PEN-L message, on "social capital"

Chris,

I've been following this thread with interest. When you say that

> in the Gramscian battle for ideological hegemony the concept of "social
> capital" may be contested ground, which Marxists leave uncontested to the
> enemy if they merely content themselves with dogmatic sarcastic utterances

it implies that we agree with the framework of hegemony and so on, when not even all "Marxists" actually agree on these concepts.

I would say there may be little or no real separation between the two versions of "social capital" --- Marxian and contemporary -- and, in fact, they may feed off each other. This loops back into the paper by Mike Cowen which I posted several days ago, i.e.

"These two concepts of social capital, the one arising out of more recent
social theory, with the other stemming from Marx's critical thinking about
capital, can now be brought together. Over the past two decades, the
concepts have run along parallel paths with each other. For the first,
social capital stemmed from addressing what used to be called the social
'question' or 'problem', and in the more recent case quoted above, that of
addressing inner-city unemployment and poverty in North America. It is this
concept which has ended up in Africa, to address a much larger scale of what
is intended to be done for development. For the second, social capital
addressed what had happened during the course of immanent capitalist
development and gave grounds for understanding the transactions of corporate
capital. One concept is meant to positively counteract the negative of
capitalist development while the other looms so large in explaining why the
unchecked transactions of capital play so much of a role in creating the
social problem in question.?

And here's a bit which I didn?t post before:

?By taking up the negative dimension of social capital, the oft mentioned propensities for 'criminals', in the name of the mafiosi or cronyism, to act cohesively through the trust relation for a socially malficient purpose, we are provided with a second source of glue to bind the two concepts of social capital together. For the purpose of this lecture, a significant implication follows for international development practice from what Seligman had concluded from his understanding, as mentioned above, of the trust relation. Trust is not some intrinsic end of social action but the means to accommodate two different orientations towards activity. From the standpoint of donors, assistance is intended to act for social welfare whereas from that of a ruling state agency as recipient, aid serves an immediate self-interested purpose. It is only the trust that conditional self-interest, working through what the Idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant called 'unsocial sociability', will establish the conditions for development that keeps the practice going.?

http://www.valt.helsinki.fi/kmi/Julkais/WPt/1998/WP1198.HTM

In other words, ?social capital? may not be contestable, because it is permanently tainted by the society in which it was born.

Regards,

Grant Lee.