>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.
I understand the role of c.s. in establishing the hegemony of a ruling class, but I thought that part of Gramsci's program was to develop working class institutions in opposition to the hegemonic ones. I also thought - and maybe Patrick Bond can elaborate on this - that South African leftists, following Gramsci, had been talking explicitly about the importance of developing a working class civil society.
Doug