Beyond the frontier: civil society revisited.” Transformation (17): 6173

...to beat one's head against the wall is to break one's head and not the wall. Gramsci (cited in Femia, 1981:190). Apparently the South African ruling class has been doing their research on re-defining the frontier between civil society and political society. The left is not too far behind. However, is there anything such as a frontier? Engaging in the current debate in South Africa on the 'role of the civil society', one should not lose perspective of its relevance for a country coming out of a period of severe repression, censorship and marginalisation of two-thirds of its population. Civil society, then, emerges not only as part of a theoretical and abstract discussion but also as part of a practical necessity of redefining the role of the state and its relation with the individuals in society. For this, and for many other reasons, the ruling class would be talking of the need to have a strong civil society in which the state interferes little with the market forces. The left, in general, would take the argument that the civil society needs to be independent from the state in order to either become 'vibrant ' or 'a watchdog over the state'; other sectors of the left would limit the role of the civil society to that of the civic organisations in the townships, and the need for those organisations to be independent from a (future ANC) government South African civil society has been there, well developed, a long time before 2 February 1990. In fact due to the current period of revolutionary transforma-tion, South Africa manifests a unique opportunity to explore and participate in a civil society that is at a high level of political contestation, tension and change. The problem might be in how we are interpreting the nature of civil society today. Therefore, it would be necessary to bring our understanding of this concept onto another level- one which might need to use, in addition to the classics (Marx and Gramsci), other new theoretical sources. The concept of civil society is sometimes taken in the South African context to be a separate and autonomous entity from the state. But civil society is als