>The civil society
>people are all about neat conversation and the "reasoned"
>mystification of social conflict.
Soft Gramscians also talk about civil society in rather bland terms. I personally believe it is an important concept, but for Marx it was much more problematical. It is an arena in which bourgeois right is fought out, always at best limited as a social right, and treated in an idealised way but in reality in the pay of the bourgeoisie and its allies.
Nevertheless a terrain of battle.
Chris Burford
London