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

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yes, I am known for my pedestrian mind because I avoid academic
post-modern deconstruction of plain talk. Yes, delivering "public goods"
is something that we mental pedestrians aim for because they are things
that common people can recognized and measure, such as the availability
of safe food and water, decent shelter, free health care, education,
freedom of movement , etc, instead of high principles of "decommodify
society and nature", aiming at "democracy's global-scale deficits" and
staging "seminal revolts against injustice".

I am not interested in engaging in debate with intellectuall parasites
by exchanging cross fire of academic jargons. My work has to do with
trying to actually lift the real wages of the oppressed poor, by a few
dollars one day at a time if necessary on the specific tactical level,
and tearing down the superstructure of neo-liberalism on the strategic
level by policy advice to victim governments.  Frankly, you Civil
Society types are the unwitting, or perhaps even willing land mines in
the first line of defense for neo-imperialism by spreading
disinformation warnings among the helpless victims of neo-liberalism
that the alternative is worse becasue it does not deliver "democracy".
It is for this reason that you condamn China's proper state-to-state
relationshio with African states , not for its imperfection, but to
exploit the imperfect characterisitic to defuse its potential for
defeating US neo-imperialism.  Your kind of message has been tried by
the Christian missionaries all over Africa and Asia during the age of
colonialism. These missionaries also accused national liberation
movement as brutally evil and undemocratic. Such snake oil theology
failed to save imperialism in the last century and it will aslo fail to
safe neo-imperialism now.  While you self-styled Progressive would
spread disinformation about Mau Mau uprisings with stories about ritual
cannibalism, zoophilia and necrophilia with goats, sexual orgies, ritual
places decorated with intestines and goat eyes, I have admiration their
desire to gain indpendence at all cost, and sympathy for that
justifiable oaths to kill, dismember and burn European settlers who
oppressed them.

Yes, I choose to be pedestrian because the war against neo-liberal
neo-imperialism is on the ground not on in the clouds. And I don't draw
a salary for my activism and do not accept perts of an air-conditioned
office among people who are dying from malnutrition and disease merely
to write fancy academic discourse for academic journals.


Henry C.K. Liu


Patrick Bond wrote:

> ----- 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.