Greens in Civil Society.

• Author: Rinehart, Larry

Greens in the US are currently faced with several dilemmas, regarding the form of our organizational unity. The most obvious of these is the question of how the Party organization is to be structured, and whether G/GPUSA should surrender its title as a Party, while perhaps remaining as some other kind of organization. Less obvious perhaps, is the question of how such a non-Party or extra-Party organization might ultimately constitute itself geographically, unconstrained by the kinds of borders that pertain to political, rather than cultural space. My intention in this article is to offer a few bits of a discourse which has been developing in recent sociological/political theory, and which I believe may shed some light on our dilemmas.

The crux of this recent social discourse is the distinction of civil society, as a domain of essentially communicative action, from both political and economic society. As Jean L Cohen and Andrew Arato have it:

The actors of political and economic society are directly involved in state power and economic production, which they seek to control and manage. They cannot afford to subordinate strategic and instrumental criteria to the patterns of normative integration and open-ended communication characteristic of civil society...The political role of civil society in turn is not directly related to the control or conquest of power but to the generation of influence through the life of democratic associations and unconstrained discussion in the cultural public sphere...The differentiation of civil society from both economic and political society...focus(es) on relations of conscious association, of self-organization and organized communication. (CA:ix,x)

This model suggests that party politics and official power, like economic competition and capital wealth, are inherently limiting of the extent of moral and ethical activity that can be accomplished in their respective spheres. It also alludes to the importance of the "other kind" of organization, the public effectiveness of which has been on the increase since the late 1960's, sometimes called collectively the "new social movements."

Autonomous, voluntary, and indigenous associations within civil society using and expanding public discourse and public spaces for discourse are the differentia specifica of contemporary social movements...The sit-ins, boycotts, and freedom rides were aimed at influencing public opinion and thereby the courts to enforce federal laws...