Non-profits serve as the activist wing of the bourgeois counterinsurgency against the revolutionary masses. They are beholden to the whims of private foundations which represent not a neutral circulation of money into causes, services and staffing but a deliberate attempt by the capitalists to dictate the limits of acceptable political expression towards what is least threatening to the issues these non-profits seek to aid.

Non-profits require these private foundations such as the Ford Foundation (as in the charity wing of the Ford corporation) to exist and they often have conditions explicit or unspoken with funding that limit the political activities of the recipient organization.

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence released many incisive critiques of the mainstream feminist movement’s reliance on the bourgeois colonial state to resolve the patriarchal violence that very state inflicts on women of color, in which indebting ourselves to the very institutions responsible for inflicting racialized violence against women of color actually strengthens patriarchy (as well as capitalism, colonialism, antiblackness, imperialism). They also released a famous anthology known as The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. INCITE! had their Ford Foundation grant rescinded several years ago after they refused to back down from a pro-Palestinian stance and they use that as an example of how non-profits service the interests of their wealthy capitalist benefactors.

Non-profits are minimally effective at solving the issues they respond to because they’re beholden to the very people who have financial investments in the status quo. Non-profits have hired union busting law firms in my area to suppress their staff’s attempt at unionization and these are social justice oriented organizations.

Non-profits often service the capitalists during times of unrest by funneling energy away from revolutionary organizing towards status quo friendly activism. They have worked with mayors and police departments to condemn protesters by weaponizing a nebulous concept of “safety” in the face of oppression, often using pseudo progressive language to demonize even Black insurgents as “white anarchists” and this is a tactic used since at least Occupy Oakland.

Further reading:

it reminds me of this quote by dan savage - “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night, and it was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.”

What a time to be alive.

"Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly. Birds fly over the rainbow. Why then, oh why can't I?"