Clodomir Santos de Morais is to organizational and entrepreneurial literacy what his Brazilian confrere, Paulo Freire, is to ordinary literacy. This book introduces for the first time in English the experiences of grassroots development workers who have applied his ideas of the Organization Workshop (OW) and capacitation in highly diverse social settings. One of the most exciting aspects of de Morais's methods of working with the most marginalized sectors of society is their relevance not just to Third World countries, but also to Eastern Europe's economies in transition and the most deprived areas of the industrialized countries.
This highly distinctive grassroots development approach to empowering socially excluded strata in economic and organizational terms holds out the prospect of becoming a very important factor in the struggle against poverty.Clodomir Santos de Morais is to organizational and entrepreneurial literacy what his Brazilian confrere, Paulo Freire, is to ordinary literacy. This book introduces for the first time in English the experiences of grassroots development workers who have applied his ideas of the Organization Workshop (OW) and capacitation in highly diverse social settings. One of the most exciting aspects of de Morais's methods of working with the most marginalized sectors of society is their relevance not just to Third World countries, but also to Eastern Europe's economies in transition and the most deprived areas of the industrialized countries.
This highly distinctive grassroots development approach to empowering socially excluded strata in economic and organizational terms holds out the prospect of becoming a very important factor in the struggle against poverty.
A Future for the Excluded: Job Creation and Income Generation by the Poor: Clodomir Santos de Morais and the Organization Workshop
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A Future for the Excluded: Job Creation and Income Generation by the Poor: Clodomir Santos de Morais and the Organization Workshop
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Overview
Clodomir Santos de Morais is to organizational and entrepreneurial literacy what his Brazilian confrere, Paulo Freire, is to ordinary literacy. This book introduces for the first time in English the experiences of grassroots development workers who have applied his ideas of the Organization Workshop (OW) and capacitation in highly diverse social settings. One of the most exciting aspects of de Morais's methods of working with the most marginalized sectors of society is their relevance not just to Third World countries, but also to Eastern Europe's economies in transition and the most deprived areas of the industrialized countries.
This highly distinctive grassroots development approach to empowering socially excluded strata in economic and organizational terms holds out the prospect of becoming a very important factor in the struggle against poverty.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781856497039 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2000 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.58(d) |
About the Author
Raff Carmen currently coordinates the Masters and post-graduate research programmes in Adult Education, Adult Literacy and Rural Social/Community Development at the University of Manchester.
Raff Carmen currently coordinates the Masters and post-graduate research programmes in Adult Education, Adult Literacy and Rural Social/Community Development at the University of Manchester.
Read an Excerpt
A Future for the Excluded
Job Creation and Income Generation by the Poor: Clodomir Santos de Morais and the Organization Workshop
By Raff Carmen, Miguel Sobrado
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2000 Raff Carmen and Miguel SobradoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-85649-703-9
CHAPTER 1
Those Who Don't Eat and Those Who Don't Sleep
Raff Carmen and Miguel Sobrado
The twentieth century was marked by conflict: apart from two world wars and countless local wars, there was the grand ideological divide between left and right, between socialism and capitalism, and more recently between governance by the public institutions of the state and the private institutions of the market. In the new century the only struggles that matter will be between the proportionally small group of the Included, whose success is based on ever greater concentrations of power and wealth, and the vast majority of the Excluded; between the global and the local; between individualism and solidarity; between the 'culture of power' vested in the institutions set up by global capital and the 'power of culture' vested in civil society. The millions of unemployed and the countless further millions teetering on the edge of survival in shanty-towns and urban slums all over the world, the losers, also known as 'marginals', in actual fact are as integral (or non-marginal) a part of the global win–lose economy as the winners. 'The margin' as a figure of speech trivializes and purposely marginalizes the vast majority of humanity who are, de facto, excluded. While poverty may always have been with us, its underlying causes have varied greatly according to the historical period. Capitalism, with its inbuilt unlimited competition drive, generates its own particular brand of poverty, generically different from the poverties experienced in any previous period, be it in feudal times or under slavery, for example, when the idea that the slave or serf should stay alive, be it only in the (self-)interest of the master, made good economic sense.
Globalization has changed all that. Globalization makes unprecedented concentrations of wealth ever more possible and feasible, with the new rich of the globalization era, a mere 225 of them, owning in excess of $1,000 billion, the equivalent of the annual income of 47 per cent of the entire world population (UNDP 1998). The extremes resulting from the disaggregation of well-being from development are at their most vivid in the 'gated city' phenomenon. These affluent ghettos, inside which the super-rich are cocooned in their sumptuous living spaces, are hermetically sealed from 'the rest of us'. There is little difference between the gated cities on the outskirts of Johannesburg and the phoney privacy of 'Alphaville', near Sao Paulo, Brazil, where mini-armies of paramilitaries, razor wire, dogs and closed-circuit television ward off the menacing ugliness beyond, which the inhabitants of the gated cities have in no small measure helped to create (Whitacker 1998; Martin and Schumann 1997).
Echoing Josué de Castro's 'geography of hunger' metaphor, de Morais speaks of a world divided between 'those who don't eat' and 'those who don't sleep', those 'not sleeping' not doing so because they are 'in permanent fear of those who do not eat'. The classical metaphor for 'prison', the steel-barred window, behind which not prisoners but citizens now cower, has become an almost 'normal' feature of end-of-century town architecture anywhere (de Morais 1997). With the gradual breakdown and subsequent disappearance of the 'economy of affection' (Hyden) – overtaken by the centripetal forces of the nuclear family, among many others – and the state's professed inability to continue to provide welfare, health and education for its citizens, just staying alive has become a never-ending act of almost superhuman resourcefulness on the part of the excluded. 'Families are becoming more nuclear. People, in the end, need more cash to survive,' declares a recent Oxfam report (Oxfam 1999).
Those living in tropical climes, to which foreign visitors travel great distances for holidays, would not normally think of emigrating to countries with colder, harsher climates, except, that is, in case of a severe dearth of local job opportunities. If things continue the way they are, the 'gated cities' of Jo'burg, Sao Paulo and elsewhere may soon prove to have been but a paltry foretaste of what is to happen on an international scale: namely the hungry, the unemployed and the excluded laying siege to a fortress Europe, USA or Australia, with 'millions upon millions of Africans, Asians and Latin Americans trying to slip between the mazes of the net or the loopholes in the legislation designed to keep them out' (de Morais, at the Manchester conference, March 1998).
Late twentieth-century neo-liberalism, the most recent stage of marketization, flooded into the space left by the now defunct social democratic consensus, while creating a huge social vacuum of its own. 'Social deficit' not only consists of in-country and inter-country inequities, but comes about also as the result of wholesale cuts in social provisions in health, education and social welfare, allowing for lower taxes which, in turn, must make the country concerned more attractive for foreign investment. Like Marxism, with which it has a lot in common, neo-liberalism generates an enormous leap of faith. Belief in the imperative of 'total market', or the doctrine of economic efficiency driven to its ultimate logical conclusion, demands that all barriers that are perceived to stand in the way of the pure individual(istic) pursuit of financial gain and the maximization of profit be removed (Bourdieu 1998: 3).
The Demise of the Welfare State
The world of globalized markets, globalized economies and global industries integrated by instant global communications is becoming so complex and so vast that there are very few people still able to keep track or see its outlines. 'Total market' has meant a systematic loss of autonomy for local and rural populations worldwide, bringing cultural, economic and social alienation in its wake. In small communities everywhere, people feel that power and culture are concentrated 'somewhere else' and that there is little they can do about it. Collective solidarity, expressed traditionally in the trade union movement, the family and the nation-state, in particular, has been in retreat for years. The modern welfare state, based on the principle of mutuality and reciprocality (rather than 'charity'), took root in the wake of the disasters of the great Depression and was urged on, in no small measure, by the example of the socialist regimes in the East.
Franklin D. Roosevelt's 'New Deal' (1933-36) in the United States stood firm for about thirty years, but started to crumble along the dualistic cracks that have always been present in North American society, i.e. the middle classes revolting against perceived 'state profligacy', with tax monies disbursed to the disadvantaged members of society, the majority of whom are black. The European version, along the lines of post-war Beveridgean full employment, social security and 'from-cradle-to-grave' social service provision, became standard policy in European countries (give or take a few variations). The institutionalization of the equal entitlement of every citizen to the goods and services of the welfare state ensured that wealth was redistributed before it was produced, rather than acting unidirectionally in favour of already existing capital. That was an important achievement by any standard.
The present crisis of the welfare state did not come about because of a crisis in the values which made it into one of the most noble manifestations of democratic and civil progress an industrial society is capable of. Neither is it true that the welfare state is 'not affordable' any more, as conservative forces have been trying to argue all along: after all, the National Health Service in Britain, for example, now perceived to have become 'unaffordable', was established in the wake of an economy bled white by the war effort, with unprecedented scarcity of goods and wholesale rationing. Since then, national wealth in Britain has increased at least threefold. In other words, the wealth that is there is simply used somewhere else, and for different purposes. In real terms, welfare is more affordable now than it has ever been. When equity, however, is at odds with citizens' private liberty, the state, as primary agent of equitable distribution, is under attack. Hence the clamour, in the name of 'individual freedom', especially since the 1980s, for 'lower taxes', 'less state' and 'less big government'.
While, historically, the generation of new wealth brings with it a general improvement of living conditions (well-being), the late twentieth-century demise of the welfare state is both paradoxical (at the epistemological level) and perpendicular to the main direction of the flow of history. Or, in the words of Stefano Zamagni (1997), 'an extraordinary and worrying inversion of [this] relationship between the production of wealth and the reduction in uncertainty'. The breakdown of the social contract in post-industrial societies between the state and the citizens has, as already said, little to do with their lack of physical wealth, but rather concerns the gradual devaluation of social wealth, a social scarcity or a 'social deficit' engineered, fostered and maintained by a combination of mega vested interests on the one hand, and private citizens' greeds on the other, epitomized by Margaret Thatcher's 1980s declaration that 'There is no such thing as society.'
Hence, also, the steady deconstruction of the fiscal system and the adoption of the socially reactionary neo-liberal agenda, both on this and the other side of the Atlantic. It was Clinton-the-Democrat, after all, who, in 1996, signed the final death warrant of welfare-as-we-know-it. The way out of this one-way street, away from the abdication by the state of its social mission, cannot ever be 'less state' or 'less big government'. In many countries, this surrender has led to the usurpation of the institutions of the state by clientelist relations (as in Latin America) and Mafia interests (as in the former Soviet Union), as well as a drift to a devaluation of work, to more unemployment and more social exclusion all around. In both (former) Second and in the post-colonial Third Worlds in particular, it was the centralized, corporate, and in many countries, for all practical purposes, one-party state that, for many years, formed the backbone and guarantee of a fairer and more equitable distribution of wealth.
As described elsewhere in this book (e.g. Chapters 5, 10 and 11), unemployment, poverty and social exclusion were virtually a non-problem in, for example, Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau immediately after those countries' independence. As described by Miguel Sobrado in Chapter 14, in the former Eastern Bloc countries such as Poland and, of course, the former Soviet Union, every citizen was, constitutionally, treated as a state employee, assured of a job, and hence protected against poverty, destitution and exclusion. Considering the parlous state in which they find themselves at present, one would have thought that countries such as Angola or Mozambique would be the last countries on earth able to 'afford' and sustain a universal social security system. But a universal social security system did exist, was feasible, was possible and did operate satisfactorily until, of course, global politics, the rush towards privatization of public goods and services and, last but not least, the triumphalist 'capitalism-has-won' tsunami of globalization overtook them and swallowed them – a tsunami that reduced countries of truly gigantic economic potential such as Angola and a former superpower such as Russia to pathetic shadows of themselves, to the status of non-countries and of non-players on the world stage.
On top of those global trends, Latin American countries in particular had to cope with their inveterate, debilitating problems of assistencialism, clientelism and downright corruption. The very centralist nature of the corporate state, which is its greatest strength – the political will combined with the capacity to distribute wealth more equally and more fairly among its citizens, as it were 'by decree' – proved to be at the same time its greatest weakness and its ultimate undoing. A centralized bureaucracy detached from genuine democratic control, checks and balances soon becomes self-serving and irrational, inexorably leading to the common good being usurped by clientelist and Mafia interests. The phenomenon is known in Cuba as sociolism – the cosy 'buddy-ism' (socio) or the unspoken 'whom-you-know' inner network among civil servants who know how to 'get things done' and how to divert the state's goods and services to their own benefit and that of their 'clients' (clientelism), thereby making state services more expensive, less effective and a rich feeding-ground for corrupt practices, also known as 'bogus privatization' (privatización espúrea – Sobrado).
All this goes to show that when democracy and citizenship are merely nominal, when representative democracy is reduced and devalued to the casting of the occasional vote in local or national elections, without any genuine participation by civil society in the democratic process, the common good is bound to suffer, resulting in a radical weakening of the very foundations of the welfare state. Neo-liberal globalization processes were the final straw for the already exhausted and weakened corporatist state in Latin America as elsewhere. The universally proposed solution – 'less state' – invariably turned out to be the remedy that only makes the disease of unemployment and social exclusion worse. The obverse side of the social exclusion phenomenon are the 'rich ghettos' and 'gated cities' mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. In between those two equally obscene extremes, the quality of life of an entire society suffers and becomes moribund. Rich or poor resemble each other in that they are ghettos, far removed from a normal, dignified, humane way of life. The real solution has to go far beyond the sterile debate around more or less state. What is at stake is the kind of state and what type of social organization our society will need in the twenty-first century.
The neo-liberal agenda, trapped as it is in the blind alley of its own egotistic opportunism, can offer only attacks on the state, combined with uniform privatizations, in terms of 'solutions' to societal problems. Privatization, used as wholesale state reform policy, becomes a self-serving vehicle feeding the opportunism of the same political class that through its corrupt practices destroyed the welfare state in the first place. First they pillage the family silver, and then, when the state is down and out, they come riding to its rescue as 'privatizing knights', siphoning off public property for a few pathetic pennies. The consistently recurring feature of the massive privatizations in Russia, Latin America (and elsewhere, such as Great Britain in the 1980s) was the wholesale conversion of public monopolies such as electricity, water and gas into private ones. At the very least, in the case of public ownership (or part-ownership) a modicum of control (in favour of prioritization of the national interest, the ecological or social environment, for example) is possible, but this vanishes completely when private gain (of often distant shareholders) becomes the only criterion going.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Future for the Excluded by Raff Carmen, Miguel Sobrado. Copyright © 2000 Raff Carmen and Miguel Sobrado. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Preface - Raff Carmen & Miguel SobradoPart 1: Context and History 1. Setting the Scene: ‘Those who don‘t eat and those who don‘t sleep‘ - Raff Carmen and Miguel Sobrado 2. Clodomir Santos de Morais and the Origins of his Largescale Capacitation Theory and Method - Miguel SobradoPart 2: Theoretical Perspectives 3. The Largescale Capacitation Method and Social Participation: Theoretical Perspectives - Clodomir Santos de Morais 4. From Paulo Freire to Clodomir Santos de Morais: From Critical to Organizational Consciousness - Jacinta Castello Branco CorreiaPart 3: The Organization Workshop in Practice 5. From Navvies to Entrepreneurs: The Organization Workshop in Costa Rica - Miguel Sobrado 6. Sacked Agricultural Workers Take on the Multinationals in Honduras - Benjamin Erazo 7. The Mexican Experience with Organization Workshops - Juan Jose Rojas Herrera 8. The Organization Workshop in Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Peru - Miguel Sobrado 9. Three Decades of Work with OWs in Latin America: An Institutional Perspective - Leopoldo Sandoval 10. ‘Doing Enterprises‘ in war-time and post-war Mozambique - Isabel and Ivan de Labra 11. In Angola, Guinea Bissau, Sao Tome and Principe - Paulo Roberto da Silva 12. Hard Learning in Zimbabwe and in post civil-war Mozambique - Isabel and Ivan Labra 13. Organization Development (OD) and Morais‘s Organization Workshop (OW) - South Africa and Botswana - Gavin Andersson 14. The Potential of the the OW in former Soviet Bloc Countries and Economies in Crisis - Miguel Sobrado 15. In Post-Salazar Portugal - Isabel and Ivan Labra 16. The Crisis of Work in Post-Industrial Western Countries - Raff CarmenPart 4: From Local OWs to National Employment Generation Systems 17. The Brazilian PROGEI-SIPGEIs - Jacinta C. B. Correia 18. ‘More than a Job: A Future‘: The PAE Self-Employment Programme in Brazil - Walter Barelli 19. The OW and Civil Society Organizations in Brazil - Jacinta C. B. Correia 20. OW‘s Potential: Concluding Observations - Miguel Sobrado