Class Warfare, the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, and the Revolutionary Alternative
In a “dog-eat-dog world” the existence of nonprofit companies has restored some folks’ hopes in humanity. People working in the nonprofit world are viewed in a somewhat saintly light. Rather than working for an oil company or trading stocks, nonprofit organizations in theory exist to help people without the motivating factor of profit. This provides masses of caring people with an avenue for supposedly supporting their neighbors: You’re feeling empathetic or ashamed? Donate now!
Donors fall into different categories: working people who want to help others, middle class folks giving some percentage of their income and feeling like they’ve now done their part, and wealthy ones who get to show off their philanthropic side while simultaneously claiming a handy tax write-off.
Under capitalism, living conditions in the United States have been plummeting. Since the 1980s the cost of living has skyrocketed, rapidly outpacing wages. It is no surprise that over this time has been a massive proliferation of nonprofit organizations. Has this happened due of the rise of increased compassion for our neighbors? Or for some other reason?
Recently here in Madison, Wisconsin, one such nonprofit who was granted millions by federal state and local governments to oversee addressing homelessness already has exhausted its funds just as the weather turns colder. Madison’s most vulnerable will have a critical need for emergency housing. In practice, nonprofits are unable to reliably meet the needs of the vast number of people for which they supposedly exist to support. That is by design, as nonprofits which do not have the resources of the government or the billionaire class, cannot replace the diminishing role of the state in ensuring the basic rights and needs of the people. Instead, they serve as a means fill small gaps while operating to restore support hope and support in the capitalist system by acting to supplementing its failings and by promote the idea through political lobbying that the capitalist state could be made to do the right thing.
The Marxist Conception of Capitalism, the State, and Class Struggle
The development of capitalism and the state must be understood in the context of class formation of the workers and the bosses, i.e., the exploited and the exploiter. Since capitalism depends on extracting the unpaid value added to production by labor that comprises profit (or capital to be reinvested into expanding production and social relations of exploitation), class relations between between workers and bosses under capitalism inevitably and perpetually creates the conditions for class conflict and class struggle.
The rise of the state under capitalism becomes an instrument of capitalist class whose primary role is to contain, suppress, or repress class conflict as a threat to profit-making and capital accumulation—i.e., the “normal functioning” of the capitalist economy. The politics of capitalism, therefore, become all the ways in which capitalist class rule and how exploitation and control of labor is engrained into law, custom, and even culture.
The first European capitalist classes conquered peoples and expropriated their land, first within their domains and later across territorial boundaries. The landowning class propped their wealth up on the labor of the dispossessed peasant masses (and enslaved people). They then consolidated power through the formalization of class rule into the structures of state governance (constitution, law, courts, military, and agencies of enforcement), with the violence and force of capitalist exploitation baked into state formation.
The vast populations of workers, occasionally conscious of the inhumane conditions of their class condition, are forced to labor for the capitalist class for survival. Without owning the means of production and means of consumption of their own, the working class is forced to sell their time and labor power to the owners in the form of the wage. The capitalist class maintains its strength by providing the smallest amount in wages that they possibly can. Because this system leads so many workers to demand more, capitalists rely on a system of violent enforcement—the state—to keep society and the economy functioning to their benefit.
Although the capitalist class (i.e. the bourgeoisie) and the state (government) are listed here as two entities, they are completely intertwined. While the economic relations under capitalism (the base structure) served as the soil out of which grew the state (part of the superstructure), over time the functions, motivations, and even the human participants have essentially become one integrated group. Two bullying fists of a single body, capitalism and the state squeeze all the wealth out of us they can, and try to violently crush anyone who mounts serious opposition to the system. Nevertheless, workers do fight back and “class warfare” is a permanent feature of capitalism.
The concept of “class warfare” is often discussed with a hypothetical tone, as if it hasn’t been the means of maintaining this setter-colonial project since its inception. Class warfare did not begin with an armed proletariat; it began with the colonizers’ slave ships, gun powder, prisons, and genocide. Since 1492, colonization served as the gestational process for the formation of property and class relations in what Karl Marx referred to as the “original accumulation of capital”: displacement of indigenous people from the land and its privatization and commoditization, the imposition of enslavement and other types of forced labor, and the racialization of citizenship and social participation to keep large segments of the proletariat in conditions of underdevelopment and super-exploitation. The US ruling class has since forcefully maintained a permanence of class warfare “from above”, which only evolves and expands over time. For example, this can be understood in how the “slave patrols and slave catchers” from 150 years ago evolved into modern day cops.
As an economic experiment of implanting capitalism through colonial violence, the Anglo-American “founders” understood their class position within the new state. They saw the contradictions of their existence, and enacted strategies that would maintain and enhance their power. The so-called “justice system” is just one of these strategies. This institution is afforded an air of neutrality, despite being built by and used for the interests of the wealthy. This description fits our government in general; an institution that on paper is “for everyone”, while in practice it is commonly understood to be an instrument for enforcing the rule of the ruling class. As class consciousness had developed among the rich before it did among the working class, it was the owners of private property who fired the first shots in the class war—and have been firing ever since.
Despite the state’s violent history, its longevity has also rested on their increased ability to maintain control in more subtle ways. The “bread and circuses” of society's past have been replaced with toxic chemically-engineered food, politically-controlled algorithmic social media platforms, professional sports and live fighting spectacles, and a constant barrage of pro-cop shows and propaganda. The breaking down of communities into atomized individuals was ensured by the loss of public transit in favor of the automobile. Revolutionary and radical unionism (from the IWW to the early CIO) was repressed by the full force of the capitalist state, corralling workers into a non-threatening and compliant (non-class struggle-based) type of unionism referred to as “business unionism”. Examples abound of ways that those in the owning class extinguish resistance and manufacture consent among the workers.
Radical Recuperation
One of the more subtle strategies of those in power is “radical recuperation”. This refers to how a “compatible” or “non-communist” left is upheld or tolerated as the only politically acceptable alternative to rightwing capitalist ideology. Originally referring to anti-Marxist members of the intelligentsia like Michel Foucault, the term may be used to describe any system, organization, or individual that relies on radical rhetoric but “recuperates” people’s radical fervor into non-radical activity.
If you join a group to fight for radical change, and all you end up doing is “lobbying” your local government representative for a favorable reform or vote outcome, you have been “radically recuperated”.
There are at least two primary forms of radical recuperation. One is loudly anti-Marxist and anti-communist. This was the typical form throughout the 20th century, when revolutionary movements were larger, stronger, and more prominent around the world. This manifests itself through people who are ostensibly “left”, but whose stance is explicitly critical of revolutionary praxis. These people posture and pretend to stand against injustice or oppression, but then oppose protests and strikes and instead attempt to steer or cajole you towards electoralism within the two-party capitalist state.
The other form is far more subtle, coming to life nearer the end of the 20th century (at least in the states; the Frankfurt School might be an early example). This form still relies on radical rhetoric. What’s missing is loud, explicit anti-communist rhetoric. As the system has been able to thoroughly suppress communist movement in the US, its use of rhetoric has evolved to the enforced absence of any socialist, communist, or anarchist theory or perspective, or that promote any kind of radical or revolutionary politics at all. These “progressive” people, groups, and institutions are then able to make a name for themselves in faux-radical ways that promote the rhetoric of resistance or opposition, but whose method and goals reject class struggle, radical mass political action, or any other type of strategy or tactic that challenges or disrupts capitalism or discredits the capitalist two-party system. These “progressive” nonprofit institutions universally stick to a political script that reinforces rather than challenges the status quo of lobbying and voting as the only “viable political action” that can be taken.
These “progressive” people, groups, and institutions are then able to make a name for itself in faux-radical ways that promote the rhetoric of resistance or opposition, but whose method and goals reject class struggle, radical mass political action, or any other type of strategy or tactic that challenges or disrupts capitalism or discredits the capitalist two-party system.
Consider the arc of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She made her name as a working-class Democratic Socialist, positioning herself as the young woman of color determined to challenge the power structure. In combining radical sounding rhetoric while working in alignment with the Democratic Party structure, she played a role in restoring hope in the two-party duopoly for millions of people. Between her and Bernie Sanders (another radical recuperator), millions of especially young voters were led to believe in the last couple of elections that a type of “political revolution” was under way.
Of course, this was not the case—and it never was meant to be. AOC, Bernie Sanders, and “the squad” all abandoned any attempts at bringing to life the radical shift in politics many people were longing for. With the Democratic Party’s victory in the 2020 election, their rhetoric about fighting for “Medicare for All,” a “Green New Deal”, and “abolishing ICE” and closing immigrant detention camps simply evaporated into thin air. They shifted to full-throated support for the Biden-Harris administration that continued mass deportation and detention, that handed out permits for oil pipelines, and that has supported Israel in carrying out a genocidal war against Palestinians to the tune of billions annually. By operating inside a pro-capitalist and imperialist party within a capitalist and imperialist state, there couldn’t have been a different outcome.
By entering into service for the ruling capitalist class, their individual class and political interests inevitably shifted. Whether radical recuperators started out in that class or become subsumed by it, they develop an inability or unwillingness to compromise their status by following through on their original mission and creating real change. AOC steered millions of people fighting the system in some capacity, back into the arms of that system. She recuperated a radical energy that could have materialized in something that could challenge capital and empire. Instead, she and others became class warriors for the other side, now fighting to defend capitalist class hegemony.
Sadly, large swaths of people who have moved into left oppositional activity have undergone erasure-based radical recuperation and moved out of movements. Anti-war and anti-imperialism are two causes that have mobilized hundreds of thousands of people in the US in the 21st century, from opposing the War on Iraq to protesting to the current US-fueled Israeli war on the Palestinian and Lebanese people. These are people who have come to an understanding that problems exist with policy; however, their inability to connect the dots of the capitalist and imperialist systems at play, leaves them feeling demoralized and hopeless when symbolic displays of opposition to pressure electoral representatives to stop war and empire fail to achieve the desired results. They recognize symptoms, but not the disorder in the system and how its representatives have fundamentally different interests than their own. Without a clear class analysis and without the lenses of anti-capitalism and revolutionary politics and organization, the anti-radical orientation and reformist conception of the state will only continue to limit our capacities to resist to holding non-threatening and symbolic marches and to contacting elected officials to appeal to their moral sentiments. The lack of a true revolutionary communist movement inevitably leads to this repeated cycle of recuperation of radical energy.
Amid the cycles of defeat through “radical recuperation,” the nonprofit industrial complex has expanded into a vast apparatus designed to replace radical and revolutionary ideas and organization.
Class Warfare in the Nonprofit Industry
Where did the rise in non-profit organizations come from? We can understand them to be an outgrowth of the failings of capitalism and neoliberalism, specifically being developed and funding to fill the gaps created by the defunding and downsizing of the state’s role in meeting the basic needs of the people. This is exemplified by the fact that healthcare and social services account for most non-profit organizations.
A second role is that of providing a vehicle for electoral advocacy and action around important issues for the working class such as immigration, environmentalism, reproductive rights, and for the rights of LGBTQIA+ people. In practice, these nonprofits promote a reformist vision that channels energy and hope away from class struggle and into lobbying elected officials to fulfill the desired legislative change. While these groups promote the idea that they stand for “change”, their proliferation, anti-radical orientation and purely pro-Democratic Party electoral strategy, and their funding by liberal capitalist donors all work to mollify radicalism and instead redirect that energy towards support and participation “from the left” within the capitalist and imperialist system. Although nonprofits are a response to the failings of the system, they remain part of and play an important role in perpetuating that system.
There are several ways that non-profit organizations engage in class struggle against the left and the working class. One way this plays out is in the broader function of non-profits in general. Acting as band-aids on a crumbling system, the masses are assuaged just enough by non-profits that they don’t foment outright revolution. Nonprofits promote a political reformism that instills a false sense of hope that the essentially oppressive and exploitative system of capitalism can be improved and made to work better. They also actively try to recruit into their staffs radically oriented people coming out of social movements, with the intention of redirecting that energy towards lobbying and acting on “behalf” of the oppressed and exploited majority. This also reinforces their role as “political brokers” that attempt to train and condition people to think of their “agency” is limited only to being voters.
Due to their funding and “channels of access” to elected officials, they project the illusion of power and leverage their position to make the victims of this system believe that there is a “moral foundation” within the liberal capitalist ranks of the Democratic Party and that the bourgeois capitalist political system is essentially “neutral” and “classless” and therefore can be corrected.
Meanwhile, plenty of the functions of capitalism exist on the business-end of these organizations. Despite the misnomer of “nonprofit”, plenty of profiting takes place in the 501(c)3 world. Under capitalism, they develop a similar corporate structure with high paid executive directors and low-paid staff, they are undemocratic and do not question the underlying structures of capitalist society. Like their “for profit” counterparts in the capitalist sector, they are also viciously anti-union for their own workers. Regardless of original intent, as people enter these neoliberal structures their class interests shift and they begin to maneuver accordingly, all in the name of “serving the people”. These dynamics of nonprofit reformism are also forms of recuperation.
Navigating towards revolutionary action
A critique of the reformist and nonprofit industrial complex is not to say that we should avoid building organizations that are aimed at helping people. Mutual aid is an important segment of any revolutionary program. However, we need to understand how our actions relate to the system itself. What leads to change? What leads to its reinforcement? Building bottom-up community care is an important part of praxis; the people must know that the revolution is serious about meeting their needs. What we must not do is work within a framework that relies on or reinforces the idea that we can make capitalist political institutions or parties work for or serve the working class, to promote the idea that popular mutual aid can replace the welfare state, or that we should relinquish revolutionary struggle to compel the capitalist state to concede more resources—even as we are organizing to overturn it.
More significantly, we need to see our goal as not merely surviving within a capitalist and imperialist system, but to abolish those systems through revolution. This process necessitates building organization that is geared towards supporting and strengthening class struggle, and that understands revolutionary potential working class in its capacity to overthrow the capitalist class and take possession the means of production. It is only in this capacity can we dismantle capitalism and replace it with socialism—a system where we abolish exploitation, privation, and oppression; and collectively decide and distribute the product of our labor to meet the needs of the whole working class.
In these times when the working class is in desperate need for radical and revolutionary change; when ruling class warfare against working and oppressed people is intensifying internationally; we need to be aware of the sociopolitical landscapes we operate in. It is imperative that we develop an analysis of capitalism and the state, and the many tools used to divide and weaken class consciousness and struggle. Revolutionary theory and organization strengthen our efforts at understanding what we are fighting for, what we are fighting against, and how we organize for that fight.
Time to get organizing!
Wolly V is a member of the Revolutionary Socialists of Madison (Wisconsin).
