Civil Society from the Inside Out Community, Organization and the Challenge of Political Influence

There is a tendency, in both academic research and the public imagination, to romanticize about the quality of life within communities. Frequently, communities are portrayed as models for peaceful, conflict-free social relations. This is true particularly when such communities are poor or otherwise marginalized, such as indigenous people, where the quality of interpersonal relations seems to become the last recourse for groups otherwise lacking in resources and political influence, harking back to earlier times before the advent of colonialism or the impoverishment associated with market economies. This is ironic because it implicitly suggests that under what are often the worst of circumstances, people can put aside normal human foibles, thrive on diversity, reach consensus without significant contention, and offer alternatives that will serve as new ideals for the organization of the very societies which have dispossessed them of power and influence. The experience of a soup kitchen in a Chilean slum during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in the mid-1980s provides sad example of this irony.2 The soup kitchen was one of the oldest in Santiago, having emerged in the depths of the economic collapse in the early 1980s. It was located in one of the most organized shantytowns, with a high level of participation in the social protests that began in 1983. Over the years, in addition to successfully feeding the families of its members, the soup kitchen organized a variety of complimentary activities for its members, and it was an important actor in the larger shantytown community. Much of the soup kitchen’s success was directly attributable to “Olga,” the elderly widow who founded the soup kitchen and became a prominent community leader. More generally, the shantytown enjoyed a strong sense of community that was reinforced by a number of factors, including the participation of different organizations like the soup kitchen in numerous public events intended to promote a veritable celebration of the shantytown’s collective identity. A shared history of collective struggle, starting with the land seizure that founded the shantytown in the 1950s and continuing on through the social protests of the mid-1980s, the ubiquitous experience of repression in the midst of poverty, and a common ‘enemy’ in the form of the military regime all seemed to unite the community vis-a-vis externalthreats. Dominated by the Communist Party (PC), which had organized the land seizure in 1957, the shantytown even benefitted from a shared world view regarding social justice and the absence of significant political alternatives. In other words, as a shantytown characterized by a high level of social organization, shared experiences dating back decades, clear common interests, and a high level of socioeconomic and political homogeneity, it provided a fertile foundation for a strong sense of ‘community’ that was encapsulated in and deliberately nurtured by organizations like the soup kitchen. Despite this, any sense of community was actually quite fragile. Political tensions between the PC and other opposition parties began to mount with the winding down of the protests in the second half of 1986, resulting in the increasing political marginalization of the PC. In this context, when a donation from Europe was received by the soup kitchen, the sense of ‘community’ quickly began to dissolve, as people both inside and outside of the organization began to question how the money was used. The lack of transparency in how the money was spent only added to people’s suspicions since it was assumed something was being covered up, even though most objective observers familiar with the situation found no evidence of wrongdoing. This, in turn, ultimately led to the soup kitchen’s demise and the ostracization of Olga by the same ‘community’ that she had worked so hard to strengthen.3 Instead of further strengthening both the organization and the community which it served, the unexpected economic windfall caused the community to, in effect, turn on itself. What went wrong? This chapter will argue that while the foundation for the inclusionary, democratic ideals typified by a romantic view of community can be found in many contexts, there is an inevitable tension between such ideals, on the one hand, and sources of conflict within communities, including the inevitable inequalities associated with grassroots participatory experiences more generally, and the danger of antagonistic relations with ‘other’ communities. To resolve this tension, the ideal of community must be analytically separated from the concept of civil society. While the two are often seen as synonymous, their relationship can be quite problematic in practice. In particular, a strong sense of community is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for the existence of civil society. Strong communities under some circumstances can actually subvert the possibility of a strong civil society. Conversely, through the emergence of autonomous organizations and an explicit recognition of the centrality of conflict in social relations, rather than its denial, civil society’s strength ultimately reflects how successfully this tension is resolved. This, in turn, determines the capacity of any modern society to achieve the ideals of ‘community.’ The chapter is organized as follows: after providing a conceptual discussion of what civil society is, the dynamics that determine the relationship between civil society and community are analyzed. A third section then discusses how the problematic relationship between civil society and communities can be overcome in terms of what I refer to as a thin societalconsensus and the way in which both civil society and communities contribute to the social construction of citizenship. This is then applied to case studies of participatory reforms in Bolivia and Brazil. The implications of this for democracy are discussed in the concluding section.

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