Message 01801 [Homepage] [Navigation]
Thread: oxenT01320 Message: 5/6 L3 [In index]
[First in Thread] [Last in Thread] [Date Next] [Date Prev]
[Next in Thread] [Prev in Thread] [Next Thread] [Prev Thread]

[ox-en] Re: The role of civil society during the WSIS process (was: Re: [ox-en] Fwd: [Wsis] World+dog fight over World Summit of The Information Society)



On Sat, 13 Dec 2003, Stefan Merten wrote:

As far as I understood this is one of the first summits where the
civil society has been / should have been included. And actually the
civil society organized quite well in preparation of the summit and as
far as I can see actually it created some far more substantial results
than the states. The states basically where caught in diplomacy making
and all kinds of contradictions whereas the civil society could
seemingly agree to some points.

Seems like some serious mystification is going on around the term  'civil
society'. 

'The States' here means representative democracy, I think - as far as I
know these people are not 'neutral', state based bureaucrats, but members
of governments, or at least closely associated with governments; and apart
from China, mainly elected governments.  .  

Elected governments are meant to represent their peoples. Civil society,
in bourgeois theory, is what is represented by the elected government.
But now you're telling us the representatives have failed and in their
place we have - what? direct democracy? the population of the world? 
Obviously not, so what are they, what is this 'civil society', and why
does it work better?

- because it is more representative? Clearly not - unless by some magic
intution of the wishes of 99.999% of the population who aren't there.

- because it is not bound by national borders? Maybe, though from what's
been visible on then outside it looks like language and other divisions 
have also been quite strong in 'civil society' - WSIS has looked very
different depending on which mailing list you read!

-because it's made up of people who are passionately interested in what
they're doing? This would be the 'free software style leadership can be 
applied to anything' argument. A bit lacking in any kind of basis at the
moment though...

This seems like the kind of topic Empire should be good for - but I can't 
make any sense of the bits that seem to be related (eg. chapter 3.5, which
talks about NGOs representing 'the vital force that underlies the People'
which just reminds me of D'Annunzio, Mussolini etc. and leaves me with
no idea what they mean).

Now you've seen them, do you have any more idea how to justify the fact 
that these particular people have some influence over the way things are 
run?

Graham

PS The same thing struck me with the results of the lobbying of the EU 
parliament over software patents - people from free software groups got
enough funding together to go there physically to lobby; they organized 
remote lobbying; and they persuaded the MEPs, who probably didn't 
have much idea either way to vote in a particular way. Why is this
better than  professional commercial lobbyists? Because it has a result
I agree with? Or is it not better, but just a tactic in an unfair war?
In which case, if the war was won, what would be the better system
that replaced this one of unrepresentative democracy + selfselected 
lobbyists?
  

However, though I appreciate the contributions of the civil society
members I think most of them operate more or less on the same stage as
the states do. The only thing which points in the direction of some
"information society (Oekonux version)" is the strong advocation for
Free Software and the like which, after all, was one of the more
prominent points in the civil society statements.

What specific oekonux connection is there in the situation?

Well, I meant "information society (Oekonux version)". What I had in
mind when I wrote that mail was the fact that the states start to
include civil society. And also as I heard that members of the state
factions of the delegations sometimes to the civil society members
said things like: "Good that you speak out on this or that. We would
like to but we can not."

Doesn't this point to the fact that states are more or less not able
to handle all this stuff any more? I mean is it really *only*
propaganda that they start to invite civil society to such events?
After all in the WSIS process more often than not the civil society
has been attested to make high quality contributions.

But of course all this does not match the way international
organizations or even nation states are used to operate. This and the
very fact that the states have severe contradictions among themselves
already is the fundamental reason for this type of chaos - and for the
little results.

This is why I think all this is part of the process of the
transformation of industrial society with its states to some
information society (Oekonux version) where I think states have no
much use any more or at least look quite differently from what we know
today.


						Mit Freien Grüßen

						Stefan

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.3in
Charset: noconv
Comment: Processed by Mailcrypt 3.5.7, an Emacs/PGP interface

iQCVAwUBP9pXRAnTZgC3zSk5AQGLnQP+OmzuRfCi8/zWwvbmIKN08lSTNYSpbART
gsthAGRCgxM7apQm1jd8e/B2Ea+1mONIy32bEUZqKtwwweC6EdJLwFMxzsMuRuuv
815jatKkTyQCkFmcXIVN2HJNcHDFIB0E7zafHl9y3YzrRJBdfBR788LoMwBzAlcw
kiKQ9G9VGLA=
=Ki8S
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
_______________________
http://www.oekonux.org/



_______________________
http://www.oekonux.org/



Thread: oxenT01320 Message: 5/6 L3 [In index]
Message 01801 [Homepage] [Navigation]