Yes, drawing a bit on Gramsci, Mzwanele Mayekiso did a 1996 Monthly Review book, Township Politics: Civic Struggles for a New South Africa. The book explains why the phrase "working-class civil society" became popular here so as to explicitly contrast the political project of mass democratic struggle organisations with early 1990s efforts of the World Bank, US AID, etc, to shrink the soon-to-be-liberated state under the guise of promoting civil society... and to explicitly stake some turf in what most critical observers knew would be another African nationalist compradorisation process... Patrick (Johannesburg) > Jim Devine wrote, > >But there's a bigger meaning of "civil society": it often means society > >outside of the state. Within this realm, it's possible we could have a > >"proletarian (or oppositional) civil society." But for clarity, we have to > >use a term like counterhegemony (following Gramsci).
