{"id":1055,"date":"2019-03-27T03:33:50","date_gmt":"2019-03-27T03:33:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sportsnewsforyou.com\/?p=1055"},"modified":"2019-03-27T03:33:50","modified_gmt":"2019-03-27T03:33:50","slug":"from-civil-society-to-political-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/?p=1055","title":{"rendered":"From civil society to political society"},"content":{"rendered":"

Agnieszka (right) in the row of 'critics' in the foreground. Team Syntegrity 2017, Artchimboldi, Barcelona. For many years now I
\nhave been meeting activists in Poland and in Europe \u2013 people working in NGOs,
\nsocial movements, informal environments and cultural institutions. Some are
\nembedded in professional western NGOs that resemble corporations, some occupy
\ntheatres or take over factories. We keep on talking about our actions,
\nengagement, about our goals. Recently, we have started talking more about
\npolitics, because it looks as if the time when civil society ran in parallel or
\ncompletely separately from politics is coming to an end. It looks as if the time when civil
\nsociety ran in parallel or completely separately from politics is coming to an
\nend.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Maintaining virtue in
\nNGOs<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Civil society is a
\ngreat idea. In a perfectly liberal-democratic world, where parliament really
\nrepresents society and its diversity, where politics (and the space between
\npolitics and business) is not always populated by the same people, and where
\npolitical parties articulate interests and develop ideas (or at least take
\nseriously what think tanks are telling them), instead of just serving citizens the
\ndaily pulp called \u2018message of the day\u2019 \u2013 that\u2019s where civil society can do a
\nlot. <\/p>\n

Making an icosahedron.It can create a space
\nto engage people in defending different values, in scrutinizing those in
\npolitical power (in such an arrangement, guardian, ecological, feminist or
\nsocial equality organizations deliver a wake-up call if problems arise, and mobilise
\ncitizens so that politicians, enlightened or not, have to deal with a given
\ntopic). It can also organize people with hobbies or those who love their local
\narea. All of this can be done by civil society in a perfect world. But as it
\nhappens, we do not live in one.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

<\/i><\/p>\n

In our world, and this is
\nclearly visible in Poland, social organizations, i.e. those that formally
\nconstituted the NGO sector, but also those working informally, have been reduced
\nto playing the role of patching up holes in places on which the State has given
\nup. Activists work with kids from difficult neighbourhoods, care for those with
\nhandicaps and bridge educational inequalities. The city halls or ministries
\nsometimes even help them by providing some money \u2013 because this is good
\nbusiness for both cities and the State. Activists usually do more for less. <\/p>\n

At the same time, in
\nour world, we have been persuaded that politics is ugly (or maybe it has itself
\nshown us its ugly face, so that no decent person ventures there?). Civil society
\nwas to be strictly non-political, and to keep politics at a healthy distance.
\nThis even makes sense, since back in the 90s in Poland we had an opportunity to
\nhave true politics, democratic elections and local authorities that were close
\nto the people\u2026 And so we understood the division of labour. It was
\ntheoretically sound. <\/p>\n

Unfortunately,
\nsomething went wrong. Politics has become a media spectacle, and the social
\nassociations and foundations have succumbed meanwhile to an ailment known as
\ngrantoid NGO-isation. Law and Justice\u2019s rise to power tipped the balance in our
\ncountry (and Orban\u2019s in Hungary). That \u2018innocent\u2019, apolitical time is now over.\n<\/p>\n

The City is Ours,
\nZagreb is Ours<\/strong><\/h2>\n

People working within
\nsocial movements and organizations abroad tell me about many years of striving
\nfor the current conditions in which their actions can take place. Friends from
\nCroatia managed to create the Kultura Nova<\/em> foundation, which supports social
\norganizations working in the culture sector. They convinced the Ministry of
\nCulture to support them. In Zagreb, they created Pogon<\/em>, an independent
\nculture centre which is a non-profit public cultural institution, based on an
\ninnovative civil-public partnership model. The founders and managers of Pogon<\/em> are activists from the union called Operacija:Grad<\/em> (Operation:City) and the city of Zagreb. <\/p>\n

I was so envious of the
\nteam from the Croatian capital as they showed me all those organizations and
\nall those independent spaces \u2013 such as Jedinstvo<\/em>
\n\u2013 places created to host festivals, debates, expositions by all those who wish
\nto organize one. After a while it turned out, however, that even though my
\nfriends worked themselves to the bone, there was always a risk that a takeover
\nby new authorities could turn all they achieved to dust. They told me: \u201cEverything which the artists and cultural
\nsector representatives have accomplished in recent years has been trashed in
\na matter of just one week\u201d.<\/p>\n

So in the spring, I met
\na friend from Zagreb. Excited, he told me that a team of activists are going to
\ntake part in the elections: that it was not enough to \u2018do civil society\u2019 any more.
\nIn May Zagreb je na\u0161<\/em>! (Zagreb is OURS!)
\ngot almost 8% of the votes in local elections. <\/p>\n

I heard similar stories
\nfrom friends in Barcelona. In their case, mobilization was facilitated by the
\neconomic crisis. Today, some of them are running local politics after their Barcelona
\nen Comu <\/em>made it into the local
\nauthorities. The team from Zagreb was inspired and supported by their friends
\nin Barcelona. After years of joint work in this environment, our contacts and
\nmutual support are on the rise. <\/p>\n

A friend from DiEM25, Sre\u0107ko Horvat told Krytyka Polityczna (Political Critique): \u201cInfluenced by the
\nexperience of Barcelona en Comu<\/em> and so called 'rebel cities', this
\ncoalition is not only bringing new and radical politics back to Croatia, but
\nthey have succeeded in something which was until now unimaginable in the
\nBalkans: by bringing together 5 new progressive green and left political
\nparties, Zagreb je na\u0161<\/em>! has proved
\nthat only by creating a broad front of progressives is there a chance to get
\nout of our current deadlock.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Romania, the Demos
\n<\/em>platform wants to enter party politics. Andreea Petru\u021b from
\nDemos said:
\n\u201cAdditionally, we think that to implement our political agenda, we need both
\nchannels: the political party and civic activism in support of our values\u201d. Then she added: \u201cmany members of our platform have
\nbeen organising, participating in or at least supporting those protests.\u201d Why
\ndo they bestir themselves? Because \u201cthe political environment in Romania is
\nstarting to become more toxic\u201d.<\/p>\n

I
\nremember Polish urban movements participating in the local elections in 2014.
\nThey entered the fray when some of the activists there also felt that it was
\nthe only way to bring about change, to move one\u2019s proposals from the basket labelled
\n\u201cgood ideas\u201d to the one called \u201czoning plan\u201d. <\/p>\n

The
\nproblem there was that some of the urban movements in Poland really badly wanted
\nto remain \u2018non-political\u2019. They stood in local elections, but they wanted to
\nwork \u2018alongside politics\u2019, and it was difficult to tell what they meant by that.
\nMaybe it was all about avoiding conversations about politics, i.e. seriously
\ndiscussing one\u2019s views. In the end, the city council members in Warsaw, elected
\nfrom the list of Miasto
\nJest Nasze (The City is Ours),
\none by one abandoned Jan \u015apiewak
\ntheir leader.<\/p>\n

It won\u2019t do itself <\/h2>\n

We all know a neoliberal story about the rich getting
\nricher and the affluence trickling down, magically, or at least automatically, onto
\nthose less rich, and even entirely poor. But this is not what has happened, nor
\nwill it ever happen. <\/p>\n

The same goes for waving a magic wand when it comes to
\ncivil society. We can create hundreds, or even thousands of excellent local
\ninitiatives \u2013 in culture, in remembering forgotten history, or testing
\nalternative economic solutions. But these experiences, or effects of these
\nactions, will not automatically go anywhere near the parliament, where the law
\nis written, nor the city hall, where city planning is carried out; nor will it
\ngo into the European Parliament or European Commission, where the legal
\nframework for the EU and its members is being forged. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Team Syntegrity 2017 opening question.I told the European Commons Assembly the same thing in
\nNovember last year in the European Parliament. Brussels was then a meeting point
\nfor activists dealing with the \u201ccommons\u201d (one of the hottest topics of the last
\nfew years \u2013 it is all about common goods, such as city spaces, but also available
\nhousing, culture or all those skate parks built by local communities, or city
\ngardens planted by activists). Since the European Parliament has created an
\nintergroup focusing on the \u201ccommons\u201d, it was possible to hold this large
\nmeeting in Brussels. <\/p>\n

<\/i><\/p>\n

Of course, we talked a lot about our experiences, we
\nshowed pictures of all those excellent initiatives, but by the evening
\nsomething had snapped. The organizers invited myself and Lorenzo Marsili to
\nmeet the participants of the Commons Assembly. We are both members of DiEM25
\nCoordinating Collective. The evening
\nmeeting showed that those who had so far been talking about individual
\n\u2018activist\u2019 experience, now wanted to speak about the looming Brexit, Trump
\nwinning the elections, populism gaining momentum \u2013 and what to do about it.
\nMany said, over and over again, that they do not \u2018do politics\u2019, that the
\n\u2018commons\u2019 are neither left nor right-wing (but let\u2019s face it, they are
\ndefinitely left). It was clear that we could not avoid talking politics any more.
\nThe old wisdom has it \u2013 you can avoid paying attention to politics only until
\npolitics starts paying attention to you.<\/em><\/p>\n

Poland
\nis similar. In spring 2017, a coalition of NGOs started demanding that the
\nEuropean Commission applies Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union. The head
\nof Amnesty International Poland, Draginja
\nNada\u017cdin, when speaking to Krytyka Polityczna said \u201cWe won\u2019t be silenced and we won\u2019t be intimidated by
\nthe accusation that we are telling on the government. We criticize the
\nsituation that needs critical appraisal.\u201d <\/p>\n

Organizations
\nwhich had so far not criticized the authorities, even though they tried to assess
\nthe impact of the situation in the country, this time unequivocally stood against
\nthe policies of the Polish government. The authorities then launched a
\ncounterattack against the NGOs. This is typical of the populists, as documented
\nby Jan-Werner M\u00fcller in his What is Populism?<\/em>, and
\nas illustrated by Victor Orban and his recent \u2018Foreign Agents\u2019 law.<\/p>\n

I
\nbelieve that, for years, the arrangement between politicians and civil society
\nin Poland was clear. Politicians did not pick on the NGOs as long as NGOs did
\ntheir work \u2013 work which the State did not want to do. And NGOs did not pick on the
\npoliticians too much, because it was clear that sooner or later, one would have
\nto find ways to work together. This was convenient for politicians \u2013 the
\nsmaller organizations, which often financed their activities from money
\nassigned by a given ministry or the local authority, could barely afford to
\nwage a war with those in power. This characteristic division of labour has been in
\noperation since the1990s, even though it finally turned out that the NGOs took
\nupon themselves more than they should have. <\/p>\n

Finally,
\nthe political situation that, as Romanians said, turned \u2018toxic\u2019, the
\ndisillusionment brought by lack of change, and the general dissatisfaction took
\nover. How long can one \u2018do\u2019 debates, workshops, festivals, write reports? 25
\nyears of work and very little to show for it. We in Poland have been given some little
\nbits \u2013 participatory budgets, election lists quotas, Culture Pact. Some people
\namongst us got jobs in public institutions and in city halls. Great! Local
\nauthorities can learn a lot from activists, and vice versa. But this is all too
\nlittle, considering the challenges. And when Law and Justice came to power even
\nthese little bits became unreliable, and the third sector \u2013 excluding the part
\ndeemed \u2018proper\u2019 \u2013 became no longer a nagging petitioner, but an open enemy of
\nthe authorities. <\/p>\n

Challenging
\nthe \u2018apolitical\u2019<\/strong><\/h2>\n

There
\nis an interesting discussion going on within the Polish NGO portal ngo.pl \u2013
\nshould the NGOs go into politics or not? In it, Jan Mencwel, an activist from Warsaw, reminded everyone that, \u201cthere is a false
\nand disturbing conviction, damaging not only for the third sector but also for the
\nform of public debate, that there is a clear moral distinction between social
\nand \u2018political\u2019 actions \u2013 the former is pure, impeccable and altruistic, the
\nlatter being a dirty game.\u201d<\/p>\n

The
\ndiscussion about NGOs and their \u2018political turn\u2019 is not necessarily about each
\nand every NGO setting up a political party or joining one, or about all civil
\nsociety representatives now having to run for public posts. It is about \u2013 as
\nMencwel duly noted \u2013 \u201cquestioning the \u2018apolitical\u2019 as the major virtue of a
\nsocial activist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such
\nchallenging of the apolitical stance is well under way \u2013 in Barcelona, Zagreb
\nand, as we see, in Poland. What we witness is what we, in Krytyka Polityczna,
\ninspired among others by Pawe\u0142 Za\u0142\u0119ski\u2019s Neoliberalism and Civil Society, would like to call a transition from civil
\nsociety towards a political society. <\/p>\n

<\/i><\/p>\n

When last year the Friedrich Ebert Foundation invited us, among other NGOs, to co-create one of the topic sessions in the Academy for Social Democracy \u2013 which was supposed to teach and to network various progressive activists, both members of political parties, as well as people working for NGOs and informal groups \u2013 our colleague Micha\u0142 Sutowski suggested that we focus precisely on \u2018political society\u2019. By that we meant all the different kinds of people\u2019s organizations \u2013 including parties, NGOs, campaigns and many others. We asked: how can they respond to current politics challenges, share their experience and create a practical synergy in changing political reality?<\/p>\n

When
\nwe published the first issue of Krytyka Polityczna<\/em> 15 years ago, using the bad word \u2018political\u2019 in
\nthe title, people thought we were crazy. Politics is confined to political parties
\n\u2013 we heard. Maybe that was why, for the next 10 years, S\u0142awomir Sierakowski has had
\nto answer the question: when are you going to set up a party? We never did. But
\nsome of us went into politics. We are in political parties, we work in city
\nhalls, we run in elections. Both then as now, we conceive of the \u2018political\u2019 to
\nbe broad \u2013 to be a sphere of influence, exerted by different means, over public
\nand social life.<\/p>\n

Three
\nmonths ago in Rome, DiEM25 presented the New European Order program. A month
\nago in Berlin, Yanis Varoufakis announced that, should the need arise, people
\nfrom DiEM25 were ready to run in elections with this program. It is now a conversation
\nabout going into politics, following new rules, as they are sketched by
\ncitizens. <\/p>\n

DiEM25
\nis not a think tank which just writes a programme, publishes it on their
\nwebpage and waits for somebody to use it. It is up to its members to decide if
\nDIEM25 should establish an international party. When I talked to them in
\nBerlin, some are having doubts, some quite the contrary. It is clear, however,
\nthat a conversation about changes in Europe is no longer one in which the words
\n\u2018politics\u2019 and \u2018citizens\u2019 cannot be used in the same sentence. It is now a
\nconversation about going into politics, following new rules, as they are sketched
\nby citizens. <\/p>\n

The
\nidea of an apolitical civil society made some sense back in the 90s. In Krytyka Polityczna, since its inception, we have made a fuss about
\nit, considering the \u2018apolitical\u2019 to be a scam. Today, the idea of a civil
\nsociety has run out of juice. It does not fit the zeitgeist. <\/p>\n

Political society is making
\nits entry on stage. In parts of Europe it already sits in local authorities,
\nwhere it is getting ready for parliamentary elections. Igor Stokfiszewski once
\nwrote about the \u2018political turn\u2019 in culture. It is time to write about
\nthe political turn in civil society. <\/p>\n

This text was written during the Team
\nSyntegrity meeting organised by openDemocracy. Conversations with people
\nattending the meeting were most inspiring and I heartfully thank everyone who
\ncontributed.<\/em><\/p>\n

Translated by Katarzyna By\u0142\u00f3w-Antkowiak<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Agnieszka (right) in the row of 'critics' in the foreground. Team Syntegrity 2017, Artchimboldi, Barcelona. For many years now I have been meeting activists in Poland and in Europe \u2013 people working in NGOs, social movements, informal environments and cultural institutions. Some are embedded in professional western NGOs that resemble corporations, some occupy theatres or…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1055"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1055\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}