Notes for contribution to Workshop on ‘Zivilgeselschaft International: Teil des transnationalen Blocks und Kampfeld’, in ‘Kapitalismus Reloaded: Internationale Konferenz, Imperialismus, Empire und Hegemonie’, Berlin, November 11-13, 2005. http://www.kapitalismus-reloaded.de/

Global Civil Society: A Concept Worth Defining; A Terrain Worth Disputing

by Peter Waterman
p.waterman@ninter.nl.net

1. The future is not what it used to be

Under a developing national-industrial capitalism, classical imperialism and ‘a world of nation states’, the bearer of emancipation was believed by socialists to be the international(ist) working class, the privileged space of struggle was the factory, industry or the capitalist nation-state/colony, and utopia was a union of socialist republican councils (the USSR) or, in the German Communist song, the ‘Sozialistisches Weltrepublik’.

Given the current transformation to a globalised, computerised, networked capitalism, the displacing, de- and re-structuring of the working class(es) (epitomised in the neologism ‘precariat’), given the generalisation of alienation from capitalism, given the increase in the collective subjects of resistance and proposition worldwide, and given the necessity and possibility of many utopias, it is time to both say farewell to the past and to energetically engage our present.

Saying farewell is not forgetting. This present argument, on the contrary, draws from historical and sometimes ancient traditions of emancipatory, social and socialist thought and action.

Phenomena such as the World Social Forum (WSF), the global justice and solidarity movement (GJ&SM), and the exponentially expanding numbers of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), their networks and cyberspace activities – these cannot be reduced to the traditional political, economic or political-economic categories of left or right. They are most usefully considered under the rubric of a global civil society in construction.

2. We need to both define and dispute global civil society (GCS)

Consider this figure, suggesting that capital, state and (global) civil society are overlapping or interlocked spheres, and that those rooted in the civil sphere can move between poles of Engagement-With and Autonomy-From capital and state (This figure has been omitted for technical reasons ed.)

Consider the following understanding of global civil society:

Global civil society (GCS) can be understood as a sphere of political, ideological, productive/consumptive, cultural and social action between those of capital and state on the one hand, and the family on the other. It is thus inhabited by both ‘Nice’ and ‘Nasty’ Social Movements – or by movements and activities of an ambiguous status or changing character.

This social/cultural/political/ideological sphere is clearly expanding at a time in which state, capital - and the traditional protest institutions primarily addressed and limited to such - are losing authority or legitimacy.

This suggests a local-to-global sphere of social activity independent of, though umbically joined to, ‘the economic’, ‘the political’ and ‘the political-economic’.

Emancipatory movements need to have a radical-democratic project for GCS, with this project understood as one in contradiction with the capitalist and (inter-)state spheres, and seeking to limit the latter.

As such it is a privileged terrain (not the sole one) for the construction of liberty, equality, solidarity, gender and sexual rights, ecological care and cultural tolerance/creation.

This is, however, not a paradise to be announced, discovered or inhabited, it is a habitat to be jointly constructed by autonomous, democratic and pluralist forces. Space within a GCS has to be won- by/provided-for the South, the Women, the Indigenous, the Casualised, the Immigrant, the Sexual Other…

This requires, of emancipatory forces, engagement with/in existing inter-state and capitalist instances and processes. It also requires engagement with/in churches, religions, and within and between NGOs/social movements that often reproduce the structures and behaviours they claim to surpass

The development of a radically-democratic GCS both depends on and stimulates the democratisation, de-concentration and de-centralisation of inter-state organisations, transnational capitalist corporations and religious institutions.

A new concept of world citizenship is required to simultaneously synthesise and surpass those of the past. This would have as its utopian imaginary a citizenship without borders, classes or genders - a ‘world that allows for many others’.

3. Representing, or representing, social emancipation: the case of labour

The institutionalised core of the international labour movement, organised in national-industrial unions and international confederations of such, has long lost any emancipatory aspiration, and even its capacity for effective defensive action. This is increasingly admitted by both the social-reformist and the (ex-)Communist bodies.

Yet the Global Unions alliance continues to claim that it is the biggest and most-representative social movement in the world. It may well be the biggest (with 150 or more million members) but the claim to representation is doubly false. In the first place it will admit to representing only (a currently declining) 13 percent of the world labour force. And in the second place, even this 13 percent does not know that the Global Unions represent it!

Representation, in any case, is not the be-all and end-all of democracy. Democracy has ‘participatory’ and ‘direct’ inflections. And democracy implies an intimate relationship between liberty, equality and solidarity (not to speak of the Common Property of Humankind, of Ecological Sustainability, of Women’s and Sexual Rights, of Pluralism). Furthermore, in a time of a revolution within capitalism, there is a problem not so much representation but of re-presentation – of presenting to one’s real or imagined constituency the new conditions, necessities and possibilities.

Representation implies pyramidal institutions, extending from the local to the national to the international, and, therefore, of vertical flows of information and ideas. But this kind of structure is resistant or hostile to horizontal flows, or to cross-boundary flows of information, feelings of solidarity/community and effective action.

In practice, the inter/national union institutions reflect the interests of labour ‘as through a glass, darkly’. This is why, while they are still heavily invested in the institutions and practices of hegemonic institutions internationally, they have a cautious presence within the World Social Forums (WSFs) and the global justice and solidarity movement (GJ&SM).

Given the prolonged crisis of the labour institutions, there have developed, over the last two or three decades, a myriad of inter/national labour support organisations, media and networks, customarily called (or dismissed), as NGOs (non-governmental organisations).

NGOs are a highly-ambiguous phenomenon, with very varied positions on the Engagement/Autonomy axis, but those closest to the new collective social subjects and democratic movements frequently focus on unrecognised issues or marginalised sectors, or bridge issues (e.g. women and work, work and rights, labour and community, waged-work and self-employment) that the institutions fail to adequately address. The NGO form, moreover, represents a new relationship between technicians/professionals/intellectuals and social movements, previously dominated by the state, political parties or the academy. The radical-democratic ones limit themselves to providing resources (which include ideas) to their intended or imagined community.

Given that unions, like labour-oriented NGOs, can have different orientations toward capital and state, can be similarly in/dependent of state/foundation funding (e.g. for international solidarity work), in different positions on the Engagement/Autonomy axis, there can be no apriori assumption by the former of political priority or ideological privilege.

4. Disputing global civil society: the case of the World Social Forum (WSF)

The WSF, now in its fifth year of existence and still growing and spreading, is sometimes seen as the exemplar of a GCS in construction. It is certainly a rich and complex example of such. So it, too, can be fruitfully considered in terms of its position within the Engagement/Autonomy figure.

The WSF has created an innovatory space and process. It distances itself explicitly from those of capital (neo-liberal globalisation), the state and political parties (state-oriented). It therefore represents an attempt to expand the civil and social at the expense of the political and economic. And it is moving from protest to proposition.

Yet the WSF has been dependent, economically and politically, on the funding and goodwill of states and corporations (foundations), its institutional base is provided primarily by NGOs (themselves of ambiguous nature), and its participants have been overwhelmingly university educated (up to 80 percent!).

The growing presence of labour within the WSF does not guarantee a solution to these problems. The traditional union organisations are themselves heavily compromised with capital and state, and often have an instrumental attitude toward the WSF. The International Labour Organisation (ILO, the UN’s inter-state organisation for labour) is a welcome presence within the WSF.

It is therefore possible that the WSF would provide the space for some explicit or implicit pact, of a Neo-Keynesian nature, by which the WSF (and whatever it is taken to represent) would be drawn away from its autonomous position and emancipatory ambitions, and towards the engagement with capital and state that institutionalised unionism bears within itself.

This, however, merely implies that other labour or labour-oriented forces, and those concerned with increasing the presence, role and power of the working classes within the WSF, address themselves to these issues with more energy than heretofore.

And that they should be equally active within the broader global justice and solidarity movement.

Neither the WSF, the GJ&SM, nor a GCS more generally represent Utopia. But they are privileged spaces within which the road to Utopia can be most effectively discussed, articulated and fought for.

5. Disputing global civil society: the case of the International Labour Organisation (ILO)

The ILO, the UN organisation for labour, is actually an inter-state body, but could also be considered to occupy precisely that ambiguous zone in which civil society, capital and state overlap.

Although capital (25 percent of the votes) and state (50 percent) clearly dominate labour representation (since its foundation having only 25 percent), the ILO is sometimes considered a model of ‘social partnership’ that the UN family could or should follow.

The ILO is, in both theory and practice, a social-reformist interstate bureaucracy devoted to the peaceful co-existence of labour and capital in the interests of the development of capitalism (it was created in 1919, in the wake of the Russian Revolution and its attention shifts to where capitalism is least established or most threatened).

Labour is considered synonymous with unionism in the ILO, and pro-labour NGOs are accepted here, as advisors, only on the tolerance of the unions.

Inter/national unionism is highly dependent on the ILO, hardly has any vision or ambition beyond those of the ILO, is complicit in ILO concessions to globalisation. It also rejects any representational rights to NGOs/social movements (that may be able to reach and speak on the 87% of ‘atypical workers’ that the unions do not or cannot reach). It has no proposals for even the reform of the ILO.

Here, nonetheless, are some proposals for an emancipatory orientation of labour toward the ILO in the era of a globalised networked capitalism:

- Reject current concessions to capitalist globalisation (the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalisation);
- Demand universal recognition of the right to international solidarity strikes;
- Turn the ILO’s policy for ‘Decent Work’ into an international labour movement campaign for the reduction of working hours in general and the equal distribution of necessary work.
- Redefine ‘decent work’ as socially-valuable and ecologically-friendly;
- Organise an international campaign on universal labour rights; start at the bottom by asking working people what rights they most require and which they feel they might be able to achieve;
- Campaign to have international labour questions concentrated in the ILO; give it legislative powers; give it power to veto labour-unfriendly policies of the international financial institutions.
- Campaign for a 51 percent representation of labour in the ILO by 2019 (and do not settle for less than 33 percent);
- Open up labour representation in the ILO to pro-labour NGOs/social movements;
- Start a broad, international, open and well-publicised dialogue about the above.

Whether one considers the ILO a part of global civil society or not, this is surely the right kind of posture for emancipatory movements wishing to expand a GCS and give it a radical-democratic orientation.

Conclusion: the necessity for utopianism

Many will consider these proposals utopian but, as Oscar Wilde said, ‘A map of the world that does not show Utopia is not worth a second glance’.

And a map of global civil society that does not have a utopian dimension is not even worth a first glance.