>>On Saturday, May 29, 1999 at 12:50:56 (-0400) Doug Henwood writes:
>>>...
>>>Aside from the lack of constituency (other than foundation program officers
>>>and dispensers of government contracts), most of the community organizers
>>>I've talked wtih have no big picture analysis at all - they only care about
>>>their particular neighborhood, or issue, or demographic group. That doesn't
>>>make them bad people, but it does help explain why they've been so
>>>ineffective, and why they're so susceptible to co-optation.
>>
>>I think this deserves repeating and amplification. This is a crucial
>>point: Parochialism invites co-optation. The reason is simple: you
>>have a particular problem and a rich benefactor offers to help you
>>solve it so you accept the help, without realizing the connection of
>>the benefactor to the underlying causes of this problem and others
>>like it elsewhere.
>
>Exactly. There's also quite a positive hostility towards big-picture
>thinking among a lot of activists. Some years ago I was on a conference
>panel with a community organizer in NYC who was going on about the need for
>encouraging small business development in the city. I responded by saying
>that this reflexive endorsement of small business really needed to be
>thought through, since small businesses pay lower wages and offer fewer
>benefits than larger ones, show higher injury rates, and are less likely to
>offer training. His response was a plea not to get lost in "the paralysis
>of analysis."
>
>About 10 years ago I did a story on a bunch of housing activists in the
>Bronx who were complaining about maltreatment of their neighborhood by
>Freddie Mac, the mortgage securitizer. I asked them if they worried about
>the danger of too much credit coming into the neighborhood to finance
>gentrification and displacement if they got what they wanted. The leader of
>the group told me they didn't care about that, all they cared about was the
>immediate matter at hand.
Parochialism and associated problems (e.g. paternalism, clientelism, etc.) has been long recognized as serious problems of th enonprofit/nongovernmnetal organizations, even by staunch supporters. The problem, as always, is structural, rather than "false consciousness" if individual activists. Specifically, the neo-liberal concept of nonprofit organization as a "gap filler" in service provision - rather than tool of political mobilization. In fact, US laws explicitly prohibit any political work on the pain of loosing the federal tax exempt status. By contrast, in many European countries (e.g. the Netherlands) NGOs are encourgaed and even reimbursed by the government for their political mobilization efforts on the grounds that political mobilization is a "public good" that reinforces democracy and thus is good for entire society, nit just special interest groups.
The opposite is true about the US, as the ruling elite, especially republicans, have been persistently working to demobilize th epublic and discourage people even from the most rudimentary forms of such participation, such as voting (Piven and Cloward make that explicit point in their book _Why Americans Do not Vote?_). I may add to it the Istook amendament (a part of Gingrich's Congress strategy to "defund the Left"), barely defeated in Congress, which would make the taxt exemption rules even more stringent.
In such environment, it is no surprise that activists try to stay as close to "specific issues" as possible - on the pain of loosing their tax exempt status.
A larger point is that the US institutional framework, from the Constitution to laws governing voluntary activism, has been consciously designed to preserve the political status quo based on the rule of the "enlightened" (read academic-military-industrial complex) elite. That is why any political reform undertaken on behalf of non-elites - be it FDR's "new deal" the Civil Rights Movement, of Johnson's "war on poverty" - that does NOT significantly change the institutional landscape an th ebalance of power will venetually get dismantled by the very powers that designed that landscape.
In short, without shattering the institutional framework on which the power of US elites rests - the bipartisan winner-takes-all system, the fragmentation of formal political instiutions by the "separation of power" principle, and the semi-formal consolidation of elite power by the "revolving door" arrangements between the government, the industry and the academe - we can kiss the prospect of any meaningful change in this country good bye.
It is not the fault of the nonprofit or community activists, their lack of vision or political opportunism, but the deeply entrenched property of the US institutional system. In fact, ngos can be an effective tool of grassroots political mobilization to influence the government in a truly open and democratic society. If they ain't such in the us, it is because the us ain't an open and democratic society, and the ruling elites do everything that is humanly possible to keep it that way.
wojtek
>