GOOD MORNING AND HOW IS THE MIND TODAY THE SOCIAL JUSTICE COALITION AND BOURDIEUS TRACE OF SOCIAL STRUGGLES OF THE PAST A few months ago, just before the conclusion of Khayelitsha Commission of Enquiry (KCE) into an alleged breakdown of relations between the South African Police Service (SAPS) and the community of Khayelitsha, I commented on what I call the NGOisation of civil society politics and civic struggles. By this I meant the demobilisation of local community self-agency by NGOs with self-referential priorities predetermined by funded mandates. I critiqued the involvement of NGOs who, by self-appointed proxy, manage and channel local civic energy into compartmentalised issue-based struggle at the cost of not challenging, or misdirecting civic action away from the causative systemic and social determinants at the root of fragmented single issue-based concerns. I contrasted such NGOisation with local grassroots community organisation driven by street level collective mobilisation informed by popular mandates and mass-based representivity. At the time I was contextualising the involvement of the Social Justice Coalition (SJC) and other NGOs and academics in the KCE. However, since then that situation has changed for the better. The SJC has now partnered with the SAPS and local community organisations to address broader systemic and social determinants of crime in Khayelitsha, in a programme driven fashion beyond the fragmented scope and politically compartmentalised agenda of the KCE. In conclusion, I believe that in a co-extensive relationship between state and civil society where NGOs belong to neither, they remain contested sites of struggle which must be engaged in service of building community self-agency and organised civic power against the root systemic causes of social ills in civil society. On this score, at an ideo-political level, I agree with Aziz Choudry and Dip Kapoor, editors of the book NGOization : Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects (2013), wherein it is argued: If we view NGOs as not outside of or external to state, market or society, but as representing - as does each of these realms - one more institutional form through which class relations are being contested and reworked, then indeed NGOisation must be considered as an always unfinished and unstable project, contingent on oppositional politics of subaltern movements and the presence of a social democratic state. To borrow Bourdieus remark about the state, NGOs too carry the trace of social struggles of the past.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 04:31:16 +0000
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