The NGOs or “non-governmental organizations” (rechristened by some as CSOs or civil society organisations) counterpose civil society against the state and describe themselves as champions and vanguards of the former, working against the apathy and bureaucratism of the latter. With the blind market forces playing havoc with people’s lives and becoming a target of widespread criticism, they now claim to represent a “third way” between “authoritarian statism” and “savage market capitalism”.

The juxtaposition of the state and civil society as mutually exclusive entities is an anarchist illusion. As Marx and Engels pointed out in The German Ideology, civil society expresses itself, in its foreign relations, as the nation and inwardly organises itself as the state. In a 1846 letter to P Annenkov, Marx explained: “Assume particular stages of development in production, commerce and consumption and you will have a corresponding social constitution, a corresponding organisation of the family, of orders or of classes, in a word, a corresponding civil society. Assume a particular civil society and you will get particular political conditions which are only the official expression of civil society.”

The NGOs’ glib talk on civil society seeks to obscure the fact that it is divided into the oppressor and the oppressed, the exploiter and exploited and that a life and death struggle is continually going on between these hostile camps. And for all their diatribe against the state, they can never be accused of advocating even a remote programme of overthrowing that oppressive apparatus. The NGOs thus function as a petty-bourgeois reformist response to the anti-people, repressive bourgeois order. Whereas the state functions mainly as a coercive instrument in the hands of the ruling classes, the NGOs operate essentially as ameliorative instruments seeking to deflect popular discontent and thus prevent it from being canalised into a revolutionary course. In a word, from the standpoint of stability of the bourgeois order, the two have been playing complementary roles. Readers can see that the NGOs represent the continuation of an old trend described in the Communist Manifesto :

“A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society. To this section belongs economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity ... They desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements.”

Initially some big NGOs had shot into prominence in the post-war era as watchdog bodies monitoring and criticising the excesses committed by the state in various parts of the world. They came to be identified with issues like human rights violation, environmental degradation, and protection of wildlife and amelioration of human destitution. During the last two decades the NGO campaign has however assumed phenomenal proportions in the ideological-political backdrop of collapse of the Soviet Union and the crisis of ‘socialist states’ on the one hand, and the ongoing intensification of imperialist globalisation on the other. In the anti-globalisation movement, the limelight is often hogged by a few giant NGOs and they have also started promoting their own version of globalisation in the form of World Social Forum and highly publicised protests against the meetings of WTO, IMF, World Bank, G-7, European Union etc. But beneath the surface, almost everywhere we can see a growing cooperation and coordination between the state and the

NGOs, where governments have virtually started leasing out the social sector to a network of NGOs.

As the state unilaterally abdicates its social obligations in one domain after another, the NGOs are encouraged and aided (by the state and corporate funding agencies) to take up these indispensable functions in the interest of social stability. This arrangement has several advantages. One, much more work can be done at an incomparably lower cost, since the lower level activists of NGOs work, as a rule, more sincerely on a meagre pay packet. The state is freed from huge financial and other ‘burdens’ of maintaining a large army of salaried employees. Two, when the state accepts a responsibility (say in health care for the poor), that becomes a legal obligation as well as a potential issue for mass movement. Neither of these applies to the welfare activities of the NGOs which, moreover, serve to depoliticise social initiatives.

To put the whole thing in perspective, in the era of growing informalisation of the economy coupled with casualisation and feminisation of the workforce and worsening environmental degradation, the long-term and overall interests of the prevalent social order demands certain checks and balances, some sort of safety net The NGOs seem to fit the bill better than the welfare state, hence its growing recognition by a whole range of governments across the political-ideological spectrum.