Immaculate Conception or Civil Society ?

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Wed May 13 07:17:50 PDT 1998


At 10:46 AM 5/13/98 +0100, Mark Jones wrote:
>Is not the future even WITH economic growth, likely to be one of social
>explosions and insurrectionary risings? And if the neoliberal promise fails,
>what THEN?
>
>The lexicon of the DEBATE journal is curious: In your call for papers, the
>word 'empowerment' is unsurprisingly there but not the words 'state'
'power',
>'police', 'repression', 'class struggle', 'tribalism': absent like the
concepts
> 'narco-culture', criminalisation of the poor, etc, and the fate of black
>people in the new econo-racist S Africa.
>
>You will not create a civil society in S Africa, which is a prerevolutionary
>society and were it not for the dead weight of ideological hegemony which you
>yourself reproduce while moaning about how people are resigned to the market
>etc, there would be risings now. Wait; indeed there ARE constant battles,
as you
>yourself eloquently describe, while simultaneously describing the alleged
>fatalism of the masses.
>
>No, no civil society in the making, but a lot of good careers
>will be made trying to create one.

The wretched of the earth spontaneaously rising and organizing themselves into a formidable force smashing the fetters of global capital cum its purveyors? Well, Hollywood did better than that in the film "Batteries not Included:" cute aliens from outer space helping tenants to kick the butt of an urban 'developer' and his thugs.

In the more mundane reality , the 'corrupt NGOs and social movements' are the only available tools to mobilize people to action -- without those tools people would be waiting for the coming of the Revolution or the Messiah for the next two millenia or so.

I agree that manufacturing abstractions like 'civil society' or 'nonprofit sector' that put under one label the Johns Hopkins Hospital, the National Football League, and a grassrrots organization fighting corporate hegemeony (on the grounds that they are all 'nongovernmental' or 'nonprofit') is an enterprise whose main impact is creating careers for intellectuals such as myself.

But such intellectual gymnastics notwithstanding, the belief in self-organization is tantamount to the belief in immaculate conceptions. Things do not happen out of thin air, and that pertains to social change as well. Things happen because they are caused by material forces -- real people and resources organized for action. Thinking otherwise is very un-Marxian -- for it was Marx who believed that the eptiome of capitalist domination, the factory, will also provide the organizational infrastructure for the movement that will eventually subsume capitalism.

Whatever one thinks of Black religiosity in the US, it is the Black churches that provided the organizational resources and infrastructure for the civil rights movement. Without that organizational structure, provided by entities that are by my standards reactionary, we would still have legal apartheid in the US.

Immaculate concpetion of a revlutionary movement? - give me a break!

Regards,

Wojtek Sokolowski



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