VacciNation

Global capitalism, in the form of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), produces and markets 'immunity' to facilitate its work in the more dangerous ('diseased') areas of the world. This logic of immunity first suggests a comparison between the hospital and the NGO, which perhaps means that the global superpower believes the hospital to be the most relevant model for the transmission of the capitalist model to other places in the world. Like the hospital, NGOs often attempt to be depoliticized, but in actual fact, the NGO is a 'pre-political' institution in society because it ignores the fact that its work could be political rather than turning a continuous, critical gaze towards itself regarding its politics; the NGO lacks political consciousness. It claims to ignore capitalist political agendas but in the end it is just hiding it or censoring it. It is as effective as a hospital in hiding its ideological background, and like the hospital it wants to establish itself as an institution for the long term, borrowing from a universalizing impulse which suggests that all humans are equal and hence need equal treatment. These global capitalist institutions claim that this 'depoliticization' is to do better work and to not be involved in the internal affairs of a nation, for they want to preserve the independence and sanctity of the nation. First, this ignoring of politics only seems to imply that politics of developing nations do not matter, that a new macro-level of politics is now at play where lesser developed nation-states are losing value and control. Rather than establishing direct connections between two nations, the logic in global capitalism is to export politics to another level, to make of the normal national political affairs something else, to give forth a different interpretation entirely of the national-level political. But what makes this so effective is that this new superpower is quite hidden: it is not another nation, such as the US, but a group of decisions: it has no 'private' agenda, the age of privatization in capitalism is now gone, rather, global capitalism is about the control of the public sphere, the reaching out into territories which are not to be converted to one's own, and also a 'turning oblivious' of the global populace with regards to what goes on in the developed world; the public sphere is not a sphere of knowledge, control and politics, but a sphere of freedom to enjoy life without these things. The question is: does this depoliticized 'being public' give life any worth and real quality? 

Depoliticization is the NGOs' attempt at 'immunity;' it is within the logic of immunity that depoliticization is operative, meaning that the political is secondary to the overall immunity and health of a community. The political is no longer considered an indicator of the community's health in the current global capitalist environment, for it could very well be the case that politics has been posited as the end-point of a community's expression; it is not a concern today when the health of the community is not strong, it is considered excessive to life today. In complete developed world fashion then, the political has been implicated within culture, and politics becomes matter of the expression of the culture and cultural health of a community rather than having an independent identity which implicates culture, economy, health care etc; politics is something people in the developing world do in their idle time (and it is considered a cause of disease because of its association with idleness and laziness; the clogging disease's impeding of flows of immune people and ideas is even more problematized by NGOs.) Furthermore, the overarching national-political, the macro-political, is considered as a virus, which began infecting all the interconnected institutions of Nepali society. What we have established here is that for the logic of immunity to function there needs to be a problematization of a certain type: a viral disease has infected the nation (but there is a cure). The political is to be solely considered a problem: the MDG does not mention politics; the UN, World Bank do not mention the political in their development indexes. But the political itself is not important for another important reason, as we have pointed out: the overarching logic of global capitalism is that of immunity, and in the logic of immunity, there is no (political) enemy, there is only disease and its symptoms.  

In the usual sense, we associate immunity with 'diplomatic immunity,' which is a concept which has quite effective uses in the developing world. In the most obvious example, it allows white-colored vehicles with developmental actors in them to travel to places which cannot be reached by other civilians; the vehicle makes one safe to an unprecedented degree, as the word immune implies, from the real dangers posed by a certain historical period or community. But we believe such an amount of safety itself has consequences on how the developing world is perceived and how developmental work is administered. Immunity implies that NGOs want to conduct their own activities in a scenario where they are not distracted or effected by the surroundings, but even more so, where they are completely oblivious to the surroundings, where they ignore the diseased elements of the social, these elements do not exist at all, and only focus on the non-threatened elements. Importantly, in the political interpretation of it, immunity is the strategy facilitating the smooth transition from Nepali Maoism to an 'NGO culture,' which means that at this moment in time the logic of immunity is important since the nation is going through instability and actors with vested interests in Nepal need to be protected and made to feel safe. Therefore, as a transit point, the logic of immunity has contact with Maoism of the past, considered as the disease, and the NGO culture which will come up in the near future, considered as the vaccination or the cure. The cure or the vaccine cannot be considered as something which is administered at one moment, but its effects are more continuous, always present, bound to the body and fluctuations of the nation, just as the disease is always 'out there,' only we are oblivious to it. And, like the vaccine, global capitalism is also to always be present, to continuously be over concerned with internal issues; the model today is a professionalized nurse at every beck and call at close proximity and not the paternal figure who supervises sympathetically.   

In the developed world, immunity first has implications for the mobilization of labor. Immunity is a very big incentive to all types of actors with vested interests. It means that the dangerous foreign can be experienced, can be touched, but it will not touch you back and infect you; it facilitates the perfect environment for encroachment, investment etc. Therefore, immunity allows for a lot of impact in the work done, but we also feel that looking for impact is itself a developed world concern. But how does immunity work, given that there is no actual, biological vaccine to make one immune from the dangers of the developing world? One answer can be found in the social science disciplines in schools: they demarcate the lines between two worlds, one which is safe and one which is diseased. They then position the NGO as an organization that does not so much bridge this gap, but makes one immune to the diseased part of the world. The diseased world is not so much a matter of entering but only of encountering from a distance, and any 'rational' individual would not want to enter it, simply because disease is not something you want to have. The possibility/threat of infection, however, is quite heavily marketed: the infection will be imperceptible, beyond understanding...it is not the 'domino effect' where communities fall one after the other, but the free movement of a virus which can infect anyone who is susceptible; therefore being able to work for an NGO is a matter of having strength, vitality, good (mental and physical) health and many other soldier-like traits; caring for one's society has been professionalized. One is to be strong and healthy, ultimately working in the developing world cannot be taught, but it is more ingrained, it is about having a stronger heart, composure etc. However, in the mentality of this NGO workforce, one can even locate a 'tourist mentality': that the foreign is to be experienced temporarily but not lived in, and while this experience is going on, a change can be enacted upon the foreign because one is stronger than the foreign, not by any innate natural strength, but by the injection which immunized one, the injection which came from one's caring government, one's strong nation etc. This association between tourism and NGOs may well be the reason that Nepal is attempting to make the tourist's experience better so that the tourist eventually returns as an NGO worker. In any case, there are agendas to align the tourist with the NGO worker, increasing their contact, inevitably promoting the NGO side of the equation, which means tourism itself could lose out eventually in Nepal as it becomes a part of a more important agenda. 

But, most importantly, immunity is not just for the NGO's worker; his entire logic in the work he does is 'making immune' of the community where he works, meaning that he himself is 'vaccinated' but that he also works as the vaccine, or as white blood cells, 'belonging' even more to the community than a foreign vaccine does. The logic is thoroughly borrowed from the biological workings of a vaccine, indeed some of the first NGOs must have been those that provided medicinal vaccines to communities. First, the NGO isolates clusters and communities which are prone to infection but not yet there, which means that the NGO does not touch the parts already infected, meaning that the logic is not to fix something which is diseased but to prevent the disease from spreading at all, to cut off the non-diseased community, identity, part from the rest of the diseased parts. For instance, this 'infection' can be both a national level threat or a local level threat. The threat can be any sign of under-development, but in the final analysis it is most likely political, and the most obvious threat to which one is to be made immune is the threat of anti-capitalism; we have essentially entered a more germophobic phase of Cold War capitalism. After isolating a cluster that could be turned against capitalism, the NGO operates by establishing programs that are perpetually distanced from the local realities of the infected populace; the tactic is to wean the populace into a new lifestyle, a new institution, a new school, so that it ceases to contact the diseased bits of the community. It is not so much the politics of the infected populace which is the target, but the whole lifestyle and life in the full which becomes an object to be changed for the chosen community. 

For instance, an NGO does not disseminate the message that X should not communicate with Y for political reasons, but it provides programs that progressively make the communication between X and Y impossible, it is about building a strong wall, a radical separation between the healthy and the diseased. There is no preservation of the will of the local community member under threat, but the cure for him is based on universal principles not based on his tastes, preferences, opinions etc. Essentially, we are in a 'post-political' realm because the political implies fixating on the disease, letting the disease infect you more, letting the infection spread, all for more knowledge regarding the disease, so that the disease evolves into an external problem, or one begins to accommodate it as a symptom of the times and so on...but today the disease must be efficiently and quickly destroyed, with no question about understanding the disease and the diseased perspective. And like how any vaccine works, this immunization vaccine first has a foreign element to it, but then it enlists the help of the community's own entities to act upon the threat. This means that there is no longer the need for perpetual foreign control to make a community immune, but local elements to a community continuously work to make itself immune from a threat. The local threat itself is first externalized, that is, it is made external, as if it does not belong to the history or the narrative of that community. Soon, there will be no need for a well-established and huge NGO like the UN to provide immune vehicles to access dangerous communities, our own Nepali development actors and volunteers will facilitate this type of access to foreigners and to themselves; we are learning to discard others and become immune ourselves. Smaller NGOs will themselves work for the logic of making immune. The rise of big international NGOs will give rise to smaller INGOs and national NGOs. The making impossible of contact between diseased and healthy is the logic of immunity: it is all about attempting to reduce to zero the probability of infection by reducing to zero the coexistence between the disease and the healthy elements. This is, inevitably, a violent notion, for it means that the NGO will work to annihilate the diseased elements if they begin to infiltrate the healthy elements. This aggression may often be misinterpreted as passion for social work.

Finally, let us demarcate between NGO-capitalism and broader global capitalism: whereas the NGO works to rehabilitate, strengthen and make healthy a suffering population, global capitalism provides precisely that terrain of the healthy. The healthy is interpreted as precisely those that can participate in the global capitalist order, and the NGO does an important job helping out by making a part clean and turning that part itself against the diseased element. What does immunity mean for global capitalism? It means that capitalism has now begun to ignore the possibility of changing the whole world. It focuses, rather, on those small elements that can be 'saved' from the disease and ignores the rest. It provides immunity to an exclusive population, and it uses cultural mediums to transmit the message about their immunity to market it very precisely to other locations where it wants to spread, it is about strategic and pointed immunization rather than broad strokes. Another important facet is the smooth mobility of these immunized entities: like white blood cells flowing in blood, they will flow to make other places and people immune after they themselves are protected. The logic is no longer to promise progress and capitalism and then have failure, but it is about direct administration ('injection') of capitalism, to sustain capitalism in a certain mode. It is about disseminating capitalism in strategically important places, and stealthily attacking those other ideologies that may be around it. The logic of immunity means capitalism thinks itself strong, and first this strength is manifest in the developed world, where the immunity against threat gives one the belief that one has 'super-strength.' In Nepal, there may still be caution, but immunization is effectively a guarantee that certain capitalist elements will not be diseased, and therefore one problem with immunity is that the NGOs may facilitate an emergence of extreme forms of capitalism, full of confidence and strength, which are more capitalist than the developed world itself. This is essentially a cancerous development, where the protective layer itself can be considered a disease.