NGOs, Social Movements and the Neoliberal State: Incorporation, Reinvention, Critique

As the global financial crisis turns a decade old, economic and political polarisation has intensified. The nature of neoliberalism as a mode of accumulation that penetrates virtually all aspects of economic, political and social life has meant that the global financial crisis is, of course, not limited to the economy. It has come to be accompanied by full-scale political and social crises in both the Global North and South (Cahill and Konings, 2017; Mirowski, 2014), and a crisis of neoliberalism itself (Saad-Filho, 2011). Despite the intellectual vacuity of neoliberalism as a system capable of explaining the world, and its declining legitimacy the world over, the neoliberals themselves appear to have no alternative to neoliberalism, except authoritarianism. The question is whether the managers of the system are capable of containing the crisis – or otherwise allowing the emergence of even more reactionary, xenophobic forces to assume power – or whether the crisis will be resolved through mass opposition to the neoliberal state. A progressive opposition will include the range of social movements, trade unions and political parties, and the building of alternative institutions, throwing neoliberalism into further crisis. Within this frame, what makes NGOs distinct is their ambivalence: the fact that they are, on the one hand, a ‘favoured institutional form’ (Kamat, 2013: ix) of the neoliberal state and, on the other, capable of building alliances against neoliberalism, particularly in times of polarisation and crisis (Beinin, 2014; Dauvergne and LeBaron, 2014). In a global context where NGOs are subject to further subsumption as ideological weapons of the state and ‘material complicity with capital’ (Choudry and Kapoor, 2013: 14), and yet where there is growing class conflict and an increasing rejection of the status quo, we cannot assume their political affinities and affiliations; instead we must consider whether and how exactly they engage in oppositional politics and under what conditions. The neoliberal venture of the past four decades has been devastatingly successful in reinforcing the transfer of wealth and power from public to private, from poor to rich and from labour to capital. In the process, this phase of capitalism has brought forth deepening financialisation and