"Civil Society"

[Chris Burford]

In Britain where we also almost have a government pretending to be a
government of national unity, we seem to be going in a similar direction.
Active embracing of global neo-liberalism. Decentralization of social
control into many competing agencies which at best are supposed to come
together in a pluralist civil society. The theoreticians of New Labour know
their stuff.

But despite the positive emphasis given to the concept of civil society in
the Gramscian tradition, it is worth remembering that Marx's approach as in
"On the Jewish Question", was deeply critical of bourgeois civil society.
It is atomised and fragmented, it is the counterpart of the economic
dominance of commodity exchange, in which the unit of social value is the
bourgeois civil right. 

No matter how many progressive organisations blossom in a pluralist
Mandela-ite or Mandelsonian civil society, which pursue what are the
bourgeois civil rights of the disadvantaged, this will not imperil the
dominance of neo-liberalism without a global political strategy.

Chris Burford

London.