Open World Conference of Workers

In Defense of Trade Union Independence & Democratic Rights

Imperialism and NGOs

Document No. 1: "Imperialism and NGOs"—excerpts from article by James Petras, professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton

By JAMES PETRAS

[Note: The following excerpts are taken from an article by James Petras, titled "Imperialism and NGOs in Latin America," which appeared in the December 1997 issue of Monthly Review. The author teaches sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton and is co-author of the book Neoliberalism and Class Conflict in Latin America (Macmillan, 1997). These excerpts are published here with the permission of the author.]

By the early 1980s the more perceptive sectors of the neoliberal ruling classes realized that their policies were polarizing the society and provoking large-scale social discontent. Neoliberal politicians began to finance and promote a parallel strategy "from below," the promotion of "grassroots" organization with an "anti-statist" ideology to intervene among potentially conflictory classes, to create a "social cushion." These organizations were financially dependent on neoliberal sources and were directly involved in competing with socio-political movements for the allegiance of local leaders and activist communities. By the 1990s these organizations, described as "nongovernmental," numbered in the thousands and were receiving close to four billion dollars world-wide. É

Neoliberalism and the NGOs

There is a direct relation between the growth of social movements challenging the neoliberal model and the effort to subvert them by creating alternative forms of social action through the NGOs. The basic point of convergence between the NGOs and the World Bank was their common opposition to "statism." On the surface the NGOs criticized the state from a "left" perspective defending civil society, while the right did so in the name of the market. In reality, however, the World Bank, the neoliberal regimes, and western foundations co-opted and encouraged the NGOs to undermine the national welfare state by providing social services to compensate the victims of the multinational corporations. É

The NGOs became the "community face" of neoliberalism, intimately related to those at the top and complementing their destructive work with local projects. In effect the neoliberals organized a "pincer" operation or dual strategy. Unfortunately many on the left focused only on "neoliberalism" from above and the outside (International Monetary Fund, World Bank) and not on neoliberalism from below (NGOs, micro-enterprises). A major reason for this oversight was the conversion of many ex-Marxists to the NGO formula and practice. Anti-statism was the ideological transit ticket from class politics to "community development," from Marxism to the NGOs. É

Typically, NGO ideologues counterpose "state" power to "local" power. É The counterposition of state and local power has been used to justify the role of NGOs as brokers between local organizations, neoliberal foreign donors (World Bank, Europe, or the United States) and the local free market regimes. But the effect is to strengthen neoliberal regimes by severing the link between local struggles and organizations and national/international political movements. É

So while the neoliberals were transferring lucrative state properties to the private rich, the NGOs were not part of the trade union resistance. On the contrary they were active in local private projects, promoting the private enterprise discourse (self-help) in the local communities by focusing on micro-enterprises. The NGOs built ideological bridges between the small scale capitalists and the monopolies benefiting from privatization—all in the name of "anti-statism" and the building of civil societies. É

The important political point is that the NGOs depoliticized sectors of the population, undermined their commitment to public employees, and co-opted potential leaders in small projects. É In practice, "non-govermental" translates into anti-public spending activities, freeing the bulk of funds for neoliberals to subsidize export capitalists while small sums trickle from the government to NGOs.

In reality non-govermental organizations are not non-governmental. They receive funds from overseas governments or work as private subcontractors of local governments. É

NGOs shift people's attention and struggles away from the national budget and toward self-exploitation to secure local social services. This allows the neoliberals to cut social budgets and transfer state funds to subsidize bad debts of private banks, and provide loans to exporters. É [T]he NGOs foster the neoliberal idea of private responsibility for social problems and the importance of private resources to solve these problems. In effect they impose a double burden on the poor who continue to pay taxes to finance the neoliberal state to serve the rich, but are left with private self-exploitation to take care of their own needs.

NGOs and socio-political movements

NGOs emphasize projects, not movements; they "mobilize" people to produce at the margins but not to struggle to control the basic means of production and wealth; they focus on technical financial assistance of projects, not on structural conditions that shape the everyday lives of people. The NGOs co-opt the language of the left: "popular power," "empowerment," "gender equality," "sustainable development," "bottom-up leadership." The problem is that this language is linked to a framework of collaboration with donors and government agencies that subordinate practical activity to non-confrontational politics. É

The structure and nature of NGOs, with their "apolitical" posture and their focus on self-help, depoliticizes and demobilizes the poor. They reinforce the electoral processes encouraged by the neoliberal parties and mass media. Political education about the nature of imperialism and the class basis of neoliberalism, the class struggle between exporters and temporary workers, are avoided. É [T]he NGOs create a political world where the appearance of solidarity and social action cloaks a conservative conformity with the international and national structure of power.

It is no coincidence that as NGOs have become dominant in certain regions, independent class politics has declined, and neoliberalism goes uncontested. The bottom line is that the growth of NGOs coincides with increased funding under neoliberalism and the deepening of poverty everywhere. É

The basic philosophy of the NGO intellectuals is to transform "solidarity" into collaboration and subordination to the macro-economy of neoliberalism, by focusing attention away from state resources of the wealthy classes toward self-exploitation of the poor.

But, while the mass of NGOs are increasingly instruments of neoliberalism, there is a small minority which attempt to develop an alternative strategy that is supportive of anti-imperialist and class politics. None of them receive funds from the World Bank, European, or U.S. governmental agencies. They support efforts to link local power to struggles for state power. They link local projects to national socio-political movements, occupying large landed estates, defending public property and national ownership against multinationals. They provide political solidarity to social movements involved in struggles to expropriate land. They support women's struggles linked to class perspectives. They recognize the importance of politics in defining local and immediate struggles. They believe that local organizations should fight at the national level and that national leaders must be accountable to local activists.

Conclusion

Local struggles over immediate issues are the food and substance that nurture emerging movements. NGOs certainly emphasize the "local," but the crucial question is what direction local actions will take: whether they will raise the larger issues of the social system and link up with other local forces to confront the state and its imperial backers, or whether they will turn inward, while looking to foreign donors and fragmenting into a series of competing supplicants for external subsidies. The ideology of NGOs encourages the latter. É

[T]heir activities do make an impact in diverting people from the class struggle into forms of collaboration with their oppressors.

To justify this approach, NGO ideologies will often invoke "pragmatism" or "realism," citing the decline of the revolutionary left, the triumph of capitalism in the East, the "crisis of Marxism," the loss of alternatives, the strength of the United States, the coups and repression by the military. This "possibilism" is used to convince the left to work within the niches of the free market imposed by the World Bank and structural adjustment, and to confine politics to the electoral parameters imposed by the military.

The pessimistic "possibilism" of the NGO ideologues is necessarily one-sided. They focus on neoliberal electoral victories and not on the post-electoral mass protests and general strikes that mobilize large numbers of people in extra-parliamentary activity. É

Marxism offers a real alternative to NGO-ism É not the hierarchical "solidarity" of foreign aid and collaboration with neoliberalism, but class solidarity, and within the class, the solidarity of oppressed groups (women and people of color) against their foreign and domestic exploiters. The major focus is not on the donations that divide classes and pacify small groups for a limited time, but on the common action by members of the same class, sharing their common economic predicament, struggling for collective improvement.