The Revolution will not be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex builds on a conference organized by INCITE! Women of Color against Violence that was organized to explore the formation of what it terms the "Non-Profit Industrial Complex." The introduction to the book describes the Non-Profit 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." Non-profits are used by the state and capitalist interests to then 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, and encourage social movements to model themselves after capitalist structures rather than to fund them. This is an innovative and challenging critique for many on "the left" who have come to occupy an institutionalized role, but it is an essential critique that ultimately offers an important vision of organizing that places people's power and the grassroots at its center rather than the needs and desires of the state and the owning class.
A key component of the book is a critique of the foundations that so often fund the majority of the non-profit organizations in the United States. These foundations are described as tax shelters for the rich, with many wealthy individuals and families setting up foundations in order to escape the estate tax. Foundations are subject only to nominal regulations and are required only to spend 5% of their net worth per year. Moreover, this 5% can include "operating expenses" which in many cases includes salaries paid to those who established the foundation as trustees. This money, rather than going to the government via the estate tax and theoretically becoming the property of "the people" is instead maintained by those with power in society and is frequently distributed in a manner that maintains the status quo. Groups are funded based on what foundations want--not what people need--and often value individual solutions over radical structural changes. It goes without saying that the majority of those serving as trustees at foundations are white, and consequently, much of the money goes to organizations made up of white people. This keeps their money--which often originated with the exploitation of people of color and working class people--within the same power structures that control society.
Many of the authors whose essays are featured in The Revolution will not be Funded view the rise of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex as a key component in explaining why social movements are relatively weak in the United States compared to other countries. They argue that the state of the current movement is a result of a deliberate and sophisticated strategy aimed at limiting the scope of social movements via COINTELPRO, the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, and capitalism. These interlocking realities--the overt repression of the government's COINTELPRO operations to neutralize radicals in the 1960s and 1970s, the rise of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex as a means of separating movements from their base, and the limiting of radical possibilities as a result of the supposed triumph of capitalism over the Soviet "left"--is articulated as an explanation for the current state of our movements. Rather than have vibrant popular move ments, the United States has a plethora of non-profit organizations that spend their time writing grants, evaluating their "performance," engaging in an endless stream of paperwork, and providing social services that were once offered by the state. These and other tasks mean that many non-profits prioritize their relationships with "funders" over their "constituents," seeing funders as more important in that they provide the money to keep the non-profit going. Of course, more often than not, funders are advocating more conservative goals than what an organization's "base" would seek, and according to many of the pieces in this book, function in a way that seeks to limit calls for radical social change in the United States.
Some of the pieces also explore how organizations can exist outside of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. They are often written from the perspective of groups that have tried both methods of organizing and in some cases are written from the experience of groups that started out at the grassroots level, become incorporated as a 501(c)3, and then went back to being a grassroots organization because there were too many restrictions on their work. A contribution by the group Project South explains how they utilize a grassroots funding strategy that uses fundraising as a form of organizing. They explain that they raise money by being responsive to the community from which they originate and aim to "develop a culture of economic give and take that places value on community, collaboration, and resource sharing." As a result, they sell organizing toolkits to sustain themselves, organize events collaboratively, and rely on their base for fundraising.
The Revolution will not be Funded is an extremely important contribution to the left. It offers an important critique of the non-profit system and outlines the ways in which it seeks to neutralize movements while reminding us that as "the left" our ultimate goal is the dissolution of hierarchy, capitalism, and oppression. It is an important critique of a system that many who consider themselves of "the left" have been integrated into while losing sight of their long-term goals amidst the regulation and bureaucracy of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex.
INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, The Revolution will not be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, (South End Press, 2007).
