Globalisation, Global Justice and Social Work

Iain Ferguson, Michael Lavalette, Elisabeth Whitmore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134342969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

Globalization has become a seemingly unstoppable force over recent decades and, in its wake, global notions of social justice have developed in response to its negative aspects. Neo-liberal economic policies have been a key element in the wider process of globalization, and these policies have had a profound impact on welfare provision and the shape of social work practice. Arising dissatisfaction among users of welfare and social work services is fuelling the search for a new, more radical social work that is firmly rooted in principles of social justice.

Globalisation, Global Justice and Social Work explores the global effects of neo-liberal policies on welfare services in different countries, with contributions from social work academics, practitioners and welfare activists around the world. The first section of the book presents case studies of impact of neo-liberalism on welfare systems, social service provision and the practice of social work. In the second section the chapters explore the relationship between social work practice and the struggle for social justice. Authors discuss the personal and political dilemmas they have had to address in seeking to link a personal commitment to social justice with their daily practice as workers and educators in social work. The final section assesses the prospects for social work practice based on notions of social justice, by looking at what can be learned from the experience of previous radical movements as well as from emergent global and local movements.

Part 1

Social work, social welfare and the impact of neo-liberal globalisation

1

Social work in Mexico: towards a different practice

Maria del Carmen Mendoza Rangel

(Trans: Mike Gonzalez, Univesity of Glasgow)

Introduction

The Association of Mexican Social Workers (ATSMAC) was founded on 20 March 1982 by a group of practitioners with the aim of opening a space for reflection on our professional activity where we could develop new methodologies for our interventions as well as contribute to the growth of the popular movement. It was the 1980s, and we were emerging from two decades in a methodological desert. Most countries in Latin America were experiencing confrontations that forced the social sciences to reconceptualise their theoretical frameworks and their models of intervention.

The Cuban revolution, the failure of developmentalism, the lost decade, the emergence of armed movements from Patagonia in the south to the Mexican border with the United States in the north, and the wars that were unfolding across the continent provoked a deep crisis in the social sciences. The ideological debate shook Latin America’s social workers to the core and opened the way to a theoretical, philosophical and political exploration of the issues involved in the transition to a new society; hence the significance of the practice of community organisation.

That is the perspective that informs the work of our association and provides the starting point of our efforts to develop a different professional practice informed by historical understanding.

A different practice in Mexican social work

The history of our profession is certainly marked by a whole series of initiatives undertaken to enable us to intervene in a specific situation with a more professional orientation. Much of the literature emerging out of social work represents an attempt to systematise a professional experience born out of a proposal to intervene.

In Mexico, it is assumed that social work arose out of a community perspective. In its early phase we find a number of experiences which, while they were described in terms of ‘assistance’, took on forms which owed much to community interventions. This was true during the period of Spanish colonisation, for example, of the religious position adopted by Vasco de Quiroga. His work began as a form of charitable assistance but little by little took on forms of organisation and mobilisation through the craft cooperatives he established. For Mexico, this is a seminal founding example of social work as community organisation. Centuries later, the Education Ministry under José Vasconcelos created, in 1921, the so-called ‘cultural missions’ whose purpose was to improve and promote the community both economically and socially.

Although it had antecedents in the colonial period, it was not until 1933 that the first degree course in social work was approved under the aegis of the School of Domestic Economy of the Education Ministry. The school was located in the Tepito district in the centre of Mexico City, an area noted for its high concentration of market traders; the result was that many of its students provided services for and worked with the traders and their families. The story goes that when the first group of students graduated, General Lázaro Cárdenas, then President of Mexico, supported their right to be recognised as professionals. Although their role within the political system remained unclear, Cárdenas’ patronage determined that social work would take on the ‘popular, socialist and revolutionary’ character of his Presidency

Four years later, a new degree course was initiated in the Law School of Mexico’s National University (the UNAM) under the direction of the Children’s Courts; this was the predecessor of the degree in technical social work whose framework was basically paralegal. From the outset, its courses were taught by professionals from other fields and very little was done to give it an orientation more appropriate to the needs of a world on the threshold of war.

By then the United States had become hegemonic in terms of professional education, so that social work was shaped by the US and assumed the anodyne methodology usually denoted by the term ‘agent of change’, a role then reinforced by developmentalist policies which emphasised the technical and neutral nature of social work.

The victory of the Cuban revolution in 1959, creating Latin America’s first socialist state, struck a note of warning to US hegemony; in response the Alliance for Progress (A for P) was set up with the aim of designing development strategies and policies based on a series of indicators which literally measured underdevelopment and the elaboration of policies for, or ‘roads to’ development. From the 1960s onwards, Latin America entered a period of crisis which produced a number of movements in opposition to military dictatorship including armed guerrilla groups in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Chile and Uruguay, and later in Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. All of them were evidence of the failure of developmentalism and exposed the dependency at the heart of our economic backwardness. In Central America, in areas like Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, the struggle to overthrow dictatorships was carried to its ultimate conclusion, unleashing internal wars which brought in their wake massive human devastation, because of the difference in the military resources available to each side.

The reconceptualisation process set in motion in Latin America in the 1960s began by questioning the theoretical and methodological foundations of social work as well as the role that the profession had played in society The result was a qualitative leap, as the profession began to define not only new frameworks and purposes but also positioned social workers side by side with the masses, whether they were called the ‘exploited’, the ‘marginalised’ or the ‘excluded’. In the framework of a transition to a new society, the demand was for community practices and models which encouraged the integration of theory and practice, with particular emphasis on ideology

By 1968, social work had become a full degree course at UNAM, and a new course of professional training was established, though it was not as yet defined by the expectations embedded in the Movement for the Reconceptualization of Latin America. In 1975 the Mexican Congress of Community Development brought together social work professionals. Their conclusions proved to be a turning point for professional training, for they argued the need to overcome a developmentalist vision and seek to work in the community with a new emancipatory perspective at the core of which was dependency theory rather than developmentalism.

The Mexican Association of Schools of Social Work was set up in the same year. It organised a series of national seminars at which students and teachers reflected together on the new perspective emerging from the Latin American Centre for Social Work (CELATS). CELATS was the organiser of the Latin American congresses where new frames of reference were already being elaborated on the basis of historical and dialectical materialism and political economy.

In 1973, the social work qualification became separated from the School of Law at UNAM and the National School of Social Work was founded. It was a time of deep crisis within the university when forms of self-management were proposed as the basis for reform; these proposals had a determining influence on both the organisation of and the course content at the School of Social Work. However, it was not until the 1980s that the School was directed by social work-qualified staff, and paradoxically it was that leadership which led to the first student protests against authoritarianism and the imposition of academic criteria.

The 1980s saw us involved in conceptual, ideological and methodological debates, yet at the same time we were also able to produce a more finished and appropriate proposal for social work in which we defined both conceptually and operationally the area of our intervention in the context of social policy. This produced professional and intellectual efforts designed to define and understand these issues, and the result was an important body of work on the theory of the profession.

In 1982, the Mexican Association of Social Workers was formed and the professional colleges set up. It was the period when social policy became defined as the ambit of professional activity and a decade in which the urban masses became a stronger collective subject as social movements grew across the continent. Paulo Freire’s psychopedagogy and his proposal for education and learning within the perspective of conscientisation become the reference point in that period for new theoretical and conceptual discussions (Freire 1970a&b).

On 19 September 1985, an earthquake destroyed a large part of the capital. On the level of organisation, it had important repercussions; the popular response to the earthquake brought a qualitative change among the social movements in the struggle for democracy. Its impact was such that 1988 saw the beginning of the decline of the one-party system with the defeat of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had held power for 70 years as the official party of the state. At that time, liberation theology, Christianity committed to popular struggles through the Christian Base Communities, infused community social work with a new impulse to become committed to the popular movements.

The development of social and civic organisation produced a growth in nongovernmental organisations, which became the privileged space for a social work that developed a gendered perspective and focused on the construction of identity, mass action, civic involvement and democracy The alternatives available with regard to public policy, the defence of the environment and sustainable development, the struggle against Aids and respect for choice in sexual preference were increasing.

By 1992, the 500th anniversary of the Spanish Conquest, a new articulation among indigenous peoples began to emerge in Latin America, and later at a global level. The Latin American Council for Indigenous and Black Mass Resistance was formed and later a Mexican Council, which gave unity and direction to the struggles of indigenous peoples and raised their profile within the processes of transition to democracy. These movements were the immediate predecessors to the Zapatista indigenous rising of 1 January 1994. They raised the banners of human rights, peace and development and developed the resistance in defence of indigenous rights and culture, while at the same time taking the first steps towards the construction of autonomous, or self-governing indigenous communities.

Social work in Mexico suffered from the same methodological shortcomings as the rest of the world, shortcomings that became very apparent when, in the 1960s, a series of conflicts throughout Latin America forced the social sciences to revise their theoretical frameworks and their methods of intervention. The uncertainty that followed this questioning of the ideas that had guided our actions until then forced social work to seek out solutions and methods that could give their intervention a more solid and scientific foundation.

In an attempt to combine orientations, intentions, procedures, instruments and techniques in a way that would allow us to act in a given context, from the 1980s onwards we approached the design of mechanisms and procedures in a more rigorous and scientific way. This enabled us not only to address issues of conscious ness but also to analyse reality and design strategies to solve social needs. At this point we again turned back to proposals on social intervention and fundamental training in the certainty that neither ideology, nor the individual, nor techniques and processes could be prioritised or sacrificed to the benefit or disadvantage of the others.

For social work this represented a major leap forward, for we took on a notion of professional intervention and emphasised process in order to overcome the partial and unilateral perspective we had tended to adopt until then. We took professional responsibility for a methodology which went from understanding to planning actions and interventions which we ourselves designed, executed and evaluated. This gave us an integrated framework which allowed reflection and collective construction.

This enabled us to participate as social workers in a continuum that took us from knowledge through analysis to intervention, defined in three stages or methodological moments in the construction and application of rigorous scientific procedures for investigating, ordering, classifying, interpreting, analysing and systematising our information. We could then plan actions and propose initiatives that would resonate in the leadership of social processes. This also enabled us to win a place among social science professionals where we could debate our political position in the reality of our country and argue our decision, based on our experience, to place ourselves side by side with popular movements explicitly devoted to bringing about social change.

In the 1990s, the recomposition of the world power blocks and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which repositioned the subjects of change, opened a range of new possibilities arising out of new social movements and political processes. We took this as the ambit of our professional intervention and this in turn allowed us to develop an array of new practices and expectations which we reflected upon and conceptualised continuously

Neo-liberalism and globalisation: generators of a society of exclusion and confrontation

Neo-liberalism, capitalism’s new political strategy, drove forward a globalisation that produced an increase in extreme poverty The creation of new complex economic functions also produced new centres of power and new economic blocks, removing the process of production, circulation and consumption from the national context and relocating them within a transnational ambit. The result was a world of fragmented and dependent economies in permanent crisis, stigmatised by corruption and political and institutional decline.

Structural adjustment, the volatility of capital, economic and fiscal rationalisation meant shrinking resources for social spending, which in turn brought increasing poverty, marginality and exclusion, widening the economic gap and intensifying the struggle for survival, a struggle which, in modern society, assumed the character of political conflict. However, unlike previous epochs, there is no need today to declare war before eliminating human beings. Today those of us who do not belong to any power group are easily excluded, eliminated, conceptualised as disposable. The most appalling thing, however, is that humanity seems to have lost the capacity to be shocked by this.

We are no longer frightened by violence; it has become an everyday thing since the media have introduced it into our homes. One no longer has to go out into the street to experience terror, mass murder or to see the spilling of blood. This logic of war sustains the model of death and exclusion that globalisation has prepared for our future. The dirty war is an accomplice of modernity, inhibiting criticism and silencing the voices that are raised against repeated crises, war, nuclear proliferation, global warning and the danger of annihilation. We live in the interstices between conflict and confrontation; we provide the dead of history, we are subsumed in uncertainty, we are imprisoned by the market as our sense of identity fades, we are destined to be the disappeared after conflict or the disasters that await us or to be the victims of the slow environmental collapse, the GM foods, the epidemics.

Globalisation is a perspective which constructs subjectivities on a model of violence. It infiltrates our imaginary and our daily life, our public and private actions. It creates a society of risk and changes the values which have shaped human behaviour until now, replacing them with institutionalised violence.

As a system of government and a model of living, neo-liberalism rests on a policy of excluding the poor and the marginalised, denoting them ‘disposable’, ‘marginal’ and enemies of those who enjoy freedom of thought and collective consciousness or who labour collectively and organise in communities. The system has no difficulty in eliminating street kids, indigenous peoples, peasants—as it did, for example, in the case of the Mexican communities of Acteal and Aguas Blancas. Theirs is a ‘project of death and destruction of all that is human, in the widest sense’.

For social subjects this has profound implications: the destructuring of collective identities; the violent dismantling of social networks through the new mechanisms of social control; and domination and repression accentuating social contradictions and deepening conflict. Experts have suggested that Mexico could very soon find itself facing an explosive situation with the disappearance of the middle sectors, as the number of jobs declines due to the disappearance of small and medium-sized industry. Even now the picture in the Mexican countryside is desolate. Peasants have been expelled from their land because of a lack of credit and resources to cultivate their land, leaving behind communities of women and children waiting for their men to find the means by hiring themselves out as labour on Mexican farms or as immigrant labour in the US, where they work with no security and often at great risk.

There is a deep discontent among all social and political sectors, and in the population in general. There was an assumption that the removal from power of the PRI would bring changes. In fact, the new government of the Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN: National Action Party) has not been able to resolve the crisis, nor improve the national economy Its loss of credibility is creating a general dissatisfaction which takes a number of forms, some peaceful, others violent, but all expressing the insecurity and uncertainty that infuses daily life at every level and in every area of social reproduction.

Another co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Social work, social welfare and the impact of neo-liberal globalisation
• Part 2 Neo-liberal globalisation and its impact on social workers and clients
• Part 3 Mapping a way forward?
• Bibliography
• Index