[E-rundbrief] Info 312 - Social Change - Critique of NGOism

[Matthias Reichl]

E-Rundbrief - Info 312: Patrick Reinsborough: Beware the 
Professionalization of Social Change. Critique of  NGOism. Excerpt from: 
Patrick Reinsborough: De-Colonizing the Revolutionary Imagination. Values 
Crisis, the Politics of Reality and why there's going to be a Common Sense 
Revolution in this Generation. May 2003

Bad Ischl, 12.11.2005

Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit

www.begegnungszentrum.at

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Beware the Professionalization of Social Change.

Patrick Reinsborough

May 2003

The worst thing that can happen to our movements right now is to settle for 
too little. But tragically that is exactly what is happening. We are 
largely failing to frame the ecological, social and economic crisis as a 
symptom of a deeper values crisis and a pathological system. Thus many of 
the modest visions of social change being put forward seem incapable of 
even keeping pace with the accelerating global crisis let alone providing 
true alternatives to the doomsday economy.

Too many of our social change resources are getting bogged down in arenas 
of struggle that can't deliver the systemic shifts we need. Most of the 
conventional venues for political engagement - legislation, elections, 
courts, single issue campaigns, labor fights - have been so co-opted by 
elite rule that its very difficult to imagine how to use strategies that 
name the system, undermine the control mythology or articulate values 
crisis from within their limited parameters.

One of the most telling symptoms of our colonized imaginations has been the 
limited scope of social change institutions. Most social change resources 
get directed towards enforcing inadequate regulations, trying to pass 
watered-down legislation, working to elect mediocre candidates or to win 
concessions that don't threaten the current corporate order. One of the 
main reasons that so many social change resources get limited to the 
regulatory, electoral and concessionary arenas is the fact that much of 
social change has become a professionalized industry.

The NGO - non-governmental organization - a term made popular by the United 
Nations policy discussion process has become the most familiar social 
change institution. These groups are frequently made up of hard working, 
under-paid, dedicated people and NGOs as a group do lots of amazing work. 
However we must also acknowledge that generally the explosion of NGO's 
globally is a loose attempt to patch the holes that neoliberalism has 
punched in the social safety net. As government cedes its role in public 
welfare to corporations, even the unlucrative sectors have to be handed off 
to someone. A recent article in the Economist revealingly explains the 
growth of NGO's as "Š not a matter of charity but of privatiziation."

My intention is not to fall into the all too easy trap of lumping the 
thousands of different NGOs into one dismissable category but rather to 
label a disturbing trend particularly among social change NGO's. Just as 
service oriented NGO's have been tapped to fill the voids left by the state 
or the market, so have social change NGO's arisen to streamline the chaotic 
business of dissent. Let's call this trend NGOism, the belief - sometimes 
found among professional "campaigners" - that social change is a highly 
specialized profession best left to experienced strategists, negotiators 
and policy wonks. NGOism is the conceit that intermediary organizations of 
paid staff , rather than communities organizing themselves into movements, 
will be enough to save the world.

This very dangerous trend ignores the historic reality that collective 
struggle and mass movements organized from the bottom up have always been 
the springboard for true progress and social change. The goal of radical 
institutions - whether well funded NGOs or gritty grassroots groups - 
should be to help build movements to change the world. But NGOism 
institutionalizes the amnesia of the colonized imagination and presents a 
major obstacle to moving into the post-issue activism framework. After all 
who needs a social movement when you've got a six figure advertising budget 
and "access" to all the decision makers?

A professional NGO is structured exactly like a corporation, down to having 
employee payroll and a Board of Directors. This is not an accident. Just 
like their for-profit cousins this structure creates an institutional 
self-interest which can transform an organization from being a catalyst for 
social change into being a self-perpetuating entity. NGOism views change in 
reference to existing power relations by accepting a set of rules written 
by the powerful to insure the status quo. These rules have already been 
stacked against social change. NGOism represents institutional confusion 
about the different types of power and encourages over-dependence on 
strategies that speak exclusively to the existing powers - funding sources, 
the media, decision-makers. As a consequence strategies often get locked in 
the regulatory and concessionary arenas - focused on "pressure" - and 
attempt to re-direct existing power rather than focusing on confronting 
illegitimate authority, revealing systemic flaws and building grassroots power.

The mythology of American politics as populist or democratic is rapidly 
being undermined by the obvious realities of corporate dominance. As 
people's confidence in the facades of popular rule (like voting, lobbying 
and the regulatory frame work etc.) has waned, more and more campaigns are 
directly confronting destructive corporations. This is an essential 
strategy for revealing the decision making power which corporations have 
usurped, but unfortunately most of these NGO led efforts to confront 
individual destructive corporations are failing to articulate a holistic 
analysis of the system of corporate control.

This is an extremely dangerous failure since in pursuing concessions or 
attempting to redirect corporate resources we risk making multi-national 
corporations the agents of solving the ecological crisis. This is a flawed 
strategy because by their very nature corporations are incapable of making 
the concessions necessary to address the global crisis. There is no 
decision maker in the corporate hierarchy with the power to transform the 
nature of the corporate beast, and confront its identity as an 
extraction-profit making machine. The CEO who has an epiphany about the 
need to re-define her corporation as a democratic institution that looks 
beyond the limited fiduciary interests of shareholders, will find herself 
on the wrong side of a century of corporate law. We need to avoid the 
temptation to accept concessions that legitimize corporate control and 
obscure the fundamental democracy issues underlying the global crisis.

Too often, political pragmatism is used as an excuse for a lack of vision. 
Pragmatism without vision is accepting the rules that are stacked against 
us while vision without pragmatism is fetishizing failure. The question 
shouldn't be what can we win in this funding cycle but rather how do we 
expand the debate to balance short and long term goals? Like a healthy 
ecosystem our movements need a diversity of strategies. We need to think 
outside the box and see what new arenas of struggle we can explore.

This is not to say that corporate campaigns and winning concessions is 
merely "reformist" and therefore not important. The simplistic dichotomy of 
reform versus revolution often hides the privilege of "radicals" who have 
the luxury of refusing concessions when it's not their community or 
ecosystem that is on the chopping block. A more important distinction is 
which direction is the concession moving towards? Is it a concession that 
releases pressure on the system and thereby legitimizes illegitimate 
authority? Or is it a concession that teaches people a lesson about their 
collective power to make change and therefore brings us closer to systemic 
change?

NGOism creates ripe conditions for going beyond mere ineffectiveness and 
into out-right complicity with the system. Time and time again we've seen 
the social change NGO's grow into becoming a part of the establishment and 
become a tool to marginalize popular dissent by lending legitimacy to the 
system. Whether its World Wildlife Fund giving a green seal of approval to 
oil companies or the American Cancer Society's downplaying of environmental 
pollution's role in cancer27, NGO's can easily become an obstacle to 
transformative change.

The professionalization of social change requires extensive resources and 
thus in this cynical era of mail-order mobilizing and 
feel-good-from-your-armchair activism its become cliché to point out that 
NGO agendas can be shaped by their funding needs. Whether NGOs are reliant 
on a membership base or institutional funders, NGO's are often forced to 
build a power base through self-promotion rather than self-analysis. Not 
only does this dilute NGO agendas to fit within the political comfort zone 
of those with resources, it disrupts the essential process of acknowledging 
mistakes and learning from them. This evolutionary process of collective 
learning is central to fundamental social change and to have it de-railed 
by professionalization threatens to limit the depth of the change that we 
can create.

When a system is fundamentally flawed there is no point in trying to fix it 
- we need to re-design it. That is the essence of the transformative arena 
- defining issues, re-framing debates, thinking big. We must create 
political space to harness the increasingly obvious global crisis into real 
change towards a democratic, just and ecologically sane world. Our 
movements must evolve past mere mobilizing and into real transformative 
organizing. Transformative organizing is more than just making the protest 
ghetto louder and bigger. It is the nuts and bolts business of building 
alternatives on a grassroots level, and creating our own counter legitimacy 
to replace the institutions of corporate society. Real organizing is giving 
people the skills and analysis they need to ground the struggle to reclaim 
our planet at both ends of the social change spectrum - the structural and 
the individual; the creation of new identities and the transformation of 
global systems. It is essential that we don't waste all our energy just 
throwing ourselves at the machine. Resistance is only one piece of the 
social change equation. It must be complimented by creation. Movements need 
institutions that can be the hubs to help sustain our momentum for the long 
haul. There are definitely NGO's which play this role well, we just have to 
insure that NGOism doesn't infect them with limiting definitions of 
specialization and professionalism.

We have to plant the seeds of the new society within the shell of the old. 
Exciting work is being done around the concept of Dual power strategies. 
These are strategies that not only confront illegitimate institutions but 
simultaneously embody the alternatives, thereby giving people the 
opportunity to practice self-governance and create space for new political 
realities. Examples of inspiring dual-power strategies are taking place 
across the world, particularly in Latin America. From indigenous 
autonomists in Mexico, to the landless movement in Brazil to Argentina's 
autoconvocados (literally "self-convened") people's movements are resisting 
the corporate take over of their lives by defiantly living the alternatives.

In the creation of these alternatives - the holistic actions of community 
transformation that go far beyond any of the limiting boundaries of 
professionalized social change - we see a vision of direct action at the 
point of assumption. Actions that reveal new possibilities, challenge the 
assumptions of the corporate monoculture and create infectious, new 
political spaces.

We can fight the doomsday economy by de-voking the apocalypse with visions 
of a life affirming future. In doing so we lay claim to a radical's best 
ally - hope. But our hope must not be the naiveté of denial. Rather our 
hope must be a sign post, a reminder of the potential for our struggles. We 
must not ghettoize hope as some mythic endpoint of struggle but rather 
learn to carry it with us as blueprint for our daily efforts.

Excerpt from: Patrick Reinsborough: DE-COLONIZING THE REVOLUTIONARY 
IMAGINATION. Values Crisis, the Politics of Reality and why there's Going 
to be a Common Sense Revolution in this Generation. May 2003, anti-copyright
http://www.smartmeme.com/downloads/De-colonizingImagination.pdf


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