Civic Materialism
= "the glue of a healthy civil society is the material benefits of cooperation". [1]
Contextual Quote
"Civil society organizations can’t perform the political work we need unless they perform economic work for its members. And this means more than organizing for the sake of demanding reforms from the state or exactions from the private sector. It means creating durable institutions where we can materially provide for one another along solidaristic lines."
- Daniel Wortel-London [2]
Description
Daniel Wortel-London:
"Civil society’s erosion, many of us now recognize, has jeopardized the left’s ability to win elections. Without civic institutions like neighborhood clubs or union halls, not only is it harder to mobilize the votes needed for left candidates to win: it is harder to convince voters that left policies are even desirable. Without a civil society built around solidarity in existence, we can’t expect candidates promoting solidarity to win. As Gabe Winant has lamented, “Eugene Debs could rise from the dead and would get little traction.”
This point is brought home by looking at recent history. After 2008, many Left-populists, Corbynites, and DSA members believed that electoral campaigns could rebuild solidarity among the electorate. In the words of organizational theorist Rodrigo Nunes, such campaigns used “representative figures” as “vehicles for expanding and consolidating the very base that they were supposed to represent.”
But these efforts to rebuild solidarity-by-proxy have generally failed. As Sam Adler Bell has written, “A campaign, even a winning one, tends to solicit serial activity from individuals: asking many people to do one thing on their own, rather than requiring them to do many things together. In other words, it is not self-evident that electoral campaigns generate solidarity.”
To build the solidarity we need to win – electorally or otherwise – we need to look at what solidarity is. A hint comes from the way Erik Olin Wright defined “social power”: power based on the ability to mobilize people for collective action. The power of civil society lies in the ability of organizations to accomplish collective goals for their members and communities – including and especially material goals. In other words, the glue of a healthy civil society is the material benefits of cooperation.
Let us remember that it was economic practices which undergirded the growth of civil society in the first place. Medieval communes, Black churches, the innumerable benefit societies that Robert Putnam idolizes: all were built around practices of mutual aid within their membership and communities. During the mid-nineteenth century, worker-owned cooperatives demonstrated how economic practices could be directly “embedded” within the values and practices of solidarity.
And it was through these economic activities that the civic institutions we seek to revive, such as the trade unions and the “mass party,” first emerged. The American Populist Party of the 1890s, we should remember, was “prefigured” by the 334 worker-owned cooperatives established in the U.S. during the previous decade by the Grange and the Knights of Labor. Trade-unions like the ILGWU, as Sarah Horowitz has written, expanded through mutual aid among their members, particularly in their early years. The mass parties of Social Democracy, from the Labour Party to the Scandinavian Social Democrats, built upon the solidaristic ties established through cooperatives. Even the Italian Communist Party was able to extend and consolidate its hegemony in Emilia-Romagna by supporting cooperatives.
But these victories, we must remember, rested on civic institutions whose power rested on economic solidarity. That is the material that makes for a healthy civil society: not bowling leagues or debating societies, but institutions providing for the material needs of their members in ways that build solidarity. I call an economy which provides for such needs a “civic economy.” And I call the theory which stresses such an economy as the basis for political action as “civic materialism.”
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Civil society organizations can’t perform the political work we need unless they perform economic work for its members. And this means more than organizing for the sake of demanding reforms from the state or exactions from the private sector. It means creating durable institutions where we can materially provide for one another along solidaristic lines.