Laurent Fraisse
*
and Oriol Alsina
*
The fire that has burned thousands of cars
every night for two weeks in the suburbs of
several French cities is but the visible and
violent sign of a structural problem: the
exclusion and social discrimination inherent
in the neoliberal economic model. Attempts
to douse the flames with the water of police
interventions in the affected areas and closing
the frontiers of Europe to immigration is
neither a fair nor an effective solution.
If we do not change the socio-economic conditions
that underpin this structural blaze, it will
break out again someday.
The solidarity socio-economy is one of the
paths that can be taken to encourage the long
term improvement of the socio-economic conditions
of the victims of social exclusion in both
the North and South. Why? Because fair trade
organizations, solidarity finance institutions
and all the other solidarity socio-economy
initiatives are concrete economic instruments
that allow thousands of people to improve
their living conditions and become actors
in their own development.
The solidarity economy is a means of taking
economic action in favour of social cohesion,
by expressing and fighting for the recognition
of socio-economic rights and access for the
least advantaged members of society to employment,
credit, consumption and housing, using the
socio-economic innovations of civil society.
But this is not the only role of the solidarity
economy. It also aims to promote a new economic
paradigm based on economic democracy and social
justice.
Faced with economic globalization and the
increase in social inequalities in both North
and South, the solidarity socio-economy's
primary challenge is to go beyond the stage
of successful local initiatives to establish
itself politically and economically as a promoter
of solidarity-based and fairer economic behaviour
and international regulations, as well as
new levels of North-South solidarity.
This ambition, which has inspired the work of the Workgroup on Solidarity Socio-Economy (WSSE) since it began, explains the strategic
importance of the two
solidarity socio-economy meetings taking place
shortly in Dakar:
We hope that these two events will open up
new avenues for hope and produce concrete
proposals capable of tackling the structural
blaze of socio-economic injustice!
