Why does the NGO left insist on chanting ‘This is what democracy looks like’ in their conference centres….That ain’t it.

Let’s be clear – there are NGOs that offer highly valued support to movements. But they are NGOs that understand that they are not movements, that they are not the struggle, that they do not lead the struggle. They are NGOs that are there to offer democratically discussed forms of support to actually existing movements. Who knows, perhaps there is even the possibility of a progressive power point presentation. But the spaces where NGO substitute themselves for movements are not the zone for doing the real work.

And when the NGO people publicly slander the movements doing the real work in the precise language of the state because those movements have politely declined their vanguardist class (and often race) based authority…well, then, their politics makes them as much a political enemy as Sutcliffe, Mlaba etc. Having an position on policy or economics a little to the left of the state may make them economic allies in principle but in practice politics comes first. That is clear because without the political means to exert a democratic constitutive power your economics is only a claim that you make about what you would do in the future while you oppress right now. Politics on the other hand is a praxis in the here and now. Who speaks? Who thinks? How is dissent handled? What language do we speak? Where do we meet? What time do we meet? These are not questions for the future.