> Not by any means were or are all civil society theorists or
> practcianers rightist or neo-liberal. <snip> In the Polish case, Adam
Michnik,
> who I met at a conference at UCSC organized by Socialist Review on
> Social Movements in the early 90's, a contributor to, "The Church
> and the Left, " was a collaborator with Jacek Kuron on, "An Open
> Letter to the Polich CP, " a marxist critique of neo-Stalinis...
Yeah, the Polish "dissidents" of the '68 generation, people like Michnik and Kuron, made good use of the "civil society" concept. In their circumstances during the 70s and 80s, it was good analysis and good strategy. If, in the end, things didn't turn out quite the way they expected, well, that's just the cunning of history. Their alliance with the church was always problematic. One can take some satisfaction, I suppose, in the fact that things didn't turn out quite to the liking of the church, either.
I studied and traveled extensively in Poland in the mid-80s. My command of the language was pretty good, though imperfect. I sensed a profoundly reactionary public mood then; many people responded to the church's vision of a faithful society, an updated version of the conservative 19th century image of the faithful peasants falling to their knees in their fields to the sound of the vespers bells from the village steeple. Barf. This was "reactionary" in the truest sense of the word: it was a reaction as much to the grey, boring, slipshod nature of the regime as it was to its underlying brutality. After 1989, though, the religiose conservatism, having served its purpose, went out the window, and Poland became what it had long aspired to be: a "normal" European country, consumerist, libertarian and competitive, mildly social-democratic. The rage of the pope at his fellow countrymen and women is palpable. Yes, they got rid of the hated "Komuna" (an untranslatable contemptuous term for communism), but the replacement was neo-liberal, not Catholic.
In the US, right-wing intellectuals picked up the "civil society" concept and ran with it, applying the idea in circumstances far removed from its origin. This is another instance of the right making use of concepts with left-wing antecedents for their own nefarious purposes.
Jacob Conrad