Introduction

Beyond the Industrial Complex

Having situated the NPIC and AIC in the context of neoliberalism, we want now to trace the lineage of “industrial complex” critique. Doing so will point to the analytical work facilitated by thinking in terms of industrial complexes. It will also allow us to draw out the limits of such a formulation and point to some of the questions that remain.

The original industrial complex formulation, the military industrial complex, was brought to attention by then US president Dwight Eisenhower in 1961. ¹ In a speech toward the end of his presidency, Eisenhower issued a warning of the dangers that a profit motive would bring to war, made possible by the newly cemented relationship between the institution of the military and a growing arms industry. Eisenhower’s caution extended to the role of the federal government, anticipating its misuse of power in this alliance between the military and the defense industry. He perhaps could not have anticipated how important that warning would prove, or the extent to which US policy would come to be driven by the endless money-making opportunities of the war on terror. Naomi Klein has termed the current version a “disaster capitalism complex,” which profits not only from war, but from the political, economic, and environmental destruction it wreaks. The privatization of US-led rebuilding in Iraq illustrates this all too clearly, as does the role domestic militarism played in post-Katrina reconstruction efforts. ²

From its attention to war-making in the context of capitalism, the military industrial complex critique was then extended to the rapidly growing US prison system. The catastrophic economic effects of neoliberal restructuring in the 1970s, along with government repression of resistance movements in communities of color, set conditions for mass criminalization of Black, Latino, and indigenous people. Since the 1980s, the growth of the prison system has been sustained by the direct investment of private prison corporations. ³ A wide range of industries gained important footholds in this prison marketplace, from food provision to telephone services to militarized correction-officer supplies. Angela Davis helped advance this critique of the “prison industrial complex” (PIC). ⁴ Critiques of the PIC drew attention to the fact that the same corporations providing “services” inside sell goods and services to those on the outside, as with telecommunications industries. Furthermore, these critiques highlighted the market in goods produced by barely waged prison labor. The active role of private prisons in the expansion of detention facilities after the passage of anti-immigration legislation in 1996, and then again in the post-9/11 period, further illuminated the political and economic alliances between corporations and the state. ⁵

While continuing to be a vital formation for scholars and activists, the prison industrial complex critique has sometimes been mistakenly taken up as implicating only private prisons—those run directly by corporations under contracts from states—rather than the system of capitalism as a whole. Ruth Wilson Gilmore has argued that even thinking in terms of profit motive is not enough. Rather, in her study of the California prison system, Gilmore shows how what she terms the “prison fix” takes care of four surplus crises for neoliberal capital: surpluses of government capacity, land, finance, and labor. The last point is key, as Gilmore demonstrates how prisons serve to take out of circulation unemployed low-wage workers for whom enough of a reserve already exists. In the terms of our above discussion, this is the direct control that accompanies the soft control of nonprofit and education systems during the dismantling of the social safety net. By turning attention to these crises of surplus, Gilmore shows that prison expansion does not only offer a site for profit-making, but secures the US economy within globalization, putting the surpluses of government capacity, land, and finance to work while making redundant the racialized populations no longer needed in labor markets. In this way, prisons represent not just another industrial complex, but a container for capitalism itself. ⁶

When extended to nonprofit organizations and the academy, the industrial complex critique has obviously been incredibly fruitful. Nonetheless, as we further develop and refine the frameworks, we must also consider their limits. In our uses of the industrial complex framework, we must recognize that it cannot explain all that occurs within a nonprofit or educational setting. The logics of the NPIC may structure the work that takes place in any given organization, but it does not fully account for or subsume it. In nonprofits, life-saving resources are redistributed, leadership skills are shared and developed, and people build radical consciousness and community. Universities similarly offer vital places for the development of ideas, selves, and communities. Alongside drudgery and conflict, real joy and love live within these complexes, both in spite of and because of their institutional contexts.

Structural critiques, such as the industrial complex model, are important for understanding larger political and economic processes that shape the possibilities for how we live and resist. However, these structures are not monolithic nor are they are fully determining. The NPIC, for example, contains within it many types of nonprofits, including both national and transnational organizations with multimillion dollar budgets and small, grassroots-funded community-based organizations. Across these scales exist a wide range of work, political commitments, and resources. It is important that we not collapse these differences even while recognizing a set of shared structural forces and logics. This is especially important as nonprofits themselves are vulnerable to these structural forces. For example, nonprofit organizations continue to feel impacts of the recession in both the increased demands for basic social services as well as the shrinking of government and foundation funding and individual donations. Many small organizations made up of poor and working-class members have dissolved or folded into larger nonprofits. A lack of funding has led such groups to give up vital infrastructure and compensated staff positions, but the work continues through volunteer labor, in members’ homes or donated space. ⁷ Similarly, while all higher education institutions are impacted by neoliberal economic reform, this is not experienced identically at all institutions. Differences in funding cuts exist across types of institutions as well as states and regions.

While paying critical attention to differences within the AIC and the NPIC, we also must be cautious not to mistake the individuals in those settings for the institutions themselves. Life within the NPIC and AIC requires constant negotiation of how those complexes constrain and enable transformative work. In those negotiations, individuals are shaped by their institutional locations but also push back and shape their organizations, universities, and broader contexts. One way to attend to these dynamics is to consider that most people are positioned within the AIC or the NPIC as workers, and as such find themselves caught between their own exploitation and the promises and pitfalls of their schools and organizations. Workers in nonprofit organizations, like any workers, navigate the demands and restrictions of their jobs and the conditions of their workplaces. Nonprofit workers are often members of the same communities that their organizations address, and as people of color, women, queer and trans people, and immigrants are also targeted and made vulnerable by the same systems of exploitation and oppression that they challenge in their work. To the extent that nonprofit organizations maintain the status quo, these forms of violence, including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism are reproduced internally in these settings.
Despite these precarious and exploitative conditions, nonprofit workers do more than simply reproduce the logics and further the harms of the nonprofit industrial complex. The priorities and agendas of nonprofit organizations are often set by workers with political commitments and values that resist the assumptions of the NPIC, and subvert or manipulate the nonprofit form to serve radical commitments. This can include centering the most vulnerable or marginalized members of the community through internal structures and mobilizing resources to support this work. Nonprofit workers also educate funders and advocate for policy change, two channels through which they shape the broader conditions within which nonprofits do their work. Such work exceeds service provision or programmatic activities, claiming space and resources for radical and transformative projects. For example, a coalition of queer and trans organizations in New York City, including the Audre Lorde Project and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), waged a campaign against anti-trans practices at the Human Resources Administration (which allocates public benefits). This coalition was successful in winning a variety of demands, including mandated cultural competency training of HRA workers developed and led by low-income trans people of color. This campaign lasted for five years, and incorporated a variety of strategies including direct action, political education, and community organizing that built collective power in a citywide membership base that led the campaign. ⁸ Another recent example of policy advocacy work driven by community mobilization is the victory gained by the SRLP twelve-year campaign for Medicaid to cover trans healthcare. ⁹ Within the NPIC, power does not flow in only one top-down direction. Rather, within its constraints, the nonprofit can be a vital site from which a great range of workers, activists, advocates, and community members collaboratively transform the conditions of everyday life.

Moving to the AIC, we similarly need to foreground an understanding of the university as a workplace setting. As workers, faculty face sped-up demands in terms of teaching loads, class sizes, and publishing, all within increasingly precarious conditions as the majority of faculty jobs are converted to non-tenure track contract and adjunct positions. As in the NPIC, this workplace setting is organized through exploitative hierarchies of race, class, and gender. For example, women of color carry a disproportionate burden of administrative and student support work while also facing structurally produced devaluation of that labor, as manifested in everything from student evaluations to tenure denials. ¹⁰ Finally, just as we do not want to mistake the nonprofit worker for the institution itself, the AIC critique must grapple with the role of academics as teachers who hold and reproduce space for political development in their classrooms while also offering support and mentorship to the political activities of students on campus. In recent years, teachers, students, and parents have drawn necessary critical attention to the impact of standardized testing and assessment on teaching and learning. ¹¹ Their organized resistance has galvanized widespread support which must be extended to university settings, especially community college and other public institutions, which increasingly face similar neoliberal restructuring.

Finally, while bringing nuance and complexity to our understandings of what happens within the NPIC and AIC, we also must think about the ultimate political aims of these critiques. Critiques of the military and prison industrial complexes have led to the articulation of abolitionist politics. In assessing US military and prison regimes, scholars and activists seek to map their operations in order to dismantle these two sites of violent oppression. Envisioning a world without war and without cages moves us from critique to building alternative possibilities today. Are we similarly calling for the abolition of nonprofits and universities? Some of us may answer that with a yes—as with the military and prison, they may be irrecuperable through reform. But here we want to distinguish between the institutional form and the content and purpose of activities within those settings, such as those outlined above. There is nothing we would want to save from the military and the prison when they are destroyed. But there may be much we want to save in the nonprofit and the university. Our task then is to think about how to nurture these elements to prepare them for their lives outside their current institutional forms.

Overview of the Issue

This special issue is made up of several sections of material that engage questions about the relationship between the NPIC and the AIC, within a context of neoliberalism as well as beyond these economic and cultural forces. In Part 1, “Reprints: The Revolution Will Not be Funded,” we are very pleased to reprint a number of key essays from The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, which is currently out of print. ¹² These articles remain vital points of reference not only for the new work included in this issue, but for much ongoing scholarship, activism, and conversation.

In the next sections, we present new work produced for this issue. These essays offer theoretical arguments grounded in case studies on a wide range of topics, including the role of civic engagement in women’s and ethnic studies programs, the constitution of community through nonprofits in and against Hawai’ian sovereignty movements, the reconstitution of privatized prison education programs in the wake of their defunding and dismantling by the state, and the commodification of “gay youth” in LGBT nonprofit worlds, among others. The pieces for the most part could be called mid-range case studies, meaning that they have an empirical base, but that “data” is oriented by guiding theoretical questions. By offering empirical case studies, the collection concretizes theoretical formations to produce nuanced understandings of the operations and contradictions of both neoliberalism and resistance to it.

Part 2, “Learning to Engage: The Academic Industrial Complex,” focuses on the AIC by looking at school settings and the political challenges and promises within. An essay co-authored by Soo Ah Kwon and Mimi Nguyen and an essay by Priya Kandaswamy both look critically at women’s and gender studies programs in the university. Whereas Kwon and Nguyen raise questions about the incorporation of “community engagement” learning requirements into gender and ethnic studies programs, Kandaswamy takes on the institutionalization of prison abolition work into gender and women’s studies programs. Gillian Harkins also addresses education in relation to prisons. Her piece looks at the development of prison college programs in the wake of the defunding and shutting of publicly supported ones. Ujju Aggarwal and Edwin Mayorga move us to consider how neoliberal restructuring of education and urban renewal programs play out in a neighborhood public high school.

Part 3, “Navigating Neoliberalism: The Nonprofit Industrial Complex,” focuses on the NPIC. Maile Arvin’s article looks at the relationship between nonprofit organizations and contemporary Native Hawai’ian/Kanaka Maoli political movements by examining their claims for rights and recognition. Myrl Beam examines the transformation of a queer and trans youth center into a primarily online venture that brands private businesses as “gay safe.” Three essays in this section are about the role of the law and legal organizations in the NPIC and in constituting communities. Lee Ann S. Wang’s contribution looks at the negotiations legal service providers go through in fostering cooperation between immigrant domestic violence survivors and the state. Pooja Gehi and Gabriel Arkles also look at immigration reform in the DREAM Act, which they relate to the Defense of Marriage Act to discuss legal advocacy for recognition. Finally, Dean Spade and Rori Rohlfs look at the production of statistics in support of mainstream LGBT political legal organizations.

In Part 4, “Activist and Academic Collaborations Across Art, Activism, and the Academy,” Colby Lenz and Treva Ellison offer an instructive example of collaborations between scholars and nonprofits toward grassroots activist prison abolition organizing. In collaboration with the Youth Justice Coalition, they produced a mapping project tracking the impact of gang injunctions in Los Angeles. Here, Lenz and Ellison offer a description of gang injunctions and their collaborative project, and share the resulting maps as well. As another example of collaboration between activists and those within the AIC, we offer links to readings published about the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott, which is part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, in “The Academic Boycott of Israel.” The past few years have seen a number of US academic organizations signing on to the boycott, including the Association for Asian American Studies, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, the National Women’s Studies Association, the Association of American Studies, the American Anthropological Association, and the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, with organizing efforts also ongoing at the MLA, as well as student-led campus-based divestment campaigns.

Also in Part 4, “Queer Dreams and Nonprofit Blues: Understanding the NPIC,” continues video interviews first featured in the “Activism and the Academy” issue of S&F Online. The videos were produced by Dean Spade and Hope Dector out of the “Queer Dreams and NonProfit Blues” conference hosted at Columbia Law School in October 2013. In these new videos, contributors to the issue and other scholars and activists speak on navigating nonprofit and academic settings. Finally, in “Archive from Below: Selections from Interference Archive,” we have included a gallery of art from Interference Archive curated by Lani Hanna and Vero Ordaz. This all-volunteer collectively run Brooklyn-based organization documents and builds connections between cultural production and social movements. We are excited to share the work of this important organization with you.

1. Farewell address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 17, 1961; Final TV Talk 1/17/61 (1), Box 38, Speech Series, Papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower as President, 1953–1961, Eisenhower Library; National Archives and Records Administration.[↑]
2. Klein, The Shock Doctrine.[↑]
3. Julia Sudbury, “Celling Black Bodies: Black Women in the Global Prison Industrial Complex,” Feminist Review 70 (2002): 57–74.[↑]
4. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003).[↑]
5. Michael Welch, “The Role of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the Prison Industrial Complex,” Social Justice 27.3 (2000); Michael Flynn and Cecilia Josephine Cannon, “The Privatization of Immigration Detention: Towards a Global View,” Social Science Research Network, September 1, 2009, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2344196.[↑]
6. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Crisis, Surplus, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).[↑]
7. See for example, Michelle Chen, “How to Turn a Grueling, Thankless Job into a Movement,” The Nation, July 3, 2014.[↑]
8. See press release from the Audre Lorde Project: http://alp.org/winning-team-welfare-justice-campaign-trains-human-resource-administration-policy-address-discrimina.[↑]
9. See press release from SRLP: http://srlp.org/medicaid-programs-will-now-cover-transgender-healthcare-following-srlps-twelve-year-campaign/.[↑]
10. See Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. González, and Angela P. Harris, Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (Boulder: Utah State University Press, 2012).[↑]
11. See Valerie Strauss, “Resistance to Standardized Testing Growing Nationwide,” Washington Post, March 24, 2014.[↑]
12. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded is available as an e-book here: https://payhip.com/b/T2Xn.[↑]