Politics & Power Quote by Susan George

The line lands like a backhanded compliment delivered with the calm of someone who’s spent years watching institutions congratulate themselves into inertia. Susan George’s “to take just one example” is doing a lot of work: it’s not just an aside, it’s a signal that the list could be longer, and that the scarcity of praise is itself the point. She’s not offering a feel-good endorsement; she’s rationing approval.

The first sentence nods to NGOs like the World Development Movement (now Global Justice Now), outfits that translate outrage about debt, trade rules, and corporate power into campaigns ordinary people can join. The second sentence pivots to “some political parties,” and the small, loaded “some” exposes the gap between activism and electoral power. It’s a subtle indictment: parties are supposed to be the machinery of change, yet they’re only occasionally worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as a pressure group.

Context matters here. George emerges from the post-1970s ecosystem of development critique, where “aid” often masked structural extraction and where real leverage sat in trade agreements, IMF conditionality, and boardrooms. The intent is to reframe what counts as “doing good work”: not charity optics, but organized confrontation with the rules of the game. The subtext is a warning to the politically hopeful: if you want transformation, don’t confuse representation with action. Build power outside the parties, because only a few of them remember what power is for.