Woman as Reason
October 2000

NGOs: a new politics of organization?

Maya Jhansi

This past year has seen a resurgence of the spirit of anti-capitalist defiance. Whether we look at youth fighting against sweatshop labor, or anti-police brutality struggles, or the environmental justice movement, it's clear that women from the lowest and deepest sectors of society are at the front lines of today's freedom movement.

There is a corresponding rethinking going on in feminist theory as well, a growing sense of the need to reconnect theory to the creative struggles of women at the grassroots levels. I have seen lots of critiques of the way feminism has become "professionalized" and quiescent. To me, the important point here is not "professionalization" per se, but the question of what exactly happened to the revolutionary potential of the movement that erupted out of and against the New Left in the late 1960s and 1970s when women demanded a total transformation of human relations, i.e., a revolution that would create a totally new woman, man, a new way of loving and living.

To Raya Dunayevskaya, this showed the philosophic depth of the Women's Liberation Movement, especially in the call for non-elitist, decentralized organization. Women demanded a transformation in human relations, not just after the revolution, but in the very organization that would help make the revolution. Now, 30 years later, a new form of organizing dominates the women's movement: Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). We have to at least ask each other why this is.

One particular essay I read this summer offers some interesting insights. It is entitled, "The NGOization of Feminism: Institutionalization and Institution Building with the German Women's Movement" by Sabine Long (in TRANSITIONS, ENVIRONMENTS, TRANSLATIONS: FEMINISMS IN AN INTERNATIONAL POLITICS (1997), eds Joan Scott, Cora Kaplan, Debra Keates). In this essay, Long critically examines the women's movement in Germany after 1989. "The creation," she writes, "of a more 'women-friendly' civil society was one of the myths associated with the peaceful revolution of 1989 in East Germany." However, noting that not much improvement was made in women's lives or women's mobilization after 1989, Long focuses on the new "politics of organization," that emerged, writing, "Ultimately it seems as though sisterhood has converged in what I call the establishment of NGOs instead of political movements."

Long is very critical of the NGO form of organizing, arguing that on the whole NGOs channel women's efforts into small-scale, single-issue and predominantly pragmatic and state-oriented directions. Long connects this to the influence of postmodernism on the movement. "NGOization entails," she argues, "a shift away from experience-oriented movement politics toward goal and intervention-oriented strategies....In that sense it might be also interpreted as a reply and a statement about the 'grounding of feminist politics once the existence of women as women is put into question.'"

It cannot be denied that many NGOs do indispensable work. While some NGOs are the right arm of global capital, others are clearly on the side of the forces of revolt. In Malaysia, for example, only NGOs have worked with women from the deepest layers-women lost in the informal sector of the workforce. Still, I think Long has raised some important critiques.

Most intriguing is Long's suggestion that the NGOization of feminism stems from the focus on "civil society." She herself does not raise the issue of whether the focus on "civil society" is a marker of the Left's abdication of Marxism; in fact, she calls state-capitalist societies state socialist, relegating socialism to the dustbin of history.

I think there is an objective reason why the focus on "civil society" has become so popular. And I think it's related to postmodernism, too. Marx gives us an insight in "On the Jewish Question." He writes: "None of these so-called rights of man goes beyond the egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society, as man separated from life in the community and withdrawn into himself, into his private interest and his private arbitrary will. These rights are far from conceiving man as a species-being. They see, rather, the life of the species itself, society, as a frame external to individuals, as a limitation of their original independence."

In civil society under capitalism, freedom is not based on the linking of human beings, but on their separation. The anti-humanism of postmodernism likewise negates the social bonds of humanity. When the Left, including the feminist Left, settles for "civil society" as a replacement for a real alternative to capitalism, it fails to address people's desire to end alienation, to have an "individualism that lets nothing interfere with its universalism."

The creative struggles of women and youth today demand more imagination on our parts. They demand a reconception of the socialist idea. Without such an idea, the politics of organizing will remain circumscribed by the given.