> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Louis Proyect > NGO's are one of the main > instruments of imperialist co-optation today. They were funded by George > Soros all throughout Eastern Europe and helped to destroy left-wing > opposition movements by promoting bogus ideas based on the free-market and > "civil society". They are also a powerful weapon against peasant and labor > struggles in Latin America and Jim Petras has written excellent articles > recently exposing them. Fidel Castro threw them out of Cuba because he > figured out what they were up to. As I stated in my last post, the NGO of > today serves the same social function as Christian missionary outfits in > the 1930s--to defuse social struggles and get the masses to put > their hopes in do-gooders rather than themselves. I am dangerously close to agreeing with Louis in principle on the role of philanthropy and the management of dissent, not just in the third world but in the US as well. Well-funded NGOs can swamp the voices and efforts of poorer, self-funded radical organizations globally - while diverting many people from the hard effort of such self-organization given the gilded alternative of merely embracing philanthropically funded NGOs. But noting the perniciousness of an NGO-funded world says close to nothing about the quality and honesty of the people working in such NGOs. In fact, if co-optation is to be successful, the goal has to be to employ the best potential activists and force them out of pragmatic compromise to hew to the political line that will assure continual funding for the day-to-day needs that the NGO serves. This dynamic leads some of the best, most radical activists in the world as in the US to spend large chunks of their time wooing philanthropic support for their NGO organizations. Each individual organization makes small incremental compromises to position themselves for such funding with the cumulative result being a divided radical movement globally and in the US. But there is a tension here that Louis wants to ignore. For cooptation to succeed, it must push very hard into the issues that legitimately self-funded democratic radical movements would be taking the lead in. This goes beyond "Christian missionary" efforts to embrace a whole range of oft-times radical endeavors - if less radical than what would exist in a less well-funded indigenous effort. And radical movements often spin-off of such NGO-funded efforts, as occurred in the US with the heavily philanthropically-funded civil rights movement - much to the dismay of those funding it. Even a bogeyman like George Soros funds some surprisingly radical organizations; in the US, he has become the funding lifeblood of some of the most dynamic organizations and activists advocating for immigrant rights. Many of those activists may not like depending on funding from someone like Soros, but good decent activists take the money because every dollar means more organizing in the community and the possible stop to one more deportation or one more challenge to racist violence by the INS. Louis is rather dismissive of other peoples compromises, because he receives income for "non-political" technical skill exercised at Columbia University, even as he enjoys the benefits and resources of being at such an institution. A lot of scientists and other "technical" people have often looked down on the compromised world of day-to-day politics, on the scramble for funding, on the political compromises made to maintain consensus. There is always some truth to that Olympian disdain, but there is a lack of self-reflection on how well such "technical" people serve the interests of capitalist interests - the market valuation on their skills reflecting how valuable the market system finds their service. If such technically skilled people "say" less that is compromised, they often do more that is of direct benefit than many NGO activists who work hard everyday to "bite the hand" that feeds them in the way they conduct radical activism within the strictures of philanthropic funding. So Louis's casual ability to attack and alienate any activist he chooses is a reflection of independence, but an independence secured through the offices of the capitalist marketplace for his skills. And one could argue that capitalism quite happily secures such people just such independence from political accountability in order to feed division and alienation within the movement. In that sense, independently funded "left intellectuals" serve as a counterpoint to dependent NGO funding - each serves to divide political leadership from accountability to grassroots institutions. The fact is that we are all compromised to a greater or lesser extent, because capitalism by its nature forces such compromises in order to feed oneself and, more broadly, serve broader political change. It is not compromise that is the problem - for the inevitable is not a problem but part of the wallpaper of life; the problem is people who refuse to see the compromises they have made and therefore are unflexive about what they need to do to transcend those compromises to the greatest extent possible. And it helps little when people like Louis fail to self-analyze their own compromises, since that just feeds the divisions and internal attacks within the movement that those capitalist-induced compromises are supposed to create. If NGOs are one reflection of capitalist influence on the mass movement, the existence of "independent" leftists like Louis are another such reflection of capitalist power. And Louis should be more cognizant of both. --Nathan Newman
