> Chris Burford wrote:
>
> >You have no idea what global civil society is, without being aware you are
> >participating in it now. You are like the bourgeois gentilhomme who does
> >not know he is speaking prose.
> >
> >In short terms, I am coming from a Gramscian perspective. You appear to be
> >coming from some sort of unreconstructed Trotskyist perspective.
>
> Chris, perhaps you could explain what "globl civil society" is, and
> how it differs from the fairly unappealing picture that Hegel and
> Marx painted of "civil society." My impression is that Gramsci was
> talking about a working class civil society, so perhaps you could
> also explain how the working class is represented at the UN (beyond
> the fact that it's uniformed members of the working class who put
> their lives at risk in peacekeeping operations).
Doug, I think you're a little bit wrong here - 'civil society' in Gramsci's terms is basically a concept established in opposition to 'the state' - a bit of a difficult thing to get a handle on, but essentially that layer of people who constitute the body politic who are not part of the state apparatus. He developed the concept in terms of the idea of how a particular group of society exercises leadership over the society as a whole - i.e. how the political programme of the bourgeoisie conditions the political programme of the 'subaltern groups'.
He also raised this question in the light of the question of how a working class might draw behind it the 'intermediate classes' - people like the specialist workers who blur the line between the working class and the petit-bourgeoisie.
Peter -- Peter van Heusden : pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk : PGP key available Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower. - Karl Marx
NOTE: I do not speak for the HGMP or the MRC.