The wretched of the earth spontaneaously rising and organizing themselves into a formidable force smashing the fetters of global capital cum its purveyors? Well, Hollywood did better than that in the film "Batteries not Included:" cute aliens from outer space helping tenants to kick the butt of an urban 'developer' and his thugs.
In the more mundane reality , the 'corrupt NGOs and social movements' are the only available tools to mobilize people to action -- without those tools people would be waiting for the coming of the Revolution or the Messiah for the next two millenia or so.
I agree that manufacturing abstractions like 'civil society' or 'nonprofit sector' that put under one label the Johns Hopkins Hospital, the National Football League, and a grassrrots organization fighting corporate hegemeony (on the grounds that they are all 'nongovernmental' or 'nonprofit') is an enterprise whose main impact is creating careers for intellectuals such as myself.
But such intellectual gymnastics notwithstanding, the belief in self-organization is tantamount to the belief in immaculate conceptions. Things do not happen out of thin air, and that pertains to social change as well. Things happen because they are caused by material forces -- real people and resources organized for action. Thinking otherwise is very un-Marxian -- for it was Marx who believed that the eptiome of capitalist domination, the factory, will also provide the organizational infrastructure for the movement that will eventually subsume capitalism.
Whatever one thinks of Black religiosity in the US, it is the Black churches that provided the organizational resources and infrastructure for the civil rights movement. Without that organizational structure, provided by entities that are by my standards reactionary, we would still have legal apartheid in the US.
Immaculate concpetion of a revlutionary movement? - give me a break!
Regards,
Wojtek Sokolowski