This topic will be discussed in Bellevue ’s decentralized event.

From Marginality to Autonomy

Discrimination and social or economic exclusion, while present in most societies, are particularly active in the current dominant system. This is because the system is based on individualist competition, social insecurity, fear of others, and on a tribal mentality: social-cultural groups, nationalis, xenophobia, and interreligious conflicts.

Despite social welfare programs and charity organisations which allow people to survive materially, these attitudes and mechanisms keep well-identified people on the margins of society; the homeless, foreigners, poor ghetto youth, people labelled as "welfare cases", "mentally handicapped", "without qualifications", "unemployed", "without papers" ...

These people are forced to choose between two alternatives: fighting for years in the hope of seeing better days, or resigning themselves to the assistance and dependence relationships which deprive an individual of the mastery of her existance and of the sens that she would want to give to her life.

Various groups, some distant and some close to those who are marginalised by the dominant society, attempt to liberate themselves from the system in order to construct their lives based on their communal values and their utopias. Their lifestyles are a break with and are often in opposition to the dominant values, lifestyles and relationships.

Who takes on such an adventure? Is the possibility to freely choose our path based on the sense that we want our lives to have reserved for those whose social background, education, experiences and reading have facilitated a certain consciousness, the search for alternatives and the capacity to construct with others this "other possible world"?

In the city or in the country, are our "alternative" or "autonomous" experiences shared with people who suffer from social marginalisation rather than choosing it? Can we go beyond the natural groupings of people who are socially or culturally similar to create a common history? With what goal in mind?

Are social struggles and fights for the access to rights of everyone the only possible meeting grounds of solidarity and common action? Are there other exchanges to explore, other actions to carry out together? On which ground? Can a Turkish peasant economically exiled into a European ghetto teach a neo-rural person to grow peppers or how to live with few material goods? Can a rap workshop unite young people dressed in Nikes and anarchist squatters? Can someone who lived on the street find pleasure in building a tent with others in an environmental and human environment that is less aggressive? Can a group of unemployed people create a self-managed alternative business?

How do we see others? Are we capable of going beyond the labels, or are we also prisoners of social conditioning?

Isn't simply asking these questions a matter of establing distinctions in order to go beyond them?

In our attitudes, our personal and collective functioning, which behaviors facilitate openness, and which, on the contrary, impose codes, norms, language, judgements that exlucde those that don't share the codes from the beginning?

Can people who are in trouble, or who have lost the sense of their life, get a new start in an alternative collective living arrangement, where the welcome, the human relationships, the activities, and the shared sense allow others to find their place, either temporarily or in the long term? Under what conditions?

Where should the compromise be made between rapidly advancing our own projects and spending the time to construct with people who are very different from us? How can we created balanced relationships that take into account the strengths and weaknesses of all, in order to avoid the welfare aid and paternalism of those who think they know what's good for all?

Can communal life, like many alternative enterprises that under pressure to be productive, reproduce the selection and exclusion that afflict the job market?

Can the search for "another alternative world", through concrete experiments to live and work together, bring about real social change without taking into consideration the mechanisms of exclusion that keep people from alternative possibilities? Or is it a vain utopia meant to sooth our conscience while we have our communal adventure?

The workshop will attempt to respond to some of these questions (and many others), concentrating on the sharing of the experiences of each person in different contexts and closely linked to our visions of the world and that which we want to change in it.