I see a problem in the discussions of "civil society" out there: the term is used by indiscriminatley by authors, pundits, etc. descriptively, prescriptively, and normatively. As description, I see no problem coining a term to refer to non-state. Marx did; and as I understood it he meant the realm of necessity, commerce, bourgoise society. Nowadays, though, it often alludes to non-state AND non-commercial ... without specifying how one can reasonalby be non-commercial (one can, of course, relatively speaking, but one still has to specify HOW if the description is to hold). But as a discription this is about as perniciously ideological as "non-governmental organization", behind which all manner of shit goes down. As normative statement about how society oughta be ... fine, but I'll leave the withering away of the state discussion for another day. As prescription, I've seen it called from from the south (Latin America) from Hernando de Soto free enterpriser types, and principled leftists struggling post-dictatorship, Gramsci in mind, to build bulwarks against the return of facisms. Thus, the comment: >'The contemporary obsession with "civil society" began with the attempt of dissident East European intellectuals to develop a credible theoretical grounding in the early 1980s.< .... is terribly ignorant of other sources of political practice, debate, innovation, ideas. The point here is we need to separate the wheat from the chaff. In the mid to late 1970s thre emerged in Bolivia an amazing amalgamation of human rights, left parties, peasant and labor organiztaions, all figthing under the banner of a return to democracy; to get Banzer out. And they did! Want to call that "civil society"? OK. They did, to some degree. Nowadays I steer clear of the term ALWAYS. Like "development" -- which in the US might well refer to 300 linear meters of strip commercial real estate -- using the term ususal hides more than it reveals. And ususally, I find, there is a better way to talk about whe I mean anyway. For exmaple, here I'm not interested in civil society per se (Lion's Club?); rather, certain kinds of "actors of civil society" who carry a progressive vision of how things ought to be, and work on it daily. Like (many) unions, rights organizations, etc. Tom Tom Kruse Casilla 5812 / Cochabamba, Bolivia Tel/Fax: (591-4) 248242, 500849 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
