[P2P-F] thinkpiece: How to distinguish civic society from the private sector

Fri Mar 18 11:32:07 CET 2011

for the blog in 10 days or so:

 We have to remember that historically, civil society actually meant the
private sector, but this was a private sector consisting of propertied
individuals and some powerful institutions such as the Church; most people,
slaves, women, non-propertied workers and farmers, where not part of civil
society. This only changed when, through many decades of popular struggles,
active citizenship rights were extented , creating a more vibrant civil
society, with many new types of social institutions such as nonprofits,
parties, but also many informal associations and relationships, now very
evident through peer production. Nevertheless despite these gains in rights
which insure formal equality in citizenship, civil society remains a deeply
divided reality. In many countries, especially in the South, the very notion
of civil society is contested because it still retains powerful exclusionary
mechanisms.

I think we can adapt two changes to the concept, so that it retains its
value, as I think we need a concept that describes what does not belong
neither to the collective state nor to private profit maximisation, but
describes activities that directly benefit the common good. The first is to
use the concept of civiC, rather than civil society, as this clearly links
it with equal citizenship and popular sovereignity.

The second change is that we have to imperative exclude activities for
private gain from the realm of civic society.

 This then gives us the triarchy:

   1.

   of the state, as representative institution (at least in democracies),
   that is formally in charge of the overall collective good, though of course
   in reality we know that it carries out this function for the benefit of
   ruling oligarchies, which means this function must be reclaimed in the
   interest of the citizens.

   1.

   that of the private sector, which contains profit-maximising enterprises
   only concerned with their own private advancement, and therefore, not acting
   as citizens; these activities need to be transformed, so that they can no
   longer ignore positive and negative social externalities
   2.

   civic society then, is reserved for all those individual and collective
   entities which act directly from a perspective of the common good, through
   self-action and self-expression instead of representation (which
   distinguishes it from the state), and this can include market actions, on
   the very important condition that these are subsumed under the common good,
   i.e. undertaken by mission-oriented entities, for which the market activity
   is a means to an end, and not an end in itself or a means for profit
   maximisation.

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