Who’s in and who’s out
1.The process of social exclusion is closely linked to/with many current day economic and human rights (HR) problems.
Social groups are excluded, because they have no access to the opportunities afforded to others in society, including public health care services, adequate nutrition, public education, public housing and employment. The many barriers to access prevent people from reaching their full productive potential –in turn constraining equitable economic growth, as well as poor people’s revenues and their HR. Lack of access makes the poor more likely to incur in health and social services expenditures they can ill afford. The exclusion process is exacerbated by prices of basic services out of reach for most of the poor.
The faces of social exclusion
2.Social exclusion has many faces; among other, it includes residential segregation, exclusion from health care, barriers in access to legal services, inequalities in education, language barriers and schooling inequities for ethnic minorities…
The word ‘excluded’ has a double meaning
3.More often, exclusion refers to the social classes and social groups (indigenous people, black people, women, etc) that are excluded
-from receiving social services,
-from the products and the income they generate, and
-from the political institutions that govern the country.
Less often are the excluded looked at as the victims of an array of HR violations. [As much as they should…].
Who are the excluded?
4.Many of the excluded play an important or even essential role in the production and distribution processes of the prevailing system: they are unemployed or they work as domestic workers, as agricultural wage laborers, as construction workers, as subsistence farmers, as factory workers with shoddy contracts, or they are the youth that never had a stable job, or the army of the underemployed vendors in the gray market… In a word, overwhelmingly, the excluded are the poor majority, or a greater than 50 % of the working-age population.
5.Not paradoxically, they are thus already integrated in the system of production, but do not receive any of its benefits –mainly because they are excluded from the structures of power.
6.The main battle is, therefore, not for the poor to be ‘incorporated’ into the system –since they already are a part of it (but are basically subordinated, powerless, landless, ‘rightsless’, excluded from owning property, from receiving services…).
7.The real problem of the excluded is more the ‘transformation’ of the system of property, of power and of violation of HR so that they can get greater access to and control over the resources and services they need.
8.Today, the poor are not only excluded from employment; they do dirty work, hold unstable jobs; they are poorly paid; they resort to the informal (gray) sector of the economy to eke out a living; they receive no fringe benefits (retirement, paid vacations, health benefits).
Who excludes?
9.States, corporations, banks, the globalization process, unfair trade, cheap/ subsidized imports destroying local industries and causing further unemployment, the WB, the IMF (as instruments of, for example, forced privatization that further pauperizes poor people) are all part of the culprits of exclusion.
10.The excluded and the excluders are essentially in dialectical conflict: the condition for domination of some is the exclusion and the violation of the HR of the many.
11.The first cry of the excluded erupts when they refuse to suffer in silence –when their poverty becomes intolerable. This then leads to organized social movements that demand justice, land, jobs, food, decent housing, schools….rights. Then, the cry of the latter is not a cry of desperation anymore, but a struggle cry; it is a cry that now goes beyond immediate concessions; it demands the socialization of the means of production and of state power; it demands the reversal of HR violations. In short, these movements demand a new society –one that no longer has excluded people.
12.The cry of the excluded reflects a world:
-of exploitation, of urban and rural hunger,
-of social decadence, of school desertion,
-of economic pilfering, of concentration of wealth in the hands of a few,
-of un-enforced labor legislation, of an agro-industry oriented towards export markets,
-of forced displacements, of a fall in real wages,
-of the progressive pauperization of retirees, of an end of staple food subsidies,
-of a relentless loss in purchasing power (the cost of living has outstripped minimum wages often severalfold), of a massification of poverty.
In short, most of these are violations of HR.
13.All this has also led to a popular rejection of electoral processes that are considered vitiated, rigged and controlled by the media at the service of (or for sale to) the powerful.
14.Only identifying and acting upon the causes of exclusion will enable more people to lead productive lives, have their rights respected and enjoy access to all the benefits of society.
15.To eliminate exclusion, then, the struggle for rights has to go hand in hand with a struggle for power.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Mostly taken from J.R.Behrman et al, Social Exclusion in Latinamerica, IADB, 2003, www.iadb.org/exr/pub/pages/book.asp?id+141 and J.Petras, Grito de los Excluidos, 2003, http://attac.org/attacinfoes/attacinfo175.pdf