Anticapitalists for Nonprofit Workers (ANW) is an emerging abolitionist coalition of burning and burnt-out nonprofit workers who struggle through the industry’s reinforcement of capitalism. We will provide a watering hole for solidarity and storytelling that mobilize us toward liberation, experimenting within and outside of the structures we inherited to dismantle capitalism and its violent cousins.
The Problem
Popularized by INCITE! in their seminal anthology The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, the term Nonprofit Industrial Complex points out the ways in which nonprofit organizations masquerade as charitable agents in service of tax havens and self-congratulations for the corporate elite. Notwithstanding any social good nonprofits facilitate, most would concede, a 501(c) designation means nothing unto itself: the National Rifle Association, the Heritage Foundation, and most professional sports leagues are nonprofits.
Even so, progressive nonprofits ultimately serve the capitalist project as well. A corporate foundation may invest millions in affordable housing, for example, but those funds constitute the excess of wealth derived from gentrification and displacement, pushing up home prices such that development of submarket housing is necessary. That the housing developer granted these funds is also a nonprofit makes little difference. The foundation spends $500,000 to address the problem it spent $5,000,000 creating in the first place. While many challenge traumatizing philanthropic behavior and structures, and increasingly so, foundations’ power and resources are never truly threatened. It’s circular. The profits establishing every US foundation, moreover, trace their origins to genocidal theft of Indigenous land and enslavement of Africans apart from which the American empire would scarcely exist.
And regardless of tax status, nonprofits proliferate because governments fail to ensure human rights and prevent poverty and suffering. The federal government is the largest grantor to nonprofit organizations, functionally outsourcing its responsibilities to an inchoate patchwork of competing agencies who prioritize their own perpetuity. As conservatives might appreciate, it’s the least efficient use of resources one can imagine.
We abolitionists, socialists, and anticapitalists recognize this. But the suffering of oppressed people, who largely comprise the nonprofit workforce itself (i.e., many of us), and the collective trauma injustice heaps up on all of us, compel us to dedicate the bulk of our time to dismantling oppressive systems. We must work for a living, and for-profit and public employers usually seem more sinister alternatives (though at least for-profits are more honest about their purpose compared to the do-gooder veneer of nonprofit equivalents). In addition to unions, mutual aid and worker co-ops represent hopeful options that subvert mainstream economies, but one wonders if scaled up mutual aid would become an industrial complex unto itself.
We feel stuck.
And we often feel alone.
Our Vision
We envision ANW as a watering hole for current and former nonprofit workers who struggle through these contradictions of capitalism and carcerality. We will:
Support each other and build relationships of love and solidarity
Refine our analysis through peer-led study and practice
Provide a space for nonprofit workers to navigate ongoing harm enacted by nonprofit employers
Showcase promising strategies to challenge problematic nonprofit behavior from within
Imagine subversive structures outside of the nonprofit industrial complex that support socialist visions
Explore collective action opportunities in collaboration with other movement structures
Prioritize art and creativity wherever possible
Experiment, evaluate, and adapt accordingly
We delicately hold the question: “what will we do?” No, we don’t want to merely sit around and talk. But we believe in the value of lamentation unto itself and that community-building is “productive” enough. And we trust that solidarity and collective learning will position us for action, any tactics of which will add to and advance existing liberationist movements.
Format + Eligibility
Via monthly, Sunday-evening zoom meetings, supplemented by discussion forums, we will employ principles and tactics from Circle Facilitation and peer learning. Facilitation will rotate among the steering committee members.
While any nonprofit worker is eligible, we have designed this space primarily for workers at nonprofits in human services, poverty alleviation, and progressive organizing broadly conceived. Foundation/grantmaker staff may be eligible, but we will monitor the power imbalances their participation may engender (especially if grantee staff were also at the table).
Regardless of the political orientations of one’s workplace, we expect participants to personally hold abolitionist and anticapitalist values. Academic or literary experience with these concepts, however, is certainly unnecessary.
Registrants also agree to embrace ways of being together that challenge traditional power dynamics and resist oppressive norms, namely pursuant to values of racial justice, decolonialism, feminism, gender justice, disability justice, and immigration justice. We will hold ourselves accountable and embrace loving conflict.