Weighing in at 1.2 kilo, almost 500 pages long, and priced at US$40 for the paperback, the fifth edition of the Global Civil Society yearbook (Glasius, Kaldor and Anheier 2005) continues to impress and provoke. It is also an exceptionally attractive publication. There is here an echo of the World Social Forum, which is also five years young, and to which GCS 2005/6 devotes some 80 pages.

What you are now reading is not a review, since I don’t know how anyone could even read GCS 2005/6 before the GCS 2006/7 appears, except by going on a civil society retreat for a month. (I am, however, thinking of proposing to my autonomist friends that we do a joint review (1)). So this is simply an initial reaction, based on the London School of Economics book launch, October 6, 2005, and an initial scan of the most-interesting-to-me chapters.

The theme of the launch was ‘Global Risk: How Civil Society Responds’. This is the theme of the Introduction to GCS 2005/6 and, arguably, of the chapters on climate change and labour migration, though not, surely, of the volume as a whole. The Introduction nonetheless presents a rather broad and balanced account of the topic, recognising the relationship of ‘unbounded’ risk to differential national, class (including ethnic and gender) positioning, as also the manner in which risk is being increasingly linked by civil society activists with social injustice – and thus with the global social justice movement. One could add to this interesting chapter another aspect, stressed by Francine Mestrum (2005), that the World Bank is systematically attempting to transform social security into ‘risk management’, with the latter intended to create citizens functional to a high-risk global capitalism. Another crucial aspect of risk is revealed by Naomi Klein (2005), the rise of ‘disaster capitalism’. Capitalism, thus, not only produces risk, it also turns a pretty dollar from disaster (social or ‘natural’).

Two points occurred to me during the launch (I mean apart from the need to brush up my Risk Society theory).

The first was the limited presence of another thought-provoking concept, ‘capitalism’, in the three major presentations. My companion and I counted but two passing mentions. So I thought I would compensate by using the word twice in my question:

Given that risk was born with capitalism, and that a society of manufactured risk has been generalised by a globalised capitalism, do we not need to consider surpassing (not overthrowing) this in order to minimise at least destructive risk?

‘No’, said Anthony Giddens, someone whose writings had earlier inspired mine, admittedly before he had been raised to the British House of Lords (a Consequence of Pre-Modernity)(2),

The Communist world produced its own risks, such as Chernobyl, and I believe the market is capable of correcting its own errors.

I considered this a Red Herring - especially bearing in mind that I had not even mentioned my own Communist background (which ceased a decade or so before Chernobyl and several before Ulrich Beck’s discovery of the risikogeselschaft)! I also considered it a pathetic response, considering that the capacity of the US/UK market-worshipping society to self-correct after its invented global risk in Iraq, New Orleans, Manufactured Unemployment/Overwork, Racism, Obese Kid/Starving Child Syndrome, Road/Bus/School/Hospital-Rage, and Generalised Fear and Hatred, has yet to be demonstrated. Let me put this another way: I cannot imagine a globalised capitalist society - founded as capitalism is on possessive individualism, gambling, commoditisation and competition - reducing destructive global social risks (if of ever newer and more bizarre kinds).

The second point arose with Mary Kaldor’s introduction of the same Tony Giddens. Now retired from the post, he had, as Director of the LSE, announced his intention to make it a centre for civil society studies as it had once been a centre for study of the welfare society.

There are, indeed, now two centres of civil society studies at the LSE – one, I suppose, national or general http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/CCS/, one specifically global. This latter one, the Centre for the Study of Global Governance (CSGG), source of the yearbook, is certainly the more prominent http://www.lse.ac.uk/Depts/global/1news1.htm. And I would have thought that the yearbook alone was sufficient to make the LSE what Giddens had intended. Whether, the centre will be as functional to the civilising of a globalised networked capitalism as the LSE’s welfare state studies once were to that of national industrial capitalism, is a mute point. The answer may depend on whether one sees civil society as somehow independent of capitalism and free of class determination or significance, or understands it as an arena of dispute between the hegemonic forces of capital and state, on the one hand, of repressive/fundamentalist forces on another, and of emancipatory forces on yet another (I am here thinking of a Third Hand rather than a Third Way).

The launch exuded an air if not of triumphalism about the achievements of Western civilisation, at least a sense of - what – quiet self-satisfaction? A sense that the creation of a global civil society is the major unfinished task of liberal capitalist modernity? And that the yearbook (now to appear in an Arabic edition), is a major contribution to this project? Yet, unless one holds to some Primitive Marxist, Domination or Conspiracy school, in which contradiction has no place, one has, I think, to take the yearbook as something more complex than a mere function of something else.

To start with, there are those 80 pages on the WSF, divided into two main chapters and involving four major contributions plus additional authored boxes, plus documents, tables and diagrams (Appendix A). The first carries contributions from three major WSF personalities, Chico Whitaker (Brazil), Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Portugal) and Bernard Cassen (France). This chapter, moreover, is intended to reveal major tensions amongst even such prominent figures about the present and future of the WSF. The excellent joint chapter by Marlies Glasius and Jill Timms (respectively Dutch and English, both long associated with the yearbook and the forums) continues and broadens this initial dialogue, presenting several unique figures and tables. It includes extensive boxes on various editions or aspects of the WSF by such young writers, of autonomist inclination, as Giuseppe Caruso (Italy), Oscar Reyes (UK) and Jeff Juris (USA).

Here, it seems to me, the yearbook overlaps with the WSF, becoming another space within which the forums and dialogue around them find expression. It is, of course, possible, from the Conspiratorial Determinist Marxist subject-position, mentioned above, to see the WSF, GCS 2005/6, and the very concept of civil society (global, national, local) as either themselves capitalist or as contributing to its reproduction under 21st century conditions. Here, it seems to me, two points are relevant.

The first is that made by Alberto Melucci (1989) about the ‘new social movements’ (NSMs) of the 1970s. He said that capitalism needed the them to provide it with signals and stimuli for its continued self-reproduction. This did not, either in his estimation or mine, imply a dismissal of the NSMs of that period or ours, since capitalism can make differential use also of religious fundamentalisms, of Communist states, and of self-styled vanguard parties of the hypothetically revolutionary and internationalist proletariat.

The second point is that capitalism – and the institutions and ideologies of old, stagnant or declining social movements – are only truly happy with dialogues they can dominate or control. Now, whilst it may not be true that ‘information wants to be free’, it would seem part of a definition of emancipatory ideas and movements that they want this. And that such should find expression within the global justice and solidarity movement in general, in and around the World Social Forum process in particular, and even in a GCS yearbook funded by a series of either more or less capitalist foundations and institutions. The latter are listed for easy access in the yearbook itself (GCS 2005/6:vii).
‘Fundingmentalists’ - people who believe that under a liberal capitalist dispensation the tune is simply and totally determined by the one who pays the piper - can afford, from their position of high moral dudgeon, to declare this, and therefore to dismiss unexamined what is so funded. The rest of us, particularly if we are confident of the power of our arguments, and are prepared to get our hands dirty and our faces dirtied (by the more-revolutionary-than-thou), are going to have to recognise the ambiguities of emancipatory struggle and dialogue, and respond to the phenomenon under discussion, whether this be a concept, a publication, or a movement. Here a long parenthesis (actually two) on similarly-subsidised centres and projects would seem in order.

Parenthesis 1. On the one hand we have the rather elegant Dutch-based Civil Society Building Network http://www.civilsocietybuilding.net/csb. This has published a report of a conference on civil society under ‘adverse conditions’ – a notion that curiously excludes the USA or the Netherlands (Ferguson and Biekart 2005). The options presented by this project are either ‘confronting’ or ‘engaging’ the state – presumably in the interests of ‘development’. Here ‘civil society’ appears as this decade’s alternative to ‘participatory development’, at least in the Netherlands. Seeking an explanation for the narrowness and febrility of this Dutch project when compared with the breadth and energy of the UK-based one, I can only suggest, 1) the long, deep, destructive and provocative UK impact of neo-liberalism, which has been only in the last few years getting its teeth into Dutch society, and/or 2) the incorporation of the Dutch project into the hermetic and self-referential world of development NGOs and development studies.

Parenthesis 2. On the other hand we have the Centre for Civil Society in Durban, South Africa http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/. The nature of this serious and highly-productive centre is suggested by a recent publication (Centre for Civil Society Research Reports 2005), subtitled ‘Problematising Resistance’. This consists of six reports, mostly about social movements, in South Africa, elsewhere in Africa and internationally (Appendix B). If we were to construct a global civil society spectrum, it would seem possible to place the Dutch project at the ‘engaged’ end, the UK one in the middle and the South African one at the ‘autonomous’ end. Whilst this is an inference rather than a declared position, I think it is implicit in the extensive conceptual/political introduction to one of its regular annual reports http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/files/CCS%202004%20Annual%20Report_web.pdf (which also makes reference to the GCS Yearbook).

So much for parentheses.

Since I have previously discussed the presence/absence of women, workers, the WSF and the worldwide web in the yearbook (Waterman 2003), and since the yearbook has more recently done well on workers and the WSF, I should here welcome a major chapter on gender by Jude Howell, one on labour migration by Meghnad Desai, and yet another on computerised socio-political mobilisation by Manuel Castells and colleagues. I have, however, only read the first of these three, not the other major chapters, nor the unique and invaluable Data and the Chronology customary to the yearbook. Of the gender chapter I can only say that whilst it provides a thought-provoking theoretical prolegomena to the question, it considers global civil society as if this could be defined, or could exist, separate from global social movements. Curiously, thus, it has boxes on India’s transexual and global men’s movements, but no direct consideration of global women’s/feminist movements (for some of the literature on which see Waterman 2005).

Lastly this: beg, borrow or steal GCS 2005/6. You won’t regret it, and the prison sentence might provide you with some kind of obligatory retreat, allowing you to read it before the next one appears.

(1) 'Autonomist', a term that recurs below, is a concept derived from the libertarian Marxists of autonomia operaia in the Italy of the 1970s http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomia_Operaia. I use it here loosely to also include possibly non-workerist anarchists and other emancipatory tendencies that critique old emancipatory traditions such as social democracy, communism, and radical nationalism/populism. Whereas the latter are customarily state-oriented, the autonomists favour self-organisation, the surpassing of both capital and state, as well as social and human alienation in all its forms.

(2) I refer here to The Consequences of Modernity (Giddens 1990), rather than The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Giddens 1998). The first was a pioneering work on contradictions under the new globalised capitalism. The second has to be considered theoretically without interest and politically without influence.

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