AFRO-NETS> Food for thought for the excluded

[Claudio Schuftan <aviva@netnam.vn>]

Food for thought for the excluded
---------------------------------

Human Rights Reader 39

Social Exclusion and Human Rights.

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 af-
forded 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 ac-
cess makes the poor more likely to incur in health and social ser-
vices expenditures they can ill afford. The exclusion process is ex-
acerbated 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 residen-
tial 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 ex-
cluded -from receiving social services, -from the products and the 
income they generate, and -from the political institutions that gov-
ern 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 be-
cause they are excluded from the structures of power.

6. The main battle is, therefore, not for the poor to be 'incorpo-
rated' 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 bene-
fits).

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 the poor) 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 rever-
sal of HR violations. In short, these movements demand a new society 
--one that no longer has excluded. 

12. The cry of the excluded reflects a world: of exploitation, of ur-
ban 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 to-
wards 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 several fold), 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 proc-
esses that are considered viciated, rigged and controlled by the me-
dia at the service of (or for sale to) the powerful.

14. Only identifying and acting upon the causes of exclusion will en-
able more people to lead productive lives, have their rights re-
spected 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, Vietnam
mailto:aviva@netnam.vn

Mostly taken from J.R.Behrman et al, Social Exclusion in Latin-
america, IADB, 2003, 
http://www.iadb.org/exr/pub/pages/book.asp?id+141
and J.Petras, Grito de los Excluidos, 2003,
http://attac.org/attacinfoes/attacinfo175.pdf

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