Cultural Hegemony, Modernization, and the Neoliberal Subject: A Historical-Materialist Analysis of Foreign-Funded NGOs and the Commodification of Labor Power as Human Capital

Abstract

This article analyzes the impact of foreign-funded non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on the native cultures of target countries through a historical-materialist and dialectical framework. First, it acknowledges the historically progressive role of modernization in dismantling oppressive feudal and colonial relations. It argues, however, that the contemporary phase of global capitalism—neoliberalism—has fundamentally altered this trajectory. Capitalism had already turned labor power into a commodity; under neoliberalism, “human capital” operates as a mystification by which workers are made to believe that their labor is a capital they can enrich through education, training, and skills, and then sell at a profit. In reality, it remains a commodity whose use produces value for others, and the same logic is extended to the totality of the subject’s attributes, which must be optimized, traded, and exchanged. The article posits that foreign-funded NGOs act as conduits for this formation of neoliberal subjects. To ground this thesis, it draws on the classical categories of historical materialism—base and superstructure, determination in the last instance, commodity fetishism, the subsumption of labor under capital, the export of capital, the relation between spontaneity and consciousness, and the self-emancipation of the working classes—and articulates them with Gramscian hegemony theory, the critique of neoliberal governmentality, and the Polanyian concept of the double movement. Examining the spectrum of NGO intervention—from “benign” organizations that supplant organic civil society to “malign” instruments of regime change—it contends that while overt destabilization causes acute material devastation, the “benign” substitutive model is structurally more insidious because it does not repress the subject: it produces it. It durably neutralizes class consciousness, co-opts dissent, and sustains global capitalist hegemony, which makes it ultimately more damaging to long-term emancipatory potential.

Keywords: historical materialism; dialectics; cultural hegemony; NGOs; human capital; imperialism; NGOization; counter-hegemony; double movement.

1. Introduction

The proliferation of transnational NGOs, funded by Western state apparatuses and global capitalist philanthropic foundations, represents a significant mechanism of ideological diffusion. A rigorous historical analysis must avoid romanticizing the past: the transition from feudal, agrarian, or direct colonial frameworks to modern capitalist relations was a historically progressive development. It destroyed rigid caste hierarchies, introduced formal legal equality, and vastly expanded the productive capacities of society, offering a degree of emancipation from precapitalist servitude.

That transition, however, was never a purely economic process, nor was it culturally neutral. Karl Polanyi showed that the “great transformation” that gave rise to market society consisted in disembedding the economy from the social relations that had contained it, and in treating labor, land, and money—which had not been produced for sale—as commodities. He stressed, moreover, that the self-regulating market did not arise spontaneously: it was deliberately implanted through state action, whereas society’s protective reactions emerged spontaneously (Polanyi, 1944/2001). His analysis of colonial contact is especially pertinent to this article: the catastrophe of native communities is not explained primarily by economic exploitation in the narrow sense, but by the rapid and violent disintegration of the cultural institutions in which their members’ lives were embedded, leaving them in a cultural vacuum that rendered them incapable of defending themselves (Polanyi, 1944/2001). Modernization is, from its origins, a double-edged process: it frees human beings from personal dependence and, in the same movement, subjects them to the impersonal dependence of the market.

Antonio Gramsci makes it possible to understand how this transformation is sustained once implanted. Where civil society has developed, the power of the ruling class does not rest on the State alone: the State is merely an outer trench, behind which stands a robust system of fortifications made up of “private” institutions. Domination is exercised by combining coercion and consent, and consent is organized through the moral and intellectual leadership of society (Gramsci, 1971). Gramsci also described transformism: the gradual and continuous absorption by the ruling class of the active elements produced by allied groups, and even by antagonistic ones—an absorption that amounts to the decapitation of its adversaries without the need to confront them openly (Gramsci, 1971). This category anticipates with precision the mechanism this article analyzes in foreign-funded NGOs.

The current phase of global capitalism—neoliberal financialization—has nonetheless introduced a new and insidious form of alienation. When foreign-funded NGOs promote post-materialist and progressive social values (often labeled “woke” by their critics) in the Global South or in post-Soviet spaces, they frequently meet fierce resistance framed as a defense of “traditional values.” This article argues that this cultural clash is not a rejection of modernization per se, but a dialectical reaction against the neoliberal commodification of the human being. It is a conflict between the neoliberal demand for an atomized, self-optimizing “entrepreneur of the self” and the surviving, non-commodified communal structures of the local material base.

The question that organizes this article is therefore properly dialectical: at what point, and through what mechanisms, does the force that in one historical phase dissolved personal servitude become, in another, an obstacle to the development of higher forms of emancipation? The answer combines both perspectives. From Polanyi’s standpoint, foreign-funded NGOs appear as agents of a new wave of disembedding, one that reaches not only labor, land, and money but the person itself. From Gramsci’s, they appear as apparatuses that organize consent to that disembedding and absorb, through transformism, the leaders who might head the resistance. The article contends that, in their predominant form, these organizations prolong the life of an order that has already exhausted its progressive character, and that they do so most effectively precisely where they appear most harmless.

2. Theoretical Framework: Historical Materialism, Dialectics, and the Neoliberal Subject

To understand this dynamic, the analysis relies on an expanded materialist framework:

The dialectic of modernization: historical materialism recognizes that capitalism was a revolutionary force compared with feudalism. It freed the individual from personal dependence (for example, serfdom) and replaced it with the objective dependence of the market. Although this created new forms of alienation, it also laid the material foundations for future and higher forms of human emancipation (Marx, 1859; Marx, 1857–1858/1973).
The neoliberal reduction to “human capital”: capitalism turned labor power into a commodity from its origins; the worker is, above all, a seller of labor power. The neoliberal era does not abolish that condition; it mystifies and extends it. Following the extension of Marxian alienation and critical theory (Brown, 2015; Harvey, 2005), the worker is made to believe that their labor power is a “human capital” of their own, which they can enrich by investing in education and skills and then sell at a return. The logic of that commodity is projected onto every aspect of existence—education, health, identity, relationships, and morality—each of which is reconfigured as a component of this “capital,” to be invested, optimized, and marketed. The self thus becomes entirely financialized.
Gramscian hegemony and the co-optation of emancipation: NGOs serve as apparatuses of cultural hegemony. They co-opt the language of liberation, rights, and empowerment, strip it of its anti-capitalist or collective content, and repackage it as a mandate for individuals to adapt and thrive within the neoliberal market order.

2.1. The Classical Foundations: Base, Superstructure, and Determination in the Last Instance

Before examining hegemony and subjectivity, it is necessary to establish the categorial ground on which the argument rests. Historical materialism starts from the premise that “in the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations,” the totality of which “constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness” (Marx, 1859). Hence the central thesis: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (Marx, 1859).

This thesis does not license a mechanical economism. Engels warned that, according to the materialist conception of history, “the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life,” and that whoever twists this into the claim that the economic element is the only determining one “transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase” (Engels, 1890). Superstructural forms—law, religion, philosophy, cultural institutions, and, in the contemporary world, NGOs—have an efficacy of their own and react back upon the base. Precisely for this reason, the struggle in the field of ideas is not an epiphenomenon but a real moment of class struggle. The Preface itself points out that transformations of the base are lived through the “ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out” (Marx, 1859).

The consequence for this article is twofold. On the one hand, the NGO must be analyzed as a superstructural apparatus endowed with a material base of its own: capital flows, budgets, payrolls, consultancy contracts, and chains of accountability to external donors. It is not a free-floating “actor of ideas” but an institution whose reproduction depends on a specific financial circuit. On the other hand, its specific efficacy lies in its capacity to intervene in the terrain where consciousness of material contradictions is either formed or blocked. The NGO does not directly change property relations; it changes the way subjects interpret, name, and process those relations.

Marx and Engels formulated the principle that links both levels: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”; the class “which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production” (Marx & Engels, 1845–1846). Transnational philanthropy and state funding of NGOs constitute, in the current phase, one of the most developed forms of that control over the means of mental production on a world scale: capital invested not to produce commodities, but to produce interpretive frameworks, agendas, languages, and leaderships.

2.2. Cultural Hegemony: From the Coercive Apparatus to the Apparatus of Consent

The Gramscian category of cultural hegemony does not designate domination exercised exclusively by force, but a power relation in which the ruling class universalizes its particular project and makes it appear as “common sense.” Gramsci distinguishes between political society (the State in the narrow sense, with its coercive apparatuses) and civil society, understood as the web of “private” institutions—schools, churches, the media, associations, and also NGOs—through which hegemony is diffused and consent is organized (Gramsci, 1971). Civil society is thus neither a neutral space nor an automatically emancipatory one: it is simultaneously the terrain on which domination is reproduced and the terrain on which a counter-hegemony may be forged. The relation between civil society and hegemony is dialectical rather than hierarchical: neither derives mechanically from the other, which is why a determinist reading of Gramsci proves insufficient (Salem, 2020).

Gramsci does not abandon historical materialism; he develops the aspect that Engels had flagged: the relative efficacy of the superstructure. Hegemony is the form in which economic determination “in the last instance” is translated into moral and intellectual leadership. Where class domination succeeds in presenting itself as the general interest, coercion recedes into the background and is held in reserve for moments of crisis.

The analytical consequence for this article is decisive. Foreign-funded NGOs are not simply “civil society actors” operating in a pluralist vacuum. They are apparatuses of cultural hegemony in the precise Gramscian sense: they produce and disseminate interpretive frameworks, normalize certain demands and delegitimize others, and they do so not through direct coercion but through the manufacture of consent. Joan Roelofs has shown how foundations and transnational philanthropic flows absorb and transform dissident ideas, organizations, and leaders, promoting consensual support for the capitalist-democratic system (Roelofs, 2003). In Gramscian terms, international NGOs function as the “traditional intellectuals” of the global order: they possess the technical and moral authority to define what counts as “development,” “rights,” or “empowerment,” whereas grassroots social movements would embody the role of the “organic intellectuals” of the subaltern classes. External funding inverts this relation: the traditional intellectual colonizes the function of the organic one.

This makes it possible to reformulate the article’s central thesis more precisely. The “benign” NGO model is not benign, because it substitutes the funded project manager for the organic intellectual, and in doing so blocks the formation of a counter-hegemonic historical bloc. Hegemony, for Gramsci, is never complete or definitive; it must be renewed, and civil society is the battlefield of that renewal. The substitutive NGO intervenes precisely on that battlefield, but it does so in order to displace the war of position onto a technocratic terrain where material contradictions are translated into manageable “problems.”

2.3. The Neoliberal Subject: Labor Power as a Commodity and the Mystification of “Human Capital”

The second theoretical expansion concerns the production of subjectivity under neoliberalism. Wendy Brown’s thesis in Undoing the Demos is that neoliberalism is not merely an economic policy but a governing rationality that reconfigures every sphere of human existence on the model of the firm and the market (Brown, 2015). Brown radicalizes the Foucauldian insight: the neoliberal subject is not the classical homo oeconomicus who exchanges equivalents on the market, but an “entrepreneur of the self” who invests in their own human capital and manages their life as a portfolio of assets. Foucault, in his lectures The Birth of Biopolitics (1978–1979), described this shift with precision: labor ceases to be conceived as an external commodity that the worker sells in exchange for a wage, and comes to be conceived as capital—a set of competences, skills, and attributes that the individual must invest, optimize, and valorize (Foucault, 2008). From the standpoint of the critique of political economy, this shift is a mystification: workers are made to believe that their labor is a capital they themselves can enrich through education, training, and the acquisition of skills, and then sell at a profit. What changes is the way labor is conceived, not its real condition: labor power remains a commodity sold in exchange for a wage, whether openly or in disguised forms such as self-employment, subcontracting, or dependent micro-entrepreneurship. Education and skills do not turn it into capital; they only alter its price and its usefulness to whoever buys it. Marx had already established that developing a specific labor power requires “a special education or training,” and that “the expenses of this education (excessively small in the case of ordinary labour-power), enter pro tanto into the total value spent in its production” (Marx, 1867/1887). Education is part of the value of the commodity labor power; it does not transform it into capital. The additional value that these capacities produce is appropriated by capital, while the cost of acquiring them—tuition, debt, unpaid time—falls on the worker. The consequence is that exploitation disappears from the horizon of intelligibility: if the worker is an investor managing their own capital, then the responsibility for increasing its value falls on them, not on the social relation that exploits them.

Jason Read has summarized this operation as a production of subjectivity in which individuals are constituted as “subjects of human capital” (Read, 2009). The notion of the “financialization of the self” finds its precise theoretical grounding here. The neoliberal subject is not simply a selfish or competitive individual; it is a subject whose structure of recognition has been reorganized: they recognize themselves—and are recognized by institutions—to the extent that they believe they are managing, investing in, and valorizing their attributes as capital. Education, health, identity, relationships, and morality are experienced as investments whose return is uncertain and for which responsibility is strictly individual (Dilts, 2011).

2.3.1. The Classical Critique: Labor Power Is Not Capital

From the standpoint of Marxian political economy, the category of “human capital” is not a neutral description but a mystification, an ideological inversion of the real relation. In Capital, Marx establishes that the historical condition of capitalism is the existence of the “free labourer, free in the double sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale” (Marx, 1867/1887). Labor power is a commodity whose specific use value consists in producing more value than it costs; the difference, surplus value, is appropriated by whoever owns the means of production. Capital is neither a thing nor a personal attribute, but a social relation between those who own the means of production and those who own only their capacity to work. The commodification of labor is therefore not a neoliberal novelty: it is the founding condition of the capitalist mode of production. Polanyi agrees, by another route, that turning labor into a commodity is what defines market society, although he calls it a “fictitious commodity” because it is not produced for sale (Polanyi, 1944/2001). Polanyi speaks of “labor”; strictly speaking, what the worker sells is labor power, the capacity to work, and that is the term used in this article.

Human capital theory dissolves precisely this relation. By presenting the worker’s capacities as “capital” that they own and invest, it erases the difference between the owner of the means of production and the dispossessed, and turns the latter into an imaginary capitalist of themselves. Bowles and Gintis showed that this theory, although it apparently returns to the classical tradition by treating labor as produced, excludes class relations and the social structure of production from its analysis, so that inequality appears as the result of individual investment decisions rather than of the capitalist organization of labor (Bowles & Gintis, 1975). At this point, the Foucauldian and the Marxian critiques converge, but the latter goes further: it not only describes a rationality of government but identifies its class function. “Human capital” is the mystified form that labor power assumes when the wage relation has been concealed beneath the language of investment: the worker believes that by investing in education and skills they are accumulating a capital of their own that they then sell, when in reality they are only adapting and raising the price of the commodity they are forced to sell in order to survive. What neoliberalism adds is not the commodification of labor, which already existed, but its disguise as capital and its extension to dimensions of life that previously remained, at least in part, outside exchange.

2.3.2. Fetishism, Reification, and the Real Subsumption of Life

In the first chapter of Capital, Marx described commodity fetishism: in a commodity-producing society, social relations between people take the form of relations between things, and the products of human labor appear endowed with a life of their own that dominates their producers (Marx, 1867/1887). Lukács generalized this insight through the concept of reification: when the commodity form becomes the universal form of society, it penetrates consciousness itself, and the individual comes to contemplate their own faculties as things they possess and can sell (Lukács, 1923/1971). The discourse of human capital carries this process to its culmination: labor power, a commodity since the origins of capitalism, now presents itself to the worker’s consciousness as a capital of their own, while affects, reputation, and personal history come to be treated as components of that commodity—objects to be valorized in order to raise its price on the market.

This extension can also be understood through the Marxian distinction between the formal and real subsumption of labor under capital (Marx, 1863–1866/1976). In formal subsumption, capital appropriates pre-existing labor processes without transforming them internally; in real subsumption, it reorganizes the labor process itself according to its needs. Neoliberal rationality carries this logic beyond the workplace: subsumption reaches the formation of the person, the use of free time, the management of health, and community relations. NGOs that provide training in “soft skills,” “resilience,” “leadership,” or “entrepreneurship” participate directly in this real subsumption of life: they transform from within human capacities that were previously developed in non-commodified circuits and reorganize them as inputs for the market.

2.3.3. Species Alienation

The connection with Marxian alienation is decisive here. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx describes alienation as the loss of species-activity (Gattungstätigkeit): human beings confront their own activity as an alien power that dominates them, instead of recognizing it as the expression of their species-being (Gattungswesen) (Marx, 1844/1975). The neoliberal subject of human capital represents a historically specific and particularly intense form of this alienation: not only the product of labor but the totality of the individual’s life—their body, affects, and biography—is placed at the service of valorizing labor power as a commodity, even as it is presented as a capital that must yield a return. The worker remains, like the nineteenth-century industrial worker, a seller of labor power; the difference is that alienation is no longer experienced only in the workplace, but also in the permanent management of oneself as an enterprise. In the Grundrisse, Marx had anticipated that, where money becomes the universal social bond, individuals carry their social power and their bond with society in their pockets (Marx, 1857–1858/1973). The subject of human capital, in addition, carries that bond inscribed in their own person.

2.4. Imperialism, the Export of Capital, and the Conquest of Non-Capitalist Milieus

The third theoretical expansion situates NGOs within the political economy of imperialism. Lenin characterized the monopoly stage of capitalism by the merging of bank and industrial capital into finance capital, the formation of a financial oligarchy, and, decisively, the export of capital as a distinguishing feature, as opposed to the export of commodities (Lenin, 1917). He also noted that the superprofits obtained in the periphery allowed the ruling classes of the core countries to bribe an upper stratum of the working class—the so-called labor aristocracy—and thereby create an internal social base for the imperialist order (Lenin, 1917).

Both theses translate directly into the object of this article. NGO funding is a form of capital export that seeks not an immediate return in the form of profit, but a mediated return in the form of political and cultural conditions for accumulation: the opening of markets, the acceptance of reforms, the training of like-minded cadres, and the legitimation of a development model. And just as the labor aristocracy offered imperialism a social base within the metropolitan working class, the NGO professional stratum offers it today a social base within the peripheral intelligentsia: a “comprador intelligentsia” whose income, prestige, and career depend on its capacity to translate the donor’s agenda into the local idiom.

Rosa Luxemburg added a determination that is indispensable for understanding the cultural clash described in the introduction. In The Accumulation of Capital, she argued that the existence and development of capitalism require an environment of non-capitalist forms of production, and that capital wages a struggle against natural economy: peasant communities with common ownership of land, in which means of production and labor power remain bound together, do not serve its ends and must be dissolved in order to release land, labor, and markets (Luxemburg, 1913/2003). What Marx had analyzed as primitive accumulation—the violent separation of the producer from the means of subsistence—is, from this perspective, not a concluded episode of the past but a process renewed at every frontier of expansion (Marx, 1867/1887). Harvey has taken up this line of thought under the category of accumulation by dispossession to describe the neoliberal form of that process: the privatization of the commons, the commodification of services, and the absorption of previously non-commodified spheres (Harvey, 2003).

From this perspective, the foreign-funded NGO appears as one of the instruments of the contemporary version of that struggle. Where classical primitive accumulation employed open violence, its neoliberal form also employs persuasion: it does not directly expel the peasant from the land, but it teaches the peasant to think of land as an asset, labor as entrepreneurship, community as “social capital,” and identity as a brand. The dissolution of natural economy now also takes place on the terrain of consciousness.

2.5. The Articulation: The NGO as an Apparatus for Producing the Neoliberal Subject

The specific theoretical contribution of this article lies in showing that these traditions—classical historical materialism, Gramscian hegemony, and the critique of neoliberal governmentality—are not alternatives but articulated moments of a single apparatus. The foreign-funded NGO operates as the suture point between the production of hegemony and the production of subjectivity, and its material base lies in the export of capital and in capital’s structural need to absorb non-commodified domains.

In Gramscian terms, the NGO organizes consent by producing the cultural frameworks in which the neoliberal subject appears desirable, modern, and emancipated. In Foucauldian terms, it produces the technologies of the self—“empowerment” workshops, “leadership” training, “entrepreneurship” projects—through which individuals effectively transform themselves into entrepreneurs of the self. In classical Marxian terms, both operations fulfill the function of reproducing the capitalist relation: Marx showed that the capitalist production process produces not only commodities and surplus value but also produces and reproduces the capital relation itself—the capitalist on one side and the wage laborer on the other (Marx, 1867/1887). The “benign” NGO participates in that reproduction at the level of subjectivity.

The literature on NGOization documents this double movement empirically: the institutionalization, professionalization, and bureaucratization of civil society organizations produce demobilization, depoliticization, co-optation, and burnout, while inserting them into modes of neoliberal governance (Choudry & Kapoor, 2013; Lang, 1997). Alexandra Ana has shown, in the case of feminist movements in Romania and Belgium, that NGOization is not an accidental phenomenon but a structural reconfiguration of civil society under neoliberal rationality—a specific form of governmentality co-produced by the state, public and private donors, and institutions of international governance (Ana, 2024). James Petras, from an explicitly Marxist perspective, had already characterized NGOs in the late 1990s as instruments that, while presenting themselves as an alternative to the neoliberal state, occupy the spaces it has abandoned, compete with class-based movements for the representation of popular sectors, and shift politics from confrontation to project management (Petras, 1999).

The dialectical key—and this is what distinguishes the argument from a moralizing denunciation—is that the “benign” NGO does not repress the subject; it produces it. It does not forbid emancipation; it offers a specific form of emancipation that is simultaneously a form of market integration. The “empowerment” of rural women, for example, translates into their conversion into micro-entrepreneurs or flexible participants in the global labor market, not into a collective transformation of the property and gender relations that exploit them. Co-optation operates precisely in this way: it does not eliminate the demand but reformulates it in a language compatible with the existing order.

3. Material Mechanisms of NGO Influence

Foreign-funded NGOs actively restructure local civil society to produce neoliberal subjects through specific mechanisms. Each can be read as the contemporary translation of a process that classical historical materialism had already identified.

The “empowerment” paradigm as market integration: NGO programs frequently frame “empowerment” (for example, of women or youth) not as collective liberation from capitalist exploitation, but as the individual’s capacity to become a self-sufficient micro-entrepreneur or a flexible participant in the global labor market. This is a new edition of the “double freedom” analyzed by Marx: the subject is freed from the communal bonds that sustained them and, at the same time, “freed” from any alternative to the market (Marx, 1867/1887). As early as 1864, Marx warned that “co-operative labor, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses” (Marx, 1864a). The micro-entrepreneurship promoted by NGOs is an even narrower version of that limitation: it is not even cooperative, but individual.
Fragmentation of class into market niches: by promoting hyper-individualist identity frameworks, NGOs fracture collective, class-based solidarities. Identity is commodified; different social groups are transformed into discrete consumer demographics and specialized labor pools, facilitating their management and the extraction of value. The Manifesto had noted that “this organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves” (Marx & Engels, 1848). Fragmentation by funding niche reproduces that competition at the organizational level: subaltern groups compete with one another for calls for proposals, thematic priorities, and visibility before donors. The General Rules of the First International attributed the failure of emancipatory efforts precisely to “the want of solidarity between the manifold divisions of labor in each country” (Marx, 1864b). The project system institutionalizes that want of solidarity.
Financialization of civil society: the injection of foreign capital into local NGOs creates a dependent professional-managerial class. This “comprador intelligentsia” internalizes the neoliberal worldview, viewing its own cultural and social interventions through the metrics of grants, deliverables, and market-friendly outcomes rather than the organic needs of the community. From a materialist standpoint, what is decisive is not the subjective intention of these professionals but their objective position: their material reproduction depends on the donor circuit, and “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (Marx, 1859). Intellectual labor is thereby subsumed into a quasi-wage relation with transnational capital, and the orientation of that labor adjusts to the conditions of its funding.
Dissolution of the moral economy and of reciprocity: intervention in communal forms of care, mutual aid, and collective labor—which in the Andes include institutions such as ayni and minka—tends to convert them into measurable, fundable “social capital” that is ultimately replaceable by services provided through the market or by the NGO itself. This is the contemporary form of the “struggle against natural economy” described by Luxemburg (1913/2003): what was previously produced and circulated outside the cash nexus is reinscribed into the logic of the project and the indicator.

4. The Spectrum of NGO Intervention: Substitution versus Subversion

Foreign-funded NGOs operate along a spectrum that runs from ostensibly “benign” service providers to overt instruments of geopolitical subversion. A dialectical analysis must evaluate both and, above all, the relation between them: the two extremes are not independent phenomena but complementary forms of a single strategy for reproducing the global order, one that alternates consent and coercion according to the conditions of each conjuncture (Gramsci, 1971).

4.1. The “Benign” Illusion: NGOs as Substitutes for Organic Civil Society

The most common and ostensibly “benign” form of foreign-funded NGO does not seek to overthrow the State, but to supplant the people as civil society. Under neoliberal structural adjustment, the State withdraws from providing social welfare, health, and education. Foreign-funded NGOs fill this vacuum (Harvey, 2005; Petras, 1999).

Depoliticization of dissent: by professionalizing social problems, these NGOs transform potential mass movements and class struggle into manageable, grant-funded “projects.” Radical demands for systemic change are translated into technocratic deliverables (for example, “capacity building” or “awareness workshops”).
The safety-valve function: these NGOs act as a safety valve for social grievances. By providing a sanctioned, well-funded avenue for moderate advocacy, they absorb the energy of the subaltern classes and prevent the formation of a unified, counter-hegemonic bloc. The population is transformed from active historical subjects into passive beneficiaries or “stakeholders” in a neoliberal project (Choudry & Kapoor, 2013).

4.1.1. The Project as Institutionalized Economism

The Leninist critique of spontaneity offers a particularly precise tool for understanding the logic of the substitutive model. In What Is to Be Done?, Lenin argued that the working class, “exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation,” without becoming “conscious of the irreconcilable antagonism of their interests to the whole of the modern political and social system” (Lenin, 1902). He added that “the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology” (Lenin, 1902).

The NGO project is an institutionalized and funded form of that limitation. It divides social reality into separate “issues”—domestic violence, access to water, youth employability, reproductive health, local governance—each with its own budget line, logical framework, and indicators, and thereby prevents communities from perceiving the connection among them all and the property structure that produces them. Lenin demanded that political consciousness be formed by exposing all forms of oppression in their relation to the social order as a whole; the project does exactly the opposite: it fragments the totality into a series of partial demands whose resolution, if it comes at all, leaves the underlying relation intact.

The inversion this entails must be underlined. Lenin held that socialist consciousness had to be brought to the spontaneous movement “from without”—that is, from outside the immediate economic struggle, from an understanding of the relations among all classes. The foreign-funded NGO also acts “from without,” but in the opposite sense: it introduces from abroad not a consciousness that transcends spontaneity, but an ideology that consolidates it and subordinates it to the transnational bourgeoisie. What is imported is not the theory of emancipation but the theory of adaptation.

4.1.2. The Division between Educators and Educated

The third thesis on Feuerbach warns against the materialist doctrine that sees human beings as the product of circumstances and upbringing but “forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself”; such a doctrine “must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society” (Marx, 1845). The substitutive NGO model materializes exactly that division: a body of funded experts who diagnose, train, and evaluate, and a population that is diagnosed, trained, and evaluated. Transformative practice—which, for Marx, consists in the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and the changing of human activity—is replaced by technical intervention on subjects turned into objects of policy.

4.2. The “Malign” Reality: NGOs as Instruments of Regime Change

At the opposite end of the spectrum are NGOs explicitly designed as instruments of hybrid warfare, “color revolutions,” or imperialist destabilization (for example, certain programs funded by the National Endowment for Democracy or by specific state-aligned foundations).

Instrumentalization of grievance: these organizations actively seek to overthrow governments that resist global capital, nationalize resources, or pursue independent geopolitical alignments. They do so by funding opposition parties, intervening in electoral processes, and exploiting the fragmented identity politics they themselves helped cultivate.
Installation of comprador regimes: the ultimate goal is not organic democratization, but the installation of a compliant comprador elite that will open the country’s markets and resources to foreign capital under the guise of “democratic reform” (Gill, 2012; Chomsky, 1999).

From the standpoint of the classical theory of imperialism, this modality corresponds to the moment when competition among blocs of capital for the conditions of accumulation—territories, resources, markets, and alignments—is carried onto the domestic political terrain of peripheral countries (Lenin, 1917; Luxemburg, 1913/2003). The perception of this threat is not a rhetorical invention of the governments concerned: a study of 153 low- and middle-income countries between 1993 and 2012 found that 39 of them adopted laws restricting the inflow of foreign aid to NGOs operating on their territory, that these governments perceive such aid as support for their political opponents, and that the volume of aid flows is associated with a higher risk of adopting such restrictions (Dupuy et al., 2016). That these laws sometimes also serve to protect incumbent governments does not cancel the material fact they reveal: external funding of civil society is recognized, by the recipient states themselves, as an instrument of political power.

The relation between the two ends of the spectrum is dialectical, not merely one of contiguity. The “benign” NGO prepares the ground on which the “malign” one can act: it creates networks, cadres, languages, and legitimacies that, in a conjuncture of crisis, can be mobilized for regime-change purposes. Conversely, the threat of overt intervention disciplines governments into tolerating the permanent presence of the substitutive model. Consent and coercion, in the Gramscian formula, do not exclude each other: they succeed and support each other.

5. Dialectical Evaluation: Which Is “Worse”?

Determining which form of NGO intervention is “worse” requires moving beyond a superficial moral calculus toward a dialectical evaluation of its impact on the material base and on emancipatory potential.

The case against the “malign” (regime change): ostensibly, the regime-change model is more immediately destructive. It causes acute material devastation, economic collapse, civil conflict, and the violent suppression of sovereign self-determination. It represents the sharpest and most visible edge of imperialist violence.
The case against the “benign” (substitutive civil society): from a historical-materialist perspective, however, the “benign” substitutive model is structurally more insidious and ultimately worse for long-term human emancipation. Why? Because it sustains and stabilizes the neoliberal order.

Neutralization of class consciousness: by professionalizing dissent and turning activists into grant-dependent project managers, the “benign” NGO durably fractures class solidarity. It prevents the subaltern classes from recognizing their shared material exploitation.
The illusion of progress: it creates a façade of “civil society” and “progress” that masks the continuing extraction of wealth and the erosion of the material base. It makes the neoliberal order acceptable and durable.
Prevention of organic synthesis: genuine historical progress occurs through the dialectical resolution of contradictions by the masses themselves. The substitutive NGO interrupts this dialectic. It imposes a synthetic, foreign superstructure that prevents the organic development of a native, revolutionary consciousness.

5.1. Essence and Appearance

The superiority of the dialectical method over moral calculus lies in its refusal to stop at the immediate appearance of phenomena. Marx observed that all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided (Marx, 1894/1981). The appearance of the “malign” model is one of destruction; that of the “benign” model, one of assistance. But the essence of both must be judged by their relation to the reproduction of the social relations of production. In this light, the visible destruction of the “malign” model contains a paradox: by making imperialist violence manifest, it also makes the contradiction visible and creates the conditions for it to be recognized as such. The “benign” model, by contrast, operates precisely in the gap between essence and appearance: its efficacy depends on the relation of domination going unperceived.

5.2. Crisis and Stabilization

In the materialist theory of history, epochs of social revolution open when the relations of production enter into open contradiction with the development of the productive forces and that contradiction manifests itself in the consciousness of social agents (Marx, 1859). Crises do not automatically produce emancipation, but they are the moments when hegemony weakens and the subaltern classes can articulate an alternative. Gramsci called this situation an organic crisis, and contemporary Gramscian scholarship has used the category to characterize the global condition after 2008 (Gill, 2012).

The “malign” model accelerates crises and, although it steers them toward imperialist ends, cannot fully control their consequences: it generates resistance, defensive nationalisms, and unforeseen political realignments. The “benign” model has the opposite function: it preemptively manages contradictions so that they never take shape as crises. For that reason, it is the most effective component of what Mark Fisher called capitalist realism: the widespread conviction not only that there is no alternative to capitalism, but that it is not even possible to imagine one coherently (Fisher, 2009). The “benign” NGO produces that realism at the community level: it teaches that problems are solved project by project, call for proposals by call for proposals, and that outside the funding framework no action is possible.

5.3. Self-Emancipation versus Tutelage

The ultimate criterion of evaluation derives from the founding principle of the modern labor movement, drafted by Marx in the General Rules of the First International: “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves” (Marx, 1864b). The same document locates the root of “servitude in all its forms, of all social misery, mental degradation, and political dependence” in “the economical subjection of the man of labor to the monopolizer of the means of labor” (Marx, 1864b). Measured by this criterion, the “benign” NGO fails on both counts: it replaces self-emancipation with external tutelage, and it shifts attention from the monopoly over the means of labor to the individual “capacities” of the subaltern. This is not a technical error that better practices could correct, but the necessary consequence of its structural position.

In sum, the “malign” NGO is a crisis of the system, but the “benign” NGO is global capitalism’s immune system. The former destroys a society openly; the latter pacifies it permanently, leaving it unable to mount a coherent challenge to its own exploitation.

6. Dialectical Impacts on Native Values and Cultures

The imposition of the neoliberal subject on societies with different material bases produces specific and contradictory impacts, exacerbated by the spectrum of NGOs described above.

6.1. The Erosion of Non-Commodified Social Reproduction

Traditional moral frameworks, despite their historical flaws (for example, patriarchy and rigid hierarchies), provided robust systems of social reproduction: care, mutual aid, and communal identity that existed outside the cash nexus. The NGO model, whether benign or malign, promotes radical individualism and the dissolution of the traditional community or family unit. This strips communities of their non-market safety nets, forces individuals to depend entirely on the market for survival, and thereby deepens their condition as sellers of labor power, now presented as marketable “human capital.”

Classical historical materialism makes it possible to situate both aspects of this claim without contradiction. On the one hand, Engels showed that the patriarchal family and the subordination of women are neither natural nor eternal facts, but historical forms linked to the emergence of private property and classes (Engels, 1884). From a materialist perspective, there is therefore no reason to sanctify traditional hierarchies. On the other hand, the same analysis shows that replacing those hierarchies with universal dependence on the market does not amount to overcoming them: it replaces a form of personal domination with a form of impersonal domination that is harder to identify and combat. The question is not to choose between tradition and the market, but to identify which elements of communal forms can serve as a basis for overcoming both.

The fierce resistance to foreign NGOs is frequently mischaracterized by Western observers as mere religious fundamentalism or irrational xenophobia. A materialist analysis reveals this reaction as a defense by the subaltern classes and the national bourgeoisie against the totalizing reach of the market. For the working classes and the peasantry, the defense of “traditional values” is often a desperate, if sometimes reactionary, attempt to protect the remnants of the communal “lifeworld” from being entirely engulfed by the market logic that is now expressed in the language of human capital (Polanyi, 1944/2001). The Polanyian category of the “double movement” makes it possible to specify theoretically why the traditionalist reaction is not simple irrationality.

Polanyi argued that the self-regulating market tends to disembed the economy from social relations, subjecting labor, land, and money—the “fictitious commodities”—to a logic of commodification that destroys the very foundations of social solidarity. In response to this destruction, a countermovement of social protection arises spontaneously (Polanyi, 1944/2001). The application to the case at hand is direct: the neoliberal discourse of human capital carries the commodification of labor—one of the fictitious commodities—to its most radical phase by extending it to the whole of human life, and the defense of “traditional values” constitutes, in many cases, a Polanyian countermovement: a resistance, often desperate and contradictory, to the complete subsumption of the communal “lifeworld” under the logic of the market. Nancy Fraser has warned that this scheme must be supplemented by a third pole—struggles for emancipation, including feminist ones—so as not to reduce politics to a binary choice between marketization and protection (Fraser, 2013). The observation is pertinent, but it reinforces this article’s argument: the problem with the NGO model is that it appropriates the pole of emancipation and places it at the service of commodification, so that protection becomes associated with tradition and emancipation with the market, and both are severed from the project of transforming the relations of production.

This does not mean romanticizing traditionalism. It means, rather, recognizing its material rationality without granting it automatic normative authority. The defense of community, of non-commodified care, and of forms of reciprocity that capital has not fully colonized is a necessary moment of any emancipatory project. But that moment is insufficient and can become reactionary if it is articulated as a return to premodern hierarchies rather than as a starting point for a higher synthesis. Materialist dialectics requires holding both determinations together: the traditionalist reaction is defensive and materially grounded, but it is not emancipatory in itself. Its counter-hegemonic potential depends on its articulation with a project for transforming the relations of production, not on its mere affirmation of identity.

6.2. The Community as a Starting Point: Marx and Zasulich

The idea that surviving communal forms can serve as a starting point—rather than an obstacle—for a higher form of society is not a romantic addition to historical materialism, but a position Marx himself held in his final years. Asked by Vera Zasulich in 1881 about the fate of the Russian rural commune, Marx replied that “the analysis in Capital therefore provides no reasons either for or against the vitality of the Russian commune,” but that his special study of the question had “convinced me that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia. But in order that it might function as such, the harmful influences assailing it on all sides must first be eliminated, and it must then be assured the normal conditions for spontaneous development” (Marx, 1881). Marx thereby explicitly rejected the idea that the pattern of primitive accumulation described for Western Europe was an obligatory destiny for all peoples.

The relevance of this position for the critique of NGOs is immediate. The “harmful influences” that, according to Marx, assailed the Russian rural commune have a functional equivalent today in programs that convert communal property into individual assets, reciprocity into “social capital,” and collective identity into a funding niche. The foreign-funded NGO reproduces a model of civil society elaborated in the centers of global capitalism and implants it, without organic mediation, in realities with different material bases. The higher synthesis that dialectics demands cannot be imported; it can only be built from the community’s own reality and by its own subjects.

This perspective also makes it possible to overcome the false dilemma between “modernization” and “tradition” in which the cultural conflict is usually framed. The real alternative is not between the neoliberal subject and the patriarchal community, but between two ways of resolving the contradiction: resolution from above, which dissolves the community into the market, and resolution from below, which transforms the community into the basis of a higher social organization, freed at once from traditional hierarchy and from market dependence.

6.3. “Organic Synthesis” and the Blocking of Counter-Hegemony

The argument that the “benign” NGO is the “immune system of global capitalism” can be formulated with Gramscian rigor. Counter-hegemony, for Gramsci, is neither decreed nor imported: it is built organically through the articulation of popular demands into a historical bloc capable of contesting the dominant common sense (Gramsci, 1971). The substitutive NGO intervenes in this process in order to interrupt it. By professionalizing dissent, translating radical demands into technocratic deliverables, and creating a professional-managerial class dependent on external funding, the “benign” NGO disarticulates the link between intellectuals and the masses that would make a counter-hegemonic bloc possible.

The result is not the absence of resistance, but its dispersal into identity-based market niches and its institutionalization in forms compatible with neoliberal governance. Civil society is pacified not because it has been repressed, but because it has been reconfigured as a set of “stakeholders” negotiating their participation in the existing order. It is in this precise sense that the “benign” NGO is structurally more insidious than the “malign” one: the latter produces a visible crisis of the system; the former produces the hegemonic stabilization that prevents the crisis from even being perceived as such.

To complete the dialectical analysis, it must be added that this stabilization does not eliminate material contradictions: it displaces and defers them. The extraction of wealth, precarization, and the erosion of social reproduction continue, and with them the discontent the apparatus seeks to channel continues to accumulate. But, as Lenin warned, the contradiction does not resolve itself spontaneously in favor of the subaltern classes; left to itself, it tends to be absorbed by the dominant ideology (Lenin, 1902). The persistence of the contradiction is the condition of possibility of counter-hegemony, not its guarantee. For that reason, the very existence of the substitutive model aggravates the problem: it occupies the organizational space where the consciousness capable of seizing on that contradiction should be formed.

7. Conclusion

Through a historical-materialist and dialectical lens, the activities of foreign-funded NGOs cannot be seen as benign exercises in cultural diplomacy. While modernization and the dismantling of feudal or colonial structures represent historically progressive developments, the contemporary neoliberal phase has hijacked this trajectory. On the basis of the conversion of labor power into a commodity, which has characterized capitalism since its origins, it has redefined the human being, who, from a holistic member of a community, has come to believe they possess “human capital”: the mystification by which workers assume that their labor, enriched by education and skills, is a capital of their own that they sell at a profit, when it remains a commodity to be traded, optimized, and exchanged for the benefit of others.

The classical categories of historical materialism make it possible to specify the scope of this conclusion. The relation between base and superstructure explains why an apparently cultural apparatus has class effects: the NGO has a material base of its own in the export of capital and acts on the terrain where consciousness of contradictions is either formed or blocked. The Marxian critique of labor power and of fetishism explains why “human capital” is not a description but a mystification that presents as capital what remains a commodity, and thereby conceals the relation of exploitation. The theory of imperialism and accumulation explains why the conquest of non-commodified domains is a structural necessity of capital rather than a cultural option. The Leninist critique of spontaneity explains why the fragmented project consolidates subordination to the dominant ideology. And the principle of self-emancipation explains why no external tutelage, however well-intentioned, can substitute for the organization of the subaltern classes themselves.

Foreign-funded NGOs act as the vanguard of this formation of neoliberal subjects. While “malign” NGOs seeking regime change cause acute and visible devastation, “benign” NGOs that supplant organic civil society are ultimately more damaging to emancipatory potential. They succeed in co-opting and neutralizing the forces that could challenge the system, render the masses passive, and sustain global capitalist hegemony. The resulting traditionalist backlash, although sometimes reactionary in itself, is fundamentally a rational defensive reaction by the subaltern classes seeking to preserve non-commodified forms of social reproduction, and it contains, as Marx recognized, elements that can serve as a starting point for a higher form of social organization if they are articulated with the transformation of the relations of production.

Ultimately, genuine human emancipation does not require the importation of neoliberal cultural frameworks through NGO funding, but the organic and collective transformation of the underlying material and economic base so that it serves human needs rather than the logic of capital. That transformation cannot be imported: it must be the work of the workers, peasants, and communities themselves, built from their own material reality.

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