The rise of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the non-profit sector in the developing world has been the subject of several studies over the last twenty years. Revolutionaries have taken a highly critical view of this phenomenon, and this interpretation seems to be gaining credence in the broader radical left.
Curiously, however, these studies have largely not been carried over into the developed (imperialist) countries, even though the role of non-profits is substantial. In the United States, “charitable” foundations control $500 billion in assets, and there are over 830,000 registered non-profits, excluding religious organizations.
The national leadership of several social movements, for instance the antiwar movement, is effectively in the hands of NGOs.
The “NGO-ization” of the U.S. Left has been a cause of distinct unhappiness—even dismay—amongst radical activists, but no accessible literature has attempted to address it.
The Revolution Will Not Be Funded is a welcome initial contribution to the discussion, although it exhibits several serious weaknesses that must be criticized. The contributors [...] coin the term “non-profit industrial complex” (NPIC) to suggest the penetration of the non-profit sector by big business and the state.
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Gerard Clarke notes: “In a neoliberal climate of disenchantment with the state…multilateral donors and their bilateral partners channeled increasing amounts of funding from the early 1980s through [...] NGOs.” Although Clarke is referring to the international problem, the same phenomenon occurred in the United States. Kivel summarizes:
Beginning in the 1980s with the Reagan-era cutbacks in social services, many non-profits experienced even more pressure to provide basic human needs services to growing numbers of people. As they became completely reliant on private donors, private foundations, or dwindling government dollars to cope with ever-increasing demands, many non-profits began spending inordinate amounts of time writing proposals, designing programs to meet foundation guidelines…and other fundraising techniques. Their work had to be developed and then presented in such a way as to meet the guidelines and approval of the ruling class and its representatives.
That is to say, NGOs became a way for the state to “outsource” its responsibility to the bottom eighty percent of its citizens while slashing taxes for the top one percent.
It is worth stressing the latter point. Ahn demonstrates how a paterfamilias with $200 million in assets could, by parking his wealth in a foundation, save his family a $100 million inheritance tax bill upon his death. In turn, the foundation is required to pay out a mere five percent of its assets per year—including rents, salaries, and other administrative costs. This is, for instance, a respectable way for rich families to provide their idle youth with a nice office and six-figure salary. Attempts to raise the required payout, or exclude administrative costs, have been defeated by the foundations’ extensive lobbying efforts—which can, amusingly, be counted towards their five percent minimum!
The non-profit model also allows the rich to dispose of their wealth to the benefit of their own favored projects, which tend to have a certain serendipitous correspondence to their business interests. Conservative foundations spend millions to produce “educational” propaganda in favor of pro-corporate programs. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spends billions buying pharmaceutical drugs for Africa—which shields intellectual property laws, so critical to Microsoft’s business model, from criticism. On the crackpot end of things, billionaire hotel mogul Leona Helmsley left most of her fortune to a charity for dogs, rather mocking the value of “philanthropy” in both the social and etymological sense.
The rise of the NPIC has allowed the neoliberal ruling class to achieve three interlocking goals: first, it has provided them with a monumental tax dodge; second, it has given cover for the retreat of the state from social welfare goals; third, it has increased the penetration of bourgeois ideology into all areas of social and political life—including the Left. On the last point, American Indian Movement veteran Madonna Thunder Hawk writes:
Many people will get involved [...] but avoid rocking the boat on an ongoing basis because if they do, they might lose their funding [...] People in non-profits are not necessarily consciously thinking that they are “selling out.” But just by trying to keep funding and pay everyone’s salaries, they start to unconsciously limit their imagination of what they could do.
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Also problematic are the solutions offered by the essays in Part III of the volume, which attempt to articulate alternatives to the NPIC model. All four essays in Part III endorse the anarchist program of “horizontality,” which situates the failures of the non-profits in their hierarchical, or “vertical,” decision-making structures. It is definitely true that non-profit organizations are, in general, “mini-corporations [whose] structure is based on a corporate model.” Of course some kind of structure is implicit in any organization, but the structure of the non-profit is not organic, arising from the political tasks of the organization itself. Rather, laws such as IRS Regulation 501(c)(3) dictate it in the interests of the accountant and the taxman.
The contributors in Part III telescope this simple and correct observation into an embrace of horizontality, a theory of political practice arising from the Latin American experience of “a whole set of revolts without leadership, without organizational memory or central apparatus.” The Zapatistas in Mexico, the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil, and the piqueteros of Argentina are offered as examples. This review cannot take up a full historical or theoretical critique of this tendency. Suffice to say that, with the evidence of history at hand, the principle of horizontality cannot command the uncritical enthusiasm it receives. For example, despite Paula X. Rojas’s claim that the piqueteros “were thinking beyond the state, and even beyond an alternative version of current institutions,” a significant section of the movement has in fact been integrated into the neo-Peronist machine of the Kirchners. Horizontality is, apparently, no guarantee against co-optation.
Indeed, the concept of horizontality, which rejects the “old Left” notions of political program, political parties, and the centrality of class, enabled the rise of the NPIC. James Petras notes “NGO ideology depends heavily on essentialist identity politics.”
Clarke elaborates: “[L]arge-scale social movements that once were ideologically and organizationally cohesive, fragmented amid a shift in the ‘themes’ of social mobilization [...] Lehmann argues, ‘In the place of large formal organizations, we find a myriad of small-scale dispersed movements engaged in an enormous variety of conflicts.’”
Without denying the problems of the “old Left,” or the tragedy of Maoist “party-building” efforts, it is beyond dispute that the fragmentation of the Left into the various “New Social Movements” helped foundation capital to co-opt it “piece by piece.” As Eric Tang writes, “These [New Social Movements] would [...] become the social justice silos that guided the funding strategies of philanthropic foundations.”
Horizontality is not a solution to the rise of the NPIC—it is, on the contrary, a historical precondition of the NPIC.
