Ihe active solidarity income (RSA) has a very administrative name to designate essential aid, allocated to people without means, so that they can dress themselves, a little, feed themselves, as they can, and find accommodation, with difficulty. In other words, he recognizes through meager financial compensation that the social body must ensure the dignity of each of its members.
The government is currently discussing a bill which should condition the payment of the RSA to a “intensive support” fifteen to twenty hours a week made up, to put it simply, of meetings and observations in the company. Starting from the principle that dignity is measured by merit, the government chooses, in the case of such a law, to index the right to survive to a factitious, unpaid activity that increasingly delegates the fate of the poor to the iniquitous mechanisms of administration.
Living with 600 euros not being a sufficient constraint, it will now be necessary to be a state trainee to collect them. The right to dignity consecrates, without derogations, that the human being, at the moment he is, cannot be deprived of subsistence. The acquisition of knowledge, intimate life, education, work, family, health, in other words any relationship to the world, are constituted through the recognition of the Other. The man is social from the outset. Dignity, conceived within this framework, establishes a network of respect whose conditions of existence must be guaranteed.
Each member of the social body must see his subsistence guaranteed
Paul Ricœur (1913-2005) wrote in the introduction to Philosophical foundations of human rights (1988): “At all times and in all cultures, a complaint, a cry, a proverb, a song, a tale, a treatise of wisdom have conveyed the message: if the concept of human rights is not universal, it There is no less, among all men, in all cultures, the need, the expectation, the sense of these rights. The requirement has always been that “something is due to the human being simply because he is human”. »
The right to dignity thus has its source in the imperative of caring for otherness. Individuality, in this sense, is made possible only by the obligation to recognize in the other what he himself recognizes in me. This correspondence, at the foundation of all civility, requires the observation and practice of a simple principle: each member of the social body must see his subsistence guaranteed.
The RSA costs 15 billion euros, 6% of the Social Security budget. This item of expenditure is 600 euros per person. And if indeed the financial argument is central in this debate, the economist Marc de Basquiat noted that such a reform could lead to the creation of 50,000 jobs, ie an additional cost of 1 billion euros. The jargon prosody that accompanies this project, crossed by the “personalized devices”THE “reintegration journey”there “socialization through work”drowns its violence in a formless technical language.
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