Global civil society and the rise of the civil economy

The last thirty years has seen the re-emergence of a civil economic challenge, side by side with the advance of globalisation, as a distinct strand in the development of global civil society. Don’t underestimate its longterm significance in the glacial shifts now taking place in the world economy. 

Global Civil Society: the three words mark out a field and an aspiration. Global rather than national, civil not the state and corporation, society not the individualism of the late consumer market. It names a civil challenge to unrestrained globalisation. 

In this sense, the Global Civil Society yearbooks have shown the extent to which global civil society has developed. Part of it evokes on a world scale the civil response to a previous period dominated by market utopian policies that Polanyidescribed, in his account of early industrialising Britain in the 1830s.  Then it was the Chartists, now it is the occupy movement, and the innumerable campaigns that have multiplied since globalisation took hold in the 1980s. Like the Chartists, they are contesting the new order politically. 

Read it at Open Democracy

Global civil society and the rise of the civil economy
by Robin Murray

(h/t kristinsponsler at The Energy Bulletin)