The Hour of Civil Society
Vilas, Carlos M.
The concept of civil society refers to a sphere of collective action distinct from both the market and "political society." When people identify themselves as "civil society," they are seeking to...
...My study on the Sandinista Ellen Meiksins Wood, it insurrection showed that the political-ideological con- catchword embracing a w cepts of "working class" and "bourgeoisie" that peo- aspirations, as well...as a ple constructed were only indirectly related to eco- political retreat...
...Civil society did not awaken from a revolutionary dream...
...New Left Review, 173 (January/February, 1989), pp...
...Many on the Left have reallocated this crucial political role to Latin America's new social movements...
...But valuable as the social movements have been, the literature has not always acknowledged their limitations...
...83-105...
...Socialist Review, 92/93 (July/September, 1992), pp...
...As a result, the popular movement is much more rich, varied and complex today than it was 30 or 40 years ago...
...As I mentioned above, civil society is distinct from political society, but it is not alien to politics...
...Civil society today is a complex mix criticize the reduction of c of cleavage and continuity, rupture and recurrence...
...We are all civil society, but not all of us become activists...
...In fact, the factors listed above further strengthen the identity and power of Latin America's bourgeoisie...
...Raymond T. Smith, Kinship and Class in the West Indies (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988...
...The spectrum of identities that people construct in the course of social action has been significantly extended...
...3 Class doesn't replace these other identities, nor does it necessarily take precedence over them...
...The diminishing political, social and cultural strength of the working classes goes hand in hand The term with-and is the civil has a result of-the con- society" solidation of the rul- clear political ing classes...
...4. See Sarah A. Radcliffe and Sallie Westwood, eds., Viva: Women and Popular Protest in Latin America (London: Routledge, 1993...
...N NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS The Hour of Civil Society 1. E.P...
...See the critiques by Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat From Class (London: Verso, 1986), and Norman Geras, "Post-Marxism...
...The counterpoint of the traditionally close relationship between the elites and the agencies of power is the questioning of that dominance by a broad spectrum of groups and "identities" that fall within a clear definition of "popular...
...According to the rhetoric civitas is the of international Roman version of organizations and state agencies, those polis, the Greek who struggle to survive in the informal city-state...
...On the other hand, they can emphasize the need to coordinate and create new agencies for mediating with the state-new and different parties and unions...
...They constitute a significant dimension of the contemporary collective struggle to build a better world...
...Today, people mobilize as youth, women, homosexuals, blacks, Indians, barrio-dwellers, workers, consumers, etc...
...Families must have the necessary social conditions so they are not forced to take their children out of school to sell tortillas or gum on street corners, or to beg...
...1 4 In German, it is even clearer...
...The macroeconomic and macropolitical stage creates conditions which favor one or another at different moments...
...The recent mobilization of civil society makes explicit the popular dimension of social dynamics...
...1 6 But in Latin America's experience, civil society is principally driven by the politics and structure of class...
...Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1963...
...Above all, they point out that the concept of class links other possible identities, and acts as a frame of reference for them...
...Such is the case, for Writers emphasizing the example, with gender questions or movements based class don't question the on ethnic identity...
...Latin America's great democratic movements have linked the broadening of political participation with the broadening of social participation...
...But to replace class reductionism with class rejectionism is no improvement at all...
...They have linked political reform with social change...
...Civil society stands at the center of today's debate on democracy and development in Latin N America...
...The activation of civil society refers above all to the multiple forms of organization and mobilization of the world of the poor and the powerless...
...VOL XXVII, No 2 SEPT/OcT 1993 39REPORT ON DEMOCRACY But the revolutionary goals of past decades were more than mere dreams, and only a hypocrite would consider their exit from the agenda for collective action to be a voluntary act...
...Although they lack the reach and heuristic potential of a non-reductionist class focus, they indisputably illuminate dimensions of social action that a crude class approach leaves out...
...Class is also central to an understanding of the politics of civil society...
...Today the corporatist and political organizations of the Latin American bourgeoisie have a power-without parallel in the last 50 years-to administer the state, appropriate and distribute surplus value, and shape the contours of social and political life...
...21-43...
...6. Carlos M. Vilas, "Clase, estado y etnicidad en la Costa Atldntica de Nicaragua," Nueva Antropologia, 38 (1990), pp...
...Clyve Thomas, The Poor and the Powerless (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1988...
...40-82, and the responses and counterresponses in New Left Review, 166 and 169...
...work itself...
...We can legitimately recover the concept of civil society without returning to the economic determinism of the past, or embracing the opportunistic subjectivism of political postmodernism...
...2. Carlos M. Vilas, The Sandinista Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986), Chapter 3. 3. See Eric Hobsbawm, "Farewell to the Classic Labour Movement...
...See Eder Sader, Quando novos personagens entraram em cena (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1988...
...31-45...
...Governmental agencies not only lost interest in encouraging popular mobilization, but they tried to crush it...
...New Left Review, 163 (May/June, 1987), pp...
...The residents of a barrio can get together to build a school, but for that school to function, a lot more than unpaid physical work and donated construction materials is required...
...Thus the concept of civil society refers to a sphere of collective action distinct from both the market and "political society"-parties, legislatures, courts, state agencies...
...The protagonism of the churches is linked to their engagement of poor people's issues and demands...
...On the one hand, they can remain aloof from political parties and the trade-union movement, and attempt either to strengthen their direct mediating role with state agencies, or pursue point-by-point negotiations with the party system and the unions regarding specific issues...
...Adam Smith, The Wealth ofNations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), Volume II, p. 236...
...9. Michael Rosenthal, "What Was Post-Modernism...
...The expression burgerlische gesellschaft means "civil society" and "bourgeois society" at the same time.15 Class is not the only conceivable articulating principle or "final reference point" in the activization of the federal railway of civil society...
...The civil society which has been mobilized in recent decades is much more than the proletariat, and the identities of its actors go far beyond the relations of production and appropriation...
...0 As a co nomic life, and had a very ambiguous link to the acteristics of postmoderni ownership or lack thereof of the means of limitation, which means t production...
...The construction of identity involves an awareness of interests, of issues, of rights...
...The greater diversity and multiplicity evident in the concept of civil society is fundamentally linked to that historical moment in which the recent popular reactiVOL XXVII, No 2 SEPT/OCT 1993 41 VOL XXVII, No 2 SEPT/OCT 1993 41REPORT ON DEMOCRACY vation occurred in many countries-the moment of authoritarianism and forced depolitization...
...6974...
...From E.P...
...He is best known for his extensive work on the Sandinista Revolution, and is a member of NACLA's editorial board...
...El Salvador Truth Commission, De la locura y la esperanza: La guerra de 12 anos en El Salvador (New York/San Salvador: United Nations, 1993...
...At the same time, however, other dimensions that were not easily expressed within the framework of traditional institutions-ethnic differences, gender, daily life-began to try out their own forms of As far as people's living conditions are concerned, social movements are more effective in dealing with particular aspects of a problem than the overall problem itself...
...In both cases political/civil refers to what in modern terms we call citizenship, the entitlement to participate in public affairs...
...By ignoring this structural dimension of the issue, the literature on social movements--emphasizing the construction of active identities-ends up reducing them to a sort of socio-narcissism...
...Today social movements-battered by economic woes and by the demobilization of their rank and file-must figure out how to articulate their demands with the political system...
...Obviously, many organizations which fall within the sphere of civil society have enjoyed a long life in the continent's political and social struggles...
...articulation between them...
...7 The women who mobilize are from the poor barrios, workers, single mothers and, to a certain degree, from the urban middle classes...
...In classical terminology, "civil" means political...
...But in general, within this revitalized civil society, few are from the ruling classes or wealthy groups...
...expression...
...Activism creates a confluence of the poor and middle classes-raising the banner of the sovereignty of the people-to confront the traditional alliance of the rich and powerful with the state and its apparatus...
...What is most distinctive about the recent reactivation of civil society is the broadening of the sociocultural reference points for collective action...
...Lawrence Krader, Dialectic of Civil Society (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1976...
...As Michael Rosentha ing from a multiplicity of determinants.' Besides the ty, in its postmodernist ver socio-labor framework, it includes such dimensions that we tell ourselves abo0 as gender, ethnicity, citizenship, religiosity, kinship, the idea of civil society region and community...
...Liberal-capitalist tradition distinguishes between the public and private spheres...
...civitas is the Roman version of polis, the Greek city-state...
...The targets of these mobilizations are institutions of power-the state, the wealthy, bosses, oppressors-and the way power is exercised-class bias, institutional racism, and the sexist slant of policies and institutions...
...The same can be said about human rights, economic policies, and constitutional guarantees...
...Postmodernists present as a virtue what is in fact the result of a struggle...
...73-99...
...See Norberto Bobbio, "Gramsci and the Concept of Civil Society," in John Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State (London: Verso, 1988), pp...
...Today it includes everything from daily life and interpersonal relations in the home, to questions of territory, purchasing power, ethnicity, gender and generation...
...he sociological profile of Latin America's popular classes is currently being transformed by economic restructuring, the opening of domestic economies to international trade and investment, and the reform of the state...
...But some form of agreement among parties and movements must be reached if the power of each is to be effectively increased...
...or in the women's movements across the continent, where women from the ruling classes are stunningly absent...
...There is no "final conceives of civil society ity of circumstantial-even Id denies the existence of he definition of these identi1 critically observes, identision, "is just a set of stories ut who we are...
...Moreover, the ver social subjects to "homo oeconomicus," today we are is left out...
...they rewrite history to suit the taste of the victors, and provide self-serving justifications which distract from the facts...
...Gender and eth- rs became the axis for nicity are offered as possible alternatives by certain currents in feminist and indigenista thinking...
...These mobilizations indicate, at least implicitly, an alternative notion of justice...
...The activation of civil society fomented by social movements broadens the concept of citizenship to include a social dimension...
...In El Salvador, 70% of the victims of extra-judicial executions between 1979 and 1982 were peasants...
...159-175...
...It implies a questioning of such "borders," and indicates the role of the "private sphere" in the gestation of conditions for collective "public" action, and in the reproduction of the political and social order...
...60-94...
...An extensive literature has developed which tends to view social movements as substitutes for parties and unions, and beyond that, as the organic expression of civil society...
...Frederic Jameson, "Marxism and Post-Modernism," New Left Review, 176 (July/August, 1989), pp...
...7 According to postmodernist thinking and neoliby is the result of an always in of these multiple identijust one-and never detery concept of determination :here may be factors which as detonators and reference cted...
...But it is also evident that many of the "old issues" are conceived of differently today...
...Class is central, for exampie, in the extraordinary mobilization of Brazilian civil society, where workers constitute a strategic unifying force...
...Up to that point, the wealthy don't have much to complain about...
...sector are now "micro-entrepreneurs...
...In class that serves as classical terminology, a reference point, not the class frame- "civil" means political...
...The term itself has a clear political connotation...
...The aspects of social dissatisfaction that parties, unions and state agencies used to channel lost their capacity to have institutional expression...
...This is not novel in Latin America...
...Today they increasingly describe the living conditions of Latin America's popular classes...
...Jameson shows the organic relationship between postmodernism and the current phase of capitalist development...
...people from different classes use different frames of reference and meanings in addressing their constituencies...
...The opposite is true of the ruling classes...
...In the ancient world and in feudal society, civil was a category which linked males, as members of certain bodies or ranks, to the state...
...See Ralph Miliband, Divided Societies (Oxford, England: The Clarendon Press, 1989...
...6 Class membership also affects political perspectives...
...What has changed above all is our way of looking at the people...
...5. See Marta Casaus ArzO, Guatemala, Linaje y racismo (San Jose, Costa Rica: FLACSO, 1992...
...The second is the option taken up by those in Brazil, where a new generation of industrial workers became the axis for linking a broad spectrum of social movementsbase communities, favela-dwellers and others-in a process yielding both new union organizations and the powerful Worker's Party (PT...
...What has changed is the connotation...
...on the contrary, it impoverishes our analysis...
...Tens of thousands of Latin Americans went from that "revolutionary dream" to their graves...
...On the victims of counterinsurgent terror in Guatemala, see Carlos Figueroa Ibarra, El recurso delmiedo (San Josh, Costa Rica: EDUCA, 1991...
...The elites become involved in the actions of civil society only when they fear that if "the poor and the powerless" take the lead, civil society could take things too far...
...While ties, among which class is the traditional liberal-capitalist conception reduced minant...
...Protesters carry a banner emblazoned with the faces of revolu- From a bio-demograph- tionary heroes Francisco Villa and Emiliano Zapata in a demonic point of view, the men stration for Indian land rights in Mexico City last November...
...In many situations, it is clear that class identity plays a pivotal role...
...As far as people's living conditions are concerned, social movements are more effective in dealing with particular aspects of a problem than the overall problem itself...
...In Brazil, a new generation of industrial worker linking a broad spectrum of social movements...
...The retreat of authoritarianism and the return to electoral processes, combined with the economic crisis of the 1980s and the later economic restructuring and state reform, have transformed the political scene, posing new opportunities and new challenges for social movements...
...Since the end of the last century, all manifestations of Latin American democratic thought have implied some questioning of the standing socioeconomic order...
...Rather, it organizes them...
...Impoverishment remains a 40N4CIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 40REPORT ON DEMOCRACY recurrent element in the identity of indigenous peoples...
...Simplifying things quite a bit, the first alternative is what Peru's social movements have chosen...
...This depends on global state policies regarding employment, income and welfare, whose designs are usually beyond the reach of social movements...
...2 of revolutionary dreams in multiple determinations of utility of the concept, but lass to its crudest economic dimensions...
...It is possible, for example, that women from the elites experience some of the same problems as their poor sisters, but you don't see them demonstrating...
...and women haven't changed, but the multiplicity of eral ideology, civil societ) reference points allows them to see themselves differ- circumstantial combinatio ently, and to define different courses of action...
...Civil society is not independent of politics, but clearly, when people identify themselves as "civil society," they are seeking to carve out a relatively autonomous sphere for organization and action...
...2 0 These alternatives aren't abstract choices...
...With the rise of capitalism, civil became a dimension of class relations...
...When people identify themselves as "civil society," they are seeking to carve out a relatively autonomous sphere for organization and action...
...The class identity of Latin American workers has been eroded by a number of factors, including the de-salarization of the work force, the growing fragmentation of labor markets, the growth of the informal sector, the crisis in the precarious systems of social security, the weakening of the leadership capacity of unions as well as their ability to achieve demands, and the shrinking number of votes garnered by most leftist political parties...
...points of action is reje This is not entirely new...
...Poverty, insecurity, informality, political oppression, and ethnic and gender discrimination have always been fundamental elements of popular identity in Latin America...
...See Vilas, The Sandinista Revolution, Ch...
...The term "civil society" is broad...
...See CONADEP, Nunca mds (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1984...
...7. In my study of the Sandinista insurrection, for example, I show that while Nicaraguan business leaders characterized members of the informal sector as "micro-entrepreneurs," the Sandinista revolutionaries referred to them as members of the "proletariat...
...Adam Smith unblushingly recognized that civil government "is instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all...
...4 Kinship relations are woven in different ways in each social class...
...Carlos M. Vilas, "Popular Insurgency and Social Revolution in Central America," Latin American Perspectives, 56 (Winter, 1988), pp...
...In the same way, the victims of repression are above all members of the poorer classes.' 9 Only in extreme cases-the final months of the Sandinista insurrection in Nicaragua, or this June in Guatemala, when business elites joined popular sectors to block a possible military coup-do the organizations of the ruling class join the poor in their efforts to mobilize...
...It is principally the poorer classes who have organized to protest the high cost of living and government pricing policies.' 8 Mobilizations against the violation of human rights and in defense of citizenship have been led by the poor and by sectors of the middle classes, with very little, if any involvement of people from the wealthy classes...
...Norberto Bobbio, "Sociedad civil," in N. Bobbio and N. Matteucci, eds., Diccionario de politica (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1982), Volume II, pp...
...The idea that t witness to a greater complexity and openness in the "in the final instance" act construction of the subjects of social action...
...Greater complexity poses problems of expression and representation...
...Almost half of the "disappeared" during the 1976-1983 military regime in Argentina were workers...
...Ellen Meiksins Wood, "The Uses and Abuses of 'Civil Society,'" in Ralph Miliband and Leo Panitch, eds., The Retreat of the Intellectuals: Socialist Register 1990 (London: Merlin Press, 1990), pp...
...While social movements have been able to mobilize resources, strengthen identities, and broaden the popular agenda, it is evident that they have also helped reproduce the fragmentation of the popular classes sought by the state and the market...
...The antecedents of today's urban popular movements reach back to the tenants' struggles of the beginning of this century in Buenos Aires, Panama City and other urban areas...
...1570-1576...
...3. 8. One of the most extreme cases of this relativistic approach is Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985...
...Gender identity, for example, is constructed in a manner linked to the dimension of class...
...Of course these spacial, gender, ethnic, racial, labor and symbolic factors all overlap...
...Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 493...
...8 Postmodernismr classic study of the formation of the English working as the result of a multiplic class, to research on the social bases of Central accidental-identities, ar American revolutions, it has been pointed out that the "objective necessities" in tl concept of social class is a historical construct result- ties...
...What we call civil society today is enormously similar to what we used to call "the people...
...From the poblaciones of Santiago to the squatter settlements of Mexico City, from the Caracas riots of 1989 and 1992 to the movement for impeachment in Brazil, from the toppling of military dictatorships to the struggles against neoliberal policies, the political stage is occupied by a wide spectrum of groups and organizations which fall within the category "civil society...
...it was defeated in its attempts to achieve global change...
...Thompson's instance...
...At certain moments they 9 combine to emphasize, for 9 example, territorial identity, while at other moments a different combination of _ these factors may strengthen economic or cultural = demands...
...9 But when loses precision, comments becomes an "all-purpose ide range of emancipatory whole set of excuses for nsequence, one of the charst civil society is its "selfhe voluntary abandonment favor of radical reform...
...Popular identity was divorced from the unions and parties because these were repressed...
...They have two alternatives...
...The question of gender, like ethnicity, plays itself out within a clear social framework...
...5 The definition of ethnic identities is pursued in an incessant counterpoint with the dynamics of class...
...The famous "demonstration of the cooking pots" of the women of the Chilean bourgeoisie against the government of Salvador Allende had much more to do with political power than purchasing power...
...Certain aspects and dimensions of today's struggles were heretofore unknown, and it would be a serious error to 3ACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 38REPORT ON DEMOCRACY put this new wine in old bottles...
...It is worth recalling that the thinker who best developed the modern concept of civil society was Antonio Gramsci, a man who-let us remind ourselves-shared the methodological and epistemological foundations of Marxism, and who attempted to liberate these foundations from crude economic determinism.' 3 A deterministic emphasis on class is unsatisfactory because it leaves out other dimensions which are as relevant-or more so-in particular situations...
...Social movements-together with the labor movement and the progressive political parties-are an expression of the continual updating of this longstanding popular tradition...
...Translated from the Spanish by Mark Fried...
...Today we are more aware that the paths to social mobilization are much more complex than what sociological analysis, Marxist or otherwise, thought a few decades ago...
...the term civil society points to the Carlos M. Vilas is a sociologist and historian at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM...
...12 Railway workers in Rio de Janeiro protest against the privatization company in 1990...
...In the past, trade unions and political parties acted as reference points for the popular movement, and gave voice to its demands in the political system...
...The notion of "popular" expresses a joining together of a wide variety of people to differentiate themselves from state power and from those who benefit from it, and eventually to confront this established order...
Vol. 27 • September 1993 • No. 2
