Global Civic Society and The Civil Economy

This is the title of a worthwhile article over on openDemocracy.net. Written by Robin Murray, a Visiting Research Fellow at the London School of Economics (as opposed to my position as Resident Applied Fool at the Manorhaven School of Hard Knocks?) on the state of the "Global Civil Society" in 2012. It is actually quite a fine summary of the movement to find an alternative to the neo-liberal globalist model and is extraordinarily supportive of the solidarity economy as a key movement going forward.

openDemocracy is heavily invested in the Globalist tradition. They reject the neo-liberal, corporatist, and nationalist geopolitical thinking but pursue globalism from a cooperative, collaborative, and democratic perspective. Personally, I find it well written and reasonably argued but riven with paradox and contradiction. The article cited, for example, is a very powerful and largely credible argument for relocalizing which, at its root, is a downward transfer of real political power from the National or super-National levels (de-monopolizing money, agriculture, energy, and production in general). It would seem that such a program requires deconstruction of large amounts of existing Law and Institutional-structures and reformation of broader means of governance along syndicalist or federalist lines. It is hard to imagine an effective Global Federation over community-level participatory democracies. The political distance (levels of political abstration) feels too big to bridge given our current state of human enlightenment.

The article is part of a series around the publication of the 10th yearbook, "Global Civil Society in 2012", compiled in 2011 and now available for purchase (Amazon Link ... UK). The previous yearbooks can be accessed at theif KnowledgeBase.