INTRODUCING GRAMSCIAN CONCEPTS.

INTRODUCING GRAMSCIAN CONCEPTS. TOWARDS A RE-ANALYSIS OF BANGLADESH'S POLITICAL HISTORY 1. After the Demise of Asian Revolutions In recent decades, interest in the theoretical ideas of the Italian revolutionary philosopher Antonio Gramsci has steadily grown in India and in Bangladesh. Along with the demise of the great 20th century proletarian revolutions in the Asian continent, a critical search has started. This search for renovation - almost inevitably it seems - leads us to Antonio Gramsci, who was incarcerated by Italy's fascist regime after having led his country's Communist Party for a brief period in the 1920s. Gramsci posed, and tried to overcome as no other theoretician, two central weaknesses in the Marxism of his days: the lack of a thorough understanding regarding the role of intellectuals in society, and the lack of a comprehensive theory covering society's superstructural relations. Thus, Gramsci sought to construct a theory of politics as an autonomous sphere in society, and to this end he devised a number of original concepts. In the below essay I will summarize the meaning of the Gramscian terms civil society, ideological hegemony, passive revolution and the historical bloc, and I will also briefly indicate what in my view is the significance of Gramsci's conceptualisation of the role of intellectuals. A truthful review of the meaning of Gramscian ideas today has become imperative for more than one reason. On the one hand it is my conviction that one of the reasons for the demise of Asian revolutions is to be sought in the fact that these revolutions, by and large, failed to develop a dialectical understanding regarding the role of society's professional intellectuals. Policymakers in the Cambodian revolution, for instance, combined the peasantry' deep distrust of educated people with an orthodox Marxist view of the superiority of the manual over mental labour. This attitude resulted in murderous practices vis-a-vis society's professional intellectuals. Again, it appears to me that the lack of a sharp distinction between recognized and nonrecognized intellectuals and the lack of a refined analysis regarding the various distinct layers and groups of intellectuals in society, are factors laying at the roots of the deformation of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Hence, a study of Gramsci's theoretical approach which identifies politics as the job of intellectuals, appears to be crucial for any evaluation of what went wrong in China. Such a study, most likely, will also result in new insights into the process of political evolution of East Bengal/Bangladesh. Unfortunately, the adoption of a Gramscian theoretical approach has been complicated by the work of the socalled Subaltern School. Interest in Gramscian ideas, in the wake of the demise of Asian revolutions in the 1980s, was initially promoted by the Calcutta-based Subaltern School. This school of thought derived its very name from a term Gramsci employed in his writings to pinpoint the fact that the autonomous experience of society's oppressed is often skipped in academic writings on history. Yet while the Subaltern School for a while adopted certain Gramscian concepts, members of the School have evolved towards a profoundly anti-Marxian position. Partha Chatterjee, for instance, whose analytical work on the history of India/Bengal has drawn much attention, has been criticised heavily for his interpretation of the history of Indian nationalism. In Chatterjee's interpretation, the notion of (religious) community reportedly replaces that of class. Though Chatterjee initially had advocated the application of typically Gramscian concepts to Indian history, - his more recent evolution in thought threatens to discredit any efforts to apply Gramscian concepts to political life in the subcontinent (1). Hence, the urgent need for a truthful and integral presentation of Gramsci's theoretical ideas. Below, I will provide a summary, and no more than a brief summary, of the key concepts which Gramsci devised (or redefined, as in the case of the concept of civil society) (2). However, I would like to stress from the start that my advocacy of Gramscian concepts will not be an uncritical one. For instance, Gramsci's categorisation of intellectuals, no matter how profound if compared with the categorisations of intellectuals that have been offered by V.I.Lenin and Mao Tsetung, remains rudimentary: in order to formulate a credible Marxist policy on intellectuals we need to introduce further categorisations. Also, Gramsci nowhere discussed how the social division of labour between tasks that are predominantly mental and those that are mainly manual in nature, intersects with the gender division of labour. Hence, from a feminist perspective too, Gramsci's theoretical work was incomplete. Nevertheless, as I will seek to demonstrate in this two-part essay, the set of concepts proposed by Gramsci offers us a very powerful tool to understand the political evolution of East Bengal/Bangladesh in the 20th century. It helps us in one go evaluate the past, and advance an innovative Marxist politics for the future. 2. Distinct View Regarding the 'Superstructure' The last decade of the 20th Century has heralded a new phase in the history of Marxism, - a period in which the ideology of 'marxism-leninism' that guided the first period in the building of socialist societies (1917-1989) will see a powerful transformation. The Marxism of future generations, I expect, will be qualitatively richer in content than the Marxism which previous generations of humanity have known. Further, in opting for and advocating the enrichment of philosophical Marxism, we need to give importance to the specific theoretical contribution that was made by the Italian socialist politician and thinker, Antonio Gramsci. While he was imprisoned under fascism, after having briefly led the Communist Party of his country as General Secretary, Gramsci performed a vast work of historical and theoretical investigation, resulting in a unique conceptualisation of political processes in class society. While defenders of Gramsci, in decades when orthodoxy held sway in the international workers' movement, have stressed his loyalty towards leading theoreticians such as Lenin, - Gramsci's originality in thought was really large. First, as wellknown, Karl Marx taught that all class societies consist of a 'base' and a 'superstructure'. The base consists of production relations, i.e the economic relations between exploiting and exploited classes, which relations are determinant 'in the ultimate analysis.' The superstructure that arises on the basis of these economic relations consists in the state's legal and political apparatus. This is erected by society's dominant class in order to ensure its control over the entire social life, and in order to provide guarantees for the economic exploitation by this class. Antonio Gramsci agreed with and used the framework of analysis laid down by Karl Marx, but he also carried Marx's work forward, by putting forward a distinct view regarding the superstructure of class societies. Here he emphasized the point that there exists an intermediate sphere between the state on the one hand, - and the economic base of society on the other. In Gramsci's view, the analysis of this intermediate sphere is essential, if we are to understand fully how class domination is maintained. Now, in pursuing his analysis of the intermediate sphere, Gramsci employed two concepts which had been used by Marxist and non-Marxist teachers before him, but without the precise meaning which he attached to them. These two concepts are those of 'civil society' and of 'ideological hegemony'. Both concepts can be traced in classical Marxist literature, but it is nevertheless true that Gramsci employed them in a novel manner, - precisely in order to highlight the existence and functioning of an intermediate sphere in class society. Moreover, this intermediate level of society is not a vague or mystical entity, but is a sphere which is occupied by concrete human beings, i.e. by society's professional intellectuals. While Gramsci was aware of the fact that all intellectuals have a class position, that in one way or another they do form part and parcel of the economic base of society, he nevertheless insisted that intellectuals have a superstructural task: namely the building of consent, of public opinion among the diverse social classes and layers, in favour of society's dominant class. Hence, Gramsci taught us that (professional) intellectuals perform an autonomous social function, located between state repression - and the direct appropriation of labour's fruits by capitalist enterprises. 3. Gramsci's Use of the Term 'Civil Society' Let's now try to delineate the meaning of each of Gramsci's concepts separately. The term civil society can be traced to the great 19th Century German philosophers. It was used both by Marx and by Hegel, from whom Marx borrowed (a part of) his method of analysis. Hegel had used the term civil society to refer to all pre-state relations, i.e. to all relations beyond the immediate sphere of the state. Thus, for Hegel, the term civil society included all economic relations. Further, Marx too had employed the term civil society in his writings, but contrary to Hegel had restricted it to refer only to the economic base of society. It can be very confusing to compare the definitions given by various philosophers for the same concept. Nevertheless, for a proper understanding of Gramsci's system of thought it is necessary to know that the definition of the term civil society has historically evolved, and that Gramsci transformed the meaning of the term to suit his own theoretical ends (3). To repeat for the sake of clarity, what has been briefly stated in the section above: Antonio Gramsci, contrary to Hegel and Marx, used the term civil society exclusively to describe and conceptualise the superstructure, and in particular those institutions of the superstructure which do not (or not officially) form a part of the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state. They include church institutions; the educational establishments, ranging from primary schools to the academia; the media such as newspapers, journals and the radio; trade unions and political parties; and all other intermediate institutions that play a distinct role in the intellectual and moral life of society. In short, the term civil society covers all the institutions located in the intermediate sphere of class society. Gramsci realised perhaps more sharply than other theoreticians of the workers' movement in his time, that the 'weight', the influence, of these institutions expands gradually as capitalist society evolves. Further, there were concrete historic reasons impelling Gramsci to conceptualise capitalist society in the given manner. Gramsci believed that the failure to achieve a revolutionary transformation in countries of Western Europe after World War I needed a specific explanation. After all, the expectation of imminent revolution had been quite widespread, reflected for instance in the theory of more or less automatic 'breakdown' of capitalism. Gramsci from his side believed that (then) existing Marxist analyses of revolutionary transformation were onesidedly 'economistic': they wrongly presumed that a crisis in production relations, in the base of society, would inevitably result in a revolutionary outburst, in the conquering by the working class of the institutions of the capitalist state . As Gramsci argued, Marxists had underestimated the influence which institutions belonging to civil society hold over the thought processes of subaltern classes. These institutions serve to ideologically re-inforce the subservience of society's oppressed. In other words, Gramsci's theoretical ideas were grounded in his analysis of European history, and it would not be wrong to state that the 'Prison Notebooks' which contain his mature theoretical ideas, are eurocentric in content. When comparing the political processes in France, Italy and other European countries, Gramsci primarily addressed the increasing complexity of superstructural institutions and relations in socalled 'advanced' capitalist societies. Yet, as we will see in the second part of this essay, the term civil society and other Gramscian concepts can very well be used to analyse the political evolution of East Bengal/Bangladesh during the twentieth century. Though most institutions belonging to the intermediate sphere were erected only in the later part of British colonial rule or more recently, - they have in course of the previous century come to exert a crucial influence upon the intellectual and moral life of East Bengal/Bangladesh. Lastly, it is necessary to emphasize once again that Gramsci considered civil society to be an arena of class struggle. It is here that different classes compete for ideological hegemony in society, and their competition can take a variety of forms, including both non-violent and violent forms. In recent decades, the concept of civil society, while neglected by Marxist parties, has been much abused by reformist propagandists, who aim at mystifying social relations and at confusing the public. Non-governmental organisations, for instance, project civil society as their arena for participation in bourgeois politics. Yet for Gramsci, the use of the term civil society was closely related to his conceptualisation of class society. He used the term not to weaken or undermine, but precisely to strengthen the class struggles of the proletariat and other classes striving to achieve liberation from exploitation, from oppression and from ideological domination by the bourgeoisie. 4. The Concept of Ideological Hegemony Gramsci's use of the term 'ideological hegemony' is closely related to his conceptualisation of civil society, and it too underlines the originality of his Marxism. First, the term is used with the specific purpose of highlighting the fact that a society's ruling class applies two methods to maintain, enforce, the loyalty of its citizens. On the one hand, the ruling class does not eschew the use of physical force to suppress dissent and impose obedience, but it generally tries to also build social consensus by applying non-violent means. While the state's apparatus of repression (the police, the army) are entrusted with the task of applying force and coercion, - the institutions of civil society and the functionaries employed here undertake the task of building consent. Ideological hegemony, then, refers to the cultural and moral leadership exerted by the ruling class over society's citizens via the institutions of civil society, in order to ensure acceptance of the ruling class' policies. Like the term civil society, the term (ideological) hegemony was not invented by Gramsci himself, but was derived by him from the writings of his Marxist precursors, more particularly from the writings of Lenin. As well known, Lenin's historic contribution towards the Marxism of his days was that he (re)asserted the primacy of political over economic struggles, and that he devised many ideas to advance the political struggles of the Russian proletariat. Previous to Gramsci, Lenin waged intense philosophical and political battles against the danger of 'economism'. Now, the concept of hegemony quite clearly was a part of the vocabulary of Lenin and of his party, the 'Social Democrats'. In Lenin's writings, the term referred to the role of leadership in a class alliance. Thus, he spoke of the hegemony of the proletariat over the peasantry, meaning the leading role of industrial workers over their rural allies in the democratic revolution. While this hegemonic role was based on the proletariat's central economic position, it according to Lenin had to be asserted politically. Hence, hegemony signified: the political leadership of the working class (4). Gramsci did not copy Lenin's term, but re-adapted it to elaborate his theory of society's intermediate sphere. In employing the concept of ideological hegemony, he sought to develop an original, Marxist understanding of superstructural relations in class society. While Gramsci fully agreed with Lenin on the need for working class leadership, he laid great stress on the need for the proletariat to (also) assert its leadership culturally and ideologically. Just as the ruling class made sustained efforts to build consensus in favour of its policies via the school system, the media, etc., - the working class too should undertake sustained efforts, via all structures of civil society, to convince the various classes and layers of the oppressed that its policies were just. Otherwise, any working class power is bound to be short-lived, ephemeral, and the bourgeoisie will easily re-assert its predominance. In short, Gramsci's theoretical work was geared towards rethinking the preconditions that need to be fulfilled before the proletariat is ready to conquer state power. In putting forward his distinct concept of ideological hegemony he reformulated the nature of proletariat politics. 5. Intellectuals and Politics I now wish to discuss what is perhaps the most decisive contribution which Gramsci made towards Marxism, ie..his conceptualisation of intellectuals. So far I have referred to two elements in Gramsci's analysis of the superstructure of class society: i.e. the intermediate sphere which he termed civil society, and the method of consensus building via the institutions of civil society, refered to as the construction of ideological hegemony. We now need to look at the strata which 'populate' these institutions, i.e. the strata that are entrusted by the ruling class with the task of consensus building. These strata are identified by Gramsci as the various layers of professional intellectuals. Although other Marxist theoreticians, such as Lenin and Mao Tsetung, discussed what contribution intellectuals can make to the emancipation of the oppressed, - Gramsci's views on intellectuals to my knowledge are (comparatively) the most mature views on the issue of intellectuals in the history of Marxism (5). First, Gramsci refused to consider intellectual activity as an exclusive activity, undertaken only by a very privileged layer in class society. Seeking to democratise the meaning of the term (which originally referred only to the very most prominent opinion-builders in society, such as famous philosophers and novelists), he insisted that human beings commonly engage in intellectual activity, since it is common for peasants and workers to think about the broader world, i.e. the world beyond the immediate sphere of their own production. Thus, Gramsci's thesis states that 'all human beings are intellectuals'. Parallel to this, Gramsci also countered the mechanistic notion which counterposes 'physical' and 'mental labour' as two disconnected forms of labour. In Gramsci's view, purely 'physical labour' does not exist, for all productive labour involves the use of the human brain! Hence, Gramsci tried to re-instate a dialectical understanding regarding the character of human labour, and his conceptualisation is essential to an understanding of 20th century capitalist management methods, i.e. Fordism and Toyotism (6). Returning now to our discussion on civil society, - it is nevertheless true that there is a section of the population in class society, which makes a living on specialised knowledge, i.e., society's professional intellectuals. Admitting this, Gramsci proceeds to identify a number of categories of intellectuals, which are unique categorisations. A distinction which is immediately relevant for the struggles of the oppressed, is his distinction between 'organic' and 'traditional' intellectuals. Organic intellectuals are those intellectuals who represent the interest of 'rising classes' under capitalism, i.e. either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. When representing the oppressed, such intellectuals directly hail from slaves, from feudal peasants, waged workers, etc., and they develop their own worldview primarily in course of their organisational work in the revolutionary movement (7). Traditional intellectuals, on the contrary, form an intrinsic part of the old class structure of society; their interests are tied up with the interests of the aristocracy and landlords, i.e. those classes which have a vested interest in opposing societal change. While it is often presumed, by superficial 'post-modernist' readers of Gramsci's, that the distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals is the main line of distinction he draws between sections of intellectuals, this is far from true. Another key-line of demarcation which he draws is that between urban and rural intellectuals, and this distinction is equally important for a re-analysis of (East) Bengal's socio-political history. Like the former distinction, this distinction brings out the fact that there are a large number of intellectuals - such as school teachers, rural doctors, journalists, lawyers, etc. - who in view of their profession form a part of society's intellectual community, but whose labour is not recognized as intellectual labour by the dominant section of (urban based, comprador) intellectuals. Rural intellectuals, according to Gramsci, are closest to the peasantry, and they often mediate between the peasantry and the institutions of the state. While rural intellectuals include a traditional segment (for instance, religious preachers) and a non-traditional segment (eg. teachers in secular schools), - both categories lack social recognition for the intellectual work which they contribute to society. Gramsci's above-summarized categorisation of professional intellectuals was rudimentary, and it can be refined on the basis of further social investigations. Nevertheless, it represents a departure, an innovation, in the history of Marxism, for these categorisations were not put forward by any other Marxist philosopher. Moreover, Gramsci as no other Marxist theoretician argued that political work is the task of intellectuals: whether they be recognized or nonrecognized, it is society's intellectuals who engage in the work of opinion-building on behalf of the various social classes aspiring to achieve or preserve hegemony. Hence, Gramsci also defined the work of building a political party as intellectual work, and argued that all those who participate in it are either already intellectuals, or, in the process of party-building, are bound to be transformed into intellectuals! This conclusion follows logically from his conceptualisation of civil society, and from his definitions of intellectuals and intellectual activity. Yet it surely constitutes a departure from the views that have held sway in 20th century peasant-based revolutions in Asia! 6. The Terms 'Passive Revolution' and the 'Historical Bloc' Just like the terms civil society and ideological hegemony, the concept of passive revolution was not introduced by Gramsci himself; it was a borrowed term. As he himself admitted in his writing on the history of the Italian Risorgimento, i.e. on the process of the formation of the Italian unitary state, Gramsci took over the term from the historian Cuoco, and then re-interpreted it (8). He used it to designate a process whereby a new political formation comes to power, replacing an older one. Contrary to what happens in a real or active revolution, however, - in a passive revolution no fundamental restructuring of social relations takes place. Hence, the term passive revolution refers to a political process that is reformist in nature. Such a process according to Gramsci can either be steered by a liberal party, or by a fascist political force. Hence, Gramsci applies the term inter alia to explain the events that led to the victory of fascism in Europe, in the thirties of the last century. Now, while Gramsci nowhere discussed the applicability of the concept of passive revolution to events elsewhere in the world, the term can well be used to characterise the process of political transformation that took place in East Bengal in the 1940s, i.e. the process whereby the Bengal Muslim League formed a political alliance and campaigned for construction of the state of Pakistan. In the given process, an indigenous ruling class replaced the former British colonial administrators, and it succeeded in achieving its aim via a transformative political program, targeting the 'decapitation' of the feudal economic order, i.e. dispossession of the absentee landlords, the zamindars. Yet the Muslim League, as we all know, did not aim at a fundamental restructuring of agrarian relations, and its Muslim-communalist orientation precisely served to redirect peasant energies away from the path of active revolution as propagated by the Left. Indeed, what the Muslim League accomplished can best be characterized as a passive revolution in Gramsci's theoretical sense. Yet it would hardly help us re-analyse the political history of Bengal if we were to adopt Gramsci's term of passive revolution in isolation. What is required in the interest of a reinterpretation of history, is that the various terms which Gramsci proposed to facilitate the analysis of society's political domain, be applied in combination. Thus, the key question in relation to the Muslim League's project of a passive revolution, is how the party's leading politicians succeeded in building a historical bloc composed, first, of various groups of intellectuals, who effectively convinced the peasant masses of East Bengal to opt for its project of a Muslim-separatist state. Adoption of the concept of passive revolution, in other words, should lead us to (re-)analyse the specific role of traditional intellectuals, of maulanas and mullahs, who enabled the Muslim League to gain ideological hegemony (9). For only a combined use of Gramscian terms serves to lay bare aspects of East Bengal's political history which are insufficiently brought out in a classical Marxist interpretation of history. This means, in the context of the analysis of East Bengal's history, that we combine the concept of passive revolution, with Gramsci's original conceptualisation of the united front. This concept, in Marxist theory, refers to the building of a broad alliance, including all those classes whose labour is exploited, and a part of society's wealthier classes, such as rich peasants and the national bourgeoisie (10). In the 1940s, both the Communist Party and the Muslim League each sought to build a united front to gain political hegemony: hegemony for the working class in the case of the Communist Party, - for the petty landlords, jotedars, in the case of the Muslim League. In this competition for hegemony it is the Muslim League which gained the upper hand, and it is Gramsci's concept of the historical bloc that helps us best understand why. For in Gramsci's conceptualisation of the united front, the role of intellectuals is decisive, and in this respect the efforts at united front building of the two political forces contrasted sharply. For whereas the Communist Party could count on the cooperation of only a few traditional intellectuals, the Muslim League counted a very large number of Muslim religious preachers among its opinion-builders. In conclusion: my plea is in favour of adoption of Gramscian concepts of analysis, but not in a piecemeal fashion. Too often, Marxist interpreters of Gramsci's theory have lifted out single concepts or theoretical parts from his Prison Notebooks, without taking due account of the structure of his thought, without taking account of the interconnectedness of these conceptual ideas. As I have just indicated briefly, and will seek to further illustrate in the second part of this essay, - a Gramscian interpretation of East Bengal's history can be extremely fruitful, since it helps reveal aspects in the country's political evolution which orthodox Marxists (including myself) for long have overlooked. Yet this exercise in Gramscian re-interpretation, to repeat, can only be effective, can only lead to a new conceptualisation of the politics of social transformation, if our approach is integral. We thus need to grasp and apply the full set of Gramsci's concepts, which as I have explained above centrally comprises: the concepts of civil society and of ideological hegemony; the concepts of rural and organic intellectuals; and those of passive revolution and the building of a historical bloc. 7. Feminism and Gramscian Thought Lastly, a brief note on some limitations in Gramsci's thought. I have already stated that Gramsci's categorisation of intellectuals is rudimentary, but this is not a major drawnback in his theory. A more serious limitation, in my view, is the fact that Gramsci nowhere discussed how the structure and functioning of civil society helps to perpetuate patriarchy. Gramsci lived in an era in which feminist theory-building, the theory regarding the liberation of women, was still rather weak, and, perhaps understandably, Gramsci overlooked feminist issues in building his own theory of the superstructure. Yet feminism is relevant to Gramsci's theory of civil society. For in all class societies, the rulers employ not just the legal, judicial and repressive organs of the state to (re-) enforce patriarchal relations, - but the institutions belonging to the intermediate sphere of society as well. Invariably, these institutions are used to propagate and strengthen male dominance over women. A patriarchal policy is easily implemented, since the institutions of civil society are overwhelmingly 'populated' by men. The sexual division of labour that prevails in most societies, imposes, first, a double burden on (many) working class women. On the one hand, they are responsible for all domestic tasks, i.e. cooking, cleaning, childcare, etc. On the other hand, women of the labouring classes often are allotted, also, secondary tasks in agriculture and industry (11). But the sexual division of labour also intersects with a division between forms of labour that are predominantly manual, - and those that are predominantly mental in character, and relegates women to the first mentioned category. Hence, the sexual division of labour stretches from the domestic sphere, via the public economic sphere, and up to the intermediate sphere of civil society and the apparatus of the capitalist state. Both in the base and in the superstructure, women's position is subordinate to that of men. Further, that women's labouring position is always secondary, is particularly sharply reflected in the intermediate sphere of society, where most functions are monopolised by men. On the whole, women tend to be excluded, or nearly excluded, from most job positions defined as 'intellectual professions', and the task of building a historical bloc that takes full account of the interests of all sections of the oppressed is complicated much by the fact that society's opinion builders are overwhelmingly male. Such a liberationist project can only succeed, if those who build mass organisations of the oppressed make special efforts to promote women labourers to the position of organic intellectuals; it can only succeed if organisations of rural and other nonrecognised intellectuals recruit female professionals, such as female school teachers, on a priority base. If not, patriachal views will easily regain the upper hand, even as the struggle for human liberation appears to gain ground. In short, a Marxist-feminist theory regarding the intermediate sphere of class society, regarding civil society and the struggle for ideological hegemony, can take Gramsci's conceptualisation as its starting point, but cannot afford to accept his views uncritically. A Marxist-feminist theory needs to, first, amplify Gramsci's categorisation of intellectuals, and take account of new theories of public-opinion building which have been constructed in the US and elsewhere in the decades since Gramsci's incarceration and death. But it also needs to rethink and refine Gramsci's ideas in the light of feminist theory-building, which theory-building has advanced rapidly in the last quarter of the 20th century. For while Gramsci's concepts help us much to re-analyse the political history of East Bengal/Bangladesh, i.e. to understand the causes that led to the formation of Pakistan and to the founding of the independent state of Bangladesh, - they only partly suffice to reconstruct, re-launch, today's movement of the oppressed. Dr.Peter Custers (Author of 'Aseya Arthanitite Punjir Sancay o Narishram' (Capital Accumulation and Women's Labour in Asian Economies), Bangla Academy, Dhaka, Bangladesh, December 1999), Amsterdam, the Netherlands, August, 2000. References: (1) For a critical assessment of the evolution in thought of the Subaltern School, and of Partha Chatterjee's ideas in particular, see Himani Bannerji, 'Projects of Hegemony. Towards a Critique of Subaltern Studies' 'Resolution of the Women's Question' (Economic and Political Weekly, March 11, 2000, p.902); a brief critique of Partha Chatterjee's use of the concept of religious community is given in Kumkum Sangari, 'Politics of Diversity. Religious Communities and Multiple Patriarchies (Economic and Political Weekly, December 23, 1995, p.3300-3301); (2) For summaries of Gramsci's basic concepts, see eg. David Forgacs (ed.), An Antonio Gramsci Reader. Selected Writings 1916-1935 (Schocken Books, New York, United States, 1988, p. 420); Carl Boggs, Gramsci's Marxism (Pluto Press Limited, London, United Kingdom, 1976); and Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi, Pour Gramsci (in French: Editions du Seuil, Paris, France, p.74); for a summary of Gramsci's conceptualisation of cultural life, see Sabine Kebir, Die Kulturkonzeption Antonio Gramscis. Auf dem Wege zur Antifaschistischen Volksfront (in German: Akademie Verlag, Berlin, German Democratic Republic, 1980); (3) The differences between Hegel's and Marx's usages of the term civil society on the one hand, and Gramsci's on the other, have been discussed in depth by Norberto Bobbio, Gramsci e la Concezione della Societa Civile (which essay appeared in a Dutch translation in the Dutch Marxist journal Te Elfder Ure No.28, January 1981, p.367); here Bobbio argued that the theory of Gramsci heralded a fundamental renovation vis-a-vis the whole Marxist tradition; as Bobbio stated: in Gramsci's conceptualisation 'civil society does not belong to the base but to the superstructure (p.378); (4) Lenin primarily elaborated this theory of his in Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (Foreign Languages Press, Peking, People's Republic of China, 1970); for the meaning of hegemony in Gramsci's theory, see Forgacs (1988), op.cit., p.422-424, and Boggs (1976), op.cit., p.36; (5) See Gramsci's concise article 'The Intellectuals' (in Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, International Publishers, New York, United States, undated, p.3-23); also Forgacs (1988), op.cit., p.300; Gramsci's original analysis of the role of intellectuals was already reflected in his essay 'Some Aspects of the Southern Question', Forgacs (1988), op.cit., p.171; it should be kept in mind that while Gramsci's conceptualisation of the role of intellectuals represents a crucial advance in Marxist thinking, his conceptualisation remained rudimentary, and in my view incomplete; (6) for Gramsci's analysis of Fordism, see eg. Peter Custers, Capital Accumulation and Women's Labour in Asian Economies (Zed Books, London, 1997, p.295); Gramsci's dialectic conception of manual/mental labour is reflected in his notion of the 'psycho-physical nexus' in the labour of professional industrial workers; see his essay 'Americanism and Fordism' (Selections from the Prison Notebooks, op.cit., p.279); the same thematic, but from the position of clerical workers, is discussed by Harry Braverman in his Labor and Monopoly Capital. The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (Monthly Review Press, New York, United States, 1974, p.293); (7) a truly brilliant example of organic intellectuals who emerged from among colonial slaves is provided by C.L.R.James in his account of the slave revolt in San Domingo (Haiti); see C.L.R.James, The Black Jacobins. Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (Allison & Busby, London, United Kingdom, 1980); (8) for Gramsci's use of the term passive revolution in the context of the 19th century struggle for the unification of Italy, see David Forgacs (1988), op.cit., p.250-251; as Forgacs stresses in his explanatory notes on Gramscian terminology, - contrary to the liberals of the Italian Risorgimento, for Gramsci the term passive revolution was merely an analytical tool, a 'criterion of interpretation', and not a programme - see Forgacs, op.cit., p.428; (9) some important sources on the role of traditional intellectuals in the political evolution of (East) Bengal are: A.T.M.Atikur Rahman, Maulana Mohammed Akram Khan in the Politics of Bengal (in Bangla: Bangla Academy, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 1995); Rafiuddin Ahmed, The Bengal Muslims 1871- 1906. A Quest for Identity (Oxford University Press, Bombay/Calcutta/Madras, 1996); Taj Ul-Islam Hashmi, Peasant Utopia. The Communalisation of Class Politics in East Bengal, 1920-1947 (University Press Limited, Dhaka, 1994). (10) a classical Marxist statement on united front work is Mao Tsetung's essay, 'On New Democracy' (Mao Tsetung, Selected Works Vol.II, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, People's Republic of China, 1965, p.339); also: Truong-Chinh, 'The Party's Policy Concerning the National United Front' (Truong-Chinh, Selected Writings, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Hanoi, 1977, p.455); for a summary of Gramsci's views on the historical bloc, see Forgacs (1988), op.cit., 424-425. (11) see for details on the sexual division of labour, Peter Custers (1997), op.cit.; an author who was keenly aware of the fact that men monopolise intellectual labour, is for instance Clara Zetkin - see her 'Die Arbeiterinnen- und Frauenfrage der Gegenwart' (The Contemporary Question of Female Workers and the Women's Question), in Gisela Brinker-Gabler (ed.), Frauenarbeit und Beruf (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 1979).

Gramsci and hegemony

The idea of a ‘third face of power’, or ‘invisible power’ has its roots partly, in Marxist thinking about the pervasive power of ideology, values and beliefs in reproducing class relations and concealing contradictions (Heywood, 1994: 100).  Marx recognised that economic exploitation was not the only driver behind capitalism, and that the system was reinforced by a dominance of ruling class ideas and values – leading to Engels’s famous concern that ‘false consciousness’ would keep the working class from recognising and rejecting their oppression (Heywood, 1994: 85).

False consciousness, in relation to invisible power, is itself a ‘theory of power’ in the Marxist tradition. It is particularly evident in the thinking of Lenin, who ‘argued that the power of ‘bourgeois ideology’ was such that, left to its own devices, the proletariat would only be able to achieve ‘trade union consciousness’, the desire to improve their material conditions but within the capitalist system’ (Heywood 1994: 85). A famous analogy is made to workers accepting crumbs that fall off the table (or indeed are handed out to keep them quiet) rather than claiming a rightful place at the table.

The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned for much of his life by Mussolini, took these idea further in his Prison Notebooks with his widely influential notions of ‘hegemony’ and the ‘manufacture of consent’ (Gramsci 1971).  Gramsci saw the capitalist state as being made up of two overlapping spheres, a ‘political society’ (which rules through force) and a ‘civil society’ (which rules through consent). This is a different meaning of civil society from the ‘associational’ view common today, which defines civil society as a ‘sector’ of voluntary organisations and NGOs. Gramsci saw civil society as the public sphere where trade unions and political parties gained concessions from the bourgeois state, and the sphere in which ideas and beliefs were shaped, where bourgeois ‘hegemony’ was reproduced in cultural life through the media, universities and religious institutions to ‘manufacture consent’ and legitimacy (Heywood 1994: 100-101).

The political and practical implications of Gramsci’s ideas were far-reaching because he warned of the limited possibilities of direct revolutionary struggle for control of the means of production; this ‘war of attack’ could only succeed with a prior ‘war of position’ in the form of struggle over ideas and beliefs, to create a new hegemony (Gramsci 1971).  This idea of a ‘counter-hegemonic’ struggle – advancing alternatives to dominant ideas of what is normal and legitimate – has had broad appeal in social and political movements. It has also contributed to the idea that ‘knowledge’ is a social construct that serves to legitimate social structures (Heywood 1994: 101).

In practical terms, Gramsci’s insights about how power is constituted in the realm of ideas and knowledge – expressed through consent rather than force – have inspired the use of explicit strategies to contest hegemonic norms of legitimacy. Gramsci’s ideas have influenced popular education practices, including the adult literacy and consciousness-raising methods of Paulo Freire in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), liberation theology, methods of participatory action research (PAR), and many approaches to popular media, communication and cultural action.

The idea of power as ‘hegemony’ has also influenced debates about civil society. Critics of the way civil society is narrowly conceived in liberal democratic thought – reduced to an ‘associational’ domain in contrast to the state and market – have used Gramsci’s definition to remind us that civil society can also be a public sphere of political struggle and contestation over ideas and norms. The goal of ‘civil society strengthening’ in development policy can thus be pursued either in a neo-liberal sense of building civic institutions to complement (or hold to account) states and markets, or in a Gramscian sense of building civic capacities to think differently, to challenge assumptions and norms, and to articulate new ideas and visions.

Refernces for futher reading

Freire, Paulo (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York, Herder & Herder.

Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, New York, International Publishers.

Heywood, Andrew (1994) Political Ideas and Concepts: An Introduction,London, Macmillan.

Reflections on Civil Society

Chapter 1

Reflections on Civil Society

In the most advanced States civil society has become a very complex structure, one which is resistant to the catastrophic irruptions caused by immediate economic factors (crises, depressions, etc.).

The superstructures of civil society are like trench-systems of modern warfare. -- Antonio Gramsci, Note sul Machiavelli.

Lo scandalo del contraddirmi, dell’essere con te e contro te; con te nel cuore, in luce, contro te nelle buie viscere.

-- Pier Paolo Pasolini, Le ceneri di Gramsci.

Poemetti (Milano: Garzanti, 1963), 77.

This Essay focuses on the reception of the civil society concept, particularly in the political thought of Antonio Gramsci and his followers. I direct attention to the concept’s universal importance and its relevance to contemporary political philosophy, especially in Poland, East Europe and Latin America. Intellectuals in these countries (notably Leszek Kołakowski and Adam Michnik), as well as numerous Latin American Gramsci students – and first and foremost the Italians headed by Norberto Bobbio – have markedly contributed to its return from oblivion and new content. Thus, this heretofore rather mythical idea developed into a material force which eventually acquired revolutionary traits and, in the past 25 years, spread throughout the Western world, especially its East European and Latin American peripheries. Lately, however, East Europeans and Latin Americans have lost much of their initial faith in civil society – which for a short time was viewed as a paradise and an ersatz form of earlier socialist illusions – as an easy transition path from poverty to well being.

ANTONIO GRAMSCI’S CONCEPT OF CIVIL SOCIETY

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was the first 20^th-century thinker to apply the civil society concept to his own ideas, although its presence in European social thought, especially works by representatives of the British Enlightenment (Locke, Hume, Ferguson), Hegel and the young Marx, dates back to the 17^th Century. However, contrary to Marx and Engels, who tied civil society to the economy, or the "base", Gramsci rather links it to society’s "superstructure" as a category between the economic base and the state’s strictly political institutions. Thus, although not everyone appears to be aware of the fact, Gramsci pioneered the trend to revaluate the civil society concept that has been gaining ground in today’s social thought.¹

The first to notice the importance and the reformatory, tradition-belying and innovative creativity of Gramsci’s civil society (società civile) theory was Norberto Bobbio (1909-2004), the Italian philosopher and lifetime Senator and one of the past century’s most outstanding scholars of democracy. Bobbio, an active socialist (for a time even on the Italian Socialist Party’s Central Committee) and today a gallant figure for Italy’s postcommunists, dreamed of synthesizing socialism and liberalism.² Paraphrasing Marx, Bobbio pointed out that for Gramsci civil society encompassed not so much economic as ideological and cultural relations,³ thus constituting an "upside-down Marxism" inspired largely by specific interpretations of Hegel.

Gramsci distinguished between civil and political society, or state. The distinction, however, was rather abstract as in fact he believed certain elements of the state concept were applicable to civil society. Hence, in Prison Notebooks, he outlined an "integrated state" concept which organically incorporated both. For Gramsci civil society was also political society, operating without formal sanction but capable of influencing collective thought and modes of behavior.⁴

An important part of civil society are the institutions of manipulated public opinion. According to Gramsci, "what is called ‘public opinion’ is closely connected with political hegemony, namely with the point at which civil society makes contact with political society. The state, when it wants to undertake an unpopular action, creates adequate public opinion to protect itself; in other words, it organizes and centralizes certain elements within civil society."⁵

It is said that Gramsci paid more attention to the role of superstructure in the processes making up a ruling class’s reign than actual power understood as enforcement and administration. For Lenin hegemony was mainly political, for Gramsci it also had an ideological aspect, and also related to the period before a given class’s or group’s acquisition of real political power. Seen this way, the revolutions are hegemony conflicts in which the old ruling class’ political reign (dominio) is separated from society’s intellectual and moral leadership (direzione).

Joseph Buttigieg, a Notre-Dame-resident U.S. Marxist and today one of the best Gramsci scholars, claims a ruling class’s position is stronger when it combines political domination with control over civil society. To achieve this, ruling classes must often sacrifice their own interests and move from mere political and economic control to a moral and intellectual unity model and a milder form of hegemony over subordinated groups. Therefore, governments must rise above immediate class interests. Reiterating Gramsci, Buttigieg says a dominant position in civil society is more important than legal and political control, which, while allowing ruling groups to impose their will, is often lost in coup d’etats. Hegemony, on the other hand, is more resistant to the effects of revolt.⁶

The military terminology Gramsci employs to describe state and social revolution is crucial in understanding his civil society concept. Especially important is the distinction between manoeuvre and positional warfare, one entailing direct combat, the other passive resistance like entrenchment or psychological tactics. State-of-the-art combat science lays more weight on positional tactics than armed combat, and Gramsci too believed that a positional approach aimed at conquering the tall wall bastions of civil society – especially in the cultural sphere – is fundamental in the political battles waged by the developed capitalist states. Social revolution in the countries of the capitalist West cannot be limited to the struggle for political power and state government. It must also penetrate to the complex system of social relations in which the ruling bourgeoisie has entrenched itself. In other words, it must first and foremost win control over "a system of entrenchments and fortifications typical for parts of civil society". In this the western countries’ situation was fundamentally different from that of socially backward Russia, where the main goal was political power (and in fact the Winter Palace). Western attempts at proletarian upheaval failed among others because their leaders, in their eagerness to copy Russia’s October Revolution, forgot that their societies were structured differently from Russia’s. This fact was ignored by west-European revolutionaries, including the Trotskyites, who proposed frontal conflict. According to Gramsci they would have done better with a positional strategy – which he undertook to prove during Italy’s almost-successful working-class upsurge.

In his deliberations on the essence of the modern state Gramsci points to statehood’s educational functions, e.g. its role in the evolution of a new citizenship model to meet rising production needs. Here the state’s influence on the moralities and mentalities of individuals is exercised with the purpose of winning their consent and support, and in such a way as to make them see necessity, and even enforcement, as freedom. State has a tendency to extend its laws onto spheres of life which were once legally neutral domains of civil society, and therefore usually unsanctioned. However, modern civil society does exert some pressure on individual behavior, morality and world outlook. Moreover, civil society is tied to state (political society) by such an intricate web of connections that citizens often feel as if it were actually the state.

In fact, Gramsci’s train of thought suggests not so much that the state should be overcome or abolished as assimilated into a regulated society, an ethical organism with a well-rooted hegemony and consensus system.⁷ The goal here, therefore, is not state but "regulated society" answering to Gramsci’s vision of communism. Gramsci’s views on civil society are fundamental in all efforts to reconstruct his quite original political thought.

The essence of civil society is best represented in the functioning of the political parties and other "public" associations which form its tissue and compete for supremacy, hegemony or alliance within its boundaries. In civil society parties that win power do not automatically stifle all rival social and political life, but do their best to maintain a balance between the many interests present in such pluralistic communities. Working-class hegemony in civil society stems from consensus and does not exclude pluralism, subordinated groups engaging in positional warfare to promote new values – and eventually develop new civil society models.⁸

Gramsci’s reflections on statehood and society are closely tied to hegemony and the role intellectual elites play in its sustenance. He employs the hegemony concept not only to penetrate past and present social relations, but also to analyze theories involving "new type" parties building "historical blocs"⁹ by social classes heretofore subordinated by the bourgeoisie. Hegemony in civil society takes place on various superstructure levels, and often goes beyond mere political commandeering. Superstructure takes on the form of institutions – state-run in political communities and non-governmental in civil societies. In both cases intellectuals – in Gramsci’s words the "clerks" or "superstructure functionaries" of the ruling class – play a crucial role in the system.

In describing Gramsci’s civil society concept I have tried to set it against the various semantic contexts present in his reflections on the state, hegemony, ideology and superstructure. It is often said that this concept represents a basic and autonomous aspect of superstructure, functioning as a bridge between the base and superstructure’s institutional outlets.¹⁰ Gramsci’s civil society can take on a variety of forms: it can be a ruling class’s ideology propounded by science, art, economy and law, a philosophy supported by social groups striving for closer ties to the ruling class, an element of political ideology, and a factor influencing a ideological information channels like the schooling system, media, libraries etc.¹¹ These observations led Gramsci to redefine the state as "the equilibrium between political society (i. e., a dictatorship or some other coercive apparatus used to control the masses in conformity with a given type of production and economy)... and civil society (or the hegemony of a social group over the entire nation exercised through so-called private organizations such as the church, the unions, the schools, etc.)"¹² According to Gramsci’s notes on Machiavelli, the state consists of political and civil society, it is hegemony "armored by coercion", thanks to which the active consent of the governed is being obtained.

In analyzing relations between state and civil society Gramsci makes frequent historical references with regard to the latter, he also mentions a possible future in which civil society has completely assimilated and eliminated the state.

GRAMSCI IN ITALY AND WORLDWIDE

In the 1970s and 1980s not only orthodox marxists but also maoists, eurocommunists, socialists, social-democrats, and partly also liberals, nationalists and propagators of the "new right", "new evolutionism" and "new thinking" concepts initiated by Gorbatchev and "perestroika",¹³ drew heavily on Gramsci’s inspiring and often backhanded writings, especially on civil society. Of all these attempts to put Gramsci’s thoughts to creative use only Adam Michnik’s and his followers’ new evolutionism proved itself as a political strategy (discounting the general postulates of broadly understood, classical liberalism). Thus, ironically, Poland, a socialist country, was the only place where Gramsci’s theory proved helpful in the mounting of a worker revolution – albeit a pro-capitalist one.

After the war Gramsci’s writings were used by almost all political forces in Italy, by the 1960s they already belonged to the pan-European philosophical and political canon. For some years the Gramscian civil society concept, as well as its interpretation by the leftist-croceanist or center-right (liberal) Gramscist Norberto Bobbio, were in the center of debates on the relations between democracy, pluralism and socialism between Italy’s socialists and communists. Accompanying this in subsequent years were controversies around the Eurocommunism theory, mainly among Italian and Spanish Marxists. Bobbio’s interpretation, which accented ideas and the human free will, postulated a breakaway from Marx’ and Engels’ economic determinism and the authoritarianism of Lenin.

These questions are a fundamental motif in newer Gramsci studies, which focus on matters like the specifics of his political thought, his views on statehood and the role of intellectuals, his interpretation of "passive revolution" and the emergence and development of freedom. The historical import of Gramsci’s philosophy arises from the presence in his writings of concepts like civil and political society, as well as equally important and closely related notions like citizenship, historical bloc, hegemony, jacobinism, organic crisis and consensus.

Many southern-European Marxists saw Gramsci as the pioneer of Eurocommunism, which discarded classical revolution as inappropriate for the countries of the West. According to one of them, by rejecting frontal attack, armed battle and "storming the Winter Palace", Eurocommunism in fact advocated entrenchment and positional warfare.¹⁴ Gramsci, however, athough quoted (and deftly reinterpreted) by Eurocommunists, never claimed positional warfare would eliminate manoeuvre tactics or the possibility, at some point in time, of revolution against the old system. Here (as in many other respects) the Eurocommunist theory showed its weaknesses, illusory character and naivete. Gramsci did not reject classical communism, but merely modified its proletarian rule theory and supplemented it with concepts like moral and political hegemony.

In the 1970s and 80s Gramsci’s theories, especially his civil society concept, also exerted a strong influence on the theoreticians of the French and Italian new right (Alain de Benoist, Marco Tarchi), who sought a deeper rooting in culture in a bid to enliven their own conservative revolution projects (Gramscisme de droite in France, Cezary Michalski and the young national right in the 1990s in Poland). It is interesting to see that the Gramscian idea of democracy and hegemony has recently been recalled by a neo-conservative author from the powerful foundation Freedom House, which supported in 2004 the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.¹⁵ In fact, the general response to Gramsci by diverse political groupings was marked by a dose of sympathy, which to a degree made him public property (Gramsci di tutti, to use Togliatti’s expression).

A historical paradox is Gramsci’s rapidly rising popularity in the United States and the Anglo-Saxon world,¹⁶ as well as the foundation in 1989 – almost simultaneously with the fall of communism and resulting total discontinuation of all Gramscian studies in East Europe – of the International Gramsci Society affiliating members on several continents. An interesting case here is Poland, where Gramsci’s civil society ideas inspired the forces that toppled communism. However, the new system had no love for this theoretician, although his revolution strategies proved themselves in practice in the case of Solidarity. We can speak of a radical ingratitude of Poland to Gramsci, of the unique country, where Gramscian technology of revolution proved to be effective. Poland remains one of the very few countries in the world whose free press made no mention at all of Gramsci’s 1991 centennial (as it failed to note lesser Gramscian anniversaries in 1997 and 2001). Neither Adam Michnik’s influential Gazeta Wyborcza daily nor the postcommunist Trybuna ran a word. Moreover, since 1991 no Polish paper nor popular or scholarly periodical has printed as much as one feature on Gramsci. It appears that, although there have been no official verdicts to this effect, Poland has sentenced Gramsci’s ideas to oblivion for at least twenty years – just as he was very quickly and effectively forgotten in all of East Europe after 1989.¹⁷ Nonetheless, it is hardly possible to lie about the source of today’s civil society concept – nor the fact that an Italian communist’s ideas were fundamental for Solidarity’s approach to civil society – even if the truth is embarrassing for many a rightwing politician.

Gramsci’s philosophy and civil society theory met with a totally different reception by Latin American followers of the dependency theory and leftist sociology that for over three decades now – in Brazil and Mexico since the mid-1970s and in Argentina since even earlier – have successfully flourished in that part of the world.¹⁸ At the time the corrosion of Brazil’s 1964-installed military government was becoming visible. The system’s decay was to a large degree hastened by the emergence of new social movements which were oriented towards modern civil society. It was then that Gramsci advanced to one of the icons of Brazilian democracy, his term "civil society" gaining immense popularity. Civil society became a synonym of all that opposed the state’s hegemony. Towards the end of the dictatorship period even those public organizations that were close to the country’s big capital were timidly moving away from the regime and closer to the opposition. In this situation – and against Gramsci’s intentions – the inseparable terminological pair "civil society" and "state" became a radical, almost Manichaean dichotomy in which all that descended from civil society was considered positive and all that related to the state negative. It is impossible here to list all the interpretations of civil society presented by multifarious leftwing factions. However, both in Brazil and the world the approach to Gramsci was soon modified by the social-liberal influence of Norberto Bobbio, thanks to which it not only helped topple dictators but also led to the erosion of leftwing intellectualism, whose representatives in Latin America and elsewhere began to take an increasingly social-democratic and even openly liberal stand.¹⁹

After the fall of "real socialism" interest in Gramsci waned a little almost everywhere in Latin America. A notable exception is still-communist Cuba, where the downfall of Soviet-style state socialism inspired a search for other leftist solutions. In 1991, the year of Gramsci’s 100^th birthday, crisis-torn Cuba became the site of the rediscovery of this quite unorthodox Marxist philosopher.²⁰ While still in the late 1980s the term "civil society" was known only to a handful of Gramsci scholars, in the second half of the following decade a debate on restoring civil society on the island was in full progress, the first to come out with such appeals being the Cuban Catholic Church (in a document in 1994). Recently the idea has also come to the ruling elites, who after 1996²¹ also began a debate on civil society, initially adorned with the ritual "socialist". The discussion focused on the role of civil society in Cuba’s uncertain future, especially in light of the country’s imminent democratization, pluralization and difficult transition to a new political model (although some Cuban leaders still hope for a communist revival, especially in Latin America).²² The fall of Latin America’s rightist and East Europe’s leftist dictatorships have encouraged Cuba to consider gradual change and launch a search for a "reconstruction model". However the capitalistic model in neighboring Haiti and the frequently miserable effects of Latin American attempts at economic neo-liberalism are proof that such moves warrant caution.

The breakdown of Latin America’s authoritarian regimes and ensuing "conservative" transition to capitalistic democracy (before the fall of communism in East Europe), forced the Latin American left to reset its ideological sights and reconsider its approach to the rules of democracy. The recent bitter experiences under dictatorship, especially the ruthless repression and torture, were among the reasons for Latin America’s rejection of revolutionary social models in favor of reevaluating democracy as such²³ and acceptance of general human rights. Today the continent’s left values its participation in the institutional structures of official democratic state and civil society. More attention is also being paid to the role of civil society – especially NGOs – in shaping democratic culture.²⁴ Also, the fall of Marxism-Leninism in East Europe had a natural impact on the Latin American left, which faced globalization and the contemporary world’s increasing complexity. An interesting light on this is thrown in the reminiscences of Władysław Dowbor and Alfred Sirkis, two Polish-descended former Brazilian revolutionaries, who recount that they had the impression of actively participating in a global war between imperialism and revolutionary socialism, and conclude wryly: "How naïve we were. We thought we could change something with a few guns". Recounting the revolutionary left’s mounting crisis, Dowbor also mentions the Polish anticommunists’ inability to understand Brazil’s anti-American moods (and frequently huffy stance towards ‘third world" Latin America). Here is what he told them: "You were under a communist dictatorship and we under a rightist regime… the ‘physical/intellectual type’ which in Latin America most often became a Marxist, guerilla or underground leftist, became an anticommunist in Poland; the same type of human who in Poland became a self-gratifying, opportunistic apparatchik, wore a military uniform and tortured students in Brazil… Latin America’s rightist regimes had the support of the CIA and its agents, U.S. money and U.S. arms. Whether you wanted to or not, your revolution, your struggle for freedom and justice, had to be colored red". Sirkis also claimed that "Solidarity’s alliance of the working class with the intelligentsia was more typical for Latin American communists than anticommunist generals". Clearly disappointed with the extreme left, Sirkis expressed content over the fact that it was given no chance to commit crime in the name of Brazilian freedom – and turned to more concrete forms of organizational activity by founding Brazil’s Green Party.²⁵

Thus, the concept of continental revolution failed to win ground in Latin America, however the leftist – and especially Gramscian – revolutionary model, based on the creation of a historical bloc and winning hegemony over civil society in the course of arduous positional warfare, quite unexpectedly brought fruit in Poland and East Europe.

Andrzej Walicki points to the fascination with Gramsci displayed by post-Stalinist Poland’s revisionistic-minded Marxists.²⁶ One of them, Adam Michnik, came out with a so-called "new evolutionism" program following the anticommunist opposition’s failures in 1956, 1968 and 1970. Michnik managed to combine the loose ideas of former Polish Marxists like Leszek Kołakowski and Jacek Kuroń into a coherent strategy for the political opposition.²⁷ And in this, more or less consciously, he allowed himself to be inspired by Gramsci’s civil society concept.²⁸

In his program for the opposition Adam Michnik stressed the importance of constant public pressure on the authorities as a means of coercing reform. According to Michnik, "the path of perseverant struggle for reform, the path of evolution towards broader civil and human rights, is the only path for dissidents in East Europe". In Michnik’s opinion it was Poland’s "revisionist-minded ex-Stalinists" who created and spread to the country’s intellectual elites a new opposition model involving the rebirth of civil society. Jacek Kuroń (1934-2004) also saw the opposition’s main tasks in the protection of civil rights and the formation of new public movements as a pressure instrument on state government. Kuroń also presented a "program for Polish society’s self-organization into independent public movements and the foundation of related institutions" with the aim of creating "a civil Poland". Neither author uses the term "civil society" in his pre-Solidarity works but both appear quite close to it, best evidenced by Kuroń’s words, "the program for today is a democratic society organized into trade unions, consumer associations (…), local governments, co-operatives and similar groups".

Like Gramsci before him, Michnik spent much of his prison time ruminating on the failure of the movements he supported.²⁹ The subsequent action undertaken by the Worker Defense Committee and Solidarity’s self-restricting worker revolution had much in common with the Gramscian concept of positional warfare within civil society as war waged by a leftist political opposition against the state.

Andrzej Walicki frequently criticized the original Solidarity’s leftist-populist character and evolution into a mass socialist movement striving for public control over the entire economy. Even some Solidarity activists eventually realized, that, "because of its nature, structure and organization, this monstrous movement was ill-suited for democracy, and this mainly for two reasons: it was structured like a factory, but expressed essentially political goals – which is a classical feature of communism – and secondly, it was per se an all-embracing movement, which augured badly for any tolerance of pluralism."³⁰

Many revisionist-descended members of the democratic opposition strove to refresh Marxism, make it more democratic and humane, and looked to Gramsci for help. Zbigniew A. Pelczynski, a Polish-descended Oxford professor, believes the events in Poland gave Gramsci’s theories a new, practical perspective, and uses modified Gramscian categories to analyze the formation and growth of the Solidarity bloc. According to Pelczynski, Gramsci proved useful to the democratic opposition’s theoreticians, the ideologues of "new evolutionism", and the "detotalitarianization" of communism.³¹ Referring to Gramsci, Pelczynski wrote: "One might say that in Poland on the threshold of the 1980s the Communist Party’s political and economic ‘domination’ was still intact, but its ‘hegemony’ was already seriously undermined…. During 1981 Solidarity’s ideas achieved ‘hegemony’ over Polish society, but the state’s ‘domination’ over the economy – and, even more, the police and the army – remained intact… The opposition between the Communist Party ‘bloc’ and the Solidarity ‘bloc’… evolved into a struggle for power of the kind Gramsci postulated."³² The broad-scale character of this short-lived bloc created by Solidarity – which embraced workers, peasants, intellectuals and the Catholic Church – was something unprecedented in the world, and far beyond Gramsci’s boldest dreams.

In 1980/81 Lenin’s The State and Revolution³³ was frequently, if somewhat cautiously quoted in Poland, and the Gramscian civil society concept (which rejected market economy) enjoyed popularity in the 1980s due to its clear juxtaposition of revolting society and state (although, because of his communist roots, direct reference to Gramsci was considered improper in anticommunist circles). Also the moral and psychological pressure applied by Solidarity ran close to the Gramscian method of fighting for hegemony over civil society – fighting without physical violence.

Asked why August 1980 had been a success, one of Solidarity’s leaders said: "Because there was an elite, because the atmosphere was right, and because we had mass support. This came together and the Bolshevist revolution theory became reality. Marxism and Leninism were beaten by their own weapons – the working class myth, a working-class leader, and a small group who mapped out goals and knew how to interpret social moods".³⁴ What is more, Solidarity to a large extent proved Ernesto Che Guevaras radical foco guerrillero and subcontinental revolution theory, which found adequate expression in Solidarity’s famous – and eventually fulfilled – appeal for the liberation of Eastern Europe’s "working people".³⁵ Thus, Lenin, Gramsci, Sorel, Rosa Luxemburg and Che Guevara proved of little help in Latin America despite their quite positive reception. At the same time, selectively and pragmatically applied, their theories proved quite useful in East Europe’s political battle against communism – although they were never really very highly valued here.

Poland’s "carnival" in 1980/81 can be compared to Italy’s biennio rosso (two red years), during which Gramsci was active in worker councils and commissions. In Italy’s and Poland’s case the biennio rossoperiod was followed by respectively Mussolini and Jaruzelski, however in neither country did the regime take on such an openly totalitarian form as it did in the case of Hitler and Stalin. The Italian revolutionary movement of 1919/1920 was in many ways naïve and ultimately failed on a misconceived theory about "the inherent weakness of the industrial bourgeoisie". Similarly during Poland’s two "white-red" years, the commissions set up by the working-class Solidarity Union and the later Self-Governed Republic Clubs³⁶ displayed much naïveté. At the time protests were frequently patterned on variants of the Italian strike model, the working class, prematurely and temporarily included in civil society, successfully fighting against the degenerated worker state in the name of a new collectivist utopia.³⁷ "Now the people, who were hitherto ‘nothing’, were to be everything – control everybody and everything – by means of worker self-government bodies and a trade union".³⁸ This is truly material for a tragicomic epic novel. Even Władysław Frasyniuk, the current leader of the liberal Democratic Party said during a debate marking the 20^th anniversary of August 1980: "At the time we really believed we’d own our factories. Not regions or cities, but precisely factories". At a recent Polish Business Council sitting Adam Michnik also recalled how difficult it was to give up illusions of "worker council rule".

FROM MARXISM TO LIBERALISM

Although the distinction between the state and society is crucial for classical and contemporary liberalism, before the fall of the Soviet bloc the term civil society rarely appeared in the western political discourse. Flora Lewis, a longtime New York Times correspondent in Poland, once said that, "Americans don’t talk about civil society because they take it for granted", triumphantly adding after Gramsci: "The Communist ideal is destroying itself as the century ends because it could not create the ‘fortress and earthworks’ of civil society, nor accommodate them".³⁹ From then on the term civil society began to lose its bellicose Gramscian connotations, becoming a synonym of commercial and social privacy – a free market opposed to an omnipresent state. During the transition to democracy in East Europe and Latin America the civil society concept was reinterpreted to serve the interests of liberal democracy rather than proletarian revolution.

Also in Italy the communist party founded by Gramsci (CPI) was found to be redundant. In view of the new realities it was decided to transform it – with the help of Gramsci’s universally applicable thought – into a new democratic leftwing party with a classical social-democratic leaning. According to Cecilia Lesgart Italy became a "melting-pot of political ideas" (we might add that the countries of Latin America and East Europe frequently served as convenient "testing-grounds" for diverse social theories and projects), enabling leftwing intellectuals to make the theoretical leap from Marxism, revolution and socialism to the more liberal and democratic "intellectual and moral reform" model.⁴⁰ Also the new, moderate Latin American left, frustrated by its repeated failures (especially in Argentina and Chile), began to oppose revolutionary projects, increasingly turning to parliamentary democracy as a goal in itself, a historical achievement imposing legal restrictions on all authoritarian and arbitrary rule. New interpretations of Gramsci in Italy and some Latin American countries made acceptance of democracy per se easier, enabling a distancing from Marxism’s orthodoxy and dogma towards liberalism. The introduction of new terminology led to the gradual "secularization" and dismantling of Marxism. In this new situation building hegemonies was conducive to the emergence of civic culture and democratic change strategies much different from political transformation through an insurgency against the state. Also adopted at the time was the Gramscian concept of state enriched by, and not opposed to, civil society.⁴¹

Bolshevist armed combat methods proved ineffective in Latin America, bringing the continent’s more moderate leftists to the conclusion that Brazil and the rest of Latin America are to a large degree western and not oriental like Russia, and therefore frontal attacks on the dictatorial state should be replaced by positional warfare conducted by a young and dynamic civil society.⁴²

Studies of Latin America’s transition from dictatorship to democracy again made mention of the civil society concept, also noting the lack of independent civil society traditions in the region (as in East Europe). As we know, the civil society concept appeared almost simultaneously in the opposition-launched political discourse in both regions towards the end of the 1970s, and especially in the following decade. The difference was that in Latin America Gramsci and his followers were quite evidently the only driving force behind the term’s resurrection, while in East Europe this role fell to post-Marxist revisionists (once quite fascinated by Gramsci) and liberals (at first reluctant to call themselves that, either out of shame or tactics).

Also pointed out was the fact that Latin America’s military juntas had failed to entirely destroy civil society, eliminating only those of its segments which were closely linked to the revolutionary left and the poorest proletariat. Economically stronger groups managed to retain considerable autonomy from their regimes.

The above-quoted Brazilian Marxist Carlos Nelson Coutinho concluded that the replacement of the Gramscian civil society concept by a liberal one in the course of Latin America’s conservative transition to democracy helped cover up social conflict, bringing hegemony to liberal forces.⁴³ Coutinho suggests a return to the original Gramscian civil society concept. In his belief "correct definition of civil society’s and the state’s theoretical status is one of the most important and most actual topics in the ideological-political debate. Showing Gramscian civil society’s purely political dimension, revealing its dialectical bond with the struggle for hegemony and winning of power by the subordinated classes is an inherent part of the battle for the deconstruction of one of neo-liberal ideology’s most treacherous aspects, in which the seemingly ‘leftist’ terminology inherited from our battles with dictatorship focuses on this new, apolitical and aseptic ‘civil society’ concept. A concept which, as we have tried to show, has nothing in common with Antonio Gramsci’s revolutionary ideas".⁴⁴

Since 1980s the question of broad enlargement of civil society and democracy has become a central theme in the critical thought of Latin America.⁴⁵ Some Latin American authors argue, however, that using the term civil society masks social classes and class antagonisms, that civil society is incapable of negotiation between polarized sectors of society, that the term has been appropriated by privileged classes, who perceive popular class as not citizens, but "mobs" threatening property and security.⁴⁶

The most recent Latin American and global reflections on civil society attempt to combine this approach with solidarity (with reference to Lech Wałęsa, Vaclav Havel and John Paul II)⁴⁷, an apolitical "third sector"⁴⁸, the search for a new state social policy, and even a total lack of trust in all statehood and existing political parties. Here, civil society is presented as a partner of government in building legitimate statehood and a defender of historical and cultural values in a world in which commercial ties are fast becoming the most universal human bond. Civil society has also been associated with the quest for social peace and justice in Latin America, with church communities organized by liberation-minded theologians, and with the post-modern search for a new liberation utopia. Today, however, the multithreaded civil society discourse is usually connected with neo-liberalism, market economy, constitutionalism⁴⁹, and inter-American integration.⁵⁰

Interestingly, reference to civil society is increasingly frequently made by authors focusing on aggression, frustration, civil protest movements and the failure of neo-liberal economy in some countries, notably Argentina, where civil disobedience has increased.⁵¹ Many of the authors who wrote about the recent events in Argentina and its "stalemate" situation (among others J. C. Portantiero), applied Gramscian categories to describe Argentinian realities: the organic crisis, the crisis of hegemony and domination, the crisis of the state, of bourgeois democracy, and even the very idea of representation.⁵²Some see Argentina as a new "civil hegemony", hear the sounds of civil society amongst the clatter of pots and pans, in sauce pan-banging protests and visualize neighborhood gatherings as the nucleus of a "people’s democracy", in opposition to bourgeois rule. Argentinian civil society appears to be quite chaotic, disintegrated, and divided into classes far removed from classical social theory. Even the so-called dominating class is disintegrated, is a "conglomerate of corporations dividing between themselves the various spheres of power and competing for hegemony, with each corporation primarily defending its own interests and privileges. The functioning of this social class in Argentinian society is pre-modern, almost medieval, in character", wrote a famous philosopher from Santa Fe.⁵³

Also pointed out is the insufficiency of Gramsci’s categories in the contemporary world. The hegemony concept, fundamental for Gramsci, takes only scant notice of an analyzed country’s ties to global economy and politics, both of which play a deciding role today. Visible in the events in Latin America – from revolting Argentina and president Lula’s populistic Brazil to Colombia, long since half-ruled by guerillas, and Chavez’s Venezuela with its not-only-geographic closeness to Cuba – is the strong influence of Latin America’s gigantic northern neighbor. In an era of prevailing liberalism and "the end of history" the United States are very concerned about mounting revolutionary and populist trends in Latin America, seeing in them a multiple specter of Vietnam.

THE IDEA OF CIVIL SOCIETY IN POLAND AND EAST CENTRAL EUROPE

Generally speaking, almost all countries of Central and Eastern Europe had no important traditions of democratic civil society. A special case is that of Poland, where social traditions of citizenship, although they were absent for some time, are relatively strong in Polish political culture. Poland has a rich libertarian tradition, dating from its famous constitution of May 3, 1791.

However, the Polish fear of absolute rule and the absolute supremacy of social self-organization over state organization was an obstacle to the country’s modernization and facilitated Poland’s partition by its neighbors at the end of the 18^th century. In the 19^th century the Polish state did not exist, but there existed numerous forms of independent associational life, of civil society directed against the oppressive rules of Russia, Germany and Austria. After regaining its independence in 1918, Poland was very unstable, characterized by ultra-pluralism, economic crisis and political fragmentation.

After the Second World War a communist regime was installed in Poland by Soviet troops. Communist Regimes in Central and Eastern Europe soon after their installation made virulent attacks on all signs of civil society. During Stalinism all aspects of independent civil society and associational life were suppressed. The idea of civil society appeared with the emergence of democratic opposition after 1976.

Before the Solidarity trade Union was born the term "civil society" could be encountered in the writings of Polish authors quite seldom and rather accidentally, mostly in emigré papers (Leszek Kołakowski, Zygmunt Bauman and Aleksander Smolar);⁵⁴ it often appeared either as a loan translation of a corresponding word in English, French or Italian or as a conscious reference to then magically sounding need for civil courage in combating the dictatorial regime.⁵⁵ Later this term turned to be a quite effective though symbolic counterweight to the so called civil militia (communist state police).

The first Polish author to use the term civil society was Leszek Kołakowski in his text published in 1974.⁵⁶ The term is also used in his well-known text written in English in 1975 and published in a joint publication entitled Stalinism in New York in 1976. In the article entitled the "Marxist Roots of Stalinism" which was first published in German in 1977 and later, in 1984, in Polish, Kołakowski uses the term civil society to discuss strivings for the "nationalization" of all citizens, to describe the undeniable advantage of the state over society in the Russian tradition and especially under the Stalinism regime. The author characterizes the omnipotent apparatus of the Stalinist state in confrontation with which the isolated individual becomes powerless which leads to almost total destruction of the civil society. Kołakowski describes the process of destruction of the remains of this society hidden even within the party factions.

The author ponders how the Marxist tradition was used to strengthen Stalinism and sees the seeds of the Stalinist totalitarianism in the Marxist utopia according to which the liberated humanity was in general to remove the difference between the civil society and the state in the future and was to eliminate all antagonisms between private interests. In Marx’s interpretation proposed by Kołakowski the introduction of the unity of the political and civil society and in general the introduction of a harmonious social unity would be possible via the elimination of private property and, actually, via the destruction of civil society by the state.⁵⁷

According to Andrew Arato (a long time U.S. resident from Hungary) the idea of civil society has been revived by the neo-Marxist critics of socialistic authoritarianism who, with this notion, invalidated one of the Marx’s assumptions thereby paving the way to post-Marxism. Arato names such authors as Kołakowski, Mlynar, Vajda and Michnik in the East; Habermas, Lefort, Bobbio in the West, Weffort, Cardoso and O’Donnell in the South or, in Latin America. They were deep in the tradition of the western, neo-Marxist discourse. Some referred to Hegel, young Marx, Gramsci and Croce to renew the old dichotomy between civil society and the state which was largely forgotten in the 20^th century.⁵⁸

In my opinion, it was exactly this Gramsci-coined notion of civil society which was interpreted in the social-liberal spirit by Norberto Bobbio as early as 1967 which later was widely in the West. It was next adjusted by Adam Michnik and Solidarity to the conditions of the peaceful revolution in Poland.

It is fair to add that scholars from Central and Eastern Europe participated in 1967 in the famous Congress devoted to Gramsci in Cagliari in Sardinia⁵⁹ where civil society aroused heated debates. In truth only the Italian philosophers and French Jacques Texier⁶⁰ discusseed with Norberto Bobbio, but papers were read out by Markovic, Vranicki and Mikecin from Yugoslavia, famous Czech philosopher Karel Kosik (Gramsci e la filosofia della "praxis") and Tibor Huszar from Hungary (Gramsci e la vita intellectuale ungherese). They all underlined the huge influence of Gramsci on the intellectual life in their countries.⁶¹

At a successive congress devoted to Gramsci and organized by the Gramsci Institute in Rome in 1989 scholars from Central and Eastern Europe pointed to the dependence between the degree of a system democratization and the interest in the philosophy of Gramsci in their countries. In Czechoslovakia the of author of Quaderni del carcere was the most popular during the Prague Spring. However, certain groups of intellectuals were still interested in his philosophy even during the "normalization" under the Husak regime. Many used the society-related ideas of Gramsci to wage a long, perilous but not entirely fruitless war on Brezhnev’s orthodoxy in Czechoslovakia.⁶²

Together with the formation of the Solidarity trade union the term "civil society" (at the beginning used in quotation marks) began to play increasingly important role in the process of fundamental systemic changes carried out in Poland and in other Central and East European countries. The famous entry in the August 1981 Accords from Gdańsk recognized that the "leading role" of Polish United Worker’s (communist) Party may be limited to the state and should not affect the (civil) society. In the article Minął Rok (A Year Has Gone By) written by Adam Michnik in August of 1981 the author mentioned the signing of the agreement with the organized society, asserting that "self-organization which ensured the protection of professional, civil and national rights" was the essence of the nascent Solidarity trade union. For the first time in the history of the communist system "civil society" was reconstructed in Poland. Adam Michnik’s writings and activities contributed considerably to the development of democratic civil society in Poland and in the region. In The New Evolutionism Michnik presented a program of struggle for civil liberties and human rights in Poland, which was "addressed to independent public opinion and not just to the authorities. Instead of telling the government how to improve itself, the program should tell the society how to act. As far as the government is concerned, it can have no clearer counsel than that provided by the social pressure from below."⁶³

The emergence of the Labor Union Solidarity has been defined as the regaining of a public social sphere and as the self-organization of civil society against the communist state in the project of self-governing Poland. The civil Society that emerged during the Solidarity period was the first to appear in the peaceful and self-limiting revolution in a one-party Soviet-type regime.⁶⁴

In August 1981 Adam Michnik wrote that the main task of the Labor Union Solidarity was the restoration of social ties and self-organization aimed at the defense of various human rights.⁶⁵ In a posterior interview Michnik credited Vaclav Havel with being one of the first to use the term civil society in communist Europe.⁶⁶ Michnik, however, and his friends from Solidarity have given this concept new meaning, rather collectivist or communitarian, articulating the democratic, anti-totalitarian feelings of the Polish society.

The imposition of martial law by General Jaruzelski was calculated to destroy independent civil society in Poland. As this attempt failed, the process of development of civil society was not halted, but acquired new forms. The military regime never liquidated the public sphere, which was supported by the underground, unofficial and even the official Catholic press, numerous publications and independent institutions.⁶⁷

Soon in the late 1980s, new concepts of civil society based on liberal economic individualism appeared provoking various discussions, e.g. on the level of democracy in popular movements, on the need of pluralism and of one all-encompassing organization. Also some leftist authors and even the communist party ideologists began to preach the idea of (socialist) civil society.

From that time on the "civil society" appears from time to time in the opposition journalism (which built a model of extreme dualism between the civil society and the still allegedly totalitarian and communist state) as well as in the official press (seeking a model for easing the tension between the two). As time went by the more moderate representatives of the anticommunist opposition admitted that "at present no one can state that the dualism exists exclusively on the state authority – society level as the society itself is diversified holding within it different groups of interest."⁶⁸ The question also appeared in foreign publications about Poland⁶⁹ and in works related to the history of the idea referring to modern times.

Already mentioned, Zbigniew Pelczynski, who described the struggle of the first, egalitarian Solidarity using terms coined by Gramsci, often received interesting and sometimes "surprising" results. Pelczynski stressed that Gramsci "ruled out the possibility of a quick assault on the state-economy domination system by the radical-social forces developing within civil society. Instead he visualized a slow ‘war of position’ in which struggle would shift from one sector of the front to another, involved capturing and temporarily losing key positions, but in the long run tilt the balance of power from the state to the civil society."⁷⁰ Pelczynski believed that Solidarity – overwhelmed by revolutionary impatience and the will to immediately gain political power – departed from the demands of Gramsci, but these demands became closer to the Catholic Church led at that time by Primate Stefan Wyszyński. He demanded a break in the struggle, the healing of the childish leftist sickness, better organizational preparation and the dealing with the Gramsci-coined sphere of civil society. (The primate did not quote Gramsci and had probably never read his work).⁷¹ Wyszyński recommended that Solidarity leaders should postpone direct political goals for a later date. However, the leaders were afraid that the weary masses may turn their backs on democracy. Pelczynski believed that the leaders were rather keen on developing the political society than on the consolidation of the civil society.

Solidarity soon came out with the neo-communist and anarchist idea of the self-governing Republic of Poland. The country was to be ruled by collective self-government, workers’ councils (soviets), workplace councils (consigli from Gramsci) and civic committees (at the time, not even in the autumn of 1989, was the need for democratic political parties perceived). Pelczynski believed that the idea of the self-governing Republic of Poland was an original theoretical contribution to the Gramsci strategy of the ‘war of positions’. In his work published in 1988, seven years after the imposition of martial law Pelczynski criticized the idea as "hopelessly utopian". He also criticized the resignation from the idea of the gradual path and slow "evolutionism." However in 1989 communism in Poland collapsed largely as a result of Gramsci’s idea of the ‘war of positions.’ According to Pelczynski, Gramsci "was enough of a Marxist to believe that a ruling class never surrenders power voluntarily. A revolution was inevitable to overthrow the system of domination and to give power to the working class and its allies,"⁷² as it was authoritatively put by this well-known liberal author from Oxford who thought that the decision not to resort to force was a "liberal and bourgeois fetish." This, without any doubt, would not be welcome by Gramsci who never said that the war of positions excluded the war of maneuvers and the revolutionary breakup with the old order at a certain stage. However, it turned out that Poland and some other countries managed to make a revolution without violence. The theory of "new evolutionism" actually proved to be true after thirteen years. The final act of peaceful transition of power may be quite hard to explain in terms of Gramsci’s theory of historic materialism and easier in terms of conspiracy theories but it would be best for us if – as long as the Kremlin archives are blocked – we recall the supernatural factors: on the 10^th anniversary of the Round Table agreements Adam Michnik called it a true miracle.⁷³

The real career of the term "civil society" in everyday language of press and other mass-media began in 1989 during the Polish transition to democracy. The issue of making citizens more active and revival of civil society was dealt with in a large team of the Round Table talks between the state authorities and Solidarity opposition.

The rate of political evolution was accelerated by the social agreement (pact) concluded at the Round Table, earlier parliamentary elections and the spectacular victory of the Solidarity in the elections. The disorganized senile Polish United Workers’ Party (originally Communist Party) soon ceased to be the ruling force, loosing its leading position and becoming nothing more than a small element of the pluralist civil society. After the dissolution of the ruling semi-communist party by its members, its successor the Social-Democratic Party of the Republic of Poland also proclaimed that parliamentary democracy and self-governing civil society were its aims.

In the amended constitution of the Republic of Poland, the word ‘socialist’ was replaced by civil. The so-called Civic Committees that originated from the Solidarity, the Civic Parliamentary Caucus (OKP), then the Civil Movement – Democratic Union (ROAD) and recently the Civic Platform gained extraordinary importance. At the same time, the crisis of public participation and first symptoms of escape from freedom appeared in the Polish civil society tired of economic difficulties.

Following the interest in civil society regarded as a kind of opposition to the state, the first postulates of creating civil state and theoretical constructions of "civil socialism" appeared in the 1980s. Also the first non-communist premier in his speech on July, 1990 said that Poland is building a modern civil state of law.

Note that as the privatization of Polish economy continued and the sphere of political freedom under post-communism and peripheral capitalism broadened, terms such as "socialist civil society" or "civil society of socialism" disappeared completely in journalism. The term "civil society" with no additional adjectives became popular. One of the authors, who propagated the great socio-economic transformation aiming from socialism to a modern capitalist (civil) society, declared authoritatively that the idea of democratic socialism is an illusion and that the socialist civil society will never become a reality.⁷⁴

In fact, already in the texts written by the ideologists of the late semi-communist party, stress was put on the creation of material basis for civil society in Poland,⁷⁵ civil society without additional adjectives became synonymous to participatory democracy, an "attribute of a state of parliamentary democracy."⁷⁶

Initially, the main problem in the discussions on civil society was whether it can exist in "real socialism". Some defended a thesis on the constitutional lack of civil society under communism.⁷⁷ Others spoke about distorted, defective or even socialist, as we have seen, civil society, mainly in Poland and Yugoslavia. During the deep crisis of the countries of real socialism civil society was very often identified only with the anticommunist opposition.

After the collapse of socialism in Poland and elsewhere a new discussion began, this time on the nature and functions of civil society in post-communist countries. The problem is in the question how the term can be applied in the description of new transformation processes. The failure of state socialism conformed the thesis on the supremacy of civil society over the state, but nobody knew how the currently defective and passive civil society could form or reproduce its fully developed structure. According to an author, this defect becomes a painful and highly dangerous fact because in its defective shape the civil society is not able to coordinate liberated social life.⁷⁸

In the present-day Poland some observers see in civil society a positive ideal, while others look at it with suspicion. Those who are against it are afraid that the idea of civil society threatens the superior idea of nation. The right wing wave of nationalism that arose after the fall of the old system is upset by the leftist liberal origin of this idea in the Polish context.

Andrzej Siciński, one of the leading Polish sociologists, has argued on numerous occasions for the topicality of the theme of civil society in present-day Poland and presented a broad program of multidisciplinary research both on the ideal of civil society and on the actual changes taking place in Poland and Eastern Europe. He has observed a kind of vicious circle in present-day Poland: "the lack of civil society hinders the creation of representative elites, and the lack of this kind of elites inhibits the creation of civil society."⁷⁹ Other obstacles to the formation of real civil society in Poland are: the poor state of Polish economy, a weakness of middle classes, a low level of the institutionalization of political parties, a lack of social bonds and of other mechanisms typical for Western-type civil society. Sicinski has noticed, however, a remarkable increase of grass roots associations, organizations, charitable actions, etc., which would constitute, in his opinion, a new attractive version of civil society.

Another author in her paper presented at a special conference organized by the Civil Institute in Warsaw saw numerous obstacles in forming civil society in Poland, obstacles enlarged by the egoistic attitudes of the majority of politicians, which loose all prestige in embittered Polish society and are left alone in disorientation.⁸⁰

According to Professor Bronisław Geremek, one of the historical leaders of Solidarity, the concept of civil society will retain its validity in post-communist societies. He does not think that Solidarity’s hope for creating a civil society was only an illusion, although he admitted that the society has not turned out to be a "strong buttress" upon which democracy could easily be built. Characterizing the initial magic of the word "citizen" under late socialism and the subsequent post-communist letdown, Geremek noticed that "the civil society of 1980 was the projection into the future of a vision that rested upon an awesome emotional unity. The civil society of more than ten years later cannot and should not base itself on emotions, but instead on the building of carefully nurtured institutions: on the practical realization of ethical values; and on the involvement of the greatest possible numbers of people in public life. The main task now is constructing democratic mechanisms of stability, such as constitutional checks and balances; civic education in the spirit of respect for law; and the encouragement of citizen activism. Civil society – he concluded – does not act in opposition to the democratic state, but cooperates with it. It no longer has to be a kind of ‘parallel polis’ but now can simply be part of the polis."⁸¹

It is important to emphasize that the Polish Catholic Church played an important role in forming a contra-system⁸² and civil society under communism, but with the advent of democracy, its role has become ambiguous. Its traditional strength may be dangerous for a fully autonomous civil society and may provoke new conflicts in future. The Church in Poland and other countries passing from dictatorship to democracy will have to find its place in pluralist civil society or even to strive for hegemony in such countries like Poland, where it has always been closely associated with national aspirations.⁸³

The new situation in Poland requires also an end not only with the fundamentalist myths of social justice and unity of the first Solidarity, but also to end with the paternalistic concept of the state. According to Jadwiga Staniszkis, a brilliant and conspicuous analyst of the East European transitions, the creation of genuine civil society is a complex and painful process that requires both privatization in economy and deep cultural changes.⁸⁴

All efforts to create a significant civil society in Poland failed and a succeeding attempt to mobilize it was made first by the then president Lech Wałęsa in his proclamation to the nation delivered on July 13, 1993, and favoring the so-called Non-Party Bloc of Support for Reforms, since weak and elitist political parties did not arouse social appeal.

The specific feature of Polish situation is the State, however paradoxical it may sound, that is an indispensable tool in building civil society. The invisible hand of the free market has turned out to be insufficient in order to revive the passive and disoriented society in Poland and other East Central European countries.

There is an increasing need to preserve all rules of law in the new society full of egoism, economic abuse and social pathology. Numerous authors consider the law and new constitution (approved with difficulties as late as in 1997) as a precondition for the development of civil society. The law stabilizes and gives dynamics to every civil society.⁸⁵

Besides, the symbolic idea of civil society in Poland draws more inspiration from traditional nationalism and specific communitarian feelings than from truly liberal values.⁸⁶ It is also said that the bitter heritage of communism has left a specific type of human mentality, the so-called homo sovieticus: a passive man deprived of initiative and imagination.⁸⁷

Polish society after 1989 seemed lost, exhibiting signs of learned helplessness, tended to withdraw from public socio-political life during the economic recession. As a result, the society begun to experience new forms of anomy.⁸⁸

In fact, civil society in Poland is still much more a utopian ideology than a concrete reality. The idea of civil society, however, has lost its initial strength and is now entering into crisis.

It is quite a problem that the real capitalism built in Poland and other countries of the East differs considerably from "utopian-socialist" dreams and "living one’s life in truth," a slogan until recently vehemently voiced by the prime movers of the systemic transformation. It is hard to say whether it was an intentional deception or naïveté. Some former Solidarity activists (like Kuroń, Modzelewski, Kowalik, Bugaj and partly Mazowiecki) feel considerable psychological discomfort and express it publicly⁸⁹ which attests to their real sensitivity and naïveté. For an impartial observer it was a sad spectacle to see in August 2005 an enormous enthusiasm of the Polish political class and at the same time deep frustration and disenchantment of the working class on the 25^th anniversary of the (Workers’) Solidarity in Poland. Discussing with Lech Wałęsa who claims to have envisaged the transition to capitalism in Poland as early as 1980, Professor Karol Modzelewski (Solidarity’s former spokesperson, who even invented Solidarity’s name) declared that for (peripheral) capitalism he would not have spent in prison eight years, or even a month: he would not have considered it worthwhile.⁹⁰ The feeling of discomfort is alien, at least to some degree, only to those who had long been convinced that Poland would have to return inevitably for good or bad to the structures of peripheral capitalism which was only prompted by Solidarity. Many authors consider the division of the world into its Centers and peripheries to be a sophisticated reproduction of the 19^th century working class dependency on capitalists within one country. They see such model of global economy development, in which strong Centers impose their rules upon peripheries and semi-peripheries, as still valid. Peripherization is being considered as a normal condition in the epoch of globalization. The transition from the position of poor peripheral countries to the Center is extremely difficult; although possible, only few countries from over 200 have succeeded in it. Some propagators point to those few examples of passing from periphery to the Center seen particularly in small or scarcely populated countries, like Ireland, Finland, Taiwan or Singapore. Especially in Poland there is a dominant conviction that with the formal adhesion to the European Union serious financial resources will come that would ensure the advancement from the European margin to the world center, although many Euro-skeptics doubt it and consider fixing of the Latin American model of dependant capitalism. Psychological and social reasons require a faith in one’s own capabilities, require a bit of an universalistic optimism to believe in the possibility of escaping a fatalistic determinism of dependency, to believe in the effective action of the role solidarity in the enlarged European Union.

The drastic change of the Solidarity program after 1989 is also a problem and was termed by some as a "huge fraud" of elites or the unforgivable sin of Solidarity. It proved to be a quite useful explanation of the mass transition of disappointed workers, who failed to adjust to the official civil or bourgeois society, to the anti-civil criminal world. The Polish political and socio-economic (r)evolution has undergone a complicated ideological process from the Gramscian idea of the civil society to the liberal idea of open society as seen by Karl Raimund Popper. An expert in the work of the latter said: "Without exaggeration we may say that Popper was the proper idol of the 1989 revolution. The underground printing offices published Popper’s The Open Society and The Poverty of Historicism which were arduously sought in political opposition circles."⁹¹ The democratic and trade union opposition in Poland started to yield to the looming ideas of liberalism and critical rationalism and learned how effectively to use Popper’s anti-dogmatic trial and error method in the political struggle in line with the principle that the end justifies the means. Adam Michnik saw different type of ideas and concepts in the Committee for Workers’ Defense (KOR): "Being the turning point of the processes of the reconstruction of the independent civil life KOR, at the same time was the crossing point of different ideological currents, the meeting site of people from different generations and circles, a river which absorbed very different streams."⁹²

Disputes on who contributed the most to overthrowing communism have been held in Poland and in the world. Often mentioned are the United States (especially the Carter and Reagan administrations), the Catholic Church (especially of Pope John Paul II) and the Afghan Mujahedins; also mentioned are the names of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, Wałęsa, Kuroń and other KOR and Solidarity leaders, and even the names of Edward Gierek and Generals Jaruzelski and Kiszczak, as well as Colonel Kukliński. However, it may be said that in this world-wide war on communism the victory was scored by "Its Excellency The Civil Society."⁹³ In the peaceful struggle, in the war of positions on the state of real socialism the victory was scored by the civil society, the idea⁹⁴ revived and launched into the political struggle (with capitalism) by the Italian communist Gramsci. I believe – and this is one of the main, quite perverse and apparently absurd thesis of the present work -–that the group of intellectual prime movers of this epoch-making victory, the event that ended the Cold War and postponed for some time the threat of WW3 includes above all the names of Antonio Gramsci, Norberto Bobbio, Leszek Kołakowski and Adam Michnik.

A number of recent enthusiasts of the systemic changes manifest authentic surprise at the fact that the cheated Polish society lacks "the willingness to protest and to self-organization to exert pressure on the rulers"⁹⁵ which generally bring result contrary to intentions. Many manifest naïve surprise that the so called transition to democracy in Poland and Eastern Europe failed to integrate Poland with the capitalist Center but instead was a transition to the oligarchic, dependent and peripheral capitalism quite common in the contemporary world. This should be the explanation to the mass social apathy and 20-percent turnout in the last elections to the European Parliament and below 40-percent to the Polish Parliament in 2005. A bit frightened, politicians have promised to the disappointed people of post-communist peripheral capitalism in Poland a moral revolution against that corrupt system ( a bit earlier there had been an orange revolution in Ukraine, the rose revolution in Georgia, tulip revolution in Kyrgyzia, and a bloody revolt in Uzbekistan).

Recently also in Poland there has begun a discussion on relations between the civil society (currently present only on the official political scene) and new social movements. The notion of a Fourth Sector has been introduced to mark organizations protesting the existing socio-economic, political and cultural system.⁹⁶ The said organizations condemn market and liberal mechanisms and any type of state coercion and propose drastic changes exceeding the limits set by the intra-systemic Third Sector. These apolitical and anti-institutional movements demand autonomy or even independence from the state sector. They build new utopias of the radical-ecology-oriented type or synthetic-universalistic, democratic-"cosmocratic", neo-communist (M. Hardt and A. Negri) and anarchist-socialist models.

New social movements in Poland strike up contacts with the Forum of the European Civil Society and the world anti-globalist movement (alterglobalists) oriented on a global civil society. This movement wants to turn to a new internationalism, new social Internationale of the 21^st century the opposing supranational political and financial institutions of global capitalism. Offensive movements proposing new, global (international) civil society take advantage of the strength of the Internet (and its broad opportunities to create horizontal social ties) and seek ideological sources in the non-submissive, defiant-romantic tradition and in the Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony and civil society. Could this idea be once again the source of rich inspiration for anti-systemic alternative?

CIVIL SOCIETY AND SOCIAL CAPITAL IN POLAND

Theorizing on the concept of civil society has been quite frequent in the social sciences since the late 1980s, especially in the political discourse of Western and semi-Western countries that aspired to full integration with the capitalist Center. Strong civil society has been considered as a remedy for democratic deficit, social apathy and economic backwardness.

Recently yet another concept, somehow related to the previous one, has entered common discourse--the idea of social capital as formulated by Pierre Bourdieu and James S. Coleman, and further advanced by Robert D. Putnam and Francis Fukuyama⁹⁷. Theoretical and practical considerations on social and cultural capital have appeared in Poland in connection with translations of American and French authors. They demonstrate the importance of social capital as a valuable social resource for the functioning of modern democratic and civil societies in a market economy, undergoing social, economic and political transformations. Social capital as a problem appears as a social and economic category full of cognitive and descriptive value, both as a social commodity and as a peculiar socio-psychological and behavioral fact⁹⁸. Social capital is usually strengthened when dominant elites voluntarily give up a part of their privileges for the common social good. The term is used to describe the mechanisms of conversion of social and cultural capital into material capital, and in analyzing the dynamics of social and structural changes in Polish society, especially in its local communities⁹⁹. Consciously creating and managing social capital and increasing its quality is understood as an ability to bond individuals in an affluent society and to develop their potential. The social capital concept appears also as a criterion for social development and modernization¹⁰⁰.

Social capital is often considered as a fragment of a general cultural competence, of economic culture, and therefore is strongly correlated with some religious and ethical systems, especially with Protestantism and Confucianism, where cultural, immaterial values in organizing economy really do matter¹⁰¹.

A specific case is that of Catholicism. Max Weber associated the development of capitalism rather with Protestant ethics than with Catholicism, but much has been changed since the publication of his famous book. Religion, especially the Catholic religion, can play an important role in improving social capital in post-communist Poland. It can allegedly guarantee social cohesion, cultural unification and durable ethical system. It can be a substitute for other, more modern institutions existing in Western world, and can prevent negative consequences of modernization¹⁰². Even Robert Putnam, far from glorifying civic spirit of the Catholic Church in Italy, highly appreciated some associations closely related to the Church. Polish bishops, including the former primate Stefan Wyszyński, were originally afraid of the spirit of capitalism, but after 1989 they accepted with a "moderate goodwill" or with limited consent the Polish transformation. It is rather generally accepted now that the Catholic Church with its moral strength and effective incentives for human cooperation may be an institution favoring pro-capitalist economic modernization, and may be a potential source of social capital¹⁰³.

Putnam’s theory of social capital has met with considerable interest in Poland. Even the question whether it is possible to emulate his Italian research has been posed. Observers demonstrate analogies and differences between Poland and Italy¹⁰⁴. In an epilogue to the Polish edition of Putnam’s work Rychard indicates that Poland could learn from his analysis. According to Rychard, Putnam’s book has filled a blank in Polish discussions on democracy. It has shown a new perspective in looking on democracy, in which a network of social ties and institutions matters more than political actors. Especially important is the neglected space between individual and the state. Rychard pointed to the historic role of Solidarity, but its conception of civil society born in a protest accentuated more unity that diversity. Civil society in the twenty first century could take more normal forms, according to Rychard. In the early 1980’s it was an ideology of civil society without civil society proper, while in the mid 1990’s it was a beginning of real civil society and social capital no longer with an ideology¹⁰⁵.

Others have seen serious methodological shortcomings in Putnam’s concept: it is tautological, it gives new meanings to capital and ignores market failures coming from various interest groups. It is a nostalgic attempt of return to a natural state of man, in which staying in nature ensures stable and mutually beneficial interactions. Putnam perceives norms of reciprocity and trust as the invisible hand of the market, what has not been demonstrated. In modern economies and societies the principle of reciprocity is a necessary but not sufficient condition of an economic order, argues a Polish critic of Putnam¹⁰⁶.

Polish authors regard social capital as a metaphor or a stylistic figure, as a mere concept of one or few theories, or they treat it as a category of an attractive, well-grounded theory in the making. It turned out that there is a need to differentiate between various kinds of social capital. The concept gains popularity as a result of a fashion coming from the United States (and partly from France), from the Center of economic, cultural and scientific world¹⁰⁷. The old concept of economic capital had been negatively charged with Karl Marx’s (and his leftist followers) critique, while the concept or watchword of social capital (with its strong rhetorical force) has spread quickly all over the world, since it can easily enter into various theories and political programs (the need for social capital is accepted by liberals, conservatives, republicans and socialists) and be regarded as a remedy for all troubles¹⁰⁸. It was present, among others, in the famous manifesto by Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder, in the US Democratic Party platform, and in the leftist ideas propagated by Bourdieu and his followers.

One of the first and unusual definitions of social capital presented in Poland differed greatly from that of Putnam. It was rather similar to Bourdieu’s views and conceived of social capital as all general informal ties (or acquaintances) thanks to which an individual raises its probability for entering an elite or to preserve his or her place in it¹⁰⁹. Some critics, however, call into question the usefulness of social capital as a theoretical tool for broader, macro-social analysis, since it serves to explain various and even opposed phenomena. It is regarded as unclear and poorer than other theoretical approaches, for example the basic values of the European Union or the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church (with its primacy of common good, subsidiarity and solidarity principles). In the Polish Government document, issued in September 2005, it was stressed that the subsidiarity principle will be a fundamental value accompanying the Operational Civil Society Program and all its activities.

One of the critics wonders if the ambiguous concept of social capital covers only a network of social ties supporting existing order or if it can cover also those ties that arouse resistance against the extant order and express a will to change it radically. Without answering this question it is impossible to classify factors favoring the social capital development¹¹⁰.

On the one hand, social capital is regarded as a means for realization of a goal such as social development, but on the other hand it is regarded as a goal for itself, because trust, loyalty, solidarity and ability to cooperate introduce positive values in human life. Besides, empirical data from various countries show that economic growth is not always accompanied by high or growing social capital; sometimes the growth is possible only in the conditions of calming excessive social tensions.

Polish and Central European authors have paid much attention to the role of civil society and associational life in the transition and consolidation of democratic order. However Polish democracy, civil society and their discontents require new tools for grasping the monstrous reality of post-communist or, better, peripheral capitalism. The importance of social capital understood as a common tendency or ability to cooperate effectively is often stressed nowadays. Many Poles disillusioned with the new reality see it as still post-communist, pre-capitalist or incompletely capitalist, lacking in social capital and in other goods. The new reality cannot be described only with the help of the civil society concept, which in the new political context of neo-liberal reforms had to change or renounce its originally communitarian, patriotic and even nationalistic meaning.

The metaphorical concept of social capital is unclear and rather intangible as compared with physical (material or productive) capital and human (individual and educational) capital¹¹¹. The present popularity of the social capital concept is now probably more intensive than the human capital concept introduced in 1960s by Theodore William Schultz and Gary Stanley Becker. The term came from economies to other social sciences (sociology, psychology, political science, ethics, theory of management, theories of culture) and is considered a sign of economic imperialism. In the realm of economies social capital coordinates individual and group activities, and contributes to the economic development of local communities, regions and nations, but in sociology it refers to interpersonal norms of trust and reciprocity in a historical process of human relations. It reflects durable institutions, cultural norms or codes and social networks. Social capital favors human solidarity and a high quality of life. Some authors consider civic associations as the most important element of social capital or even as its main source (apart from religion, formal institutions and family ties)¹¹², others derive civic engagement energy just from social capital.

According to many Polish authors, the broad concept of social capital is the essence of civil society, especially of civil society that is effective in its development. It contains everything that determines sound social relations, the common good and cooperation¹¹³. According to Piotr Sztompka, the President of International Sociological Association, "the key to rebuilding robust civil society is the restoration of trust in public institutions, public roles, and political elites, as well as in the viability of a new political and economic order"¹¹⁴. However, the link or correlation between the density of civil society organizations and the degree of interpersonal trust (associated with social capital) is rather complicated. In the majority of Western and/or rich countries high civil society indexes are accompanied by high interpersonal trust and socioeconomic wellbeing. However, for Japan and Spain, low civil society density and high interpersonal trust are characteristic. By contrast in Brazil, strong civil society and associational life lies behind unconsolidated democracy and low social capital¹¹⁵. Poland, although it has contributed considerably to the rebirth of the civil society idea and to the East European transitions to democracy, is still lacking in both robust civil society¹¹⁶ and social capital, as we shall see later on. Poor countries, like Poland and Brazil, usually show lower levels of interpersonal trust than more affluent democracies. The World Bank and other institutions believe that strengthening social capital by investing in it may improve the situation in underdeveloped countries.

Bronislaw Misztal in his work presents a different approach, by putting the concept of civil society in the wider context of the "good society" debate. He argues that what is crucial for constructing a good society is how dead capital (social capital) can be mobilized and put to work. Thus, his approach suggests that civil society can be built even in societies where people have relatively less subjectivity, authenticity and subsidiarity, but that it requires extensive measures of social mobilization. This approach is consistent with the more economically oriented work of De Soto.¹¹⁷

The present widespread discussion on social capital in Poland and elsewhere is not only an intellectual fashion, but is connected with a further development of democracy and market economy in the whole world. The concept is considered a useful tool for researchers and for practical social engineering. It is mysterious glue that makes good society out of separate individuals. Some Polish authors believe that the category of social capital allows a better understanding of public life in new post-communist democracies than the civil society perspective which was very fashionable till recent days. Doing research into the causes of progress or stagnation in small Polish towns and local communities Trutkowski and Mandes, two young authors, have gone beyond the civil society and social participation theories and made use of other theoretical tools, more sensitive to cultural and historical context, such as social capital concept¹¹⁸. This is often considered a value in itself, as a virtue necessary for capitalist development.

The social capital concept has usually positive or neutral (Coleman) connotations, but some American and Polish authors speak also about dark, unsocial, negative capital (F. Fukuyama, M.E. Warren, Alejandro Portes, Margaret Levi), perverse and unproductive capital present in criminal or terrorist groups and even in some corrupt political elites. The dark social capital in Poland is made possible and facilitated by high level corruption, symptoms of crony and political capitalism, by erasing the distinction between the private and public spheres, and by formal, institutional and financial barriers hindering the civic and political activity of Polish citizens¹¹⁹.

Present-day Polish political culture is full of distrust, especially towards state institutions. Poles belong to the least trusting societies of Europe. According to the European Value Survey from 1999 Denmark, Sweden and Holland are the countries where the trust is highest. In those societies over 60% of the citizens put trust in their fellow countrymen, whereas in Poland only 18, 4%. Moreover in Poland there has been, at least since the 1970s, a vacuum between family and nation. This void has not yet disappeared; under the post-communist peripheral capitalism it has not been filled with much desired civil society. According to Janusz Czapiński, who established criteria for strong civil society in high social capital, present-day Poland does not fulfill any criteria of civil society¹²⁰. From the point of view of general interpersonal trust Poland has occupied the last place in the European Social Survey in 2002 and in later years. In Poland the opinion according to which one can trust the majority of people is shared only by 10, 5%, whereas in very affluent Norway by over 70%. Also recently a tendency to enter voluntary associations has decreased rapidly. In this we hold the last place in Europe. Also intolerance towards homosexuals is displayed more frequently in Poland than in other countries. The high level of interpersonal trust, active participation in voluntary organizations and tolerant attitudes towards homosexuals are strongly correlated with material prosperity and with general satisfaction with life. One can conclude that material wealth paves the way towards social capital and that it is very difficult to build social capital under economic misery and profound political disappointment with the post-communist reality and its democratic leaders. Mass migration of young Poles from formally democratic Poland, even more intensive than under foreign occupation, is a sign of great dissatisfaction and distrust. Perhaps only the rapidly increasing level of education can give a slight hope for a possibly higher degree of social capital in Poland in the future.

The weakness of Polish civil society consists in a low engagement of citizens both in public affairs and in non-governmental organizations. Equally low is civic honesty¹²¹. Social apathy has led to the fact that the percentage of Poles participating in legal and illegal demonstrations (or even contacts with politicians) is the lowest in Europe. At the beginning of 1980s the most frequent demonstrations and strikes in Europe were precisely in Poland. Now, high unemployment and the widespread awareness that after 25 years of protests some problems (inequality, social exclusion, injustice, corruption) are more acute than ever prevents people from violent protests. Tadeusz Kowalik, a leftist scholar, one of the first Solidarity advisers, declared recently that in Poland, after a dozen or so years of radical changes, there has been established one of the most unjust political systems known in the history of the European continent¹²². Another scholar, Andrzej Zawiślak, a former minister coming from Solidarity, declared that even in his darkest projections forecasts he could not imagine a political system of so low quality as has been created out of Solidarity’s dreams for Poland¹²³.

Zdzisław Krasnodębski, an intellectual guru of the ruling Law and Justice Party, along with Rafał Matyja, points at a deep distrust existing in public and social life of Poland, a distrust in Polish politics, a distrust of post-communists and of neo-liberals coming from the former democratic opposition, a mistrust of liberals towards Catholic traditionalists and of liberals towards the ruling conservative party accused of preparing a dictatorship, which is a sign of Polish abnormality¹²⁴.

Poles do not trust in them and do not participate in political life; usually they do not show real interest in public affairs. The turnout at polls is very low, in 2005 at parliamentary elections about 40%, at local authorities elections in 2002 about 44% and for the European Parliament in 2004 only about 20%. Relatively the highest turnout in recent years, about 50%, was for the presidential election in 2005. The low turnout at the polls comes from a widespread popular disappointment with politicians of all tendencies who have never kept their promises when they came to power. Now only 40% of Poles accept democratic rules.

A lot of distrust towards its citizens is shown also by the authorities of the Polish state. Distrust is present even within the ruling coalition. The state restricts individual choices, multiplies regulations, prohibitions and bans, and does not support NGO’s. A generally frightening atmosphere of distrust and suspicion is also fostered by the official policy of persecution and distrust towards possible "agents", people who might ever have had any contacts (even unconsciously) with the former communist rulers, and especially with its secrete police. Besides, crucial decisions are usually taken beyond any real dialogue by isolated political leaders who distrust the common sense of their fellow countrymen¹²⁵.

The research Institute for National Memory, full of young inexperienced historians, has been transformed into a political police and a kind of inquisition. Only young people, below 35 years and former emigrants, seem to be free from political suspicion. Afraid of the recently prevailing excessive cult of former communist dissidents, those historians now eagerly discover and exaggerate ambiguities in their behavior under communism. The former finance minister and deputy prime minister under the Law and Justice party government, professor at the Catholic University of Lublin, unjustly accused of collaboration with the former communist secret police, has recently declared with indignation: "The epoch of solidarity and liberty has ended; the epoch of squalidity has begun".

Distrust in legendary leaders of Solidarity (Lech Wałęsa, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Jacek Kuroń, and Adam Michnik) and of some famous Catholic priests is widespread. Also the most important neighbors of Poland (Germany and Russia) are treated with mistrust. Even some foreign ministers in the Third Republic were accused of having been Soviet agents. Other politicians were accused of having been children of the pre-war Communist Party of Poland members or grandchildren of Wehrmacht soldiers. A well-known fact is a mutual mistrust of all presidents of independent Poland; recently, at the end of August 2006, Lech Wałęsa and Lech Kaczyński celebrated separately the anniversary of Solidarity.

Other sociologists are less pessimistic in their estimation of the condition of civil society and trust in Poland. They are still impressed by the spontaneous self-organization of the first Solidarity, although they acknowledge that civil society is still weak and in the making¹²⁶, and that we have had problems in the transition from rebellious civil society in opposition to a civil society which after 1989 somehow participation in local and central authority¹²⁷. Even those who are rather pessimistic in their estimation of the present condition of civil society and social capital in Poland believe in a kind of neo-socialistic equalization, in a European Solidarity that eliminates regional differences; they are convinced that in the long run Poland will become very close to the material wellbeing, social and organizational rules of other countries of the European Union.

After the fall 2005 parliamentary and presidential elections Poland is strongly led and governed by twin brothers, who have managed to form a right wing coalition of semi-authoritarian, populist and conservative forces. The victorious forces have taken advantage of widespread discontent, the acute crisis of the leftist parties, and the popular frustration caused by the corrupt democracy installed during the transition from authoritarian socialism to peripheral capitalism in the preceding 16 years. They have focused their critique on liberal and post-communist elites blaming them for egoism, for all the evil and especially for unrealized utopian dreams of the initial communitarian and egalitarian Solidarity movement; its aim, as we know, was to combine freedom with social equality.

The leading conservative and "republican" Law and Justice party is trying to strengthen state power, to consider it as a superior aim, and to embrace with its rule all independent spheres of life. It shows therefore a deep distrust towards the ideas of self-management, civic communities, independent initiatives and civil society in general. Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of the ruling party and now the prime minister of the right-wing government declared that the idea of civil society, promoted by the former communist dissidents, is a Western liberal invention, alien to the Polish political culture. Although in subsequent declarations his reservations towards the idea of civil society have been slightly diminished, his emphasis is still being put on a strong solidary state, on an exclusive concept of the Polish nation, on suspiciousness and mistrust towards the majority of citizens. The ruling coalition is promoting only patriotic education, not civic education.

Jarosław Kaczyński’s project of a moral revolution and of the Fourth Republic, overcoming the first 16-17 years of the unsuccessful Third Republic after the 1989 breakthrough, is criticized by neo-liberal and post-communist intellectuals: it brings a danger of centralization, of weakening civil society and of unrealistic expectations¹²⁸; it favors the feeling of instability and even of a disaster¹²⁹. This deepens a neurotic complex of victim, revives the old Polish romantic, messianic myths and other prejudices. The whole conception of twin brothers Kaczyński is being considered as archaic and provincial, it generates chaos on the political scene and anti-modern traditionalism, it curtails competence of independent institutions, promotes general incompetence and contempt for intellectual elites¹³⁰. Polish liberals are afraid of the excessive, anachronistic cult of the state directed against civil society that limits the state power¹³¹. It seems that the new Polish political tendency to connect politics with moral infallibility, with the ideas of sovereign state and of sovereign democracy, and looking for an absolute enemy (something similar is present today also in Russia) is inspired by Carl Schmitt’s ill-famed political thought, by the conservative revolution theory in Weimar Republic¹³² and by the tradition of Polish and European authoritarianism (Franco, Salazar, Dollfus, Pétain, Piłsudski, Dmowski). Robert Krasowski, the Editor-in-chief of the semi-official Polish daily Dziennik has recently (9 September 2006) announced in his Editorial the demise of Western liberalism and its gradual replacement by neo-conservatism: "The neo-conservative Realpolitik is being executed today, and its classics – Strauss and Schmitt – are being studied today by the Prince advisers. Not only Bush’s, but also Blair’s, Putin’s, Sarkozy’s, Olmert’s or Kaczyński’s advisers. What is more, no alternative is seen for the new, more rigid, and for some less sympathetic, face of the West".

According to Krasnodębski and other ideologues of the Fourth Republic, the Third Republic has been a sick state that badly needed deep reconstruction. His book Demokracja peryferii (Democracy of Periphery), published in 2003¹³³, met with great interest. It was a balance of the Third Republic disaster, not of successful transformation, which imitated in a mindless way Western liberal solutions which in fact are unattainable, and forgot about the originally Polish tradition of moral and rather collectivist republicanism, romanticism and even the participatory and republican Solidarity movement. According to Krasnodębski in Poland after communism a façade democracy without values and a new oligarchic system has been introduced, which will not allow building a genuine market economy and a fully democratic system. The former socialist utopia has been replaced by a new liberal utopia¹³⁴. He has criticized the popular modernization theory present in the new Polish capitalism in a manner similar to the dependency school. Much to his surprise no significant leftist critique (almost all post-communists have become liberals) of the new social and political order has appeared in a country of huge fortunes and public misery. Besides, he noticed that new hegemonic relations are rising in a united Europe, in which Poland with its weakened state and shaky economy may become a vassal subject or peripheral to the European Empire.

Unlike liberals and post-communists, Krasnodębski suggests that there had been a viable alternative to the dependent development model chosen in 1989 by liberal elites or imposed on Poland (although supported for a time also by the Polish society fascinated with Western dependency when the Soviet socialism collapsed¹³⁵), and that even now the communitarian, anti-individualistic project of the Fourth Republic may change substantially the disastrous situation of Poland.

The conservative revolt against the pathological democracy of the periphery or better against the peripheral capitalism in Poland, the revolt against all kinds of foreign interference fired up intellectually by Krasnodębski and continued in practice by the twin leaders, is a noble and naive attempt to avoid the evils of capitalism present in all underdeveloped and dependent countries. Such revolts usually end in failure, as did the leftist indignation at a false democracy in the so called Third World countries. The ideologues of Polish Solidarity and of the Law and Justice party have never read texts by Raúl Prebisch and by the dependency school, so they are not aware of universal, rather permanent defects of peripheral capitalism, present in the existing world system. Some, however, have noticed a similarity between the specific case of Poland and of Latin American countries; unfortunately this superficial observation was accompanied by a nationalist feeling of superiority, what appalled the Mexican ambassador to Poland, among others.

The watchwords of a Fourth Republic, of moral revolution and of a "new distribution of trust"¹³⁶ suggest that the utopian ideals of Solidarity were betrayed after 1989. They call for a new state, for moral sanitation of the national reality, for political purges and extraordinary tribunals, for breaking corrupt business cliques, for a more radical breaking off with communism, for toughening laws on former Communist collaborators, and for the elimination from public life of post-communists treated as scapegoats. The calling for a breaking from communism has turned out to be very difficult in the specific situation of Poland, where the majority of post-communists have turned out to be much more pro-capitalist than have the members of Solidarity. Those mythic watchwords have rather turned out to be a skillful and efficient maneuver warning the political class of a possible danger, of a forthcoming leftist revolt against corrupt capitalism; eventually, the watchwords turned out to be an efficient maneuver helping to absorb both populists and nationalists, populist Left and Right wing forces into a conservative, allegedly anti-systemic, coalition promising the disappointed people a morally decent capitalism with social sensitivity and human face¹³⁷. However, the expectation that only morally decent people will rule, will overcome the corrupt system in a poor country, and will introduce justice in peripheral capitalism is a new and extravagantly quixotic utopia or simple naiveté.

Official spokesmen and intellectuals associated with the rightist ruling party stress the need to preserve national sovereignty and a strong national state in the European Union. They have opposed the till now dominant tendency to prefer civil society newspeak to national identity discourse. They say that after 16 years of transformation Poland is still a post-communist country with a weak state, a corrupt, regulated economy, and a weak civil society. They say, similarly to extreme leftists, that the process of modernization in Poland is limited to few great cities, that it consists in inner colonization. Only a tiny middle class draws profit from this modernization, while the overwhelming majority of people is marginalized and treated as the "rubbish" of civilizational change. This reality is perceived by a considerable part of society as an unjust social and political order¹³⁸. This reality is defined in Poland as a monster of post-communism (Jarosław Kaczyński), as incomplete capitalism (Jadwiga Staniszkis) or savage capitalism. Only a few authors treat it as (normal) capitalism or better peripheral capitalism, which exists in greater part of the world¹³⁹, especially in Latin American countries, which, except for Cuba, have never had communism.

Dariusz Gawin interprets the post-communist situation in Poland also as a second trahison des clercs, when the Solidarity leaders betrayed workers, the people of Solidarity, leaving them alone while changing into a middle class. Behind this project stood an ideology of Polish liberalism (pop-liberalism) or lumpen-liberalism (Jarosław Kaczyński), which easily and derisively stigmatized those who could not cope with the new reality, and considered them therefore as a redundant mob. In such a situation the watchword of Fourth Republic has been whole-heartedly accepted by the poor, less educated and Catholic people living in the provinces as a promise of a just, more inclusive and transparent modernization.

The spokesmen of the Law and Justice party opt for a noble republicanism in which the people prevails over false liberal elites and becomes a chief political player. One of them has posed the question of how the areas of trust could be extended and areas of distrust reduced in Polish politics¹⁴⁰. The sources of distrust, in his words, do not lie in superficial, subjective reasons, but in fundamental differences between the conservative Law and Justice and liberal Civic Platform, which allegedly feels contempt for the democratic decisions of the people. The first party is interested in a deep reform, renovation of the Polish state, and in the creation of the Fourth Republic, whereas the second party would presumably like to preserve existing social and economic structures. Andrzej Nowak sees the obstacle to fundamental change in the independent spheres of mass media, banks and courts. But the care for civil society, for the third sector organization and social capital is clearly seen precisely in the above mentioned institutions, especially in the independent press¹⁴¹, quite often criticized by the present government of Poland.

The Law and Justice rule is interpreted as a playing with authoritarianism, with a gradual retreat and dissolution of democracy¹⁴². This is a dangerous tendency, since the number of people willing to participate in political decisions is decreasing. The citizens do not believe in the value of democracy, but retreat to privacy; they do not trust courts, political parties and other institutions; they are convinced that all decisions usually are undertaken beyond any control. Polish citizens conceive of democracy not in terms of political liberty and free market, but in terms of controlling the market, and in terms of social and economic equality. It seems that in Poland and elsewhere after a wave of democratization a new period of a democracy outflow and its implosion is oncoming. Perhaps the only guarantee that democracy in Poland will not collapse easily lies in the impact of foreign public opinion and in the participation of our country in the European Union and in NATO structures. In Europe Poland is now perceived with distrust as a country that ceased to be a leader in post-communist transformation; it is rather an isolated enfant terrible trying to find a dangerous solution to its illness.

Liberal elites, who are rather excessively fascinated with the "great success" of the Polish transformation, announce a forthcoming defeat for the conservative, rather mythical revolution: "The most important fault that will probably be found with the ‘anti-systemic coalition’, when it loses its power, are lost chances. Attached to it is a growing provincialism of Poland, an atmosphere of permanent cold war, growing isolation in foreign policy, and pushing a part of Poland down towards its worse part: towards obsessions, pathological distrust, paranoid threat of strangers, grandiloquence on dignity"¹⁴³.

Liberals and left-wingers are trying to interpret the complicated Polish reality of 2006 as a situation in which the old opposition between the communist state and civil society is coming back, and being reproduced in new circumstances. They argue that "once again it is necessary to build an alternative polis based on knowledge, freedom, debate, pluralism and friendship", that Poland should be proud of its civic tradition based on cultural values, and not of the authoritarian tradition of a repressive state¹⁴⁴.

NOTES

1 Gramsci’s enormous role in the rebirth of the civic society concept is generally acknowledged in the near and "far" (Latin America) West. In Poland, however, where Gramsci is completely forgotten, publishers offer voluminous editions on civil society which do not even mention his name.

2 Interestingly, some orthodox Marxists in their comparisons of class society and civil society theories saw precisely Gramsci’s concept as a clumsy syncretism of liberalism and Marxism, G. Hunt, "Gramsci, Civil Society and Bureaucracy", Praxis International 2 (1986), 207.

3 N. Bobbio, Gramsci e la concezione della società civile, in: Gramsci e la cultura contemporanea. Atti del Convegno internazionale de studi gramsciani tenuto a Cagliari il 23-27 aprile 1967, a cura di P. Rossi, Roma 1969 (2^nd edition 1975, expanded book editions 1976, 1977); also among others in Civil Society and the State. New European Perspectives, J. Keane, ed. (London: Verso 1988), 83. Norberto Bobbio’s writings about Gramsci were widely discussed in Italy and worldwide and appeared in several Italian editions and foreign translation (in Spanish in Argentina and Spain, in Portuguese in Brazil, in English in Great Britain and the U.S., also in Polish and Turkish – the latter while Turkey and Poland were still under military rule), among others in numerous collective works. Since the late 1960s Bobbio contributed greatly to the civil society concept’s penetration of contemporary philosophy and everyday language.

4 Marcus A. Green, "Gramsci no puede hablar", in: Hegemonia, etado y sociedad civil en la globalización, ed. D. Kanoussi (México: Plaza y Valdés 2001), 82-86.

5 Quoted after W. Adamson, Hegemony and Revolution. A Study of Antonio Gramsci’s Political and Cultural Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 219-220.

6 J. A. Buttigieg, Gramsci y la sociedad civil, 73-75.

7 N. Bobbio, "Gramsci and the Concept of Civil Society", in: Civil Society and the State, 76.

8 Marcus A. Green, Gramsci no puede hablar, 105.

9 Hughues Portelli (Gramsci et le bloc historique, Paris 1972, 8), claims that this key concept expresses the basic aspects of Gramsci’s political thought. In his characteristic of the "historical bloc’s" superstructure Portelli – with pronounced help from Bobbio – starts out with a detailed analysis of the Gramscian civil society concept.

10 Cf.: N. Bobbio, Gramsci and the Concept of Civil Society, 82-86; Gramsci’s thoughts on civil society are contained in Gramsci und die Theorie der Zivilgesellschaft, the first part of a special issue of Das Argument (July-October 1994) entitled, Ethik und Staat: Zivilgesellschaft; also see: "Società civile e riforma intellecttuale e morale", Critica marxista 2-3 (1987).

11 H. Portelli, Gramsci et le bloc historique (Paris: PUF, 1972), 17-18.

12 A. Gramsci, Letters from Prison (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 204.

13 Interesting information and comments about the influence of Gramsci’s civil self-government illusions on the allegedly genuine "intellectual and moral reform" of the Soviet perestroika can be found in W. F. Haug, Gorbatschow. Versuch über den Zusammenhang seiner Gedanken (Hamburg 1989); especially chapter 4 entitled, Die Entdeckung der Zivilgesellschaft, 331-451. See also E. Novikov, P. Bascio,Gorbachev and the Collapse of the Soviet Communist Party (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1994); M. Martin, The Keys of This Blood. The Struggle for World Dominion Between Pope John Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachov, and the Capitalist West (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 265-274.

14 J. Sempere, "Eurocomunismo, guerra de posiciones y alternativa de sociedad", Nuestra Bandera, 103 ( 1980).

15 A. Karatnycky, "The Democratic Imperative", The National Interest, 76 (2004), 111. Nowadays more and more authors are convinced that men are not ruled by force alone, but also by ideas. See T. Bates, "Gramsci and the Theory of Hegemony", in: Antonio Gramsci. Critical Assessment of Leading Political Philosophers, ed. J. Martin, vol. II (London and New York, 2002), 245; Sun Jing, Wen hua ba quan li lun yan jiu (On the theoretical study of cultural hegemony), Beijing 2004.

16 This was recorded quite early on and with some concern by, among others, Michael Novak, a U.S. rightwing Catholic liberal quite well known in Poland, in "The Gramscists Are Coming", Forbes, March 20, 1989. In a late-September 1992 interview for the Russian daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet also warned Russian readers against the communist Gramsci and his "dangerous" influence despite the fall of Marxism-Leninism in that country, especially on intellectuals. In a book and article entitled Fatal Fiction – Bolshevism’s New Face and Old Mechanisms (Antyk 13-14 (2003), Polish ultraconservative Dariusz Rohnka goes much further in his exaggerated, perhaps even obsessive unease about the presence of Gramsci’s ideas in the world, especially in the U.S.: according to Rohnka and other conservatives (notably R. Scruton), Gramsci’s strategies are used in the U.S. to "wreak havoc" in social and political relations, education systems, religion and customs, the outcome of this radical political and cultural revolution best evident in the emergence of Bill Clinton, moral relativism and political correctness, frequently described as "cultural Marxism". Rohnka believes America is going through a cultural revolution patterned on Gramsci’s ideas and concludes that, "Antonio Gramsci has no reason to turn in his grave. At the outset of the 21^st century cultural hegemony is certainly in the hands of his followers". Another Polish conservative, Stanisław Michałkiewicz, stated that today’s "eurosocialistic" and over-bureaucratized European Union was striving to embrace Gramsci’s "anti-Christian" ideology.

17 T. Vostos, Der Begriff der Zivilgesellschaft bei Antonio Gramsci. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und Gegenwart politischer Theorie (Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 2001), 28.

18 Mention of this is made among others by E. Garcia Méndez in, La teoria del Estado en Marica Latina: modelo para armar, Sistema 61 (1984). In the 19^th century the term civil society was already used by Simón Bolivar. One of the first 20th-century works to use "civil society" in its title and to describe socio-historical phenomena concerned Argentina and was published in Mexico: L. Allub, Estado y sociedad civil: patron de emergencia y desarrollo del Estado Argentino (México, 1974) In Argentina the term civil society was used in opposition to military society already in 1928 by the famous Marxist Aníbal Ponce in his writings on tyranny, military dictatorship and the leadership system (caudillismo). Argentina was also relatively quick to assimilate Gramsci’s works. See J. Aricó, La cola del diablo. Itinerario de Gramsci en América Latina (Buenos Aires 1988). It is worth adding that the first translation of N. Bobbio’s famous text on Gramsci and civil society first appeared in Argentina in 1972, a decade earlier than in Poland.

19 For more on this see: C. N. Coutinho, El concepto de sociedad civil en Gramsci y la lucha ideológica en Brasil hoy, in: D. Kanoussi (ed.), Gramsci y América (Ciudad de México - Puebla 2001), and Coutinho’s short essay, A recepção de Gramsci no Brasil in his book, Gramsci. Um estudo sobre seu pensamento politico (Rio de Janeiro 1999); also see: A. Squella Narducci, La influencia de Bobbio en Iberoamérica, in: La figura y el pensamiento de Norberto Bobbio (Madrid 1994).

20 J. L. Acanda, La contemporaneidad de Antonio Gramsci (La Habana 1991). It must be noted, however, that Gramsci, Althusser and other western Marxists were quite popular in the young Cuban socialist state before the country’s sovietization around 1970.

21 Still in January 1996 the party daily Granma called civil society a "U.S.-inspired fifth column", a "Trojan horse sent by the enemy" and an "alien neoliberal intrusion". However, already in March of that year a communist party document and Raúl Castro made cautious mention of a "socialist" or "Cuban" civil society model. A study by the Institute of Philosophy in Havana showed that the civil society concept played a major role in the devaluation of marxism and socialism in the USSR and its satellites and their transition from communism to reform and, eventually, full liberalism. A wide range of Cuban opinions about civil society can be found in a debate entitled, "Sociedad civil en los 90: El debate cubano" at http://www.geocities .com/catedragramsci/; M. Limia David, "Retomando el debate sobre la sociedad civil" at http//www.filosofia.cu/contemp. and in J.L. Acanda, Sociedad civil y hegemonía (La Habana: Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de la Cultura Cubana Juan Marinello, 2002). Also cf.: M. Vázquez Montalbán, Y Dios entró en la Habana, (Madrid: El País, 1999), 386-391.

22 H. Dilla Alfonso, P. Oxhorn, "Cuba: virtudes e infortunios de la sociedad civil", Revisita Mexicana de Sociologia 4 (1999).

23 S. Mainwaring, G. O’Donnell, J. Samuel Valenzuela, eds., Issues in Democratic Consolidation: The New South American Democracies in Comparative Perspective (Notre Dame 1992), 294, 311, 333.

24 Manfred Max Neef, Antonio Elizalde y otros, Sociedad civil y cultura democrática (Santiago de Chile 1989).

25 A. Domosławski offers an interesting account of Dowbor’s and Sirkis’ lives in "Jesień Partyzantów", in: Gazeta Wyborcza, August 19-20, 2000.

26 A. Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom (Stanford 1995), 426. This is especially true of Kołakowski, Hochfeld, Bauman and Geremek. The latter has an evident tendency to idealize Gramsci, whose utopian theory he respectfully sets apart from other socialist and communist programs: "In his prison notes Antonio Gramsci outlined a vision of an ‘ordered’ society easily capable of managing without state institutions, and hence without oppression instruments. In this way the state was to be marginalized and the main political weight shifted from rivalry for state government to positional warfare for hegemony over civil society", B. Geremek, "Społeczeństwo obywatelskie a współczesność", in: Europa i społeczeństwo obywatelskie. Rozmowy w Castel Gandolfo, K. Michalski, ed. (Cracow: Znak, 1994), 249.

27 Cf.: David Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics. Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1990), 31, 67. David Ost points to a paradox: "despite the fact that the Marxist tradition devastated civil society in Eastern Europe, it is the Marxist tradition that is largely responsible for reintroducing the concept of civil society in Western Europe". Here, Ost mentions Habermas from the Frankfurt School and Gramsci from the Marxist "old left". Ost fails to notice Gramsci’s influence in East Europe, especially on communist revisionists, and overestimates Tocqueville’s and Hannah Arendt’s role in shaping the opposition’s civil society aspirations. The here-quoted W. Adamson pointed to Gramsci’s superiority over those social theoreticians and social movement mentors, who, like Alain Touraine, feel a need to bring politics into civil society.

28 In a conversation with me Adam Michnik admitted that he had "learnt a lot" from Gramsci. In his famous conversation with Tischner and Żakowski he even stated, that he had been a "Gramsci-type communist", Między Panem a Plebanem (Cracow: Znak, 1995), 80.

29 A comparison of both authors’ prison writings would be quite interesting. Both displayed a strong sense of intellectual and moral resistance, both felt alone in their struggle, both had the courage to fight for their dignity, and both rejected freedom offers extended by the official authorities (the fascist regime in Italy and the communist authorities under martial law in Poland). Cf.: A. Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and A. Michnik, Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); H. Heintze, "La lecture politique d’un prisonnier solitaire. Antonio Gramsci et les lettres de la prison", in: La réception de l’oeuvre littéraire (Wrocław 1983).

30 J. Kaczyński, "Nowa Polska czy jeszcze stara"?, in: T. Torańska, My (Warsaw 1994), 118.

31 Z. A. Pelczynski, "Solidarity and the ‘Rebirth of Civil Society’ in Poland", in: Civil Society and the State. New European Perspectives, ed. J. Keane (London: Verso, 1988), 365.

32 Z. A. Pelczynski, "Solidarity and the ‘Rebirth…", 367, 371.

33 T. Garton Ash (The Polish Revolution: Solidarity 1980-1982, London 1983, 9, 15), claims that already before 1980 the Worker Defense Committee operated along the Leninist guidelines of What Is to Be Done, with small worker groups instructed by intellectuals in their role as the "avantgarde of the revolution". However, Ash points to a subtle difference: the Committee’s goal was evolution, not revolution. Yet the British historian seemed to ignore the Gramscian correction to Leninism and Trotskism when he wrote in 1981: "In sum, the situation in Poland could be, and was, compared of that of Russia in summer 1917. Then the Soviets grew alongside Kerensky’s Provisional Government in what Trotsky described as ‘Dual Power’. Now Solidarity grew alongside Kania’s Soviet-style, Soviet-backed government. The Party leader declared to the Plenum that a state of ‘Dual Power’ could not be tolerated. Yet it was already there, and Soviet intelligence could see it was there" (Ibid, 99).

34 Bogdan Borusewicz, "Dzień jedności", Gazeta Wyborcza, August 19-20, 2000.

35 As we know, Che Guevara proposed the creation of "many Vietnams" to force the capitalist world to disperse its forces and ultimately fall. Already in August 1980 The New York Times searched for a Baltic Che Guevara among Poland’s shipyarders. Here is a fragment of a report on the U.S. press’s coverage of the August 1980 events: "The papers usually adorned their articles with large pictures showing workers – all young, bearded and smoking cigarettes, either singing the national anthem or standing next to a cross commemorating social riots that had taken place there a decade earlier, or reading papers, or receiving flowers from children through the shipyard gate. These simple workers were sympathetically portrayed as the new `brave young men` who dared oppose the empire. The New York Times called these bearded and frequently bereted workers Baltic versions of Che Guevara", A. Brzezicki, "Polski sierpień w amerykańskiej prasie", Tygodnik Powszechny, Aug. 18, 2002.

36 Their founder was proud of the fact that his idea awoke the interest of unionists and socialist party doyens. See: Jacek Kuroń, Gwiezdny czas (London: Aneks, 1991), 240.

37 One can say that this was the fulfilment of Gramsci’s dreams from his worker council days in Turin. Gramsci saw these councils as an economic-political and cultural element of an emerging proletarian civil society. Cf.: W. Adamson, "Gramsci and the Politics of Civil Society", Praxis International 3-4 (1987/88), 321, 323.

38 L. Mażewski, W objęciach utopii. Polityczno-ideowa analiza dziejów "Solidarności" 1980-2000 (Toruń 2001), 57.

39 F. Lewis, "The Rise of ‘Civil Society’", in: The New York Times, June 25, 1989. The U. S. Journalist openly admitted something that Poles refuse to accept: that it was none other than the Italian communist Gramsci who introduced the term ‘civil society’ into contemporary political language.

40 Cecylia N. Lesgart, "El tránsito teórico de la izquierda intelectual en el Cono Sur de América Latina, Reforma moral e intelectual o liberalisto político?", Revisita Internacional de Filosofia Politica, 16 (2000). See the Polish left’s somewhat similar intellectual transition from Marxism and socialism to liberal-postmodern democracy here in my essay, "From ‘Socialist’ to Postmodern Pluralism in Poland".

41 Cecylia N. Lesgart, "El tránsito teórico..."; especially important in the article is the part entitled, "Antonio Gramsci y la salida del marxismo" (Antonio Gramsci and the Departure from Marxism).

42 Cf. a short essay by C. Nelson Coutinho, "A recepção de Gramsci no Brasil" in his book: Gramsci. Um estudo sobre seu pensamento politico (Rio de Janeiro 1999) and a book: Lincoln Secco, Gramsci e o Brasil. Recepcão e difusão de sus idéias (São Paulo: Editora Parma, 2002).

43 One liberalism convert is Fernando Henrique Cardoso, an earlier Marxist and until recently President of Brazil. Historical necessity may also force a shift to liberalism by the country’s current head of state, leftwing unionist and Labour Party leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (once dubbed Brazil’s Lech Wałęsa). Congratulating da Silva on his presidency, Wałęsa repeatedly pointed to the differences between them, Wałęsa representing a typically Polish pro-U.S. stance, Lula a U.S.-hostile attitude typical for Brazil.

44 C. N. Coutinho, "El concepto de sociedad civil en Gramsci y la lucha ideológica en Brasil hoy", in: D. Kanussi ,ed., Gramsci y América (Ciudad de México – Puebla 2001). Similarly, a Polish author (J. Tomasiewicz, "Jaki ATTAC?", Obywatel 1, 2003, 44) recounts how, "throngs of to-date leftwingers went over to their enemies. Most often it was the former Marxists that became liberals. This resulted not only from their common roots in the Enlightenment, but also their deeply-rooted faith in historical determinism: these people wanted to be always on the side of progress, the winning side, hence when progress turned out to lead to capitalism, they embraced capitalism".

45 Y. Acosta, Las nuevas referencias del pensamiento crítico en América Latina: ética y ampliación de la sociedad civl (Montevideo 2003).

46 See Struggles in the Americas. Hemispheric Civil Society Conference, R. Boyd, S.J. Noumoff, ed. (Montréal: Mc Gill University, 2003).

47 Cf.: H. F. Gaviria, "El Estado y la Sociedad Civil en la doctrina de la Iglesia", Revisita Javeriana, 1997, October.

48 Cf.: V Encuentro Iberoamericano del Tercer Sector. Colombia 200, Lo público. Una pregunta desde la sociedad civil. Memorias (Bogota 2001). Under the term "Third Sector" the authors understand all the various non-governmental organizations speaking up for issues like human rights, justice, solidarity and tolerance. However, Manuel Castells calls so-called NGOs "neo-governmental organizations" due to their significant funding by the state and participation in the emerging "network state".

49 Cf.: R. Hernández Vega, La idea de sociedad civil. Avance teórico (México 1995); E. Peruzzotti, "Constitutionalismo, populismo y sociedad civil. Lecciones del caso argentino", Revisita Mexicana de Sociologia, 4 (1999).

50 G. L. Escobar, "La globalisación y sus efectos en el desarrollo económico", Revisita Javeriana, 1997, October; A. Serbin, "Globalization, the Democracy Deficit and Civil Society in Processes of Integration", Pensamiento Propio 3 (1996).

51 T. Luzzani, "Przebudzenie obywateli" (Civil Awakening), Gazeta Wyborcza, February 4 2002. The violent protests launched in December 2001 by the heretofore quite numerous Argentinian middle class (complete with setting fire to buildings and shop looting), were reminiscent of the protests by Poland’s working-class aristocracy in December 1970 and June 1976. The Argentinian riots were the Latin world’s biggest social crisis in the past decades. According to Luzzani the Argentinian middle class had in recent years allowed "its most precious possessions" to be taken away and was now seeking new forms of representation, new leaders and new alliances. The case was somewhat similar with the Polish protesters. It seems that behind the protests in both countries lay the exaggeratedly occidental and false awareness of their citizens, who attempted to deny Argentina’s true position in Latin America and Poland’s in East Europe. An unexpected effect of the Polish and Argentinian protests were the total destruction of an adventurous industrial working class in Poland and a drastic downsizing of Argentina’s wealthy middle class. It is worth adding that society’s poorest, immersed in their usual apathy, hardly ever protested – neither in Argentina and Poland nor elsewhere. The awareness aspects of the Argentinian crisis (the strong influence of illusions) were pointed out by E. Garzón Valdés in his famous article, "Cinco tesis sobre la situación Argentina", Claves, May 2002.

52 M. Romano, R. Sanmartino, "Crisis de dominio burgués: reforma o revolución en Argentina", Estrategia Internacional, February 18 (2002).

53 Julio de Zan, "La sociedad dividida", (paper at the VII Jornadas Internacionales Interdisciplinarias del ICALA in Rio Cuarto, Argentina 2002).

54 Cf. L. Kołakowski, "Marksistowskie korzenie stalinizmu" (Stalinism’s Marxist Roots), a 1975 paper reprinted in: Czy diabeł może być zbawiony i 27 innych kazań (London: Aneks, 1984), 248-249, 251-252, 255-257; See also J. Rupnik, "Dissent in Poland, 1968-1978: The End of Revisionism and the Rebirth of Civil Society", and Iván Szelényi, "Socialist Opposition in Eastern Europe: Dilemmas and Prospects", in: Opposition in Eastern Europe, ed. Rudolf L. Tökes (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University, 1979).

55 Cf. M. Kusy, "On Civic Courage", International Journal of Politics, Spring 1981; a good analysis of the pre-civil-society condition by Czech and Polish authors can be found in: Zbigniew Rau, From Communism to Liberalism: Essays on the Individual and Civil Society (Łódź 1998), 92-93.

56 "The Myth of Human Self-Identity: Unity of Civil and Political Society in Socialist Thought", in: The Socialist Idea. A Reappraisal, ed. L. Kołakowski & S. Hampshire (New York: Basic Books, Inc. Publishers, 1974).

57 L. Kołakowski, Czy diabeł może być zbawiony i 27 innych kazań, (London: Aneks, 1984), 244-259. The term comes forth a whole ten times in the essay. However, Kołakowski fails to see that in many of his writings – especially his early texts – Marx interpreted the 1848 and 1871 uprisings in France as civil society’s revolts against the state and therefore gave the term a positive connotation. Years later it was taken over by the Western non-totalitarian left. Cf. C. Gordon, "Governmental Reality: An Introduction", in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed., G. Burchell and P. Miller (London 1991), 29-30.

58 A. Arato, "The Rise, Decline and Reconstruction of the Concept of Civil Society, and Directions for Future Research", in: Civil Society, Political Society, Democracy, ed. Adolf Bibič, Gigi Graziano (Ljubljana 1994), 3; see also Civil Society. A Reader in History, Theory and Global Politics, Ed. by John A. Hall and Frank Trentmann (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005).

59 Antonio Gramsci was born in 1891 in Ales near Cagliari on Sardinia. Ales, and especially the Congress in Cagliari, was the birthplace of the modern civil society concept which played such an instrumental role in the changes taking place in today’s world.

60 Cf.: "Sul Convegno gramsciano di Cagliari", Critica Marxista, 2 (1967).

61 Cf.: Gramsci e la cultura contemporanea. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi gramsciani tenuto a Cagliari il 23-27 aprile 1967, a cura di P. Rossi, vol. 2,2^nd edition (Roma 1975); Inside is an essay by Polish author Bogdan Suchodolski. Volume 1 is almost entirely devoted to the Gramscian civil society concept.

62 See G. Liguori, "La fortuna di Gramsci nel mondo", Critica marxista, 6 (1989), 82.

63 A. Michnik, "The New Evolutionism" , Survey, 3-4 (1976), 263; see also Jeffrey Goldfarb, Beyond Glasnost. The Post-Totalitarian Mind (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989).

64 See J. Frentzel-Zagórska, "Civil Society in Poland and Hungary", Soviet Studies, 4 (1990).

65 Adam Michnik, "The Promise of Civil Society" in his book Letters from Prison and other Essays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 124.

66 "Towards a Civil Society: Hopes for a Polish Democracy", The Times Literary Supplement 4 (1988).

67 See Hanna M. Fedorowicz, "Civil Society in Poland: Laboratory for Democratization in Central Europe", Plural Societies, vol. XXI (1990).

68 An interview with Bronisław Geremek published in Konfrontacje 2 (1988), 7.

69 A. Arato, "Civil Society against the State: Poland 1980-1981", Telos 1-2 (1981). At the time many western leftists, mostly raised on Gramsci, were thrilled with Solidarity, seeing in it the only really vital working-class movement.

70 Z. Pelczynski, "Solidarity...", 375. A somewhat similar appraisal of the situation was offered in March 1981 by one of the more radical Communist party leaders" "We are in a condition of unarmed rebellion against the political system by most of society, with the state’s political structures and the Party and its leading role put in question". Also a study team under A. Touraine pointed to Solidarity’s transition from trade union to an openly political organization.

71 However, another author, the above quoted Malachi Martin (The Keys of This Blood, 269), who also interprets the recent history of communist Poland with the help of Gramscian terms, deems that "under Wyszynski’s canny and guiding hand, the all-pervasive Catholic Church in Poland developed its own anti-Gramsci version of Gramsci process, its own network within which Polish culture could be preserved and developed."

72 Zbigniew Pelczynski, "Solidarity...", 375.

73 A. Michnik, "Cud Okrągłego Stołu" (A Miracle of the Round Table), Gazeta Wyborcza, February 6-7, 1999. Several years earlier the Polish-American sociologist Adam Przeworski called Spain’s switch to democracy "a miracle" and "a unique case" not to be repeated elsewhere (Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (New York 1991), 8, 187.

74 R. Krawczyk, Wielka przemiana (Warsaw: INTERIM, 1990), 19. Also Tomaz Mastnak noticed that civil society was initially conceived as alternative rather than opposition and was first articulated as "socialist civil society", but it "was found very soon that this term was a contradiction in terms." – T. Mastnak, "Civil Society in Slovenia: From Opposition to Power", in Democracy and Civil Society in Eastern Europe. Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, ed. P. Lewis (New York 1992), 134. The former Yugoslavia was one of the first countries where the concept of civil society appeared. See A. Bibić, Zasebnistswo in skupnost: civilna druzba in drzawa pri Heglu i Marxu (Ljubljana, 1972); M. Krizan, "Civil Society – A New Paradigm in the Yugoslav Theoretical Discussion", Praxis International 1-2 ( 1989).

75 A. Bodnar, Społeczeństwo obywatelskie – problemy interpretacyjne (Warsaw: Wydział Ideologiczny KC PZPR, 1989), 3.

76 W. Markiewicz, "Społeczeństwo obywatelskie a demokracja", Nowe Drogi, 7 (1989), 9.

77 J. Staniszkis, The Ontology of Socialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

78 P. Ogrodziński, Pięć tekstów o społeczeństwie obywatelskim (Warsaw: ISP PAN, 1991), 65.

79 A. Siciński, "Elites and Masses in Post-Communist Countries. The Polish Case", in: Cultural Dilemmas of Post-Communist Societies, ed. A. Jawłowska, M. Kempny (Warsaw: IFiS Publishers, 1994), 206.

80 H. Świda –Ziemba, "Społeczeństwo obywatelskie, politycy, życie codzienne", Więź, 8 (1992).

81 B. Geremek, "Civil Society Then and Now", Journal of Democracy 2 (1992); see also his paper "Die Civil Society gegen den Kommunismus: Polens Botschaft", in: Europa und die Civil Society, ed. K. Michalski (Stuttgart 1991).

82 R. Sharlet, "Human Rights and Civil Society" in Eastern Europe: The Opening Curtain? (San Francisco -London: Westview Press, 1989).

83 See J. Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 92-114 (The chapter "Poland: From Church of the Nation to Civil Society").

84 J. Staniszkis, The Dynamics of the Breakthrough in Eastern Europe: The Polish Experience (Berkeley – Los Angeles – Oxford, 1991), 26.

85 See K. Wrzesiński, "Państwo i prawo a społeczeństwo obywatelskie", Studia Filozoficzne 4 (1990); J. Zakrzewska, "Prawo w społeceństwie obywatelskim", in Obywatel. Odrodzenie pojęcia, ed. B. Markiewicz (Warsaw: IFiS Publishers, 1993), 107-112.

86 See T. Buksiński, "Społeczeństwo obywatelskie a społeczeństwo rynkowe", in Filozofia w dobie przemian, ed. T. Buksiński (Poznań: UAM, 1994), 284; T. Buksiński, Liberalisation and Transformation of Society in Post-Communist Countries. Polish Philosophical Studies V (Washington, D.C.: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2003).

87 J. Tischner, Etyka Solidarności oraz Homo Sovieticus (Cracow 1992); A. Smolar, "Vom Homo Sovieticus zum Bürger, Transit 3 (1993).

88 L. Kolarska-Bobińska, Aspirations, Values and Interests. Poland 1989 – 1994 (Warsaw: IFiS Publishers 1994).

89 Usually these are meaningless "family feuds" or "safety valves"; nonetheless many post-Solidarity activists unconsciously support and proclaim pre-communist views much more frequently than the post-communists, who today are far removed from all fundamentalism.

90 See the debate on the 25^th anniversary of Solidarity, published in Tygodnik Powszechny, 36 (2005), 10.

91 A. Chmielewski, "Karl Popper i jego wrogowie" (Karl Popper and His Enemies), Gazeta Wyborcza, November 2-3, 2002.

92 A. Michnik, Takie czasy... rzecz o kompromisie (London: Aneks, 1985), 13. In an interesting conversation with Cohn-Bendit, in which he mentioned Hegel, Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg and Lukacs, Michnik said: "Solidarity proposed civil society, which by nature is an imperfect society. This is what lies closest to my heart. Everything I wrote in prison after December 13, 1981, was a defense of this one thesis: namely that we are fighting not for a perfect, ideal and non-conflictual society, but for a society which resolves its conflicts within a certain set of rules –democratic rules" – A. Michnik, Diabeł naszego czasu (Warsaw 1995), 421, 428, 432. Gramsci worked along basically similar lines. Adamson ("Gramsci and the Politics of Civil Society", Praxis International, October 1987 – January 1988, 324-325) wrote: "In almost everything Gramsci wrote in Letters from Prison one can discern a positional battle for a diversified civil society". Gramsci and Michnik were convinced that revolutions are mainly brought on by political and cultural circumstances, and not economic factors. In their opposition programs both postulated building a civic front in a long march through institutions.

93 In the final period of communist Poland a Communist Party ideologue spoke ironically about "Its Magnificence Civil Society", dubbing the concept "a teacher’s pet term". See M. Goliszewski’s conversation with L. Krasucki in Konfrontacje 2 (1988), 9. Eight years later another leftist, the famous subcomandante Marcos, will bestow greetings and red flowers on "Madame la société civile". See fragments of Marcos’ declarations in Problemes politiques et sociaux, May 2003 ( a special issue entitled "La société civile en question").

94 Commenting the peaceful transition of power in East Europe, T. Garton Ash (The Magic Lantern. The Revolutions of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (New York: Random House, 1990, 135), has present day elites, now reluctant to continue governing the country, declare after King William of Wirtemberg; "Je ne puis pas monter à cheval contre les idées". It seems that some members of the post-communist elite saw the ambiguity inherent in the Hegelian-Marxist civil society concept (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) as a historical chance for their own anchoring in a capitalist, bourgeois society. According to Garton Ash in 1989 it was mainly the working class that fought for the simultaneous status of citizens and middle class. The majority’s failure to achieve this goal resulted in a chronic "moral hangover" and dangerous frustration bouts which will continue to hamper the country’s development for quite some time to come. The problem of expectations running beyond the possibilities of capitalist reform is discussed by Brazilian liberation theologian Frei Betto, who visited Poland in its final communist phase and warned us "not to treat economic reforms as a gift from Santa Claus with each every household receiving a present in the form of a bourgeois lifestyle".

95` I. Krzemiński, "Kryzys państwa – kryzys społeczeństwa", Rzeczpospolita, February 17, 2003.

96 P. Żuk, Społeczeństwo w działaniu (Warsaw: Scholar, 2001), 118-151; see also John Keane, Global Civil Society? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Transnational Civil Society. An Introduction, Ed. by S. Batliwala and L. David Brown (Bloomfield: Kumaria Press, Inc., 2006), especially the chapter on the rise of civic transnationalism by Sanjeev Khagram.

97 The idea inspired by 18^th century authors (Adam Smith, David Hume and Edmund Burke) appeared fleetingly already in 1920 in a text by Lyda Hanifan and in 1977 in a text by Glenn Loury. See Zbigniew Jan Stańczyk, "Dwa rodzaje kapitału społecznego", Gospodarka Narodowa, 1-2 (2000), 17; see also Trust and Civil Society, Edited by Fran Tonkiss (London: MacMillan Press, 2000).

98 Jerzy Przybysz, Jan Sauś, Kapitał społeczny. Szkice socjologiczno-ekonomiczne (Poznań: Wyd. Politechniki Poznańskiej, 2004), 5.

99 The first Polish publications on social capital are summarized by Adam Bartoszek, Kapitał społeczno-kulturowy młodej inteligencji wobec wymogów rynku (Katowice: Wyd. UŚ, 2004), 27-32.

100 Tomasz Zarycki, "Kapitał społeczny a trzy polskie drogi do nowoczesności", Kultura i Społeczeństwo, 2 (2004). The author shows the main ideological orientations, political discourses and ideal visions of Poland. It is interesting to see that in all cases the social capital concept "can be used to support the arguments both for and against each of the orientations".

101 Halina Zboroń, "Kapitał społeczny w refleksji etycznej", in: Kapitał społeczny – aspekty teoretyczne i praktyczne. Edited by Henryk Januszek (Poznań: Wyd. AE, 2004), 59-74.

102 See the quoted above article by Tomasz Zarycki, 59.

103 Mariusz Kwiatkowski, "Kościół katolicki, ‘duch kapitalizmu’, kapitał społeczny", Przegląd Powszechny, 1(2002): 87-89; see also John A. Coleman, S.J., "A Limited State and a Vibrant Society: Christianity and Civil Society", in: Civil Society and Government, Ed. by Nancy L. Rosenblum and Robert C. Post (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2002), 223-254.

104 Adrian Cybula, "Making Democracy Work... and Polish (Silesian) Case. An Essay on the Applicability of Putnam`s Research in Polish and Italian Conditions", in: Eseje socjologiczne. Edited by Władysław Jacher (Katowice: Wyd. UŚ, 2001).

105 Robert Putnam, Demokracja w działaniu (Kraków: Znak, 1995), 319.

106 Bożena Klimczak, "Kapitał społeczny a dobrobyt indywidualny i społeczny", in: Kapitał społeczny we wspólnotach (Poznań: Wyd. AE, 2005), 19-21.

107 Andrzej Przymeński, "Kapitał społeczny, pojęcie czy teoria?", in: Kapitał społeczny. Edited by Lucyna Frąckiewicz, Andrzej Rączaszek (Katowice: Wyd. AE, 2004), 66.

108 Anna Kiersztyn argues that the ideas which usually enter into social capital conceptions had been known by many philosophers praising the value of social ties, duties and values of trust in good societies. Social capital conceptions may fulfill an ideological function and may want to preserve nice illusions that maximalizing individual profit is in accord with cultivation of public virtues. See her text, "Kapitał społeczny - ideologiczne konteksty pojęcia", in: Kapitał społeczny we wspólnotach (Poznań: Wyd. AE, 2005), 49-50.

109 Edmund Wnuk-Lipiński, Demokratyczna rekonstrukcja, (Warszawa: PWN, 1996), 151.

110 Andrzej Przymeński, "Rozwój kapitału społecznego i jego czynniki", in: Kapitał społeczny – aspekty teoretyczne i praktyczne. Edited by Henryk Januszek (Poznań: Wyd. AE, 2004), 51-53.

111 See R.W. Jackman, "Social Capital", in: International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 21, Elsevier 2001, 1416-1419; Mariusz Kwiatkowski, Maria Theiss, "Kapitał społeczny. Od metafory do badań", Rocznik Lubuski 2004, vol 30, part II, 13-35.

112 However, E.C. Banfield, E. Tarkowska and J. Tarkowski have shown that the dominant ethos of ‘amoral familism’, no concern for collective issues, present especially in postwar southern Italy and in Poland of 1980s, led to social disintegration, pathology and very low level of social capital.

113 Diagnoza społeczna. Warunki i jakość życia Polaków 2005, Edited by Janusz Czapiński, Tomasz Panek (Warszawa: VIZJA PRESS&IT, 2006), 257.

114 Quoted after Galia Chimiak, How Individualists Make Solidarity Work (Warszawa: Ministerstwo Pracy i Polityki Społecznej, 2006), 52. Sztompka has made an attempt to develop his own version of trust, of social and civilizational capital. He saw barriers for progress in the realm of tradition and in generational inertia of some cultural traits.

115 See Omar G. Encarnación, "Tocqueville`s Missionaries: Civil Society and the Promotion of Democracy", World Policy Journal 1 (2000): 9-18; id., The Myth of Civil Society: Social Capital and Democratic Consolidation in Spain and Brazil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Funding Virtue. Civil Society Aid and Democracy Promotion, M. Ottaway and T. Carothers, eds. (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2000).

116 The authors of the above quoted and current Diagnoza społeczna say: "We are open, mobile society, but still not civil society", 19.

117 Bronislaw Misztal, "Tożsamość jako zjawisko społeczne w zderzeniu z procesami globalizacji", in: Tożsamość bez granic (Warsaw: Wyd. UW, 2005): 21-31. See also Bronisław Misztal, "Paul Hanly Furfey as a Theorist of Good Society", in: Bronisław Misztal, ed., Paul Hanly Furfey’s Quest for a Good Society (Washington: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2005), 1-21.

118 Cezary Trutkowski, Sławomir Mandes, Kapitał społeczny w małych miastach (Warszawa: SCHOLAR, 2005), 49.

119 Daniel Wincenty, "Brudny kapital społeczny – społeczne uwarunkowania i zagrożenia dla demokracji", in: Obywatel w lokalnej społeczności. Studia i szkice socjologiczne. Edited by Marek Szczepański and Anna Ślisz, Tychy – Opole 2004.

120 Janusz Czapiński, "Polska – państwo bez społeczeństwa", Nauka 1 (2006), 8; see also an interview with Czapiński in Gazeta Wyborcza, 18 May, 2006.

121 See Indeks społeczeństwa obywatelskiego (Warszawa: Stowarzyszenie Klon/Jawor, 2006), 13.

122 Tadeusz Kowalik, "Mój rok osiemdziesiąty dziewiąty", Gazeta Wyborcza, 23-24 March, 2002.

123 "Rozmowa z prof. A. Zawiślakiem", Obywatel 5 (2004).

124 Zdzisław Krasnodębski, Granice polityki w Polsce", Europa, 24 May, 2006; see also Vladimir Shlapentokh, "Trust in public institutions in Russia: The lowest in the world", Communist and Post-Communist Studies 2 (2006).

125 See an interview with Lena Kolarska-Bobińska (Ozon, 2006, no. 24, 13), Director of the Institute for Public Affairs.

126 Civil Society in the Making, Editors Dariusz Gawin and Piotr Gliński (Warszawa: IFiS Publishers, 2006).

127 See an interview with Piotr Gliński and Tadeusz Szawiel, Sprawy Nauki, 2006, vol. XII.

128 The rather ill-famed twin brothers once again have promised the Polish people what had been previously promised and not kept by Lech Wałęsa, by the so-called Electoral Action of Solidarity (AWS) and by the post-communist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD). An independent intellectual Karol Modzelewski (see his article in Gazeta Wyborcza, 29-30 May, 2006), associated with the initial Solidarity trade union, has recently written on the cultural cleavage of Poland and posed a difficult question, what would happen in future when the deceived people will ask once again who has stolen their victory.

129 Piotr Sztompka, "O potrzebie wspólnoty obywatelskiej", Europa, 24 May, 2006.

130 Andrzej Rychard, "Rewolucja kulturalna?", Gazeta Wyborcza, 15 May, 2006.

131 See Aleksander Smolar, "Kaczyńscy atakują społeczeństwo obywatelskie", Europa, 4 May, 2006.

132 Jadwiga Staniszkis, "O społeczeństwie bez państwa i polityki. Republika Weimarska, PRL i IV RP", Europa, 9 September, 2006.

133 Zdzisław Krasnodębski, Demokracja peryferii (Gdańsk: słowo/obraz terytoria, 2003 and 2005). The title is inaccurate, it should rather be Democracy under Peripheral Capitalism: the Case of Poland, but Krasnodębski is not acquainted with predominantly Latin American theory and case of peripheral capitalism, and cannot therefore fully understand the Polish case of a similar phenomenon. The perplexing challenge how to modernize a Central European periphery (Poland, Lithuania) in the past and now is also discussed in his recent article "Modernizacja peryferii", Europa, 2 September 2006. Krasnodębski, a Polish professor from Bremen University, would arrive at a deeper understanding of the Polish situation, if he read one more German book on his favorite topic: Dorothee Bohle, Europas neue Peripherie: Polens Transformation und transnationale Integration (Münster: Westfäliches Dampfboot, 2002).

134 Zdzisław Krasnodębski, Drzemka rozsądnych (Kraków: Ośrodek Myśli Politycznej, 2006), 263. It is interesting to see that also some famous leftwingers, for example Slavoj Zizek, say that after the alleged defeat of all utopias there has come a rule of the last great utopia, of a liberal, capitalist democracy on a global scale.

135 Smolar adds that after 1989 Poles did not want more experiments, fully believed in the market institutions that had been tried out in the West, and wanted to bring their country from the East to the West, they wanted to become the West as quickly as possible. See Aleksander Smolar, "Radykałowie u władzy (2)", Gazeta Wyborcza, 9-10 September, 2006.

136 Rafał Matyja, "Za kulisami rewolucji moralnej. Polityczne cele Jarosława Kaczyńskiego", Europa, 28 June, 2006.

137 Michał Kamiński, "PiS nie naśladuje metod Gierka, próbuje tylko nadać kapitalizmowi ludzką twarz", Dziennik, 20 April, 2006. The wachword of capitaism with human face had been earlier and in vain proposed by the former post-communist president Aleksander Kwaśniewski.

138 Dariusz Gawin, "PiS nie jest wrogi nowoczesności", Gazeta Wyborcza, 7 August, 2006.

139 A Polish journalist Marcin Wojciechowski, doubting in Russian capitalism, has asked professor Richard Pipes (Gazeta Wyborcza, 22 May, 2006) whether the Russian oligarchic and bureaucratic regime will evolve towards a pure Western-style capitalism and was justly answered that it is still a really existing capitalism, present also in many countries of Asia and South America.

140 Andrzej Nowak, "O sporach, przyjaźni i odnowie polityki", Europa, 31 May, 2006.

141 See, for example, Jakub Wygnański, Bogumił Luft, "Szukanie kapitału społecznego", Rzeczpospolita, 24 July, 2006. The authors of the inspiring article say that today in Poland there is no conflict between the state and civil society; as both parts are very weak, they strongly need each other. In conclusion, the above well known authors (NGO`s activist and a journalist) firmly insist that a more serious attention to the development of social capital in Poland should be devoted in strategic documents for 2007-2013 years. In the draft project of the so-called Operational Program Civil Society for 2007-2013, issued by the Ministry of Labor and Welfare in September 2005, only marginally it is mentioned a necessity to strengthen social capital and to develop human resources and social economy.

142 Paweł Śpiewak, "Zwijanie demokracji", Europa, 2 September 2006.

143 Aleksander Smolar, "Radykałowie u władzy (2)", Gazeta Wyborcza , 9-10 September, 2006.

144 See, for example, Magdalena Środa, "Społeczeństwo silniejsze od Kaczyńskich", Gazeta Wyborcza, 18 May, 2006.