civil society

is problematic insofar as it enables liberal democracy to happily coexist with capitalism and other relations of domination because political equality leaves intact other spheres of power and inequalities.

Wood argues that in this way liberal democracy can happily coexist with capitalism and other relations of domination because political equality leaves intact other spheres of power and inequalities (1995:224). (100)

is generally defined on a public/private distinction which overlooks a level of politics and community organization where a great deal happens without fundamentally affecting the exploitative powers of capital or fundamentally changing the decisive balance of class power.

Thus, the fact that the public/private distinction is constitutive of civil society also denotes one of the key structural limitations to attempts to contest this distinction and, as such, has important consequences for any emancipatory democratic project. According to Wood: 'In capitalism, a great deal can happen in politics and community organization at every level without fundamentally affecting the exploitative powers of capital or fundamentally changing the decisive balance of class power' (1995:275). (p. 104)

is necessarily based on a market economy.

Although in the broader Hegelian and Gramscian sense, civil society can contain a good deal more than the market economy, it is vital to keep in mind that the market economy forms the basis of civil society. Failure to do so results in the weakening of civil society as an analytical and normative concept because it again runs the risk of presenting an 'idealised' picture of civil society. Wood argues that in much of the current literature on civil society, the concept renders capitalism invisible because it is indiscriminately used to refer to everything from households and voluntary associations to economic firms. In this sense, she argues, 'the totalising logic and the coercive power of capitalism become invisible when the whole social system of capitalism is reduced to one set of institutions and relations among many others, on a conceptual par with households or voluntary associations' (1995:255). (101-2)

E.M. WoodThinkers

E.M. Wood