Poverty, Merging of Knowledge, and Social Criticism from our social philosophy project research. Some of these articles have been published in the book Pour une nouvelle philosophie sociale (For A New Social Philosophy) edited by François Jomini, David Jousset, Fred Poché and Bruno Tardieu and published by Bord de l’eau, 2023.

Our articles and videos have highlighted issues that seem invisible to social philosophy (and, more broadly, political discussions) but are easier to see if the participation of people experiencing extreme poverty is included. We have illustrated how their lived experience is at the heart of a collective, plural approach to knowledge.

In this final article of our Poverty, Merging of Knowledge, and Social Criticism series. Below we describe how the law was analysed in the research project and discuss the results. The insights lead us to take a further step in the questions raised by this research: that of biopolitics.

Law: An instrument of liberation or oppression?

By Cristina Diez, member of the ATD Fourth World Volunteer Corps

This article was written as part of a presentation at the Social Philosophy Conference held by ATD Fourth World on the 9 and 10 of December 2022 at the Université Paris-Cité. The results of a three-year-long participative social philosophy research project based on the Merging of Knowledge approach were presented during the seminar.

Participants from a variety of countries were invited to talk with the researchers. These participants shared their critical reading of various texts published in the book Pour une nouvelle philosophie sociale: Transformer la réalité à partir des plus pauvres (For a New Social Philosophy: Transforming Society with people experiencing extreme poverty). This article addresses Part 2 of the book, which discusses the law.

The chapters on the law present a tension between law as an instrument of liberation and law as an instrument of oppression. Is that tension resolved? I encourage readers to read the book and decide for themselves. What follows is my analysis.

A contradiction

Part 2 of the book begins with a contradiction: it introduces Joseph Wresinski’s idea that the law’s legitimacy is rooted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the inalienable dignity of each human being, but then asserts that the law is an instrument of violence. To agree with this legitimation, a critical review of the Declaration is needed. I believe there are four issues that argue against agreement:

• The Declaration does not take the rights of nature – of animals and plants, or of Mother Nature – into account.
• The Declaration does not make much sense in countries in which the government is practically nonexistent.
• The Declaration places us in an individual rather than a collective context and way of thinking; there is no mention of collective rights in the Declaration or the book.
• The Declaration has become propaganda¹.

Against an uncritical acceptance of the founding texts

In this article, I will briefly review the last three issues, beginning with the last one. An uncritical acceptance of the founding texts, laws, and declarations obscures the fact that they were written by the most powerful countries, in their interests, or have been appropriated to defend those interests. Thinking that we have rights gives us the impression that all is well. However, in the second part of the book, it is easy to see how the law can fail to protect the populace:

“The law can fail when it is voided or suspended by a political branch, for example, in a public health emergency when certain rights, certain civil liberties, are suspended.”

In [the most recent] health emergency, for example, the issue seemed to be global health and safety. However, laws enabling multinationals to keep their vaccine patents were prioritised at the expense of people.

The permanent suspension of the law

If we look at the lives of people living in extreme poverty, we see that they live in a state of permanently suspended law. To understand how this suspension works, we must highlight the concept of norms and normative power. Through normativity, every citizen can become a judge. Norms give us the ‘right’ to judge: “you’re not normal”; “what you’re doing is not normal”; “how you raise your children is not normal”. When citizens are members of an institution, such as social services, a school, or a medical centre, they have the power to compare the behaviour of people living in poverty with the ‘social norm’. If the verdict is negative, disciplinary measures may be applied. This control mechanism is what the participants in ATD Fourth World’s research on the Hidden Dimensions of Poverty called “institutional mistreatment.”

Three-fold violence

This is a form of violence against people living in poverty, and it is three-fold:

• It resides in the obligation to conform to norms that are legitimate only because a society deems them normal at a particular time in history,
• It stems from the fact that the living conditions of people experiencing poverty can prevent them from conforming to those norms and,
• It is inflicted when social institutions condition access to assistance or support on conformity with social norms, thus depriving people living in poverty of access to their rights and punishing them through measures such as placing their children in foster care.

The rule of law is the principle that everyone, including the government, is subject to the law and that laws are applied fairly and equally. And we can see that as long as people are able to adapt to norms, the law works for them. However, according to the theorists of biopolitics following on from Michel Foucault, society’s non-adherence to the rule of law — society as experienced by people living in extreme poverty — is closer to reality. We are all living in “anti-rule-of-law societies” as more countries become governed by the executive rather than the legislative branch.

Law’s paradox

The tension in the book between what a society without the rule of law would be and the oppression inflicted by the law enables us to see law as paradoxical. A critical theory of rights can be developed. Still, at the same time, for part of the population and as long as the rule of law is not suspended, rights provide the justice system with a framework and resources in the event of a violation.

In the Social Philosophy Conference, it was stated that:

“poverty is not the problem of the poorest people among us alone: it is the problem of society as a whole”.

I would like to add that it is also an opportunity for change because it helps us understand how society really works. To understand the methods of control and punishment that are implemented when we stray from the norm, we must look to the margins of society; when you live in the ocean, you do not realise that you are in water, but when the waves wash you ashore, you understand what water is and what it is not. People living on the margins enable us to see the norms that oppress them.

Poverty is also an opportunity; to survive, the people experiencing it have developed and are developing mechanisms of resistance. As a society, we must learn from people who, even sometimes unconsciously, carry with them an entire history of resistance transmitted from generation to generation.

Law and resistance

We must also learn resistance from the Roma, from indigenous peoples, from those who were enslaved and resisted slavery, and from the abolitionist movement. In such contexts, a very particular type of resistance developed. To understand this particularity, I will refer to an idea of Foucault’s that was mentioned in the text. Foucault explains that resistance reinforces power and power needs this resistance; through it, it learns, evolves, and becomes stronger. To bring about real social change, we must therefore create alternative types of resistance that do not reinforce power. The book mentions several strategies of this type deployed by people living in poverty, such as apparent submission, poetic gestures, and workarounds.

Issues with thinking in binary terms

Finally, I would like to mention two other major limitations inherent in law. First, by treating us only as individuals, the law makes it hard to think in collective terms. Second, it keeps us thinking in binary terms. Law was created through binary thinking and is enforced in a context of binarism: compliance or violation, rule of law or no rule of law. But binary thinking does not help us evolve or change. We need a new approach — perhaps a more circular way of thinking — to help us stop thinking solely in individual terms and begin thinking about the collective.

Binary thinking locks us into a mentality in which we see things in terms of opposition and resistance. Therefore, the rules of our actions are dictated by what we are opposing; in this context, there is no room for creativity. To change the world, we must create the unthinkable, the unexpected, the inconceivable, the unique — not by opposition, but because creating and experimenting with something different is a pleasure.

I connect this conviction to something that is emerging in ATD Fourth World. We are a movement built on refusal; we refuse to accept extreme poverty. I feel that we are beginning to experience a paradigm shift as we are becoming increasingly aware that we cannot build on negativity. We need proposals based on the model of civilisation that we want, not on what we don’t want. For me, the fundamental reference point is “life”. We want a society that fosters life. That is why maintaining custody of children is a recurring topic in the book: it is our right as human beings to conceive and to care for life.

1. The Global North presents itself as the perfect upholders of human rights, assuming a position of superiority from which the (lack of) respect for human rights in other parts of the world is measured and criticised. They encourage the belief that their countries give priority to human rights. When human rights are framed this way, if they are not a reality for everyone, the response is often simply to say that the system is not perfect but we must nevertheless believe in it because it is the best option.