public and third sector

The text of a 2017 presentation examining the significance of the “third sector” or “social economy”, the non-profit community development and assistance sector, its origins as a replacement for faltering government aid programs for excluded sectors of the population, its diversification and increasing economic impact on job creation, service provision and housing, its association with the “civil society” movement, its avoidance of conflict with state and private power and its reliance on parliamentary procedures and negotiations, its ideological smokescreens, and the rise of the “new commons” ideology as a delusional strategy for non-confrontational withdrawal from the system.

The Homes & Community Agency(HCA) is the UK state regulatory body for social housing; its job is to monitor the performance, finances and provision of services of landlords. Missing from the media coverage of the Grenfell Tower fire disaster so far is any discussion of what relation the HCA has to this horror story of corporate murder. Given the years of complaints from Grenfell tenants(1) about their landlord the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation(KCTMO)(2), we can reasonably ask why the HCA never stepped in to investigate the terrible tenant-landlord relationship and the many fire safety complaints tenants had flagged up repeatedly before the fire broke out.

In what Partha Chatterjee calls 'most of the world' the state and capital have two defences against grassroots political society - the police and civil society (especially NGOs and the academy). The first protect oppression with violent repression, the second do the same by throwing up a spongy wall around it in which grassroots political society is absorbed via individualising technocratic 'public participation' processes and educated to accept domination via all kinds of workshops and training that teach people to know their place. This article is an important attempt to think with grassroots militancy against civil society.

CLR James gives an overview of ancient Greek democracy, how it functioned, how it came about, and how it offers features which could be emulated in a future, radically democratic socialist society.