These Are the People Who Are Going to Save Us?
an inside account on the terrifying inept world of climate NGOs
Recently, I had the chance to interview someone who had a job once helping a confluence of NGOs and “professional organizers” to set up a countersummit in protest of one of the COP events – the yearly conferences established by the Paris Agreement supposedly to deal with the climate crisis (the link is to an article I wrote that demonstrates how the official approach actually increases emissions, rather than decreasing them).
I definitely couldn’t turn down the opportunity, because it puts the full spectrum of NGOs on display. Inside the Conference of the Parties, you have some of the biggest, most influential and established NGOs rubbing shoulders with scientific boards, world leaders, investment funds, and other corporations. Outside protesting, you have the NGOs and organizations that brand themselves as radical, critical of the system.
The criticism has been made many times, and with good reason: NGOs and charities on the whole constitute an important component of counterinsurgency as well as the privatization of government responsibilities.
Regarding counterinsurgency, it’s the idea that the nature of society under the State is conflictual and antagonistic. Resistance will never go away, so the State bases its power on learning how to manage resistance permanently. NGOs play a major role in this by offering bandages and ignoring or misrepresenting the size and nature of the wound; dividing up complex problems into a single-issue approach that avoids the deeper roots and entangled nature of the problems; buying some people off with high-paying jobs managing rather than truly addressing the problem, and thus inviting them onto a (very low) rung of the upper classes, inducting them into the oppressive mindset that entails; exhausting many well meaning people as exploited volunteers; giving the middle class a way to periodically clean their conscience; spreading the idea that social problems should be dealt with by experts rather than examined collectively…
As for privatization, NGOs brand themselves as helpful actors providing necessary services, but these are services that according to the mythology of a social contract, governments are supposed to provide. Think of it like this: government means war, regulations, taxes, land theft, prisons, support for rich people and horrible corporations… so if a government isn’t even going to provide access to housing, food, and healthcare, why the hell should we put up with a government?
For a longer critique of the non-profit industrial complex, check out The Revolution Will Not Be Funded and for a little rant, my earlier newsletter, "The Death of Abolition".
Read source at https://petergelderloos.substack.com/p/these-are-the-people-who-are-going