Challenges to the Non-Profit System
These new organizing models pose some important challenges to the non-profit system. First, they challenge the notion that hierarchy and centralization are required to do mass-based political organizing. In the current non-profit system, organizations, particularly those that have a scope extending beyond the local level, tend to be based on a hierarchical governance model, with an executive director, board of directors, and on down. People often argue that collective and horizontal decision-making structures are inefficient. And to the extent that they do work, many activists insist that they work only for local organizing projects or projects that are small in scope.
However, in some recent Latin American experiences we see horizontal structures for very large groups, groups much larger than any current movements in the United States. Generally these movements hold asambleas populares (popular assemblies) to determine political agendas through consensus. They are used by the Zapatistas, the MTD in Argentina, and many others engaged in struggles for autonomia. Grounded in the underlying principle of direct collective power, these practices are used to avoid power cementing in certain people placed in representative roles. People gather locally, in their community or neighborhood, on a street corner or somewhere else public and easily accessible to discuss and reflect on issues that need to be decided. What seems like a facilitator’s nightmare–a large, sometimes very large, group of people without a set agenda–becomes a space to practice how we want to live collectively. They may then select rotating representatives who will meet in another popular assembly to share what is going on throughout the movement. These non-permanent representatives take these ideas back to their original popular assembly, where they then report to fellow community members and gather feedback. Popular assemblies are very inclusive–even children can participate if they are interested. Sometimes, the decision-making can be slow: this process went on for a year in order to lay the groundwork of the Chiapas uprising. During the Zapatista negotiations with the Mexican government, they took a pause of several months to consult with their thousands of members before moving forward. However, similar horizontal non-centralized processes have also been used to make almost spontaneous decisions that led to the shutdown of entire countries. These processes were used to make very quick decisions to shut down Argentina in 2001 and to force out the president of Bolivia in October 2003. In other words, horizontal decision-making can be done on a mass scale. 1
These models demonstrate that everyday life is political and that everyone can participate politically. Political work is not outside the struggle for subsistence or in an organization’s office or center, but in life. For example, some of the MTDs in Argentina set up collective kitchens, whether in joint community spaces or in the homes of MTD members. As Raul Zibichi notes, this kind of shared “domestic” space became one of MTD’s most important organizing fronts:
The tendency was for the non-state orientation of domestic spaces to extend as a form of action into very broad public spaces. The rupture of the “domestic wall” brought with it, to the surprise of the protagonists themselves, the novelty that public space was occupied using the articles and practices associated with domestic space (pots and pans in Buenos Aires; rumor-mongering in El Alto). Thus, in Buenos Aires, neighbors came to the assemblies–in the local squares–with their domestic animals and with chairs from their houses, while in El Alto they watched over their dead in the dusty streets built by the community. 2
This contrasts strongly with the frequent habit of US non-profits to show their ownership over an issue or a particular campaign: to be considered engaged, community members must go to their office for training or attend their events. But for some movements, political education does not necessarily take place in a building; instead, it is integrated into the organizing itself. For instance, Brasil’s MST centers education, including political education, in its work, arguing that one cannot build a movement among people who are not actively engaged in learning. This is in the context of a movement that is 300,000 families strong. Given the instability with which people in the landless movement live, education must take place “on the run,” in whatever conditions people are living under. So the MST developed Itinerant Education, an education system available for all children and adults based on Paolo Freire’s principles of popular education, which work toward liberation, not indoctrination.
“The Movement of Unemployed Landless Workers of Brazil (MST) that gathers homeless, tenants, rural workers, squatters, and small-scale farmers is without a doubt, the most powerful social movement of Latin America,” says Marta Harnecker, a Chilean political writer, analyst, journalist, and researcher who has spent the past 30 years gathering and raising the visibility of popular struggles in Latin America from La Habana, Cuba. Nevertheless, as movement leader Joao Stedile points out, “It’s evident that both the right and the left have not been able to correctly interpret the political character of the Movement.” 3 But the MST has no intention of becoming a political party, focused instead upon on-the-ground commitments to centering everyone’s education, the development of settlements that model the world they are trying to create, and a spiritual grounding that points to unlearning internalized social practices, including an active “gender” sector and monthly rituals called místicas (mystics). The “gender” work includes safety patrols of MST members, armed with machetes and trained in gender issues. They intervene in domestic abuse situations and bring offenders to community accountability sessions. This organizing work breaks with the traditional revolutionary mold and centers activities that most non-profits could ever dream of getting away with.
The Cop in the Head—Internalized Capitalism
One of the scariest manifestations of modern capitalism is the system’s ability to co-opt experiences, practices, even culture, and to then re-create and repackage them within a careerist, profit-driven (even in “non-profits”), and competitive logic. The non-profit system, as other essays in this volume demonstrate, supports the professionalization of activism rather than a model of everyday activism. For many of us, activism has become something that you do as a career. When organizers from other countries see that activists are paid to do work in the United States, it makes them wonder. It took my father (who is very familiar with grassroots struggles) a few years to understand the work that I was doing. “Your job is a community organizer; what does that mean, it’s your employment? Who is paying you to do this work? And why?” And since many of us are being paid by foundations allied with corporate interests, my father also said, “Clearly, they are paying you to keep you from really challenging the system, to make sure that you are accounted for.” As long as we are doing our social transformation work through a paid job, it is much easier to pressure, relate to, and keep track of what we are doing.
When we focus on organizing as part of everyday life, the process becomes as important as the final product. In many cases, foundation funders and the non-profit culture expect groups to achieve a campaign goal in a relatively short period of time. They are not interested in funding the much slower work of base building, which takes years and years to do. Consequently, non-profits become short-term-goal oriented, even if they did not begin that way. Many also become focused on “smoke and mirrors” organizing, in which you do something that looks good for a photo op but has no real people power behind it. A critique from some organizers in Latin America on this is that there is no one who can do “smoke and mirrors” tricks better than the mainstream corporate right-wing media. They are better at manipulating information to push forward their political agenda. Why would we want to play that game? Our true power is people’s power, but that work is slow and does not necessarily catch the attention of the mainstream public and actually challenge the interests of those behind the funders.
When models focus on everyday activism, they have achieved a mass scale that can really push for change. Here in the United States, we are impressed if 100,000 people come to a march on Washington. In Chile, during the Socialist Popular Unity government, you could expect to see a turnout of almost a million people (out of a population of about 10 million), on a regular basis. At the last mass demonstration a week before the military coup on September 11, 1973, the number reached a million people. If we were to have the same level of participation in the United States, that would be a protest of about 28 million people! This is exactly the kind of large-scale movement building we need to create in the United States. But if the revolution will not be funded, then we have to be ready to stop jet-setting to conferences on airplanes every few months or weeks, and stop staying in hotels and fancy retreat centers with “all you can eat” buffets. We would have to be prepared to do the hard work of long 20-plus hour bus rides, sleeping on the floor in communal halls, and peeling 50 onions to cook one meal. Yet the non-profit system clearly hinders us from building such movements. Through the non-profit industrial complex’s institutionalization of our movements, people who are not “professionals” do not have equal access to organizing. Negotiating all these bureaucratic systems requires specialized skills that are unfamiliar to many of us. Rather than challenging state power, the non-profit model actually encourages activists to negotiate, even collaborate with the state–as those police permits for anti-police brutality marches illustrate.
I have known some widely respected organizers in Latin America who were part of land occupations and settlements involving thousands of people. Clearly, activists in the United States could learn so much from these movement builders, particularly those that are now in this country. Instead, their work and efforts have been marginalized because many are not fluent in English or formally educated; nor are they “executive directors” with professionalized organizer skills. Meanwhile, the NPIC has cultivated an “elite class” of non-profit managers skilled at fundraising and formally educated, but often not deeply connected to the communities they are working with, even as people of color. Many of these managers/directors know a lot less about political history, analysis, and movement building than some autodidacta (self-taught/organic) political organizers/intellectuals who don’t stand a chance at getting a non-profit job.
But this critique of the NPIC is just the tip of the iceberg. Our analysis must examine how we have internalized these dominant ideas of how to live and organize as the only possible way. The most radical non-profit “staff collectives” that have formal hierarchies and titles just “to deal with the outside institutions” don’t flinch at having the executive director make $40,000 a year and an organizer make $25,000. These are our deeper contradictions. Within Sista II Sista (SIIS), we tried to address these issues by having no titles of position and a flat salary for everyone, regardless of formal education or years of experience. We did not realize that this flat structure was not actually equitable because paying a single person with no dependents, like myself, the same as a single mother made no sense at all. But even after stripping away the corporate non-profit model at SIIS, we did not realize how much we had internalized capitalism, not knowing how to address the new reality that one ex-staffmember was going to work making $8 an hour at a store while another was making $30 an hour as a consultant. We never pushed ourselves to collectivize our income and truly break from the cop in our heads. But trying, risking, and creating new ways of existing and living outside the NPIC is one possible step. Another is to keep looking to our imagination while embracing the inspirational stories of others living their future in the present.
New Relationships with Non-Profits
While it is important to be critical of the non-profit system, we do not necessarily need to get rid of it all together. Revolutionary movements around the world use non-profits (NGOs) as well, but they have a different relationship with them. In the United States, many are attempting to do organizing work through non-profits. In other places, the movement building happens outside non-profits. However, these groups will sometimes start an NGO that serves a strategic purpose (such as providing technical assistance), but the non-profit does not have power to determine the movement’s direction. Rather it is accountable to the movement.
For instance, the MST works with some NGOs that provide technical assistance for agronomy, sustainable development, and organic agriculture. The Zapatistas worked with an NGO to produce a video documentation project that would train Zapatista community members to document their work as well as abuses from the state. After ten years, each region will have its own video documentation center, and that non-profit will dissolve. The Zapatistas have also partnered with an NGO to help communities create their own education systems. Once this task is accomplished, that non-profit must leave the autonomous territory. Other revolutionary movements in Central America started NGOs as fronts to provide a public face and help advocate for the human rights of its members. However, in all these cases, the membership base does not come from the non-profit. Thus if an NGO loses funding, it does not impact the movement. Nowhere do those non-profits have files of the movement’s membership; it is completely separate from the non-profits. NGO “professionals” bring tools and skills but have no decision-making power at all. In many cases (when the NGO is not a front for the political organization), the non-profit workers, though they may work very closely with these movements, are not considered members of these movements–they are supporters or allies and see themselves as such.
In the current US context, it’s clear we still have a lot of work to do. I would argue that we need to do more organizing and base building that works outside the non-profit system. Non-profits then could participate in structured relationships of accountability created by the movement and support the work without co-opting the movement itself. The work that is now publicly visible in Latin America did not happen overnight but was the result of much trial and error and invisible work that laid the base for a powerful movement. If we want to build powerful movements here, we need a spectrum of approaches and we need to figure out ways to organize without paid staff and without funding. We need to take risks, and then compare strategies. In addition, we need to think of strategic ways to involve people of all sectors in the movement–be they unwaged mothers, non-profit workers, teachers, or grocery store workers. We need to answer the question of how to strategically involve not just traditional political sectors to effect mass social change.
- In Bolivia, these sectors “were capable of mounting an insurrection without leadership or leaders…. when workers formerly left the organization of their work to employers and the management of society to the state, they had to rely for their struggles on hierarchical and centralized structures, and depended on their leaders—union and political—to represent them and make decisions. The autonomy of such persons vis-à-vis capital runs in tandem with their autonomy vis-à-vis the state. In fact, the most important problems of their daily lives, from the construction and maintenance of their environment (dwelling, water, sewage, and streets) to essential aspects of education and health, have been taken in hand via an impressive network of basic organizations. In El Alto alone there are, according to different sources, between 400 and 550 neighborhood juntas, one for every 1,000 inhabitants over the age of 10.” Zibechi,
“Subterranean Echos,” 23.[↑] - Zibechi, “Subterranean Echos,” 31.[↑]
- Joao Pedro Stedile, Brava Gente (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones Barbarroja, 2000), 42. My translation.[↑]
