Re: [A-List] Civil Society - Progressive or Reactionary

["Patrick Bond" <pbond@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Globalization based on the rules of market fundamentalism in the past
> decade has grossly underprovided public goods. The mostly obvious examples
> are environmental protection and poverty elimination. This correction of
> this deficiency in public good is now left to Civil Society thus the state
> needs not bother with it... The Civil Society movement is the garbage dump
> of negative  externalities created by market fundamentalism.

Henry's doing some more flame-baiting, I guess. Oh well, let me be foolish
and reply.

Henry, your critique is disappointingly pedestrian, based on this strange
economistic foundation. 'Public goods'? Surely anti-capitalist forces are
after more than that? James Petras offered a much tougher version of
NGO-bashing in Globalization Unmasked (Zed 2001), still highly recommended,
and did so without recourse to the liberal externality discourse.

Instead, based on Michael Burawoy's reading of a Gramsci/Polanyi dichotomy,
many of us at the Durban Centre for Civil Society embrace radical social
movements aiming to decommodify society and nature. The explanation
is in the last annual report: http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs under CCS Reports.

A few lines:

'Civil' Societies in South Africa, Africa and the world

This is a good time to consider the emerging environment in which civil
societies carry out their work, not only in South Africa but throughout
Africa and the world. This report is being penned five years after the
Seattle protest against the World Trade Organisation, a critical rupture
that put elites everywhere on notice that democracy's global-scale deficits
were no longer immune to society's critical gaze.
        And in another famous insurgency in 1994, the Zapatista movement
spoke from an obscure region of southeastern Mexico about the suffering of
Third World people when 'neoliberalism' (free market economic policies)
accompanies longstanding political repression. The Zapatista guerrillas,
peasants, liberation theologians and intellectuals successfully melded
indigenous people's militancy and highly effective use of communication
technologies. The result was widespread international resonance with
Zapatismo's critique of the architectures of global power, making the people
of Chiapas emblems of something much larger.
        In considering these seminal revolts against injustice, there are
Southern African and African precedents to be explored, throughout both
recent and distant history. South Africa's long and winding road to
democracy left local civil society organisations with some of the world's
richest repositories of knowledge about successful transformation from
colonial and racist rule. We are conscious not to lose sight of these
precedents now, at a time of persistent and in some cases worsening
economic, gender and environmental injustices, as well as racism. But we
collectively realise the importance of lessons from Africa and the rest of
the world, which also deserve brainstorming in the pages that follow.