“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
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