Non-Profit Nastiness

“The Revolution Will Not Be Funded – Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex,” by various authors, 2007

This book was inspired by a 2004 conference of the same name attended by about 800 people, riffing off a song by Gil Scott Heron.  It includes contributions from a variety of activists involved or working for ‘progressive’ non-profits across the U.S.  They christened the many non-profits in the U.S that sprang up in the mid-1970s as the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC), which they tie to universities and also prisons.  While the title seems to reject the concept, some of these writers still try to combine non-profit work with ‘autonomous’ goals, while they take funding from rich people, foundations and are registered with the IRS as 501(c) (3) groups.

I’ve never worked for a non-profit, but I’ve had some contact with their methods and employees.  Firstly, you’d have to be in their sub-culture to wade through the repetitive and archaic rhetoric in this book.  I did it for you.  Many are formerly activists involved in prison reform, fighting sexual assault, in anti-war, pro-Palestinian, poverty and anti-racist struggles.  Then they became involved in 501(c)(3) groups pursuing some of those same issues.  Some subsequently broke with the NP model. Oddly they are mostly inspired by older no-profit groups like the Zapatistas, Brazil’s Landless movement, Palestinian liberation organizations, etc. Their rhetoric is mostly based on ‘intersectionality’ and one on ‘non-reformist reforms.’ Many authors have a fuzzy idea about what ‘left’ actually means, repeatedly getting it confused with liberal.  They do not connect to political parties. One writer thought that Marxism didn’t care about anything but class.  Au contraire!

The restraints in the non-profit and NGO sectors are based on money, though also on the increasing degreed, grant-writing and careerist ‘professionalization’ of the hires.  Organizations that deviate from the funders and legally required Board of Directors on issues like Israeli divestment, anti-war stances, community defense or organization, explicitly political positions – i.e. any number of issues beyond liberal ameliorative measures – either get their funding cut or are required to change their tone.  This book includes some examples, as when the City of Seattle, through a Board of Directors, closed an anti-violence against women group, Seattle Rape Relief. One group in Atlanta, New South, tried to ignore the legal guidelines of an NP, functioning as “autonomous grassroots in NP drag” in their words.  However, this seems the isolated exception.

 

What I found most odd is claims that ‘the best and the brightest’ worked in the non-profit sector.  Nearly all of the authors seemed completely unaware of present left-wing, labor or socialist organizations that ONLY rely on donations, dues, periodical sales and other forms of fund-raising.  These groups are unencumbered by the middle-class, palliative slant of the non-profit.  The authors hark back to the so-called romantic days of the U.S. Black Panther Party or the early days of the United Farm Workers which were not funded by foundations.  But instead of building unions, organizations and parties embedded in communities, neighborhoods and workplaces, that work is now outsourced to nearly a million U.S. NPs.

 

The book is a bit dated and has been joined by more recent books looking at mega-monied philanthropists like Bill & Melinda Gates and the fraud of ‘saving the world’ that they promote.  The book names the Ford, Rockefeller, Gates, Sage, Pew, Soros, Mellon, Mott, Carnegie and Annenberg Foundations - that collection at the end of every PBS program - as suspect.  Well-funded non-profits like the Arab American Anti-Defamation Committee limit their demands in the Arab middle-east like getting Palestinians to adapt to Israeli rule.  Anti-war coalitions like United for Peace and Justice have no Arab members.  Internationally 80% of the Palestinian infrastructure is funded by international foundations.  One article shows how foundations actually serve as tax havens for the rich and corporations.  Even with the required 5% donations, they still make money overall in investments.  Only a tiny amount of this goes to social NPs, as the vast majority of foundation monies are doled out to arts organizations, hospitals and universities. The book has an excellent history of how the more radical CORE was co-opted by foundations in the 1960s and moved towards black capitalism. The book’s real angle is how workers in an NP can move to a more radical, revolutionary stance instead of just having a one-issue job “helping people.” 

 

NPs have become a privatized part of the welfare state, as human welfare issues are transferred by the ideology of neo-liberalism into becoming an individualized charity event in which the private ‘civil’ sector dominates.  Internationally NGO’s play that same role.  In this structure, capital can retain almost direct ‘soft power’ control while trying to buy off former radicals and troublemakers.

Other prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box upper left:  “Mau-Mau-Mauing the Flack Catchers," "Planet of the Humans."

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

May 15, 2020