Death To the Non-Profit Industrial Complex!
Summaries of resources against non-profit:
Got to first give it up to INCITE!
INCITE! Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex
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What is the “non-profit industrial complex”?
The non-profit industrial complex (or the NPIC) is a system of relationships between:
the State (or local and federal governments)
the owning classes
foundations
and non-profit/NGO social service & social justice organizations that results in the surveillance, control, derailment, and everyday management of political movements.
The state uses non-profits to:
Monitor and control social justice movements;
Divert public monies into private hands through foundations;
Manage and control dissent in order to make the world safe for capitalism;
Redirect activist energies into career-based modes of organizing instead of mass-based organizing capable of actually transforming society;
Allow corporations to mask their exploitative and colonial work practices through “philanthropic” work;
Encourage social movements to model themselves after capitalist structures rather than to challenge them
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And from the book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the non-profit industrial complex — The Political Logic of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex
“The Velvet Purse of State Repression
It may be appropriate to initiate this discussion with a critical reflection on the accelerated incorporation of progressive social change struggles into a structure of state accreditation and owning-class surveillance since the 1970s. Robert L. Allen’s classic book Black Awakening in Capitalist America was among the first works to offer a sustained political analysis of how liberal white philanthropic organizations–including the Rockefeller, Ford, and Mellon foundations–facilitated the violent state repression of radical and revolutionary elements within the Black liberation movements of the late 1960s and early 70s. Allen argues that it was precisely because of philanthropy’s overtures toward the movement’s more moderate and explicitly reformist elements–especially those advocating versions of “Black capitalism” and “political self-determination” through participation in electoral politics–that radical Black liberationists and revolutionaries were more easily criminalized and liquidated.[2] Allen’s account, which appears in this collection [The Revolution Will Not Be Funded], proves instructive for a current critique of the state-corporate alliance that keeps the lid on what is left of Black liberationist politics, along with the cohort of radical struggles encompassed by what was once called the US “Third World” Left. Perhaps as important, Allen’s analysis may provide a critical analytical framework through which to understand the problem of white ascendancy and liberal white supremacy within the dominant spheres of the NPIC, which has become virtually synonymous with the broader political category of a US Left.
The massive repression of the Black, Native American, Puerto Rican, and other US-based Third World liberation movements during and beyond the 1960s and 70s was founded on a coalescence of official and illicit/illegal forms of state and state-sanctioned violence: police-led racist violence (including false imprisonment, home invasions, assassinations, and political harassment), white civilian reaction (lynchings, vigilante movements, new electoral blocs, and a complementary surge of white nationalist organizations), and the proliferation of racially formed (and racially executed) juridical measures to criminalize and imprison entire populations of poor and working class Black, Brown, and Indigenous people has been–and continues to be–a fundamental legacy of this era. Responding to the liberation-movement era’s momentary disruption of a naturalized American apartheid and taken-for-granted domestic colonialism, a new coalition of prominent owning-class white philanthropists, lawmakers, state bureaucrats, local and federal police, and ordinary white civilians (from across the already delimited US political spectrum of “liberal” to “conservative”) scrambled to restore the coherence and stability of white civil society in the midst of a fundamental challenge from activists and radical movement intellectuals who envisioned substantive transformation in the very foundations of US “society” itself. One outcome of this movement toward “White Reconstruction” was the invention, development, and refinement of repressive policing technologies across the local and federal scales, a labor that encompassed a wide variety of organizing and deployment strategies. The notorious Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) of J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) remains the most historically prominent incident of the undeclared warfare waged by the state against domestic populations, insurrections, and suspected revolutionaries. But the spectacle of Hooverite repression obscures the broader–and far more important–convergence of state and capitalist/philanthropic forces in the absorption of progressive social change struggles that defined this era and its current legacies.
During this era, US civil society–encompassing the private sector, non-profit organizations and NGOs, faith communities, the mass media and its consumers–partnered with the law-and-order state through the reactionary white populist sentimentality enlivened by the respective presidential campaigns of Republican Party presidential nominees Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. It was Goldwater’s eloquent articulation of the meaning of “freedom,” defined against a racially coded (though nonetheless transparent) imagery of oncoming “mob” rule and urban “jungle” savagery, poised to liquidate white social existence, that carried his message into popular currency. Goldwater’s political and cultural conviction was to defend white civil society from its racially depicted aggressors–a white supremacist discourse of self-defense that remains a central facet of the US state and US political life generally. Though his bid for the presidency failed, Goldwater’s message succeeded as the catalyst for the imminent movement of White Reconstruction in the aftermath of US apartheid’s nominal disestablishment, and in the face of liberal reformist changes to US civil rights law. Accepting the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, Goldwater famously pronounced,
Tonight there is violence in our streets, corruption in our highest offices, aimlessness among our youth, anxiety among our elders and there is a virtual despair among the many who look beyond material success for the inner meaning of their lives…. Security from domestic violence, no less than from foreign aggression, is the most elementary and fundamental purpose of any government, and a government that cannot fulfill that purpose is one that cannot long command the loyalty of its citizens. History shows us–demonstrates that nothing–nothing prepares the way for tyranny more than the failure of public officials to keep the streets from bullies and marauders.[3]
On the one hand, the subsequent exponential growth of the US policing apparatus closely followed the white populist political schema of the Goldwater-Nixon law-and-order bloc.[4] Law and order was essentially the harbinger of White Reconstruction, mobilizing an apparatus of state violence to protect and recuperate the vindicated white national body from the allegedly imminent aggressions and violations of its racial Others. White civil society, accustomed to generally unilateral and exclusive access to the cultural, economic, and political capital necessary for individual and collective self-determination, encountered reflections of its own undoing at this moment. The politics of law and order thus significantly encompassed white supremacist desire for surveilling, policing, caging, and (preemptively) socially liquidating those who embodied the gathering storm of dissidence–organized and disarticulated, radical and protopolitical.
In this historical context, COINTELPRO’s illegal and unconstitutional abuses of state power, unabashed use of strategic and deadly violence, and development of invasive, terrorizing surveillance technologies might be seen as paradigmatic of the contemporary era’s revivified white supremacist hegemony.[5] Contrary to the widespread assumption that COINTELPRO was somehow excessive, episodic, and extraordinary in its deployment of (formally illegal and unconstitutional) state violence, J. Edgar Hoover’s venerated racist-state strategy simply reflected the imperative of white civil society’s impulse toward self-preservation in this moment.[6] Elaborating the white populist vision of Goldwater and his political descendants, the consolidation of this white nationalist bloc–which eventually incorporated “liberals” as well as reactionaries and conservatives–was simply the political reconsolidation of a white civil society that had momentarily strolled with the specter of its own incoherence.”
The Non-profit Industrial Complex (NPIC) is a system of relationships designed by colonial and capitalist forces to manage and neutralize effective radical organizing.
Smash the Non-Profit Indigenous Complex! — Printable format PDF (3.8MB)
- The NPIC is inherently extractive and colonial.
The NPIC was established to manage social and environmental groups with the same structure as corporations. Non-Profit Organizations (NPOs) co-opt movement momentum into campaigns they manage to control and capitalize off of. Based on the charity model, NPOs focus their resources on building organizational power and not community power thereby stripping essential resources from front-line radical liberatory organizing, while reproducing or prolonging inequality and social hierarchies. - The NPIC upholds capitalism.
Wealthy families, individuals, foundations, owning classes, and corporations use the NPIC to shelter their wealth from having to pay taxes. These capitalists grant millions but save many millions more by profiting off of the tax breaks from the NPIC. They have no sincere motivation to end the injustices that they often perpetuate and benefit from. - NPOs are more accountable to funders than their communities.
Most NPOs are not transparent with their grant funding reports. They operate with a low level of secrecy to ensure that desperate communities they impose their representation on do not see how much they extract and profit from their misery. They often design bloated budgets for personal gain and are not resourceful. They ultimately create incentives to exploit struggles. - NPOs Foster Abusive Power Relationships.
Due to their artificial structure and nature of hiring positions as movement “jobs” or professional titles, security culture and intersectional practices are almost always compromised within these groups. Most often, qualifications are limited to those with academic or activist portfolios and not based on dedication and commitment to the issues and necessary hard work to address oppressive actions and behaviors. Hierarchical Indigenous NPO’s become easily corrupt with cronyism, nepotism, and cis-heteropatriarchy. “Leaders” in the NPIC typically exploit issues to build their social capital and clout. Once these organizations are established, abusive individuals who maintain them often go unchecked due to lacking community-based accountability and job titled positions that absolves them from committing harms. NPO’s are also notorious gatekeepers that have reshaped and distorted what grassroots political movements like abolition and mutual aid have hxstorically stood for. They also undermine and delegitimize radicals whose work they co-opt while channeling and hoarding resources away from those autonomous people, groups or efforts. Overall, they implicitly alienate radical tendencies by their very existence thereby compromising not only potential resources and support, but their very safety. The professionalization of activism and movement work has entrapped many within the rugged lie of independence and commodified relations that are in ongoing tension with actual practiced Mutual Aid.
NPO’s have also overtly collaborated with state agencies and law enforcement to denounce, distance, and criminalize radicals. This has hxstorically regulated our resistance to these oppressive structures. - NPO strategies are explicitly reformist.
Regardless of the radical revolutionary decolonization jargon they use, NPOs don’t want to end colonialism and capitalism because they wouldn’t have a job without these systems of oppression. NPOs look at movements and break them down into manageable campaigns that meet the grant conditions of large capitalist foundations. They strip away radical tendencies in organizing with management tactics such as “Non-Violent Civil Disobedience” and direct popular energy towards begging colonial politicians for concessions. Their language may be radical but their actions are informed by the respectability and legitimacy they seek to maintain with their capitalist funders and their political targets. Colonizers aren’t going to relinquish their power through bad publicity, voting, or aggressive lobbying. Those tactics serve to reinforce colonial power and de-radicalize overall liberatory efforts. - NPOs Can Perpetuate False Representation.
Some NPOs appear to be radically driven by Indigenous Peoples yet their founders are not Indigenous and they have no meaningful connection to the communities and struggles they claim to represent. Seeding Sovereignty, as an effort driven by non-Indigenous People, is a primary example of this insidious misrepresentation and profiteering. Other NPOs can be driven by Indigenous Peoples who are movement based yet use these movements as stepping stones for personal gain (financially or through clout chasing) or towards political careers. Due to their resources (and access to resources), they often dominate the narratives of struggles. Acting as the sole voices for Indigenous issues, many NPOs in the Climate Justice Movement have agendas driven by settler social and environmental NPOs such as 350.org or the Sierra Club.
The overall strategy of the NPIC is colonial, upholds unjust power relationships, and capitalism.
Groups like NDN Collective are prime examples of the problems with the NPIC. They have co-opted the term “collective,” which is a radical non-hierarchical practice, but are structured with a president and CEO. They purchase and maintain private property as a “land back” campaign that is not a radically anti-colonial action to build Indigenous autonomy, but a capitalist strategy.Their CEO is paid more than $200,000 a year and their annual operating budget is more than $10 million dollars. They recently received more than $10 million dollars from extreme capitalist and working class exploiter Jeff Bezos. The NDN Collective organizes with the idea of “Decolonizing Wealth,” which is really just a marketing strategy to commodify and cash-in on Indigenous struggles.
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Indigenous non-profits rushed to secure funding and brand their efforts as “mutual aid” when they were providing financial and resource handouts. This is not mutual aid but acts of relief and charity that serve to keep communities dependent on the very hierarchical and exploitative systems we want to abolish.
The NPIC is a barrier to building collective power towards liberation.
Indigenous capitalism doesn’t equal liberation. Smash the NPIC!”
The Nonprofit Sector as White Space
“We can begin by asking, “How do white leaders in the nonprofit sector use white space approaches to addressing public space as white space?” Biss’s revealing intervention belies how core it is to our sector’s approaches, including those designed to address racial inequities. It is in the very framing of racial equity work, which itself is contested — diversity, equity, and inclusion (which has gained approval in the sector’s own white space) versus racial justice, including reparations (the preferred approach of people of color). It shows up in who leads even in the design of racial equity change processes (usually it’s the white leaders who have “inadvertently” designed their own organizations as white space). It is in the capturing of our work and sharing out into the world with a white frame for an audience imagined as predominantly white (mostly white funders and donors). “
Why Are We Still Struggling with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Nonprofit Governance?
“McCambridge commented on this isomorphism as an example of how institutions preserve and recreate themselves in their own image. This in turn sets a norm that gets copied by peer institutions, turning the problem into a systemic issue. One potential remedy is to “design for the margins,” a concept that comes from MIT’s Ceasar McDowell. That is, put marginalized people at the center of institutional and program planning, which, it turns out, also benefits those who are not marginalized. “
The Industry of Black Suffering: Breaking Down the Non-Profit Industrial Complex
“This is best exemplified by the idea that many non-profits geared at empowering Black people will use phases like “anti poverty” instead of terms like “wealth development”. We need to be thinking about justice for Black people, which requires white people to renounce their loyalty to a social arrangement that maintains White power and control. Justice and self-determination for Black people would mean that the Black community would control its own political and economic resources — a move that has long been considered taboo in the non-profit sector because it requires sacrifices from white executives and Board members that many of them are just not willing to give up. In conversations with white people who call themselves anti-racists in Baltimore, several of them have agreed that white people must be willing cede the privileges they receive and work towards giving resources and power to Black people.
The argument was not centered on all non-profits being bad or that white people have no role in the fight for justice. Non-profits should see their goal as empowering a community to meet its own needs and control its own destiny. The Black community should not be forced to remain in a position where we are dependent on benevolent white people to provide services and resources for us. We also argue that whites must be led by Black people and defer to the direction and vision of Black people when engaging issues that most directly impact Black people.
These distinctions are important because the priority for Black people in these instances should be building independent Black institutions. Often times the Non-Profit Industrial Complex frames out the capacity for us to have conversations about how we build institutions for Black people that accurately respond to the forces present in our community. If the priority is not building Black institutions, it offers an opportunity for white led non-profits to usurp the resources and social capital of the Black leaders and organizations. This has the impact of destabilizing the impact of Black organizing while dually increasing the wealth, prestige and status of non-profit organizations. This effect, while insidious, can easily go unnoticed by white people without an posing an explicit challenge the institutional arrangement of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex.”
Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex
“While “nonprofit” can refer to any institution with that business status, the phrase “service nonprofit” is more specific, referring to nonprofits that engage directly in providing services to people, such as beds for homeless people, or advocating for services, like Planned Parenthood’s Action Fund.
Service nonprofits are part of what some progressives and leftists sometimes refer to as the “nonprofit-industrial complex.” The US nonprofit sector today accounts for more than $1 trillion in annual economic activity, making it on its own one of the world’s largest economies.
The anthology The Revolution Will Not Be Funded defines the nonprofit-industrial complex as “a set of symbiotic relationships that link political and financial technologies of state and owning-class control with surveillance over public political ideology, including and especially emergent progressive and leftist social movements.”
And this awesome Zine:What’s the Non-Profit Industrial Complex and why should I care?
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Postscriptum -
That second link, Resmaa Menaekm just recently talked about here:
“I do want to say something about the words diversity and inclusion and there’s another one that’s been I’ve been hearing lately. It just makes me roll my eyes. It’s cultural agility.
Leslie: That’s a new one for me.
Resmaa: Yeah yeah it’s a new one. I’ve just been hearing it a lot in circles. Cultural agility. Not how do we begin to look at and develop somatic abolitionist communities, right. Not how do we begin to confront and abolish white body supremacy and develop anti- racist communities. Not that! Let’s become more ‘culturally agile’ right. All of these terms, are terms that make passive, white body progressives supremacists…make them feel better, right?
Because none of those will acknowledge genocide. Diversity does not… cultural diversity does not usually acknowledge genocide. Does not usually acknowledge land theft. Or colonialism, or imperialism or enslavement. It usually doesn’t acknowledge those, right? One of the things I want to impart is that when we talk about these terms, these terms have a particular cultural context, right. And they usually don’t fit the context of the people that have been genocided. They usually don’t fit the context of the people that have been enslaved, right?
And so what I want to say is this: whenever somebody says to me diversity, the next question is, if you’re creating a different culture not just a strategy but a different culture, the next question that should come up in you, in your vessel, in your very somatic, in your body, should be the question ‘diverse from what?’
Because when you talk about diversity what you’re saying is there is a standard and we’re bringing something in diversifying from that standard, right? That’s what diversity means. Diversity either means bring something in to have some more flexibility, or to move away from — diversified, right? So when we say diversity we never ask the question: ‘From what?’ And all know we all know it. We all know it. We intrinsically know but if you never landed, never say, when we say diversity. we’re saying we are diversifying from the standard that the white body is the supreme standard of humanity. And we want to bring in other things. That’s what we mean. But we never say that.
So what diversity ends up being as a genuflect is food, music, identity right, that’s what it ends up being other than saying we are diversifying from the standard of white people being the standard of humanity. That’s what we mean we say diversity. Same thing with inclusion. What are we…so if you’re going to include something in, right, you must start with something first. Who’s doing the including, like what are you bringing in, like what..
Leslie: What are you keeping out?
Resmaa: Yeah! What are you keeping out, and what is the standard for like, if you start with inclusion that we want to include something you ‘re saying that that there is a standard by which you’re bringing something into. What is the standard by which we’re bringing something in to? We’re including these other communities and cultures and in to this standard of the white body being the standard, right? So, so, as people who are developing culture, we have to talk differently. We have to be differently. That being and talking differently in that language has to come up out of culture.
if you don’t start with the container which you can begin to have these reactions begin to occur in, then you never, ever begin to create a culture, and white…what ends up happening is that the white bodies who are out here doing the work…what ends up happening is that they end up not being able to sustain the work. Because the moment they start getting pushback, they’re using the same language and the same tone, and the same quality in their somatic body, the same vibratory response. They have not calibrated any differently, so their body experiences without challenge, the same as somebody who’s not doing the work — as the devout racists, as the passive racists. There is no culture change, so they don’t enter into the world differently. Even if they’re out here doing strategy. That’s the thing about building the cultural container.
If you don’t do it, and you’re not up against other bodies, and you’re not loving other white bodies, and you’re not creating culture around other white bodies and you’re not speaking a different language, you will genuflect to the language that currently is standard. And the current language that is standard is a racist understanding. It’s a racist ideology. It is in the soil. It was here before America became America. “
— Death to the Non-Profit Industrial Complex!
