[Reader-list] The NGO-Industrial Complex (Another non-Communist manifesto?)

[Kshmendra Kaul]

"The NGO-Industrial Complex (Another non-Communist manifesto?)"
by RA
 
A new spectre is haunting the world.  Picking up where the colonial projects left off, it aims to complete their transnational projects and crystallise the dominant world order once and for all. It can be seen as the newest stage and mutation of both capitalism and colonialism, with aid workers as the new missionaries.  Yet this avatar breaks with previous projects in that it commodifies not just goods or people, but emotion itself. It equally seeks to neuter dissent and reproduce itself not through the politicised discrimination and particularization of colonialism, but instead, through a generalized depoliticisation.  And although it may operate with a similarly well intentioned ‘help us help them’ ethos, its realized effects are slightly less admirable.  This is the Non Governmental Organisation Industrial complex.
 
Yet what does it mean to liken NGOs – generally viewed as altruistic non-profit vehicles for social change – to the prison and military industrial complexes? To begin with, the label ‘industrial complex’ can be defined as a system of relations between the State and certain institutions and organizations in a particular industry - in this case foundations, intergovernmentals and nonprofits - often with an associated ulterior agenda or motive.  It may be noted that NGOs differ from the military and prison industries in that they are external to, and thus ostensibly independent from the state.  It can however be argued that the tax-exempt status which these philanthropic and charitable organizations enjoy vastly changes their relationship with the State.  This is to say, that while taxes may pit corporations in opposition to the State, the NGOs’ exemption results in them functioning as a part, and the international arm of said State.
 
And indeed, globalizing forces have today redrawn us into a world that is increasingly interdependent and borderless, at least on paper. It is in this international aspect where Rostow’s Five Stages of Growth theory, which takes the nation state as the basic unit of economic analysis, falls short.  Past his fifth stage of mass consumption, he poses the question of where a nation, having attained technological maturity and having “at its command a modernized and differentiated industrial machine”.  Options range from the expansion of the welfare state to the increasing of “the nation’s stature and power on the world scene” to “the creation of new inner, human frontiers in substitution for the imperatives of scarcity” (1971:16). 
 
It may then be possible to posit a sixth stage of growth to add on to Rostow’s original five: that of globalisation and transnationalism.  This stage too possesses an “inner logic and continuity … (and) and analytic bone structure, rooted in a dynamic theory of production” (1971:13-14). It is well characterized by the body of philanthropic NGO organizations, which achieve a tripartite synthesis of Rostow’s posited options above.  Structured not by an individual state, but instead the world government, it can be viewed as an expansion of the welfare state on a global scale. The body’s collective aim is thus stated as the alleviation of poverty and human suffering through government initiatives that transcend national borders.  It can however be argued that this philanthropic mission belies an underlying, perhaps more insidious aim: the global promotion of the nation with regards to both stature and power.  
 
The pattern of Buddenbrooks dynamics that Rostow cites (1971:11) is also relevant in considering the creation of the aforementioned ‘creation of new inner, human frontiers in substitution for the imperatives of scarcity’.  Denizens of a society in this proposed sixth stage are characterized by their relatively higher levels of economic comfort and standard of living, replete with all the accoutrements of hypercapitalism.   This affluence leads them to behave “as if, having been born into a system that provided economic security and high mass-consumption, they placed a lower valuation on acquiring increments of real income in the conventional form”.  Included among these ‘new’ aspirations is the drive for charity and philanthropic social change, as facilitated and enabled through the collective body of NGOs. In previous stages of economic growth, this commitment to philanthropy has tended to be the province of only the rich elite in any
 given society.  This division does not change in this sixth stage, except to be mapped onto the global scale of the ‘world society’.  So it is that the ‘richer’ countries do the developing, while those seen as being less economically advantaged in the hegemonic globalisation paradigm are the countries that are being ‘developed’.  
 
At this conjecture it is important to quickly emphasise that there should be no inevitability or universality ascribed to these stages.  Rather, a conscious effort at delinking and self-extricating from this process may prove far more effective for those countries targeted through this NGO-industrial complex.  Even in the countries that are doing the ‘developing’, it is worth noting how this complex reproduces itself in its ‘home’ societies.  This is an age where corporations too function as consumers, and are often subject to the same mores as their human counterparts.  It thus becomes no longer adequate for these firms to simply function by the ‘imperatives of scarcity’ or the turning of profits.  Rather, these entities are almost expected to display a conscience, with a ‘green’ environmentally commitment, and careful investments.  The twin pillars of ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ and ‘Socially Responsible Investing’,
 along with the phenomenon of ethical consumerism, thus force corporations to accumulate an entirely new kind of brand-related capital.  This new maxim answers not directly to profit, but instead to the maximization of PR.
 
While CSR and SRI do certainly have a plethora of positive effects, they do serve to both fuel and reinforce the NGO-industrial complex.  Perhaps not unlike the electoral political system, it self-sustains by presenting itself as the only viable and effective avenue for a certain kind of social change.  Individuals are equally affected by this construction, which can be said to appropriate, commodify and redistribute these philanthropic aspirations.  This can equally be said to result in a simultaneous statizing and depoliticizing of local social justice movements, where activist energies are redirected into NGO careerism, and certain institutionalized modes of organizing which have very different outcomes to those approached with a mass community-rooted ideology.  Especially fascinating is its appropriation not only of emotion, but also of grassroots-based strategies and aesthetics.  This is not limited to just the NGO complex, but goes on to be
 picked up and institutionalized by other State institutions, as clearly evidenced by the Obama Campaign’s recent fundraising and mobilizing tactics.  
 
So it is that even emotion – in the form of liberal guilt – gets modulated and monitored, almost replete with a barcode and price tag attached.  If, following Bataille (1949), a society can be characterized not by what it produces so much as by that which it wastes, then this commodification of emotion must surely represent the most efficient form of capitalism yet.  Like the development project , it is “efficient in its inefficiency” (Ferguson 1994:268), managing to in a way commodify the uncommodifiable, and integrate into discourse that which previously resisted definitions.  Thinking of the commodification of emotion in terms of excess is especially interesting in that it retains the idea of philanthropy as a luxury, albeit one with catastrophic potentials.
 
In terms of Amin’s four-sector economic model (1974), a ‘developed’ society can be defined in terms of its production of capital goods and mass consumption, while its ‘less developed’ counterpart largely produces exports, and  paradoxically, luxury goods.  It is thus possible to see LDCs like Ferguson’s example of Lesotho as exporting labour, and producing philanthropy and the absolution of liberal guilt.  A ‘developed’ country on the other hand would mass consume said philanthropism, and direct its production towards capital investments in the LDCs.  Yet just how does this collective body of NGOs function?
 
To return to the initial anthropomorphisation as spectre, the body can be seen as held together by a skeleton of intergovernmental organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.   This is further fleshed out with a constellation of NGOs and imbued with a common development ideology. In analyzing the development project, Ferguson has volunteered that “one can only aim to be, in Nietzsche’s terms, a good physiologist”.  And indeed, it could be interesting to further map this project medically – with its addressing of symptoms not causes, reliance on capital injections, the one-cure-fits-all approach – and perhaps even consider foundations in terms of phallic endowment.   Yet even as these intergovernmentals provide an economic framework for the NGOs, they delimit these smaller organizations into a specific ideological project, with its own momentum.  It is then both unsurprising, if a little sinister, that the IMF
 acknowledges that “the Bank and the IMF are twin intergovernmental pillars supporting the structure of the world’s economic and financial order” (IMF [i]). 
 
Exactly what is this economic and financial order? It may be useful to refer to George Orwell’s famous statement of "he who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future" (1949).  Yet who controls the present now?  It is here tempting to immediately vilify an amorphous “System” that somehow represents the world economic elite.  However, it is certainly possible to point to the “G8” group of nations to answer the question of who controls the intergovernmentals in question.  It is perhaps best seen in the old boys’ club-type agreement in which the United States and Europe pick the President and Managing Director of the World Bank and IMF, respectively.  And although these picks are subject to approval from other member states, both institutions’ weighted systems of voting ensure that the interests of its largest shareholders are not only maintained but also furthered. In the World Bank, for
 example,  each the five members holding the largest number of shares – currently Germany, France, the United States, United Kingdom and Japan – have the privilege of appointing an Executive Director each.  The remaining (currently 19) Executive Directors are meanwhile rather tellingly elected by the other 166 nations currently in the World Bank. 
 
Development discourse thus works to reimagine a society it in order maintain its specific assigned place in the world’s economic and financial order.  Following Ferguson, it can be seen as an institutionalised discourse generated by certain development intergovernmentals that simultaneously constructs an entire country “as a particular kind of object of knowledge, and creates a structure of knowledge around the object.  Interventions are then organized on the basis of this structure of knowledge, which, while failing” on their own terms, nonetheless have regular effects” (1994: xiv). Despite Amin’s protestations that “a society cannot be reduced to a mode of production” (1972:605),  the discourse does just that.  The society in question is slotted into a hierarchy of ‘development’, whether as a ‘less-developed’ country, or a card carrying member of the Third and Fourth worlds.  The civilizing mission is thus reincarnated in a
 rather more innocuous guise, replete with the sentiment of an economic ‘noblesse oblige’. 
 
The approach of the development discourse is fourfold and works to reimagine the target society by assigning four characteristics.  As defined by Ferguson, these are as being ‘aboriginal’ and agriculture based, with a single national economy, and adherent to the principle of governmentality. More important than the perhaps inevitable degree of failure for him are the instrumental side effects, especially the increase in and reinforcement of bureaucratic state power, and the depoliticizing effects, which function by reimagining social realities that may be structural or political as purely technical and apolitical. 
 
Ferguson goes on to argue that development functions by framing the stage for, and launching interventions that in reality have no effect (and possibly even intention) of eradicating poverty. Not unlike the recent usage of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to launch a war in Iraq, poverty thus serves not as an end goal, but instead a point of entry.  As a result, the development project proves perversely ‘successful’ in its failures and in the resulting reproduction of a certain mode of power relations, both within the target state and on a global scale. Like the reinvented 19th-century Islam, it too functions as a “powerful means of integrating the new periphery and subordinating it to the design of the centre” (Amin 1972:517).
 
In a sense this development ideology can even be compared to an overly technicalised colour-by-numbers approach to photography, involving a limited amount of preselected filters.  The ‘developing solution’ is applied in the dark, before the photo is essentially hung out to dry while the technician waits for the results.  Yet like negatives on a film strip, the developer begins with choosing exactly which scenes (and scenarios) are to be developed, and comes armed with a fair understanding of how the developed product will turn out.  This analogy is however admittedly a very crude oversimplification.  It must also be acknowledged that even though they function within the development machine, and may be carried by its momentum, the majority of individuals and firms operating –albeit as cogs- within it come to the project with the best of intentions.
 
Further research look the labour dynamics within these smaller NGOs, many of whom underpay, and perhaps even exploit their employees and volunteers.  It would also be interesting to compare the modes and effects of development discourse – dubbed as ‘devspeak’ and ‘devthink’ – to the Orwellian ‘Newspeak’. And although entirely unaddressed here, it would also be fascinating to examine the alternatives to participation in the current hegemonic globalisation-through-development discourse, whether through Amin’s delinking, some form of protectionism, or otherwise. To paraphrase an anti-globalisation slogan, now more than ever, another world is possible, and another Africa is necessary.





WORKS CITED:
 
Amin, Samir – Underdevelopment and Democracy in Black Africa: Origins and Contemporary Forms, Journal of Modern African Studies 10 – (1972
Amin, Samir - Accumulation and Development: A Theoretical Model, Review of
African Political Economy Vol.1, No.1, (1974)
Bataille, Georges  - The Accursed Share (1949)
Ferguson, Jim – The Anti-Politics Machine (1994)
Orwell, George – 1984 (1949)
Rostow, W.W. – Stages of Growth (1971)
 
 
IMF [i] The IMF and the World Bank: How do they differ? http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/exrp/differ/differ.htm