CAUSES

There are many direct causes of poverty, exclusion and precarity, which are always manifestations of inequality. But all originate in an inhuman ideology. This system – free-market  capitalism – claims to exalt individual liberty by removing any limit on it, by exacerbating it through the exclusive search for profit and power. Its first objective is speculation and the accumulation of wealth. In this conception, financial profitablity and economic growth are more important than human dignity or liberty. It transforms the emancipating autonomy of the individual into an obsessive individualism. Everything that creates society is dismantled. It’s functioning ensures that the rich continue to amass wealth and the poor stay poor, even though they may be sufficiently assisted to avoid excessive social tension.  

 EFFECTS  

The standardisation of precarious and flexible work has led to the scandal of the “working poor” whose numbers are ever increasing and who live below the poverty line. The deregulation of the labor marktes has led to a spreading of slave work even in high industrialised countries.

The growing competition between the workforce of different countries (f.e. through dislocation of jobs) undermines not only wages, but also working conditions and the most elementary labor and union rights. Increased numbers of lethal casualties follow from that.

The right to live with dignity in decent housing is more and more trampled in Europe as a consequence of the unrestricted rise of rents and housing prices, of large scale privatisation of public housing carried out in the name of competition, to satisfy the insatiable appetites of speculators, large property owners and the banks…

This situation is also the consequence of an evolution of the sharing of added value: the proportion of GDP devoted to labour has been receding continuously in favour of the remuneration of capital, dropping from 75% in 1970 to 66.2% in 2006. 

The progressive undermining of social right, Unemployment and the reduction of social protection leave an ever greater share of the population in poverty, depriving if of access to fundamental rights: employment, health, education, housing, culture. At the same time, populist ideologies espousing racism, law and order and/or authoritarian solutions gain ground. Criminalisation and the repression of the poor are the answers ever more frequently handed out to the poor and European movements struggling for their rights. T

The World Bank’s large scale campaigns promoting “the fight against poverty” or the UN’s Millenium Objectives are well short of what is needed to reduce the progression of poverty and they seem to have been drafted principally to allow their promoters to assuage their troubled consciences. According to official sources, nearly 25% of the population within the European Union is poor, with important disparities between northern and southern countries as well as between western Europe, and the central and eastern parts of the continent, particularly affected by poverty. The most vulnerable are particularly hard hit: women, children, the elderly, the handicapped, immigrants and all peoples referred to as “travellers”. 

We also observe a “relational poverty” which is characterised by isolation, the feeling of uselessness, the rupture of social and family connections and individualism. Poverty has become a major obstacle to normal school education, aggravating the phenomena of illiteracy, hindering access to training and culture and, as a consequence, to employment It is not only a problem of level of resources or conditions of living, but a question of dignity: “the hardest is not living on nothing, it’s being considered as nothing,” we often hear. Injustice and suffering go together.

Europe’s opportunist immigration policies incite the trampling of workers’ rights and the maintenance of low wages. Illegal migrants are a totally pliant workforce who have no rights. Unemployment insurance is continually cut both in amount and in duration.

The industrialisation of agriculture provokes rural poverty and aggravates migration from rural areas. Galopping urbanisation, land and property speculation lead to ever greater numbers of  badly housed and homeless people. Shantytowns and camps reappear around cities for lack of housing financially accessible to households with modest revenues. The headlong race for profit and consumption leads to a general degradation of the environment, to uncontrolled industrial risks and generates dysfunctions which lead to catastrophes.

These affect primarily the poorest who live in the most exposed areas.  

WHAT ANSWERS ?   

Our debates should allow us to elaborate some proposals. 

Different types of response exist: responses from the public sector, responses brought by structures which favour social links, which emphasise assistance, those that mobilise the “have-nots” and encourage them to struggle to conquer their rights, to found or experiment with alternatives, to unite and emerge from the shell of their isolation and poverty. For without the mobilisation of the concerned women and men and their associations of struggle, without the total involvement of the trade union movement, exclusion and precarity will continue to progress. 

We have a goal : to build a just and fraternal society, and also a conviction which is that each man, woman and child in poverty remains the first actor of her or his development. The goal is the same for all, the means to reach it may vary according to the sensibilities of each individual. A few ideas :

The human person, as well as the recognition and implementation of her or his fundamental rights

– and not the market place

– must be placed at the centre of public policies as well as those of political and association leaders  and the employees and volunteers of these organisations.  Each of us must ensure 

- that informal groups of solidarity be recognised, even when they exist autonomously from the associative, charitable or militant networks (migrants from the same country, people from the same neighbourhood, etc…) and that they be considered partners, 

- that the elaboration and evaluation of local, national, indeed international policies be carried out with those most directly concerned.
The people who suffer from exclusion must be associated all along the process of elaborating any policy affecting them.

- the intervention of the state and public policy is an absolute necessity to promote social progress and ensure a fair division and redistribution of wealth to benefit every woman and man. - the priority of labour over the renumeration of capital must be ensured, and all forms of financial, real estate or other speculation must cease.

- the implementation of global social rights for every man and woman throughout the world.

 We must become aware of the worldwide urgency to forge a struggle against the interests of certain states, certain multinational corporations, certain large global fortunes which mock all ethical and ecological principals for the sole purpose of greater profit.   

 
The thematic pole of “precarity, exclusion, poverty” is open to all those who struggle to build a just world of solidarity with all the “Have-nots” so that they may enjoy their fundamental and social rights and that they may have the right to “space and speech” in the society, beginning with the social forums themselves.

The project aims to mobilise more generally the civil society at large in the desire to create shared initiatives. 

In what kind of society do we want to live? Let us globalise solidarity and organise our struggles to globalise hope: this is what we wish to debate and construct at Malmö.   

THANK YOU FOR CONFIRMING YOUR SIGNATURES (received following the first appeal launched in 2006 at the Athens ESF).   

Signataries : No Vox Network - Secours Catholique-Caritas France - IPAM Network – LDH – Fédération Nationale Accueil-Paysan – Vamos ! – FAL (France Latin America) -  French committee of the homeless – APEIS – AC Act against Unemployment) – DAL – Hungarian Social Forum Forum – Hungarian Association of People living below the Poverty -  Peasants’ Rights –CEDIDELP -  Droits Devant – European Feminist Initiative for another Europe, Social Rights Association (Sosyal Haklar Derneği Turkey), Dalit Solidarity network – Sweden, Marches Européennes, … 

Add or confirm your signatures by e-mail :

annie@echanges-partenariats.org

bernard-jean-bouchez@secours-catholique.asso.fr  or genevieve-colas@secours-catholique.org