If the success of Left movements relies on nonprofit organizations, we must be honest about the industry’s reproduction of capitalism and state violence. Revolution is the only way.
It’s a precious occasion when your most cherished political values merge with your workplace’s. I count myself lucky to have recently witnessed a pair of lauded abolitionists teach an audience of philanthropy about the ways in which criminalization lurks behind each crisis with which we contend “in these times.” But as is often the case in panels I patronize, analysis of the problem satiates more than its corresponding recommendations.
Full of wisdom cultivated through lived experience and constant study, their concluding call to action exhorted us to fund organizing, foremost, but also “movement infrastructure.” Examples of this included supporting organizers’ ability to convene, to pay their staff well, to rest, and other ways to cultivate the “strong organizations” we need. Movement infrastructure is the framing of the house without which no plumbing or electrical can function, they explained.
But through elaboration, they painted a familiar landscape: the amalgam of self-perpetuating corporations who skirt taxes through charitable veneers competing for whimsical philanthropic attention to keep oppressed people alive at best. Buttressing the agencies who directly interact with their constituency are associations that gather them around ever more specific centers of gravity, membership organizations that themselves often belong to broader associations of associations. All these concentric circles require countless consultants, often composed of burnt-out nonprofit professionals lured out by comfortable consulting fees that still serve the mission. This we often refer to as the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC), popularized if not coined by INCITE!. Whatever “movement infrastructure” may be, it sure swims and quacks like the NPIC. And since inauguration, it is clearer than ever how reliant we are on this system to resist fascism and state violence.
To the panelists’ credit, the question put to them presumes the legitimacy of the philanthropic system in the first place. That question –– “what should foundations do in the face of fascism?” –– overlooks how even the most progressive funder represents extreme wealth, which denotes excess derived from the exploitation of workers at the hands of the ruling class, ultimately serving capitalism. Even the best of philanthropy represents the meager moral convictions of the elites we ought to be mobilizing against, the leaders of the carceral and capitalist systems responsible for the poverty and deprivation our nonprofits set out to ameliorate. Well-meaning dissidents have named how philanthropy is inherently extractive, and we therefore might better consider foundation giving as returning stolen wealth. It is valid to interrogate the origins of one’s endowment and make amends to the communities from which it was extracted. But “reparative philanthropy” still does little to challenge culpable institutions. And this is the moral conundrum afflicting any leftist employed by philanthropy.
These misgivings make sense when you work in such proximity to obscene wealth, but direct-service nonprofits (that is, grantees) aren’t off the hook, if dealing exclusively with bad options. Only a handful of revenue streams keep any given nonprofit afloat. Governments take the lion’s share of grantmaking, and, especially when oligarchs govern, it’s easy to identify the ethical compromise of accepting public funds. Those who eschew public funding for moral reasons (a sentiment found in both the stereotypical left and right political wings) turn to foundations, corporate sponsorships, and wealthy individuals, each of which largely serve to alleviate capitalists’ guilt more than maximize impact, much less invest in revolution. No grantmaker will ever fund organizing that genuinely threatens its own power. Still others might turn to membership dues or fee-for-service models, which charge your constituency––those who are also the least likely to afford it––for the services you provide them.
Recognizing these intersecting conundra, leftists celebrate mutual aid and other unincorporated ways of organizing and meeting communities’ needs. We criticize the existence of the “career organizer.” I count myself among the celebrants of mutual aid, but I’m still cautious. I’m not the first to point out that it can seem a trendy label slapped on the ways in which Indigenous people all over the world have taken care of each other forever. Moreover, organizing is labor, and labor deserves to be compensated. You could persuade me that organizers should earn more than anyone else, as an infamous TED Talk suggested twelve years ago (though problematically so). And if the only morally pure organizer does so in the margins of their day jobs and personal responsibilities, we afford them so little time. Small wonder it’s so common for grassroots organizing to incorporate or fade away.
This dilemma is as old as the 501(c)3, at least, but especially acute in the DOGE-days. As funding cuts deteriorate the already gaping public safety net, philanthropy finds itself in the catbird seat. Funders don’t want to be considered gap-fillers anyway. But in any given community, foundations recognize that not every nonprofit will survive the onslaught, so they compose secret lists of the nonprofits they can and cannot afford to lose. They are prioritizing. Foundations may employ people with lived experiences of oppression and poverty as program officers, whose influence over such decisions comforts me some, but they ultimately report to capitalist trustees who hold the purse. This is not who you want ranking your city’s service providers.
This comes as the nonprofit workforce comprising progressive movements, broadly understood, become increasingly radicalized. Some recently so by organizing for Palestinian liberation or the 2020 uprisings. Others by the Occupy movement or other salient movement chapters before. Radicalization opens your eyes to the interconnectedness of oppressive systems: when you learn zionism as colonization, you might notice Native Americans share a similar story, or the other way around. When you embrace #TeslaTakedown, you notice how Musk is not alone among the oligarchs pulling the strings, just more cartoonish than most. In my experience, the contradictions of the nonprofit industry’s complicity in capitalism lead not just to burnout but to outright despair. To existential dread.
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It is reasonable to argue that pointing out the harms of progressive nonprofits risks opening a schism in already fractured movements. Some of my friends think I waste my time complaining about the NPIC when we should instead debate our organizing strategy. But if anything separates those of us resisting fascism from the minds behind Project 2025 –– and why I resist calls to compose the left-wing version of it –– it is that we aspire to intellectual and ethical integrity. As we organize against state violence, we ought not reproduce it in our own organizations. I don’t know what it might look like to distinguish movement infrastructure from the nonprofit industrial complex, but I have hunches.
If anything, a movement transcends any of its composite organizations. A nonprofit leader is not automatically a movement leader. A sector is not a movement if it functions like an industry. Unlike how corporations measure success by constant growth, any given nonprofit serving progressive visions should remove its own perpetuity from the table; institutional egos seem one of our most stubborn obstacles to revolution. That so many nonprofits will perish under the DOGE days is awful, but that does not mean every nonprofit is valid. And if a movement suffers with the loss of a single agency, it was not a movement in the first place.
The title of the most instructive text we have about the NPIC, which I paraphrase in the title of this piece, makes the second point: the revolution will not be funded. It is not just that the movements we require to abolish state violence are unfundable, but that any organization associating itself with such movements requires revolutionary politics. I’ll defend harm reduction until my last breath, but harm reduction can look like incrementalism, and the latter fails to deliver liberation. The measure of any “movement” organization is not its IRS designation but its participation in revolution. And if anyone’s composing a list of criteria for revolutionary politics, by the way, might I suggest it include denunciation of genocide and apartheid.
Third, no movement survives absent community. The notion has been co-opted, and that an emphasis on relationships seems sappy is evidence of that, but it remains true that deep and genuine relationships constitute necessary ingredients for revolution. It can be difficult for the nonprofit industry to embody this because the roles of service provider and service consumer so easily bifurcate us into “us” and “them” even if nonprofits employ former clients. Given the inherent power differential, I doubt it’s truly possible for foundations to cultivate egalitarian and mutual relationships with both nonprofits and the people those nonprofits claim to serve. But as long as philanthropy exists, it should seek such solidarity.
Finally, as the co-author of Abolish Rent, Leonardo Vilchis, told me in response to my lamentation about my complicity in the NPIC at a recent conference, it is no use beating yourself up for working for a nonprofit. No labor escapes the tentacles of capitalism. But do not kid yourself that your nonprofit employment is much more than a job. We may not choose nonprofit careers for the salaries, but the purpose of work itself is to earn a wage in order to survive. However much your nonprofit’s mission aligns with your passions, maintain some distance between your employer and your spirit. Guard against any effort to weaponize “mission” to trap you in oppressive work environments.
None of these hunches satisfy, but the call-to-action generations of Black, brown, and Indigenous abolitionists have emphasized for decades transcends any given crisis: colonization and capitalism are the roots of oppression, so it is there we must grasp. And such deep roots will not budge absent revolution. Our task as organizers, therefore, is to steer these stubborn nonprofits toward a revolutionary politic as we undermine the foundations of capitalism. Liberation is the dream, and revolution is the road that will take us there.
