System, Group, and Power: Chapter One, Text Eight

How the Marginalized Survive

The marginalized persist, eat, get dressed, pay rent, marry, and have children. Thus, there must be an ecological niche which the question of adaptation to a hostile urban environment has sparked, created in part by the marginalized themselves in the city. A specific social structure has risen on top of the precarious economic base of marginality which is suitable for this ecological niche, guaranteeing minimal subsistence during more or less prolonged and irregular periods of economic inactivity. This social structure brings a certain kind of association to the forefront: an exchange network between relatives and neighbors. We propose that such exchange networks act as the socio-economic mechanism which responds to the lack of social welfare, substituting it with a type of mutual aid based on reciprocity.

Membership to an exchange network is not an obstacle to its members’ participation in the labor market, insofar as they have access to it. The economic function of the exchange network is limited to fostering security: it is an emergency mechanism, necessary since neither market exchange nor the redistribution of resources on the national level guarantee survival. Furthermore, the exchange network fully utilizes one of the few kinds of resources which the marginalized possess: their social resources.

Lomnitz, 1978, p. 26.