| Venezuela: Exclusion and integration- A synthesis in the building? |
| CHAPTER:5 Profiles of exclusion and principles of integration: A synthesis in the building |
  
In this section, an attempt will be made to explore the concept of exclusion in the understanding of the links between the various expressions of social decomposition visible in Venezuelan society. The panorama shows a background in which there are horrifying elements of the violation of social and individual rights alongside hopeful signs indicating that a society has to regenerate itself; a society which is rejecting old forms of behaviours and attempting to start their replacement.
By relating together the various directions that have been analysed, it is possible to discern two opposing tendencies. One which is driving towards disintegration and contains exclusion factors which are building up every day. The effects of these factors will accompany the development of Venezuelan society over the coming decades. This process is advancing rapidly and is leaving indelible scars. It is expressed in material terms by children who are born hungry and grow up in a state of malnutrition; children who drop out of school and thus start up once again the vicious cycle of poverty; in young people who can find no lawful way out for their concerns or who find themselves compelled to start their working lives under conditions of enormous disadvantage; young people who attempt to obtain by force what the television is "selling them" every day as being essential for them to be a part of society. It also expresses itself in the apprenticeship of violence implicit in growing up without a father, who was condemned without being guilty. It feeds on despair of possibilities of escaping by one's own efforts and of frustration with the unmet promises of a State which attempted to monopolize everything.
However, there is another tendency which is moving forward slowly from small nuclei in which are being built experiences of a distinctive co-existence, of a democracy which has grown up from the base. As it grows, it moves towards the construction of a society in which the organisational principle is the "Federation of the diverse" and not the uniformization.
Nevertheless, it is possible to observe a fundamental difference in the pace of advance of both tendencies, which makes it difficult to predict the outcome. Whereas the construction of new negotiation environments and rules is a process which takes long periods to mature, the disintegration and the detachment which are generated by the exclusion from material goods and social and individual rights are very rapid and involve very strong and far-reaching imbrications.
From just looking at the of signs of deterioration in the economic, social and political environment, it may be concluded that, even though innovation in the technical aspects of social development is an important component in the fight against exclusion, the main weapons are to be found in the political arena. Producing social services of high quality calls for deep changes in the social institutions. Integrating the population into the market requires an adequate number of sufficiently well-paid jobs. To achieve this it is essential to restructure the production apparatus and its managers and to create "markets" where they currently do not exist. A process such as this requires a long-term vision and a very special effort of social concertation.
Venezuelan society has a tough apprenticeship before it: learning to divide up the resources that have been generated internally, overcoming the short-termism and insecurity which currently dominate the activities of various agents. The fall in oil prices indicates a massive collapse because, from now on, the resources available for distribution will be increasingly in private hands. The margin of manoeuvre in free disposal of funds for social investment, or for applying social tariffs has fallen sharply. At the same time, globalization considerably reduces the degrees of freedom for establishing standards for wage setting, and taxes on private activity for financing social development. Both processes mean that national governments will be less able to regulate markets and generate goods and services that contribute directly to well-being.
This last effect forms part of a significant centrifugal tendency in the level at which exclusion and inclusion processes are generated. From the national level up to the supra-national level, and down to the sub-national levels, this is a trend which is widely recognized in other contexts. Calderón [1995] states that "the withdrawal to the local, cultural, daily environment (..) is not foreign to these changes (..) and related to the technological revolution, the central role of information systems and social control, the construction of the social welfare State and the new role of culture industry and market, the concentration of power and the fragmentation of social differentiation ..".
The agents and the "rules of the game"
The rules of distribution in the accumulation model based on the distribution of oil revenues, which was in force as from the 1940's, gave the central State a dominant role in distribution, and privileged certain social agents over and above others. The starting point compelled those in charge to devise a "modernizing" plan in which building "civil society" and the intermediate institutions "from above" by making substantial use of oil revenues, was virtually the sole option. This was in line with a system in which:
(i) The State had a very active role in the promotion and financing of economic growth. In addition, it was the State's task to guarantee improvement of living conditions for the population. Public expenditure was the driving force in the economy and in the generation of well-being. The implementation of this objective led to a complex tangle of subsidies, transfers, controls, State bureaucracy, public investment, and maintained internal contribution to financing of the State apparatus at a low level.
(ii) There is a deep-seated conviction that the oil riches belong to everybody and consequently social ascension is the responsibility of the State, and is something which is certain to take place. The creation of public employment, an extensive network of free social services and the benefits laid down in the labour protection legislation are the ways in which these resources should be directed to families and contribute to their well-being.
(iii) The private sector, which was assigned the role of building, with State finance, a production apparatus based on import substitution and the construction of the economic and social infrastructure network, survived with the help of this financing. Protected by an excessively high exchange rate, subsidized public services and subsidized credits, productivity and foreign competition were replaced as criteria of success by the ability to administer for the State the money that had been handed out.
(iv) In this model, "civil society" was represented by the political parties, the sole channels for bringing together and processing demands, by the trade unions, to a large extent promoted by the State and the parties, and the employers' associations whose basic role it was to administer the benefits granted by the State.
(v) At the same time, one saw the establishment of a set of rules of play for the settlement of disputes, which in turn promoted internal stability.
In the transition from the model of import substitution to the model of "external" growth, an attempt was made to impose the following rules or to give greater emphasis to them than was previously the case:
(i) The "free market" will generate sufficient jobs to allow the incorporation of more families into the labour market generating sufficient "autonomous" income to allow them to overcome their poverty without need for "outside assistance". Social mobility is now an individual responsibility and depends on full integration into the market.
(ii) The State will assume responsibility for helping to increase the population's human capital, granting equality of opportunity by means of education and health services and a social infrastructure of sufficient size and quality. This means that the State has the responsibility of promoting their existence but not necessarily of providing them directly. In the other social areas, the State will assume a basically compensatory role.
(iii) With the aim of financing its functions, the State will call on the participation of society in the form of taxation. The private sector will take on a more active role both in the creation of jobs and in the provision of social services. For this purpose it will be necessary to promote a "favourable environment". As a part of this favourable environment, policies of redistribution will not interfere with the economic system: indirect subsidies and intervention in pricing systems, including the price of labour, will be replaced by direct subsidies and compensatory programmes targeted at "demand".
(iv) Civil society will assume a more active role both as a service provider and in controlling the activity of the other agents. In this way, it is attributed a major responsibility for the results of its actions. In virtually all social sectors, programmes are devised which call for "the active participation of the population", this being understood in different ways.
This process of defining new standards is reflected in social policy. In the first place, indirect subsidies are eliminated and partially replaced by direct subsidies which are vehicled by the health and education social networks. In the second place, the fall in real wages and the changes in the structure of production augment the changes in the labour market and force more individuals to take part in the market with less probability of protection and lower incomes. This means that:
(v) What is happening is a redefinition of the roles of the various members of the family group as well as an increase in the burden that reproduction means for them. This change can be presented schematically as "the progressive non-viability of the nuclear family model in which the man is the bread-winner, participating in the labour market, and the woman has the tasks of reproduction"; this is the model on which were based, and on which continue to be based, the social protection systems.
These new standards imply clear contradictions with the formulation of rights contained in the 1961 Constitution. The economic and political non-viability of the old model and its incomplete replacement by something else has the factors conditioning exclusion from the political and material point of view. This has resulted in greater "vulnerability" in the most excluded sectors of the population and in the social resistance of the excluded, as well as the resistance of the included to the loss of their previous privileges. Both situations generate different types of violence. It is in this feed-back process that we have the main link between the material dimension and the political dimension of the processes of exclusion.
At the same time, society is attempting "by trial and error" to define new standards by means of a set of reforms and counter-reforms which are progressing very slowly, in that they are coming up against interests which arouse considerable sensitivity and opposition. The great majority of the reforms proposed by the State Reform Commission, such as the reform of the political party legislation, the reform of the trade unions, the professionalization of public administration and the reform of the judicial authorities are currently before the National Congress, are making no progress to approval because, within the National Congress, there is inadequate representation of the groups that are pushing them forward.
Social rights and the material dimension of exclusion
There is an enormous gap between what the Constitution has defined as social rights and what occurs in practice. This finds its expression in segmentation between groups in which social, individual and political rights are extremely limited, and groups which have extra-large protection. As a result, there are fewer instances of these two segments coming together.
There is an extreme degree of exclusion which affects approximately 25 per cent of family groups; this does not always coincide with family attributes since the access these families have to public service networks depend on State investment decisions. The poorest are outside the protected labour market, outside the scope of social security, and a significant part of them are outside the networks through which the compensatory programmes are operated. When they access education services, the limited quality and suitability of these services condemns them to a "second rate participation". In the health services, the care that they receive is restricted to emergency situations. As far as these groups are concerned, poverty becomes increasingly complex: the deficiencies are multiple and inter-related. This increases the difficulties of sectoral and national policies and results in inefficient use of the resources available.
Depending on socio-economic stratum, the position in the family life cycle, and on the opportunities that have been open to the various family members each one of these family members has a configuration of attributes that will place him or her in one of various degrees of vulnerability. What stand out from these axes of variability are the following factors: whether the family is nuclear or extended, whether the family head is working or not, whether he or she has a level of education which is higher or lower than the basic level, whether the head is a man or a woman and whether the household is in the early or late stages of the family life cycle. Nevertheless, these factors do not today constitute criteria for access to the various programmes. In general, they are individual characteristics of the persons themselves and not of the families.
As far as participation in the labour market is concerned, one sees a set of implicit and explicit standards which lay down a sort of set of equivalence rules: unless the average level of education in the household is higher than the full basic level, it is impossible to escape from a situation of indigence. This entry into the labour market implies a series of present and future costs. The most dramatic of these costs are to be found in the cost of the poorest women entering the labour market, and in the cost of young people who drop out of school before having completed the minimum nine years of education.
The "social" situation in this respect may be summarized as follows: when they have reached 19 years of age, more than half Venezuelan adolescents are living in indigent households; if they are males, they are fully integrated into the labour market but their labours scarcely produce sufficient income to cover the minimum requirements of food for one person. Furthermore, not only in many instances are they responsible for the survival of the previous generation but they are also facing up to adult life in a situation in which they are scarcely equipped to deal with the conditions that were confronted by their parents.
The labour cycle and the relationship between age and wages also vary depending on income strata, and may be a disadvantage for the poorest. Young people enter the higher income brackets later; however, adults remain for a longer time in the labour market and their wages increase with age. A third of those who are not working receive old-age or other pensions which supplement household income. For this reason, they more often live in their own homes and not with their children. Amongst the poorest, those over 50 years of age have very low employment rates; this means greater pressure on young people to enter the labour market at an early date. However, what is more marked is that their wages, when they continue to work, are significantly lower than those for the population of mature age, and very few of them receive old-age or other pensions. The burden of the elderly falls directly on families in the earliest stages of the family life cycle either because their parents are living with them or because they have to bring in money to support them, and thus contribute to the redistribution of poverty.
The standard used for setting the minimum living wage involves a minimum of two persons working in order for the family to stay out of indigence. The concept of the minimum wage as a "family wage" is tending to disappear. Since 1991, the number of full-time workers needed for the family group to get up the poverty line has risen from 2.4 to 2.9. Nevertheless, the relatively widespread entry of married women into wage-earning employment is common only in the higher income levels. In half of the poor households, only one person, usually the head of the family, is working. In this context, poverty may be interpreted, according to the outline developed by Sen [Gore, 1995], as a "flaw in the definition of entitlements". If the supply of labour from households is increased without the future generation being sacrificed, it means that State social policy will adopt this new situation as the new family model; it will therefore make direct transfers and or provide services which substitute women's domestic work and allow young people to remain at school. If this is not the case, overcoming poverty will mean higher minimum wages or food prices set according to the biological reproduction needs of the work force.
Nevertheless, there remains the problem that, if one increases the labour supply, or changes the standard for setting wages, this will bring about greater distortions. Employment planning is one of the victims of market-oriented solutions. Nevertheless, it is essential to give thought to the ways in which we can to create sufficient, well-paid jobs. Should it be found that this is not feasible over a reasonable period of time, it will be necessary, as is proposed by Marshall Wolfe [1994], to reconsider the objectives of "full employment" and find other ways of achieving what is currently provided by the function of entering the labour market incomes, production of the necessary goods and services, social integration, self-realization.
As far as implementing entitlement to education and health is concerned, the most extreme degrees of exclusion affect between one quarter and one third of the population.
If there is any feature which stands out in current experience of the poverty from which growing sectors of the population are suffering, it is insecurity about material conditions of life, not only for the future, but also for today. This is one aspects for which the gap between hypothetical standards and reality is the greatest. If uncertainty is its way of life, the population will experience security as a short-term problem. This factor is apparent in our inability to defer any rewards, and this has an effect on the possibility of putting together a divided country project.
Likewise, one can see strong links between geographical segregation, access to social entitlements and preservation of individual rights. These are all the more significant since this segregation tends to affect large sections of the population. Living in a barrio, even when the characteristics of the individuals in the family group would make it possible to exit from poverty, is a barrier which is increasingly insurmountable.
As far as public action is concerned, the main problem today is the quality and the relevance and not the cover of the services provided. There are qualitative indications that if someone uses public services, he or she has his or her opportunities undermined from the very outset. The State is not meeting the responsibility it has of massively endowing the population with relevant health and education services of acceptable quality. Social security which, until now, was a prominent part of the social pact, is making the inequalities even greater because those who are protected are not those who are in need.
Drawn up to fit an economic model and designed for a specific type of society, the social development project has fallen into inertia and has lost its bearings. However, the main social actors have not recently been involved in any extended debate as to where we are going. The education and the health models are clear expressions of this. Restricted access to economic resources has combined with institutional rigidity in such a way that it has not been possible to put into effect solutions.
There is no doubt that we have available a significant network for the provision of social services, and this is something we inherited from the period of mass provision. To this must be added a network which has, until now, been overlooked, and which is in a process of incessant change, namely the local network of social services. However, the existence of factors threatening to strip the civil servants in these services of their privileges is hindering the efficient and effective provision of services. The judicial, the education, the health and the social security systems are all environments in which it would be possible to reduce the causes of daily violence. This would mean eliminating the advantages and sinecures of those very associations and political organisations that hold in their hands the wherewithal for restructuring.
As from 1989, economic and social programme implementation progressed rapidly in those areas which did not require concertation or which did not involve major institutional adjustments; this was because people underestimated the adverse effects of institutional rigidity, a lack of consensus and a climate of conflict [Zambrano, 1992]. Thus any policies which, in principle, ignored the political factors, produced only incomplete or half-finished results. Moreover, they usually entailed a much higher social cost than was originally foreseen. The reason for this was that institutional components were non-functional or that reforms central to the operation of the model (for example, taxation reform) proved unfeasible.
In this context, with resources becoming more scarce, the welfare role of the State, i.e., social policy understood as all the instruments which have an impact on income distribution and the efficiency of their action, was considerably reduced. Even though modernization and improvements in the effective-ness and efficiency of State action figured prominently in all restructuring plans, this is one area in which there has been the least progress.
Areas that were stable and regulated, and where change would have entailed major political conflict, staid as they were even though people were well aware that things were not working properly. In the hope that its inaction would be short-lived, "ad hoc" mechanisms were introduced to handle emergencies; however, they were ephemeral and incompatible with stable standards. The regular social budget was replaced by "social funds" or "emergency funds", the universal social policy was replaced by "compensatory programmes", public employment was replaced by "micro-enterprises" in the service sector, and many regular and extensive programmes were replaced by "emergency operations"
On the other hand, to avoid conflict, new programmes were entrusted to new, decentralized administrative structures where one could lay down more flexible criteria for taking on staff and allocating resources. Programme implementation was, also, entrusted to non-govern-mental development organisations.
In a political model in which labour market access is considered the best way for people to overcome poverty "through their own efforts", social protection mechanisms tend to be seen as "assistance-centric policy", closely linked to clientelism and populism. These mechanisms are accepted only as "compensatory programmes" and they should be suppressed as soon as the emergency is over. Even social security is something that the individual himself or herself should provided out of savings he or she has accumulated during a working life. This minimizes the role of solidarity, universalism and State contribution.
A comparison of the social indicators by generation gives no indication that the forthcoming generation will be any better off, since it is basically no different from the current generation. Over the past decade, there has been an accumulation of deficiencies and new exclusions which make it difficult to imagine returning to the same route without attention being devoted to the groups that will suffer irreversible consequences. Alongside a social policy of wide scope, it will be necessary have a policy of long-term social protection, focused on various types of family groups which have difficulties in maintaining themselves independently.
The crisis of State services has accentuated the tendency to abuse the advantage that the population has in participating in these programmes; more weight is given to "savings" implicit in this than to "control over decision-making". It is important to emphasize that all the improvements in the efficiency of programmes introduced for greater community participation in no way compensate for a permanent situation of enormous fund shortages and of the loss of standardizing ability on the part of the central institutions in establishing an effective social policy. Finally, expanding cover cannot be supported by free or inadequately remunerated labour, with the population assuming financial burdens occasioned because services are both inefficient and incapable of accessing market solutions.
Because they are close to the population, local governments and their action take on particular relevance in this context. Local government action does not cause drastic changes in social policy and programme content and orientation. Local government specializes in social assistance that responds to the increased insecurity encountered in daily life by a population which encounters growing difficulty in finding stable employment. However, the focus in the handling of these problems is changing; particular activities education, health, psychosocial care and subsidies are being combined and targeted at the most needy, thus overcoming the compartmentalization of sectoral programmes.
However, the policies that local governments are implementing to a large extent respond to the perception they have of the instruments and their scope. On the one hand, because there is insufficient money to go round, activities are spread horizontally with insufficient depth and breadth. On the other hand, the "local" outlook means that people use tools that are not always right for the problem. For example, faced with enormous employment problems, local governments merely promote micro-undertakings; and, since they have difficulty getting the public to participate, they tend to blame the victim. They institute courses in self-esteem, and forget that Government structures are deficient and that the public is not given sufficient about its rights and the money available to defend them.
Local election pressures do not always produce an increase in social funding because the "fiscal" dimension of decentralization has progressed much more slowly than the political dimension. Also, there are serious technical problems a lack of skills of local governments in project formulation.
On the other hand, the reduction of the period of office of local authorities to three years has had the effect of placing enormous pressure on them to produce short-term results which, in some cases, aborts the processes of administrative organisation and participation on the part of the citizens. At the same time, abuse of mechanisms of opposition on the part of legislative assemblies, wears down the governments which are compelled to defend themselves. The visible result is greater institutional fragmentation due to an "explosion of institutional innovations", conceived to avoid rigidities and obtain new funding against a background of legislative weakness on the part of the central authorities. Likewise, where competence overlaps the division of functions between the central and local authorities is not clearly defined.
The political dimension of exclusion
The Venezuelan political system is currently characterized by a crisis in the Government's ability to govern. This is reflected: in the fiscal deficit and the inefficiency of the public apparatus; the low productivity and international competitiveness of the country's private sector; the way in which the population questions the social institutions; the rebound of corruption and impunity of sanction; and the institutional crisis visible in growing confrontation between the economic, political, military, trade union and social leadership.
Faced with the fall in national revenue and in particular the fiscal crisis, the traditional patterns of income distribution have become inflexible; this is helping to make budgetary allocation more rigid, especially since the traditional actors have historically captured specified portions of State revenue.
The 1995 budget and political conflicts
The past week has been dominated by discussions in the Lower Chamber about the approval of the draft budget for the 1995 fiscal year. Once again, the country's political class, including the Government which proposed it, decided to back a proposal which, according to the heads of the parliamentary factions of the various opposition parties, is not viable because revenue has been overestimated whereas expenditure has been underestimated. Faced with the imminent fiscal imbalance which is implied by the implementation of this budget, it is highly probable that the inflationary pressures which are currently affecting the country will become even more acute in the coming year.
For political reasons, our leaders are not interested in confronting the economic interests of specific groups or sectors. Furthermore, instead of informing the country as to the extent of this imbalance and negotiating with each of the economic and social actors, in an open and transparent manner, the conflict of distribution which underlies the budget, they prefer to agree to everyone's requests and then leave it up to inflation to subsequently resolve the conflicts.
It would be pointed out that the budget, for good measure, demonstrates the ability of Venezuelan society to find a definitive solution to two basic conflicts. The first has to do with the distribution of revenue between different social groups which are involved in the economic process in view of the atrocious distribution of revenue that has occurred in the country over the past three decades, the State has had to intervene increasingly to compensate all those who suffered prejudice; thus aggravating their economic and financial situation. The second conflict relates to the distribution of production resources in the community between the public and private sectors; this conflict arises from the government's increasing need to augment, or at least maintain, its current participation in national expenditure, in spite of its inability to obtain the corresponding real transfer of private sector revenues. Moreover, faced with the increasing financial needs of a State which still does not seem disposed to carry out rationalization, at least as may be judged by the facts, its appetite for additional funding may end up by being voracious.
"Políticos y el déficit", Diario Economía Hoy, 28 November 1994, p.2.
In view of the increasing inability of the State to arrest the deterioration in its citizens quality of life, it is possible to see, alongside the violence and the protest, more organic reactions on the part of civil Society. Its strength is beginning to show itself in tendencies to reduce the power of the traditional sectors within the bodies governing national life and a desire to strengthen the participation of autonomous social organizations which express national, regional or local opinions:
(1) The demand for greater autonomy in the face of the political parties and the State itself: the emergence of autonomous organisations in civil society aimed at generating solutions to the needs that the State has failed to provide for or provides for inadequately; and to eliminate the existing mediation between civil society and Government agencies with a view to directly promoting the adoption of specific decisions.
(2) Increase in political participation: existence of demands for the creation of more and better bodies for public participation in decisions affecting the population.
(3) Awareness of and ability for social motivation: society is demonstrating greater ability to define and express its interests as well as motivating the public in favour of achieving its objectives.
(4) Trends in favour of privatization and political decentralization on a geographical basis: existence of social forces which are promoting the withdrawal of the State from areas of the provision of services and/or economic activities. In spite of resistance, these trends are being strengthened by the fact that government facilities are overburdened in view of social needs and regional development.
(5) The degree and manner in which earlier tendencies are occurring at a national level varies considerably; this has brought about an increase in the complexity of Venezuelan society and has made the work of centralized Government bodies even more difficult.
All this has made it necessary to reform the Venezuelan political system so that it can better respond to the growing complexity of Venezuelan society, opening up channels for expectations of greater autonomy for those in the system, creating and diversifying mechanisms of sociopolitical participation, representation and negotiation so that the excluded can be brought back into the political system. Decisions must be taken that will reintegrate the discontented back into the Venezuelan political system in a manner which pays due heed to the difficulties of achieving consensus through clientelism and sinecures.
What is opening up for the Venezuelan political system is a period of greater divergence, shared leaderships, partial agreements on the basis of sectoral consensus, in which regional and local leaderships are the basis of legitimacy and the source of representation.
The fact that the current political, social and economic crisis coincides with political decentralization has contributed to maintaining relative stability and filtering into the interior of the country the tensions of all sorts that are oppressing the capital's inhabitants. Furthermore, this "eventuality" has opened up the road to creativity by local governments, compelled as they are to respond to the growing social demands of their electors.
There is a profusion of new and old mechanisms of participation in decision making and of bodies which could promote greater control by the population over its governments. As is commonly the case in Latin America, the problem is not the lack of regulations but rather the fact that the potential users are little aware of them and, in particular, the absence of effective structures for ensuring their application as well as effective sanctions in the event of their violation. However, one should not underestimate the persistence of a paternalistic and assistance-centric political culture as a decisive factor in the scarce use that is being made of the new participation environments. Changing this culture will require a long process of increasing maturity which has in no way been permitted by the recent economic and political changes [Lander, 1995].
The connections between material and political
factors in the exclusion process
Although the focus behind this study has certain advantages over the studies of poverty and traditional political analyses it should now be possible to highlight the links between the various approaches, and thus make it easier to trace out policies for overcoming them. If this is not the case, the sole progress that we would have achieved and one which is not insignificant is to "bring together" a series of analyses which are normally related to different academic traditions.
Nevertheless, a significant advance that should be recognized here is that the main advantage of applying the concept of exclusion is specifically that of demonstrating empirically the structural nature of the barriers that confront the excluded. Thus, in efforts to overcome exclusion, this approach makes it possible to focus on policies for reforming the institutions, and not, as has been the case in the approaches based on material poverty, on changes in the individual characteristics of the poor.
In our opinion, the line of thought in the relations between both approaches, the socio-economic and the political, in the creation of the processes of exclusion is to be found in the spread of the process of segregation in both domains.
These segmentation processes are apparent at the material level especially in the labour market and in the fashioning of the urban structures that have created "environments" in which the population has ever fewer opportunities to meet and cohabit. It is also expressed in the decomposition of the main mechanisms of integration: the school, the family and employment (Sanchez and Pedrazzini 1994, cited by Lander [1995]).
When a significant fraction of the population is obliged by these processes to live marginalized from what the Constitution lays down as being its rights, there is naturally less inclination to act in accordance with the "rights" of the citizen, which from the perspective of the citizen himself, have lost their validity.
Amongst the requirements that must be met to allow a more rapid advance of the "constructive forces", there stands out the need for intermediate institutions which play the role of bringing together and processing demands. These intermediate institutions should form a replacement for the "dome agreements" which governed the solution of distribution conflicts in the past. In addition they should make it possible to compensate for the inequalities between agents with very different powers of negotiation, for example between poor localities and rich localities.
Another essential requirement is better distribution of information. The profusion of organisational and legal resources continue to be of little use since there is scarce knowledge of their existence. On the other hand, the majority of social programmes are activated only if the potential beneficiary requests them. However, the knowledge required to make the request is not actively disseminated. Consequently the ones who end up benefiting from them are those who have access and contacts and not those who have the greatest need.
Finally, it is clear that without a functional system of rewards and punishments, it is impossible to promote social integration. The reform of all aspects of the penal system the police, courts and prisons is a prime condition in the fight against social exclusion. There is also an urgent need for a legal aid policy which is not a welfare State service but rather a decisive tool for implementing constitutional rights: "citizens" rights.
Confronted with such contradictory currents, we share the assessment made by Marshall Wolfe [1994] to the effect that historical trends rarely develop in a predictable way for the observers at a given moment in time. As Wolfe himself says:
One can easily think of remedies to mitigate certain extremes of exclusion, but the fundamental paradoxes of the system currently seem to go beyond the comprehension or control of any agent, which justifies placing greater hope in the improvisations that emerge from inside societies through the reciprocal action of exclusion and integration [Wolfe, 1994, p. 83].
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