[p2p-research] a must read essay: Engaging Critically with the Reality and Concept of Civil Society

[Michel Bauwens]

via
http://p2pfoundation.net/Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society,
and to be published on the blog on Dec 4,

a must read essay, challenging hierarchy in civil society:

(processed and excerpted version, ask for full version via jai.sen at cacim.net
)

summary thesis: civil society is not just an advance, but also itself an
oppressor of the wider possibility for the emancipation of the "incivil"
sectors of society


Engaging Critically with the Reality and Concept of Civil Society

** Paper: Interrogating the Civil. Engaging Critically with the Reality and
Concept of Civil Society. By Jai Sen.*

Source: Forthcoming in :

Jai Sen and Peter Waterman, eds, forthcoming (2010b) - Worlds of Movement,
Worlds in Movement. Volume 4 in the Challenging Empires series. New Delhi :
OpenWord

Author contact via jai.sen at cacim.net


Contents [hide<http://p2pfoundation.net/Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society>
]

   - 1 Excerpts<http://p2pfoundation.net/Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society#Excerpts>
      - 1.1 Introduction<http://p2pfoundation.net/Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society#Introduction>
      - 1.2 Civility as
oppression<http://p2pfoundation.net/Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society#Civility_as_oppression>
      - 1.3 The political productivity and emancipation of the
incivil<http://p2pfoundation.net/Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society#The_political_productivity_and_emancipation_of_the_incivil>
      - 1.4 The uncivil
underworld<http://p2pfoundation.net/Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society#The_uncivil_underworld>
      - 1.5 The World Social Forum as instrument of civil domination and the
      role of the incivil movements within and against
it<http://p2pfoundation.net/Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society#The_World_Social_Forum_as_instrument_of_civil_domination_and_the_role_of_the_incivil_movements_within_and_against_it>
      - 1.6 The WSF is ruled by a transnational civil
class<http://p2pfoundation.net/Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society#The_WSF_is_ruled_by_a_transnational_civil_class>
      - 1.7 NGO's and the pacification,cooptation of emancipatory movements
      and their
leaders<http://p2pfoundation.net/Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society#NGO.27s_and_the_pacification.2Ccooptation_of_emancipatory_movements_and_their_leaders>
      - 1.8 Conclusion<http://p2pfoundation.net/Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society#Conclusion>

[edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society?title=Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society&action=edit&section=1>
]Excerpts[edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society?title=Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society&action=edit&section=2>
]Introduction

Jai Sen:

"In our times, in both social and political literature and the media, the
phenomenon called ‘civil society’ – or, by extension, ‘global civil society’
– is increasingly accepted and celebrated as a powerful contribution to the
democratisation of politics and to bringing common sense and civility to
difficult situations. This is so especially in the North, and among those in
international organisations, but increasingly so also in the north in the
South. In this essay, I put forward the argument that civility – which I
submit is at the core of civil society – is structurally suffused with what
in effect are profoundly anti-democratic undercurrents, and has always been
so. I argue further that today, at a time when the world is dramatically
changing, with the historically oppressed becoming new actors on the stage,
the power of civility is – even as civil society makes its contributions –
undermining processes of much deeper and wider democratisations that are
opening up. This, I suggest, should be reason enough to give pause for
thought to members and leaders of civil organisations to reflect on and
rethink their politics (and their lives); and to give those who do not see
themselves as necessarily belonging to civil society, a critical lens
through which to view it. This is difficult terrain, however, because the
term ‘civil’ and the concept of civility (and their equivalents in perhaps
all languages and cultures) are so embedded in our everyday lives and our
self-images. They are part of our everyday language, norms, and customs;
they are deeply buried in stories and storybooks; they are contained in all
our textbooks. Almost by definition the term and the concept are today
normatively positive, without question. This is perhaps true of all
societies that are conscious of themselves as being ‘civilised’, past or
present. But it is especially in the past two decades that the term ‘civil
society’ has been vigorously introduced into common usage, in governmental
policy, in academia, and in the media – three key circuits of the
propagation of ideas – as a part of neoliberal globalisation; and in these
circles it has been made a given and a good – a virtually unquestionable
good. It is difficult terrain also because the word ‘civil’ in the term
civil society is very beguiling, especially for those who feel that they are
civil and belong to civil society. However, we need to see the word for what
it is – a veil – and to take care not to get seduced by it.

I therefore try to critically visit and examine this apparent good, by
looking at two issues:

- One, the dynamics of power relations in the building and exercise of civil
society in the world as it is unfolding today, especially in relation to
emerging movements and alliances among the historically and structurally
oppressed and marginalised;

- and two, the structural politics and dynamics of the global civil
cooperation that underlies what is called ‘global civil society’, taking the
World Social Forum as an example.

In particular, even as I acknowledge the many contributions in history of
civil organisations and civil societies, I try to look critically at the
question of power relations within such organisations and processes, and at
the internal contradictions of civility. The question of the power of
conventional market corporations, and of (market) corporatism, has been well
explored, as has the question of the corporate State.2 But for some reason,
when we talk of ‘power’ we automatically refer to the state or the market.
What I attempt to do here is a parallel exercise, to look at power not among
and between state and market and of their power over society, but at power
within the non-state (and also non-market) world and among and between
non-state actors; in short, at power in the world of civil society.

I do this at two levels. I argue first that the concept of civility is
central to (though not alone in) the exercise of power in the non-state
world. And second, I reflect critically on the democratic options that
global civil society is offering us, not normatively but in structural
reality, with the aim of getting practitioners and theorists both in the
civil world and in what I term the incivil world to engage with this hard
question. I do not, however, try to define, or re-define, the terms. On the
one hand, this has been done so richly by others, such as social theorist
John Keane;4 and on the other, fixing their meanings is not my objective.
Rather, it is to critically engage with and interrogate them, to open them
up for debate.

Along the way, I argue that part of the problem lies precisely in the
relations of the production of knowledge : Since it is (usually prominent,
rule-making) members of ‘civil society’ who, as the brahmins of society,
produce the knowledge that most of us are brought up on (that defines what
society is and how it works, and establishes the values that it stands for),
it is a self-fulfilling and self-reinforcing process. But I also argue that
this is changing, with new actors emerging on the stage – including,
crucially, in terms of production of knowledge."


[edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society?title=Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society&action=edit&section=3>
]Civility as oppression

Jai Sen:

"My first submission is that ‘civil society’ is not what it is said, and
assumed, to be, as outlined in the previous section; nor is it what the
textbooks say it is, a neutral (and neutered) ‘space between the individual
(or the family) and the state’. Rather, it is just what common sense tells
us, and what the term itself indicates : Civil society – a society, or
better, a community that is bounded and governed by norms of civility that
its thought- and rule-givers define for it; and a section of any given
society that has become – in its own terms, and by its own definition –
‘civilised’. The etymological linkage between these various terms is
self-evident and unavoidable, and the very fact that theorists like to give
a different spin to a particular term within the family, without reference
to the others, should itself raise questions.

As perhaps in all contexts, the rules of civility that prevail are always
set by individuals and institutions that consider themselves to be civil and
civilised; and the primary aim of the rules is to ‘civilise’ and mainstream
everything and everyone : To bring order into society by making sure that
everything operates within defined limits. These limits and norms change
over time, in all societies, but generally speaking the change is
incremental and highly conservative, tightly controlled by the rule-giving
institutions and individuals. In particular, there is little or no room for
deviants – for all those sections in society that do not follow the rules of
being civilised. In addition, it is generally the case that the civilised
feel threatened – sometimes vaguely, sometimes directly – by those who do
not conform and by the very existence of such worlds. And so they variously
term such sections ‘anti-social’, ‘deviant’, ‘wild’, and ‘uncivil’, and seek
relentlessly to marginalise, subjugate, convert, or tame them; in short, to
civilise them. This has been the case historically, and it is true today –
though the boundaries are constantly changing, as social relations evolve,
through processes of negotiation and struggle. If some such people become
sufficiently docile and domesticated, they are left alone and ignored; on
the other hand, if they resist or are too assertive, the tactics change and
may even include attempts to destroy and exterminate them (only in the most
civilised of ways, of course).

One of the most infamous examples of this in history has been the savage
treatment by settler societies – largely immigrants from what is now Europe
– of the Aborigines of Australia, the Indians of Latin America, and the
First Nations in Canada and the USA. All of this, including genocide, was
done in the course of “the great cause of civilisation”.17 Indeed, the rise
of colonisation coincides precisely with the formation of so-called ‘civil
societies’ in colonising countries; the two took place together. Equally
barbarous has been the treatment of slaves, throughout history and across
the world; and the horrors of Hiroshima, and more recently Iraq, were again
committed in the name of the protection and promotion of civilisation. But
this behaviour is not only a function of what we commonly understand as
colonisation. It is equally true of the behaviour of self-styled civil
societies within their own societies, and it is as true of what we today
call the North as it is of the South. Just as two examples, we have the
barbaric treatment of dalits in South Asia by upper caste Hindus –where
discrimination and exclusion have historically been defended by the upper
castes as a means of protecting their own purity, and the purity and order
of ‘society’ – and the manner in which the civilised gentlefolk of, say, the
Netherlands ‘treated’ and ‘processed’ the Dutch peasantry and working
classes in special ‘homes’ even as recently as early twentieth century,
teaching them reading, writing, dressing, table manners, and bathroom
manners in their attempt to ‘civilise’ them into ‘proper’ citizenship.

...

In particular, all so-called ‘civil societies’ have historically emerged
through intensive processes of the civilising of societies, especially
through the establishment of enforcement agencies such as the police and of
prisons, homes, mental ‘homes’, and other institutions where these ‘unruly
elements’ were – and continue to be – incarcerated and ‘civilised’. I submit
that this, and the treatment that aboriginals across the world have been
subjected to, comes from the same root – and that we need to search for that
root.20 Conversely, we need to recognise that colonisation, and the process
and treatment of ‘civilisation’, are not restricted to the conquest and
domestication of alien lands and peoples.

In short, I suggest that for colonisers and civilisers alike it is their
self-appointed historical task to domesticate and civilise the world and to
establish a civil order. Most centrally, this means establishing hegemony
over all those who (and all that) they consider to be wild and uncivil.

The civil, and the task of civilisation and of building a civil society, is
therefore umbilically and dialectically tied to the uncivil. In my earlier
writings on cities, borrowing the term from someone who specifically used
the term to refer to the ‘deviant’ in society, I used the term ‘unintended’
to describe the dynamic tension that I sensed between the different worlds I
could see in cities. I argued that the unintended build separate, parallel
societies, and ‘cities’, of their own, but through a complex dynamic of
relationships with the intended world.21 Given the contemporary resonance of
the term ‘civil society’, I feel that the terms civil and uncivil – and, as
I will argue, incivil – are equally relevant and useful.


In this narrative, the ‘civil’ are those who are otherwise referred to as
the middle and upper classes, and earlier as ‘the gentlefolk’. In the part
of India I come from, Bengal, we have the term bhadralok, the ‘proper’,
‘civil’, or ‘well-mannered’ people. Beyond good manners, however, a crucial
aspect of civility is power, where this civil class sees itself as being
permanently in power. Although the proponents of civility would prefer it to
be represented as merely a benign and well intentioned rule by those who
have a superior understanding, in reality civility is interpreted and
manifested as power-over – as a force of control, not of emancipation.22 In
West Bengal for instance, even though there has been a government of the
left continuously in power for over thirty years now (since 1977), which
according to any conventional understanding of the left might have been
expected to challenge such an order, there has been no reduction in the
power and hold of the bhadralok over the state. To the contrary, there have
been several instances during this reign of massive repression of dalits, of
which the Left Front government has on each occasion made strenuous efforts
to suppress media coverage.

This is unlike, for instance, the neighbouring state of Bihar – which the
Bengali bhadralok typically sees as being an ‘uncivilised’ state – where
despite continuing caste warfare and extreme caste atrocities, the OBCs
(Other Backward Classes) have come into power during this same period; or in
the also-neighbouring state of Jharkhand where the adivasis have come into
power. This speaks volumes about the power, reach, and resilience of
civility."


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]The political productivity and emancipation of the incivil

"Let me now explain why I propose and use the terms ‘incivil’ and ‘uncivil’
as analytical categories, in contradistinction to ‘civil’ : First, in order
to focus on the dialectical reality of civility; second, in order to make
clear how ‘we’ see not only ‘them’, as ‘the other’, but also ‘ourselves’,
and for ‘us’ to be constantly conscious of this; third, by contradistinction
and opposition, to signal the resistance of such peoples to the singular and
hegemonic norms of the civil – and indeed, to implicitly suggest that there
are many civilities, many different forms and modes of civilisation and of
life; and finally, to politicise the term ‘civil’ and to draw out its
political content and reality.

As I see it, the dynamic of civility plays out as a function not only of
class but also of caste, in those contexts where this applies (right across
South Asia, reaching into Southeast Asia, covering over a billion and a half
people); of ethnicity and race; of faith and cosmology; of sexuality and
sexual preference; of language; and of gender, especially as it intertwines
with some or all of the above.

In this view, those who constitute the core of ‘civil society’ are in
general middle or upper class, middle or upper caste, white (or at least
‘fair’, where in many societies ‘fairness’ of complexion is something that
the upper castes and classes aspire to), heterosexual male, actively or
passively practising the dominant religion in the region, and speaking its
dominant language (and which is often colonial); and also people of colour
and other differentiations and preferences who are allowed by such sections
to join them, on condition of loyalty and adherence to the rules. Those who
constitute the ‘incivil’ – as perceived and stigmatised by the civil – are
the lower classes, the lower castes (and the outcastes), and in general
people of colour, especially the black and the indigenous, and all those of
other languages, faiths, and preferences. There are of course those who have
been successfully domesticated and ‘civilised’, but such people are often
left hanging in a tragic middle world, as second-class denizens.

...

The new reality is that all over the world we are now seeing precisely these
sections of society – peoples who have been historically oppressed and
marginalised by civil society and state – organising themselves; and in
contexts such as Bolivia and parts of India, where they constitute the
majority of the population, they are slowly not just accumulating power but
also asserting it, often (though not always) in independent and insurgent
ways that challenge ruling civil society. They are also building their own
transnational linkages and associations and increasingly putting forward
their own visions of the world. These historically ‘unintended’ worlds,
which I term the incivil, are new societies in the making – of their own
making and on their own terms.

This is of course not a linear process, nor automatically successful in
emancipatory terms. There is plenty of evidence already available of
inversions and implosions. One reason for this seems to be the tendency of
the leadership of such sections to, once they are in power, adopt and
reproduce the laws and customs of their former oppressors; another, the
tendency to use organisational forms and cultures developed in dominant
civil society and that they inherit, and therefore also the hierarchical
social relations embedded in them, as a part of the biopolitics of state and
society.30 But these are inversions that are natural enough; and when seen
in a longer historical perspective there is surely no question that we are
today at a new threshold of human history, a historic deepening and widening
of the democratisation of local and national societies and of global society
– a re-imagining and re-building of the world – that is being undertaken and
led not by civil societies but by the incivil of the world."


[edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society?title=Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society&action=edit&section=5>
]The uncivil underworld

Jai Sen:

"Beyond the incivil, however, lie other worlds : Worlds of gross
exploitation such those of child prostitution and trade in women, of bonded
labour and other forms of slavery, and of trade in organs, drugs, and arms.
These worlds, which overlap with the incivil, are broadly the sections of
society where the criminal, the mafia, and the criminalised lumpen rule. As
films such as The City of God make so dramatically clear, large sections of
contemporary society live these very other lives.32 Even while recognising
that these worlds too are often ultimately controlled and exploited by
members of civil society - and at the risk of oversimplifying things - in
order to distinguish this world from what I am referring to as the incivil,
I refer to this world – this reality – as the uncivil.

Without elaborating further on this complex point, I suggest that we need to
make a distinction between these two realities, incivil and uncivil, and
that this is of vital strategic consequence to the task of building other
worlds. As a contribution to this rethinking, I propose that we use the term
‘incivil’ for the victimised and oppressed who are building insurgent
societies and challenging existing power structures dominated by the civil;
and ‘uncivil’ for those who, while also resisting civil society and
subverting it, do so with motives and actions are that far more limited,
material, and in general criminal and exploitative. In lived reality, it is
true that the dividing line between ‘incivil’ and ‘uncivil’ is often blurred
– but I believe and urge that we need to recognise that these are different
worlds, and crucially, that they co-exist in dynamic tension."


[edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society?title=Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society&action=edit&section=6>
]The World Social Forum as instrument of civil domination and the role of
the incivil movements within and against it

"At the risk of taking several liberties at once, I suggest – on the basis
of my research on the history and dynamics of transnational civil alliances
and of involvement in the World Social Forum process – that there is much
reason to believe that the broad sketch of a process of ‘civil’ domination
that I have attempted here applies also to emerging civil alliances and to
the World Social Forum; not uniformly, nor absolutely, but all too widely.38
An examination of the WSF also yields some insights into other, related
tendencies, of civil corporatisation and the exercise of civil power.

To speak of civil domination is not to say that indigenous peoples of the
world are not establishing transnational or global alliances – they are;39
but it is to suggest that the centres of power in global civil alliance are
still very strongly located in the North, and in the ‘North within the
South’; that they still very much lie with the middle and upper castes and
classes and among white males; and that transnational incivil alliances are
still all too dependent on these power centres. This remains the case even
if some incivil alliances are acutely aware of this centrality and reality
of power, and strategically work with it. An example is the Minga process
that has been launched by the indigenous peoples of Latin and Central
America, with one foot in the WSF;40 another is the struggle of third
generation dalits in India, who have also consciously used the WSF as a
convenient platform.

...

However, wherever mixed alliances have appeared to take shape, or even in
most of the big actions in multicultural contexts such as the US (such as
Seattle in November 1999 or Washington, DC in April 2000), Canada (Quebec
City in 2001), or the UK (Gleneagles, 2005), people of colour, indigenous
peoples, or the incivil in general have so far hardly been seen. By and
large, all such initiatives are still dominated by members and organisations
of ‘civil society’.


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]The WSF is ruled by a transnational civil class

"I turn now to the question of corporatisation within civil processes, and
of the power relations that are contained therein, which build and
consolidate on the structural relations and realities of civility and civil
society. I will again take the WSF as an example.

The WSF is ten years old in 2010, and even though I myself have argued that
it is an extraordinary example of a process in organic emergence, in terms
of learning from its own experience,55 I believe that it has also reached a
stage where it is showing strong tendencies of becoming corporatised, and
thereby losing its soul, its essence. Since I have already presented these
arguments in detail elsewhere,56 I will only summarise them here.

The WSF resonantly calls itself an ‘open space’ – open to pluralism and
diversity –but its history shows strong tendencies both towards cooption, as
discussed above, and also the periodic articulation of strict and
exclusionary rules for membership and / or participation.

Examples are the requirement, at one point, of a written declaration of
adherence to the Charter of Principles of the Forum for membership of its
committees; and the coercive question to those registering for the Mumbai
Forum in 2004 as to whether or not they agreed with the Charter of
Principles. As in many corporate structures, this gate-keeping takes place
not only through articulated rules but also through a ‘tyranny of
structurelessness’ where a barely visible leadership makes (and breaks) the
rules and decides who is eligible to join, without making the procedures
public.58 The social and political dynamics that lie behind such control are
always disguised by a veil of civility, and it takes determined
investigation to lift the veil and show the real face behind.

The tendencies also include an increasingly intense discourse about the
representativeness of the International Council (IC), even though the
Charter of Principles declares that the WSF is not a representative
organisation and does not seek to represent world civil society.60 Although
the IC has taken some steps in recent years towards systematising the
processes of application and approval, the rules and criteria by which
decisions are made remain undeclared. This notionally democratic ideal and
debate about representativeness therefore contrasts sharply with the
long-standing non-democratic and non-transparent organisational culture of
the IC.

There was some possibility that this might change after the IC adopted a
Resolution in Nairobi in January 2007 regarding the need for an assessment
of the internal functioning of the WSF. As it turned out, despite public
reminders61 the Commission established to undertake this review chose to
focus only on the much simpler question of the logistical organisation of
events, and ducked the far more difficult issues that are involved in
regulating relations between different bodies, including relations of power.
Moreover, the final report of the committee remains unavailable, and the new
rules therefore invisible.

This behaviour is also manifested in the degree to which the WSF has become
real estate at local and national levels, especially for those with
political ambitions. Despite protestations to the contrary in its Charter of
Principles, it is often a piece of territory to be struggled over, gained,
and retained, at almost any cost. The experience of the WSF in Mumbai in
January 2004, of the ESF in London in 2004, and of the WSF India process as
a whole, are classic examples of this.63 In most cases the leadership of the
Forum, once installed, never changes, because there are no procedures
established for doing so. This is again a classic manifestation of the
tyranny of structurelessness, where it is always the already powerful who
take advantage of such a situation.

Furthermore, we need to recognise that those who are in the leadership of
the WSF – as manifested in the membership of its International Council – are
also in the leadership of many other significant civil alliances and
coalitions at national, regional, and global levels; not only among civil
organisations but also among social movements. In social and structural
terms, this is remarkably similar to the case of the conventional corporate
world, which Sklair has described as the emergence of a ‘transnational
capitalist class’.64 On the one hand, this prominence in national and global
society has been the driving logic behind the formation and expansion of the
IC; on the other, it makes the IC a hugely powerful body – in effect, a
supra-board of the activist civil world – despite the WSF’s Charter’s and
spokespersons’ very civil insistence that it does not see itself as a locus
of power. It is again precisely the formal denial of this power that is a
manifestation of civility’s power.

Over the years, and through all these actions, the leadership of the Forum
has also at times behaved like that of an organised and orthodox religion,
or party. It has its priests, its faithful constituency, and its rituals.

...

Notwithstanding the declared progressive political intentions of these
calls, the social reality of the Forum is that it remains largely led by
aging males, mostly white or honorary white, from middle and upper class and
caste sections from settler societies around the world, despite the recent
widening of the membership of the IC to include more movements. On the
whole, the spirit of openness and consensus that characterised the Forum in
its early days – which I too have written about and celebrated – is tending
to get lost and be progressively replaced by what seems to be a far more
categorical, hierarchical, and corporate civil structure. I assert this even
while I repeat that the WSF has been an extraordinary example of
institutional emergence (where the process of horizontal spread and
proliferation is far more important than any single event), and even while I
recognise that the leadership of the Forum has often been unusually creative
in terms of responding to challenges and introducing change. All this
however is not mutually contradictory; and indeed, this ability to learn and
adapt is an intrinsic attribute of civility – and more broadly, of retaining
control and power."


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]NGO's and the pacification,cooptation of emancipatory movements and their
leaders

"While one result of NGO mobilisation is a greater exposure for those who
have been historically marginalised and excluded, and through this some
degree of selfawareness and self-confidence, there are many other results as
well. One is that those in the leadership of popular organisations often get
‘lifted off’ the ground by the experience, and uprooted. They either get
progressively more drawn into international level work by their sponsors, to
whom they provide legitimacy, or they get attracted by the perks and power
of international work. But as important is the fact that it is in fact the
NGOs that sponsor them, and their leadership, who tend to move to constantly
more powerful positions through such actions, often behind the scenes. This
does not happen by accident. We therefore need to be more critically aware
of the structural dynamics involved in such situations.

Secondly, we live in a time when the incivil, more than ever before, are
independently and insurgently building their own organisations and their own
transnational coalitions and alliances within and beyond ‘national’
societies. In many instances, they reject the concept and project of the
dominant ‘nation’ within which they find themselves located and which they
seek now to transcend. In some cases these initiatives are emancipatory and
progressive, and in others, regressive – just as in the case of civil
society. But in relation to the much celebrated thesis of ‘globalisation
from below’, in which civil organisations (‘NGOs’) have been projected as
playing the key role, we need to recognise that this is not globalisation
from below (GfB) but globalisation from the middle. More importantly, the
real globalisation from below is taking place in very different ways and
largely quite independently of the celebrated version.

...

Equally possible and real is the well-established practice of civil
organisations co-opting (and thereby ‘civilising’) incivil movements and
tendencies. To cite just one example of stark differences of praxis, there
is a world of difference in the manner in which many dalit organisations
perceive neoliberal globalisation – as potentially one more tool to blow
open the caste structure that has imprisoned them for over a thousand years,
which they regard as their primary issue – versus the formal ideology of the
WSF and the alter-globalisation movement, of opposing neoliberal
globalisation. Despite this major contradiction, the WSF never objects to
their presence, and to the opposite, wants it and celebrates it. We need to
question this selective openness, and reflect on it. If we accept that the
WSF’s opposition to neoliberalism is based on principle, then we need to
recognise that there are deeper reasons than mere opportunism why its
leadership is willing to accept this contradiction but not, for instance,
the participation of armed organisations. The answer, I suggest, lies in the
historical task of civil organisations to civilise the incivil; in this
case, by co-opting them.

Third, we need to far more seriously read and recognise, especially in this
context of competing alter-globalisms, the degree to which the leadership of
international civil organisations, private foundations, and many social
movements promoted by such organisations is coagulating into what has many
of the characteristics of a powerful ‘transnational social class’. As I have
argued above in terms of the WSF, these characteristics include key
individuals (mostly males) across the world being on the boards of each
other’s organisations, thereby building everlarger webs of interlinked
control.82 This is not only true of the WSF.

Fourth, it is important to remember that the recent phenomenal growth and
expansion of civil society and transnational civil organisations is not only
a result of spontaneous association and action, though this has played an
important role. It is also a function of Northern governments being far more
flexible in terms of funding international NGOs from the 1990s onwards, as a
part of the neoliberal project and as a part attempting to secure global
hegemony through the dominance of the Washington Consensus.83 Governments
now see civil organisations at local, national, and transnational levels as
useful, if not yet critical, role players in their larger geopolitical
ambitions."


[edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society?title=Engaging_Critically_with_the_Reality_and_Concept_of_Civil_Society&action=edit&section=9>
]Conclusion

Jai Sen:

To conclude, the emerging global alliance and cooperation between civil,
social, and political actors – that is collectively referred to as ‘global
civil society’ – is first and foremost a crucial vehicle for transnational
civil solidarity, which translates into the consolidation of the hold of
civil societies transnationally.

In a very limited sense, it is true that this coming on to the world stage
of non-state actors contributes to the democratisation of world politics, a
stage that has so far been monopolised by nation-states. But seen through
the lens of the historic larger and wider democratisation that is beginning
to unfold in our times, this cooperation and consolidation is, more
importantly – due to the dynamics of civility and its internal tendencies to
corporatisation that I have tried to discuss in this essay –, an instrument
for the consolidation, strengthening, and imposition of historically unequal
social and political relations and entrenched interests at local, national,
regional, and global levels. In fundamental terms, what is fondly called
‘global civil society’ is therefore today arguably contributing to less
democracy, not more."

-- 
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