[lbo-talk] Corey Robin on AJE on Bluestocking panel

lbo83235 lbo83235 at gmail.com
Tue Nov 15 10:31:41 PST 2011


I wasn't really following this thread until shag's last post, which prompted me to read Corey's piece. I think shag's criticism is essentially right, but I'll add a couple of observations:

First, I think the whole state / market / civil society framing is really problematic, and in fact plays into continuing capitalist dominance. Current usage of the term "civil society" is a recent development (especially the past 25 years or so), and has been substantially reinforced and entrenched internationally through financial support, initially from some of the major foundations (Mott, Ford, Atlantic, Rockefeller) and subsequently through public foreign assistance programmes (USAID, DFID, etc.). To my eye, this "professionalisation" of the sector was accompanied by a significant contraction in the meaning of the term: away from its original usage in Hegel - where it was more an approbative term for the kind of society we should be creating (i.e., a civil one), and where "civil society" was all-encompassing (i.e., where the state and the market were both understood as integral parts of an appropriately "civil" society) - and toward the current usage, where "civil society" more often names just one sector or sphere of "society," with state and market as other "sectors" thereof. This essentially neutralised much of the potentially emancipatory energy that was at risk of (up)rising through the NSMs and other organising efforts, and undermined what might otherwise have taken the form of a healthy craving for explicit class analysis. I've worked closely for years around people for whom "civil society" isn't just a descriptive term in an analysis, but also a significant element of their professional identity, and although they're generally much more class-aware than their professional peers in the "private sector," there's also a lot of resistance to the suggestion that the term "civil society" has itself become part of the repressive ideological apparatus.

Second, it seems to me the role of official violence in protecting capital is being given short shrift. As the source of capital's "violence of last resort," "legitimate" organs of violence such as the police essentially create and maintain the space within which "private" violence is "fair game": without the implicit backing of the full might of the state, I don't believe private perpetrators of such violence would have nearly the free reign they do. That isn't to dispute the profound internalisation of the policing function over several generations that Foucault so effectively highlighted, but Corey's analysis seems to overlook this "backstopping" dimension.



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