Tom Kertes

Last night a new friend and I were talking over a beer (actually it was over a jug) and she told me that she had worked out a theory to explain why I am so interested in politics, and also for why my politics are so much about universal justice and human rights values.  Her theory was that perhaps I had been bullied as a kid (for being gay) and that this experience led me to my politics. She wanted to know if this was the case. I told her no, but I am now wondering, on more reflection, if perhaps there’s more to the story.

I told my friend that I hadn’t been bullied as a kid (for being gay or otherwise) and that my lifelong interest in politics preceded any awareness of being gay (I was interested in politics since I was seven, or for as long as I can remember). My interest in politics intersected with being gay only to the extent to which being gay conflicted with opportunities for being “mainstream,” or for exercising this interest. At the time I came out I knew that I was too liberal for an easy path in American politics, but being gay compounded this reality to a level that I thought made any career in politics impossible.

The first words I said to myself after deciding to come out in 1991 were “there goes my political career”.  At eighteen, I believed that I was done for as a politician.  This is one of few instances when I have so easily given up. At the time I felt a deep and tragic loss. Looking back, it was one of the best gifts I could have received, an unexpected blessing from being gay and by coming out.

What I lost was a sense of entitlement, which took years to recover.  What I gained is knowing that while we are all entitled to fully participate in community life, this entitlement usually requires a fight to secure, a fact of life that unfortunately applies to all but the most privileged.  In time I also learned the value of the fight itself, the value of demanding and then securing a place at the table.

Reflecting on this now makes me realize how clearly 2010 is not 1991. Little did I imagine that in just under twenty years many American communities would elect openly gay politicians to many levels of political office, with their personal life being just one of many factors in their public life. In 1991 there was no Will & Grace, no Ellen’s coming-out episode. Gays and lesbians were mostly invisible on television and in movies, and if seen were most often portrayed as sad and tragic, dangerous and debased, or in some other stereotypical form. Back then I could not even dream that neighbouring Canada would recognize same sex marriage without distinction.

When I came out in 1991, I took it for granted that mainstream politics was not an option for me, and that my (then planned) career path of going from law school, to law practice, to city elected office, to state office, to federal office was over. My interest in politics and my anger at the reality that I was unlikely to be a mainstream politician led me instead to the tail end of the the radical GLBT rights and AIDS movements, which profoundly influenced my development as a person.  My eyes were opened to injustices in the world. I witnessed the capacity of the powerful to inflict pain on others.

Now an “other” I wanted to view all the other “others” as being simply human, just like me.  And this required that I not turn a blind eye to human suffering anywhere, not to the children who died of disease and poverty in the embargo years after the first Gulf War, not to the children later burned alive with chemical weapons in the battle of Fallujah, not to farm workers in modern day slave-like conditions in Florida, not to public housing residents displaced to build sports stadiums, and not to homeless day labourers working for less than $4.00 an hour to clean trash after baseball games.

While times have changed in terms of respecting the rights of gay and lesbian Americans for the better, it was only a few years ago when George Bush included denial of same sex marriage rights in his State of the Union address to Congress.  These remarks followed Bill Clinton’s signing into law the “Defense” of Marriage Act, which denies federal recognition of same sex marriage across the board.  Governor Gary Locke (now Barack Obama’s Secretary of Commerce) did the same for Washington state.  Gay and lesbian Americans were not considered as full participants of civil society by the entire mainstream of American politics (which is actually a very narrow band, given the weakened state of American democracy).

We are still used as political footballs in a high stakes cultural war played for partisan gain.  As with the human rights violations in Iraq, Cuba and Afghanistan, the U.S. government, political and media elite and legal system did not seem to share my values when it comes to treating everyone with dignity and respect, or in treating all life as sacred. So I moved to Canada in 2007, where (thankfully) I am no longer a political football in political cultural wars, and where human rights are still celebrated and advanced by the society at large.

This brings me back to my friend’s questions: Was I bullied? And did bullying contribute to my politics and to my current interest in and passion for community organizing?  Did bullies get me into a lifelong mode of fighting for universal justice?

My answers to these questions are actually related to some of the ideas and issues I have recently confronted in my transition to Canadian society, whose political systems I am learning to be part of in a much different way than I related to those of my home country.  Since moving to Canada I have become much more “pro-system” and am now interested in working within the system, accepting (and celebrating) that I live in a functioning democracy worth participating in, worth contributing to, and worth protecting.  I feel much more “engaged” in civic life, going back to how I viewed myself within society just before the day I dropped out of my childhood dreams on the day I decided to come out.

My friend asked if being bullied as a gay man contributed to my political work, and I said no.  But in truth I think that the answer is yes, as I was bullied by society.  This bullying led me to a different path in politics, as a community organizer instead of as a politician. It ultimately led me to a different country, where I remain a community organizer but can now be reoriented toward participating in a democracy, rather than protecting the community from a greatly weakened form of democratic government. In this sense bullies did help shape my politics and my passion for human rights – just not childhood bullies. It was grownup political operative bullies who did this for me – such as George Bush’s Karl Rove and Bill Clinton’s Dick Morris.

Now that I am in Canada, where I feel welcome to participate in civic life as a participating member of society, I want to share the opportunities to which I’ve been privy as an immigrant, or the opportunities of inclusion.  I know that not all immigrants and not all Canadians, especially First Nations people and Canadians in poverty, are so fully welcome to the table of community and civic life. This is why I want to work with others who believe the table should be open to everyone.

I am thankful to be in Canada, to be an immigrant to this country and to be welcomed as an equal member of our society. I am also thankful that I know what it is like to be excluded and pushed to the margins.  I hope that I will always remember what it means to be excluded, so that I will remain committed to sharing the lessons learned of the value of inclusion and human rights for all. What I learned by being taken out of the mainstream of American politics are lessons I hope to share and apply in my new country, as I work with others to ensure that everyone in Canada is respected and included in our society together.

I just finished reading a thoughtful critique of NGOs at Rebel Press, which opens with the following statement:

I’ve spent three years heavily involved in [two different NGOs]. Both have set me thinking about the way non-governmental organisations (NGOs) operate and their role in reinforcing the status quo.

The piece builds a case against NGOs through observations and insights about the structure, work, economics and politics of NGOs. Here’s a summary of the points in the piece, most of which are direct quotes:

• NGOs often mirror the very transnational corporations they claim to oppose
• These NGOs reduce ‘activism’ to donating money or spending it ethically
• NGOs generally operate with a corporate structure
• NGOs that were originally set up with a radical purpose increasingly mirror the transnational corporations / government / system they intended to resist
• NGOs simply reinforce the very structures that have created the problems
• NGOs are obsessed with fundraising and do so on a marketing-basis (shallow exchanges, not deep commitments)
• Counting measurable achievements such as how many leaflets were distributed, or the quantity of funds raised, prevents us from reflecting on what changes have been achieved
• NGOs also perpetuate a model of single issue politics

I believe that the critique in the article is well-founded, and I agree with many of the observations and insights for why many NGOs are problematic from my political perspective. But I disagree with how these facts are synthesized, or what meaning is made from the observations.

I think the best way to make sense of these observations is by understanding that the NGOs examined by the author are politically opposed to her (and my) values and vision, and therefore have an agenda that is intentionally being carried out for a different political purpose. The agendas of these NGOs are the same as those of transnational corporations and neoliberal governments, organizations that I also oppose for political reasons because I have a different set of values and visions from which I operate.

What’s interesting about this, and what the left should learn from this is not that NGOs are a bad or an ineffective kind of strategy (indeed, they are a very good strategy of our political opponents), but that:

• power matters,
• it’s about politics (or, ideology matters) and
• institutions build power.

We should not oppose NGOs in whole, but should only oppose NGOs opposed to our politics, but build other kinds of NGOs that project our political values and vision.

The NGOs that the article calls out all seem to understand power, politics and the role of institutions in projecting power. Aside from knowing that Greenpeace, Make Poverty History, Amnesty International and other NGOs are politically opposed to structural solutions to the consequences of neoliberalism, and therefore do not warrant our support, we should also look at the role, structure and outcomes of these kinds of NGOs as a means to projecting our own power. We need not only better understand what we are up against, but also to fashion effective strategies ourselves, which can draw on the some of fundamentals on which our opponents strategies are based.

Power and Politics Matter

Large NGOs are both reflections and projections of power. I suspect that many NGOs became part of the prevailing political system through a series of dependency steps, essentially resulting in a buyout through the provision of operating funds and other investments, which were made by people who understand how important it is to be engaged on all levels of political and cultural life. This is how these forces remain the prevailing forces in much of world culture.

For those of us on the left in countries like Canada, the United States and (I imagine) New Zealand, where the left has very little power, it’s hard to imagine what it would be like to hold onto the level of power that neoliberal and liberal institutions have. The people running these institutions know what global power feels like, know how to have it, project it, and likely know how easily they could lose it. Because they control massive amounts of power reserves in the form of financial capital, one way to stay in power is to create financial dependency relationships using this captial with NGOs, by providing funding in exchange for certain influence.

I suspect that there are three ways in which this influence is achieved. One way that influence is built is by asserting ideological “truths” (or assumptions) into the the operations of the organizations. Theses truths are not calls for specific slogans or narrow political positions based on ideology, but are rather things like placing an importance on quantitative measurement of outcomes, emphasizing the role of the marketplace and marketing in strategic planning, and insisting on professional management models and efficiency as ways to carry out the work. These are strings attached to grants, government funds and legitimacy in the funding world.

Another way that influence is achieved is by placing known leaders and adherents to neoliberal or liberal ideology in places of responsibility and leadership of the organization, often in exchange for funding by both implicit and explicit means. This is partially achieved as an indirect result of the management models advanced by funders, with professional management emphasized in “good governance”. These managers will be required to have having extensive training in liberal universities. This influence is also achieved through explicit insertion of leaders into an organization, as a condition (or suggestion) of funding. There is nothing sinister about this in the minds of the influencers, as the people inserted and doing the inserting believe that they are right in their assessment of the problem and solution, and therefore believe justified in asserting influence over an NGO in order to ensure that the right solutions are the ones being pursued. This is related also to the networking circles that funders create, which provides a pool of leaders to work within different NGOs and sustain influence by funders of the work of these NGOs.

Finally, dependency is achieved with money, which is made all the more effective when coupled with the risks of growing too quickly or growing without a strong base. Organizations raising or using money itself is not automatically the problem, since there is a lot of work of any organization that requires money. For example, money allows an organization to carry out work by providing spaces for working together, paying the costs of communication, facilitating networking through travel and events, and allowing some workers to devote all their working time to a cause, especially in the role of coordination or communication internally. Organizing a base is usually very time and material intensive, making money an important factor for most organizing efforts.

I don’t think money alone is a problem, so long as the money comes from a base committed to the original values of the organization, and that going after money does not lead to a new focus for the organization. But one of the ideological assumptions of neoliberal and liberal thinking is the “goodness of growth,” which many lead an organization to get ahead of itself, acquiring money beyond its base, thereby leading an organization to new base (one opposed to the organization’s original goals).

Once an organization has been overtaken, through ideological drift, insertion of leadership from opposing positions and dependency created in baseless funds, then the narrative and meaning of the organization may become a tool to carry out an agenda reflecting the values and assumptions of neoliberalism and liberalism. From the standpoint of these political projects, such takeovers make a lot of sense. They not only diminish power of opposing viewpoints, but also strengthen power of the prevailing perspective.

It’s About Politics (or, Ideology Matters)

For the left to respond to the threats that intentional takeover of our institutional spaces, and the successful targeting of our natural base, we need to recognize this all of this is politics, and that includes politics at the very personal level of those who lead and run institutions. When a liberal is inserted into the leadership of a critical organization what is happening is, pure and simple, a political takeover. When that person’s connection to money, or management competency, or experience, or their relations to policy makers are provided as reasons to justify their advancing role in the leading of an organization, these are masking the real reason, which is – almost always – about politics.

What a cause needs is people who are both committed (politically) to the vision and values of the cause and capable of carrying out that commitment. Organizations that forget this, and who allow people who are committed to different politics, will eventually be overtaken by opposing ideologies. Again, this does not need to be “master planned” to happen, as it happens one choice at at time, one hiring decision at a time, one board appointment at a time. People simply apply their beliefs and values when advocating for a position within an organization, and too often our opponents are better at pushing these agendas and putting people who share their beliefs in place of people who share ours.

An advantage for most neoliberals and liberals is that there are literally thousands of liberal training and leadership development institutions in the form of universities, including many management and public leadership programs. Billions of dollars goes to recruitment and training, knowledge construction and the continuation of these leadership development programs, including 4-6 years of paid training in graduate schools that identify and train leaders sharing common values and ideological assumptions. This is one reason why the left needs to start building more leadership development institutions, to develop skills and knowledge for our own leadership base.

In short, we should be basing our decisions on who will run (at every level) our organizations based on demonstrated commitment to, and understanding of, a political agenda. Until we base our hiring, partnering, appointment, election and coalition decisions on an explicitly political basis, choosing to work with those who share a political vision, we will continue to have our institutions overtaken by those more capable of carrying out their political agenda, in opposition to ours.

Institutions Project Power

I fear that some of the conclusions in the entry on NGOs move toward a shunning of political institutions altogether. This logic says that given how NGOs in power today mirror the agenda of our political opponents, we should do away this organizing model altogether. I think that this is the wrong lesson to draw from the observations of the current state of massive NGO institutions.

Power is projected through institutions, which aggregate the power of individual persons through some form of cooperation. Institutions build power from the centre of the institution, which comes out of political processes within the institution itself. Institutional power comes entirely out of the collective work of its contributors, which can be converted into political capital and used to influence social, political and economic decisions and structures of the society. Institutions outlive individual persons, but as social constructions are also dependent entirely on people – both within and without the institutions. There are transactional institutions, built through the buying of commitment, such as a corporation. There are also transformational institutions, built through commitment to shared values, such as some political parties and many faith communities.

The problem of NGOs is not that they are institutions, but that they are institutions in support of the continuation of the prevailing political and economic forces. That they are institutions, and that they are effective ones at that, is only problematic from the perspective of those with a different agenda. If we view the institutional form itself as the reason that leading NGOs are a problem, we risk becoming institutionless, which would leave us without any means of building or sustaining power. Our reason for opposing one NGO or another should be based on our assessment of its actual poltical agenda, not because it is in the form of an institution. Deciding that all institutions are bad is political suicide of the highest order, and the stakes are too high for us go in this direction.

Political assessment is purely subjective, and requires looking deep into an institution and knowing what its leaders value and want to ultimately achieve. True political agendas are not always easy to know, which is why political engagement and movement building are so important. Leading liberals and neoliberals know the political leanings of the people that they work with, having gone through extensive training together, having an open ideological language, spaces for discourse, and, above all, knowing power and understanding what’s a stake and the complexity of being a minority that rules over the majority (especially with an un-”popular” – or not for the people – ideology). Any political movement needs to apply this kind of reasoning when assessing who will lead its institutions, and as a result which of its institutions will be supported.

Powerful movements are sustained with a multitude of institutions, of many kinds, and with a diversity of specific outlooks. We need media, networking, scholarly, educational, economic, political, civic, social and ceremonial institutions that share much, but not all, in common and that will work together in spaces big and small to project the power required to realize these common values. Monolithic institutions rarely sustain entire movements, as this creates an easy route to take over, produces insular and purist ideologies that are not based in reality, cannot help people function in reality beyond the ideology, and attract authoritarians to their ranks because some people simply want simplistic clarity and prefer to be told what to do, rather than to be part of dynamic and creative (messy) movements and institutions.

Finally, and most important for those in power within the left, is the need for an institution to have a base. The base supports institutions that are (or seem to be) in line with the values and interests of the base, based on trust built up over time and united by a common identity. Without a base an institution is a at risk of being either toppled or taken over. This matters most for those within the institution, who require a base to expose internal forces aimed at changing the core values of the organization. A strong base also matters to those considering taking over an organization, since a base increases the cost of takeover, and does not add to the value since if the organization changes values since a new base will still need to be built in place of the old base. If a base is particularly strong, the process of changing bases is very difficult and expensive, as to cultures conflict at the level of the base. A great weakness of most left organizations today is the near total absence of a base, opening institutions up to easy takeovers and denying left leaders committed to left values of internal defenses.