adminStephanie McMillan and Vincent Kelley
About 20 years ago, in a conversation with a Bangladeshi organiser, the topic of non-government organisations (NGOs), or non-profits, as they’re often called, came up. He said bluntly: “I hate NGOs.” His vehemence was surprising.
NGOs are far from revolutionary organisations, but their work still seemed more helpful than not. Political differences with them aside, it seemed dogmatic to denounce free healthcare and anti-poverty programmes.
Short of more radical measures, NGOs seemed to serve an important interim function. Since that conversation, NGOs have proliferated across the globe. First deployed in dominated countries, they have now become a staple of the political landscape in the imperial core as well.
Today, the reasons for the organiser’s hatred of NGOs is clear. NGOs are destructive, both in their current work and in their preclusion of an alternative future beyond the capitalist present.
Here are four reasons why:
1) NGOs undermine, divert, and replace autonomous mass organising:
NGOs have come to occupy a central role in social movements and political activism in the US and elsewhere —what Arundhati Roy calls the “NGO-isation of resistance.”
Sincere people often believe that they will be able to “get paid to do good,” but this is a fantasy.
Nina Power writes that “there is no longer any separation between the private realm and the working day,” contending that “the personal is no longer just political, it’s economic through and through.”
While she does not explicitly make this connection herself, the mushrooming of “social justice” and political NGOs is a good example of the erosion of this separation.
For those of us involved in organising, there is an eerily familiar pattern: Some atrocity happens, outraged people pour into the streets, and once together, someone announces a meeting to follow up and continue the struggle.
At this meeting, several experienced organisers seem to be in charge.
These activists open with radical language and offer to provide training and a regular meeting space.
They seem to already have a plan figured out, whereas everyone else has barely had time to think about the next step.
The activists exude competence, explaining — with diagrams — how to map out potential allies, as they craft a list of specific politicians to target with protests.
They formulate simplistic “asks” to “build confidence with a quick win” and anyone who suggests a different approach — perhaps one involving the voices of people other than the mysterious default leaders — is passive-aggressively ignored.
Under their guidance, everyone mobilises to occupy some institution or the office of a politician, or to hold a march and rally. The protest is loud and passionate and seems quite militant, yet, the next thing you know, you find yourself knocking on a stranger’s door, clipboard in hand, hoping to convince them to vote in the next election.
Student organising is also channelled into NGO activism.
This co-option of student organising into reformism is rampant, and directly funded by capitalists.
When an “unorganised” person is spotted at these types of mobilisations, they are surrounded like fresh meat in a circle of hyenas, instantly devoured by paid activists who must meet recruitment quotas to keep their jobs.
The next time you see these new recruits, they are clad in the purple, red, orange, or lime green t-shirt of whatever org brand they have been sold.
This hardly seems like the kind of “organising” that Black Panther George Jackson had in mind when he urged revolutionaries to go to the masses in order to “contribute to the building of the commune, the infrastructure, with pen and clipboard in hand.”
Activism is being capitalised and professionalised. Instead of organising the masses to fight for their interests, NGOs use them for their own benefit. Instead of building a mass movement, they manage public outrage. Instead of developing radical or revolutionary militants, they develop paid but ineffective activists along with passive recipients of assistance.
2) NGOs are a tool of imperialism:
Military invasions, or the threat of invasion, still play an indispensable role in aiding imperialist countries in their quest to extract and exploit resources and labour in the global periphery.
But the “boots on the ground” tactic has more and more become a measure of last resort in a broader, more comprehensive strategy of control that today also includes less costly and socially disruptive methods.
NGOs, like missionaries, are used to penetrate an area to prepare favourable conditions for agribusiness for export, sweatshops, resource mines, and tourist playgrounds.
While these days military action is usually characterised (at least to the home population) as a humanitarian intervention, the ostensibly humanitarian character of NGOs seems to justify itself. But it is essential to apply the same critical eye to NGO interventions that we do to military interventions.
Haiti is the most extreme example of NGO complicity in imperialist aggression. Referred to by many Haitians as “the republic of NGOs,” there were already 10 000 NGOs in the country before the 2010 earthquake, more per capita than anywhere else in the world. 99 percent of earthquake relief aid was funnelled through NGOs and other agencies, who made out like bandits, pocketing most of the money that people around the world had donated in good faith with the expectation that it would actually help the communities devastated by the catastrophe.
This is not new.
Decades ago, Usaid and the World Bank were already imposing export-led economies and concomitant “structural adjustment” programmes on Haiti and elsewhere.
Even 20 years ago, 80 percent of Usaid money wound up back in the pockets of US corporations and “experts.”
As the process matured, NGOs evolved into the favoured entity of this parasitical form of accumulation, capitalising and feeding on the misery created by “aid” in the first place.
In many dominated countries, NGO directors have become a fraction of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie, using the state as their source of primary capital accumulation.
For the past 20 years or so in Haiti, many of those who initiated and led NGOs also came to occupy political roles from President to Prime Minister to members of Parliament, including Aristide, Préval, and Michèle Pierre-Louis.
So global imperialism doesn’t just give NGOs a reason to exist, but involves them actively in the project of imperialist domination.
In another example, in 2002 NGOs stood side by side with the White House, the CIA, and the AFL-CIO to back what James Petras call “military-business-trade-union bureaucrat-led ‘grass roots’ coup” to oust democratically elected president Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
After a domestic mobilisation successfully restored Chavez to power, US-financed NGOs backed a lockout orchestrated by oil executives that was only defeated by workers’ subsequent takeover of the industry.
3) NGOs replace what the state should be doing:
“Aid” agencies funded by capitalist/imperialist institutions—corporations, foundations, and the G8—have taken over key functions of states in dominated countries.
Ironically, the need for aid has come from draconian loan conditions demanded by these same imperialist social formations.
This “withering away” of state-run social programmes in both imperialist and dominated countries does not mean that states have become weak.
It simply means that they can devote more of their resources to conquest, repression, and accumulation, and less to pacifying the populace, preventing them from rising up in mass discontent.
In Bangladesh, microcredit programs have been aggressively promoted as an ostensible means of easing poverty, but they have had disastrous effects. While microcredit’s founder Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank received the Nobel Prize for creating “economic and social development from below,” in reality, they simply opened up new markets for banks among the rural poor, while the victims of their lending practices have been reduced to selling their organs to pay off interest. As historian Badruddin Umar stated, “Their [government and imperialists’] principal objective in this was to perpetuate poverty and to distract the attention of the poor from political struggles for changing basic relations of production as well as social relations which create and preserve the conditions of poverty.”
Jennifer Ceema Samimi writes that, even in the US, “The devolution of the federal government has resulted in the government’s reliance on for-profits and nonprofits to provide a variety of goods and services, including welfare services.”
4) NGOs support capitalism by erasing working class struggle.
Part of the reason NGOs are reproducing so rapidly, in both the imperial core and periphery, is that they’ve become the survival option du jour for unemployed graduates with progressive inclinations navigating a global economy in crisis.
The job market today, even for young people with means and education, is extremely challenging. This fact, coupled with capitalism’s growing crisis of legitimacy amid skyrocketing inequality and oppression, makes NGOs an attractive employment prospect. They offer a way out, a chance to secure a good job, especially for the petite bourgeoisie.
In Haiti, for example, they are the largest employer.
The NGO sector is equally attractive to the US petite bourgeoisie as an individualised option to escape proletarianisation and class struggle.
Many college-grads, emerging with degrees in the humanities and social sciences, are presented with dreary employment opportunities and have few options for good jobs. With low-wage service work as the alternative, NGO employment is a welcome prospect. As one young NGO employee recently said, work in the non-profit sector is branded as “meaningful” work, work that not only helps make the rent, but also helps change the world. – Counterpunch
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