Jess Fournier
Department of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz
Coined in the early 2000s, the term non-profit industrial complex (NPIC) describes the relationship between non-profit or non-governmental organizations (NGOs), governments, and private business, to emphasize the role of these organizations in political economies. For the purposes of analyzing the non-profit industrial complex, we will use Hardt & Negri’s definition of an NGO as “any organization that purports to represent the People and operate in its interest, separate from (and often against) the structures of the state” (Hardt & Negri 2000, 312). Within this category are international human rights/humanitarian organizations and US nonprofits that operate domestically to provide direct social welfare services or “transform whole groups of people’s personal feelings and sense of self, to cure them of their social ills by empowering them” (Eliasoph 2011, 20-1). While the missions and structures of non-profit organizations vary, the concept of the non-profit industrial complex illuminates the similar role they play in enforcing American hegemony and empire around the world.
Dylan Rodriguez defines the non-profit industrial complex as “the set of symbiotic relationships that link together political and financial technologies of state and owning-class proctorship and surveillance over public political intercourse, including and especially emergent progressive and leftist social movements” (Rodriguez 2009). Rodriguez critiques the non-profit structure as the “convergence of state and capitalist/philanthropic forces in the absorption of progressive social change struggles” into 501(c)(3) organizations with strict regulations that ultimately curtail radical movements (Rodriguez 2009). Early use of the term was popularized by San Francisco Bay Area activists in the early to mid-2000s to call attention to the impact of state repression and professionalization on anti-capitalist, queer and trans, and Third World liberation movements (Rodriguez 2009). Many of these concerns are collected in the 2009 South End Press anthology edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence called The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence’s loss of a Ford Foundation grant in 2004 sparked their interest in the non-profit industrial complex. They argue that the state uses non-profits to “redirect activist energies into career-based modes of organizing… [and] allow corporations to mask their exploitative and colonial work practices through ‘philanthropic work” (INCITE!).
The non-profit industrial complex is related to theorization of the prison industrial complex by Bay Area organizations like INCITE! and Critical Resistance. Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines the role of non-profit organizations in the US as a complement to the prison industrial complex; the two are connected materially and ideologically to quell resistance to the US’ efforts to marketize and privatize social welfare (Gilmore 2009). Gilmore defines non-profits as the “third sector” – neither state or business, but operating as the “shadow state” that provides direct social services previously provided by New Deal/Great Society programs until the 1970s (Gilmore 2009). While the third sector provides social services, government agencies that the state is actively seeking to dismantle have become “policing bodies” that oversee and set the parameters of service provision to those populations “abandoned” by the state (Gilmore 2009). Gilmore and other 2000s critics of the non-profit industrial complex ultimately argue that the links and shared repressive goals of the state, business and non-profit organizations make revolutionary movements incompatible with non-profits. Non-profits are “without significant political clout, forbidden by law to advocate for systemic change, and bound by public rules and non-profit charters to stick to its mission or get out of business and suffer legal consequences if it strays along the way” (Gilmore 2009).
Most analyses identify the non-profit industrial complex as an outgrowth of neoliberal policies in the 1980s and 1990s that dismantled “state institutions meant to cushion citizens against economic risk,” such as welfare, unemployment, or public housing (Mananzala & Spade 2008, 55). The privatization of social welfare not only “curbed the efforts of social movements – especially labor movements – that challenged the fundamental profit logic of capitalism and neoliberalism” but generated crises for communities suffering the harshest impacts of neoliberalization (Mananzala & Spade 2008, 56). Non-profit organizations became one means for the state sought to offload the costs of social reproduction, made more difficult by neoliberal policies (Elias & Roberts 2016, 792). However, this offloading did not represent a separation from the state but rather a “subcontracting” of particular responsibilities to non-profits (Bernal & Grewal 2014, 7). As of 1993, US and European NGOs received 75% of their funding from their country’s governments, with levels as high as 80% for some Canadian NGOs (Efuk 2000, 48), demonstrating the continued enmeshment of the state and non-governmental organizations. In addition, NGOs can serve as part of the state’s efforts to “impose a moral agenda in the context of austerity politics” (Elias & Roberts 2016, 794). In the United Kingdom, child welfare and anti-poverty programs are a means for the government to “exert greater control over the everyday life” of poor families (Elias & Roberts 2016, 793). Child welfare and other social service programs demonstrate the linkages between neoliberal austerity policies, social conservatism, and criminalization that Gilmore identifies in the relationship between the non-profit and prison industrial complexes.
Non-governmental organizations not only reflect, but actively construct frameworks for governance in different moments. Jessica Whyte notes the ideological basis for the role of NGOs under neoliberalism predates the 1980s retrenchment of the welfare state. The particular human rights definition adopted by NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in the wake of the 1948 United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights “defended the same (anti-)political virtues the neoliberals attributed to the market: restraining political power, taming violence and facilitating a margin of individual freedom” (Whyte 2019, 23). While humanitarian NGOs advocated against state repression, their narrow definition of civil and political rights meant that “poverty and economic inequality were not of concern in their own right,” (Whyte 2019, 101). In 1970s Chile, NGOs criticized Pinochet’s disappearance and imprisonment of dissidents but blamed communist groups for violence and omitted the role of the neoliberal economic policies promoted by Pinochet and the Chicago School that resulted in mass unemployment and starvation (Whyte 2019, 101). NGO intervention in Chile served to reinforce the interests of Western capitalist nations that benefited from the dictatorship and constrained the field of ‘acceptable resistance’ to nonviolent political speech.
In addition, Hardt & Negri describe the role of NGOs as creating a moral justification for imperial intervention, even as they position themselves as neutral advocates for freedom and democracy. By reporting on particular forms of ‘human rights abuses,’ humanitarian NGOs “prefigur[e] the state of exception from below…armed with some of the most effective means of communication and oriented toward the symbolic production of the enemy” (Hardt & Negri 2000, 36). For example, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch initially corroborated the manufactured Nayirah Congressional testimony in 1990, which was eventually revealed to be an organized propaganda campaign to generate support for the invasion of Iraq (MacArthur 2018). While NGOs present as independent entities not beholden to governments or private business, it is clear that they can construct pretexts for neocolonial military intervention under the guise of human rights.
The interconnected nature of different institutions in constructing political economies that the non-profit industrial complex describes challenge notions of the state as absent in the era of neoliberal governance. Writing about Puerto Rican feminist collective La Colectiva’s work in the aftermath of Hurricane María, Rocío Zambrana notes that the group’s “tactics challenge the view that in merely actualizing the interests of capital the state is absent… The state was not in the service of citizens, but this does not mean that it was not operating effectively” (Zambrana 2020).
Bibliography
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