Benjamin Y. Fong and Melissa Naschek joined The Jacobin Show, our weekly YouTube broadcast, to discuss their recent article for the spring issue of Catalyst. In “NGOism: The Politics of the Third Sector,” they describe the structural binds requiring nonprofits to adopt the language of public well-being without adopting the politics of social transformation.

Fong and Naschek argue that the NGOs have come to fill the political void where strong labor unions or other mass-membership organizations used to be. Given the structural incentives to which nonprofits are subject, their mode of addressing social problems systematically avoids taking on the profit motive and, as a result, bears certain consistent features that the authors refer to as NGOism.

By bringing together community elites as “stakeholders” to technocratically manage social problems away, nonprofits reinforce social and economic hierarchies through their methods of civic engagement, and avoid the type of class conflict we need to win real political change.