Hold onto your beenies folks. 

Our story starts 60 years ago. The civil rights movement gave way to the Watts uprising in 1965. The Watts uprising shook the foundational assumptions of the civil rights movement and called into question its gains.

Let’s revisit what MLK said to musician, actor and activist Harry Belafonte, shortly before his (MLK’s) assassination: “I have come upon something that disturbs me deeply. I’ve come to believe we’re integrating into a burning house. I’m afraid America may be losing what moral vision she had. Until we assure the underclass has justice and opportunity, we will continue to perpetuate the anger and violence that tears at the soul of this nation.”

And at the Mason Temple in Memphis Tennessee on April 3, 1968, speaking to striking sanitation workers the day before he was assassinated [chills] King said “What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?”

What King is speaking to here is the failure to resolve the problems of the “underclass” – which in King’s time he counted as 40 million and which today constitutes the 140 million people in the United States that are poor or near-poor. It was the poor and dispossessed that rose up during the Watts Uprising, not the Black petite-bourgeoisie of nearby Baldwin Hills. The co-optation and diversion of the civil rights movement by the powers that be paved the way for a comparatively small segment of Black people to ascend into higher echelons of the state and the public and private sectors.  The contradictions of the class structure in the United States remained unresolved. 

Let’s let MLK bridge us into another piece of context for how we’ve gotten here today. The automation of the 3rd Industrial Revolution – the invention of the microchip and the adoption of computerization across the economic system resulting in the ability to offshore/outsource production and create global supply chains.

The third industrial revolution began to displace large numbers of workers and heralded the shift from an industrial workforce to a service economy. At the same time, as a consequence of this increasing automation, the ruling class rolled back social welfare programs. Not as many workers needed = not as much support needed to keep workers alive. Less incentive on the part of the capitalist class for social investment into workers’ healthcare, housing, education and overall well-being. Remember, the capitalist class sees our class (their labor force) as a cost of production. Therefore, the retrenchment of the state and social programs. Therefore –

In the shadow of the 3rd Industrial Revolution, computerization, the shift from an industrial economy to a service economy, and the retrenchment of social welfare programs we get (drum roll please) NONPROFITS TO THE RESCUE!!! Now, the nonprofit sector is varied and includes everything from the United Way and the American Cancer Society to PETA and other things. I’m going to focus here on the “social justice” side of nonprofits. These are the organizations that get funded by the wealthy to make change in society (as long as that change does not involve taking the wealthy out of power and reorganizing society in the interests of the poor and dispossessed). A lot of great work has been produced about the nonprofit industrial complex.

I want to summarize some fundamentals as someone who has been part of, adjacent to and working in and around this sector for about 20 years now. And this is not to completely foreclose on the possibility of real potential human and material resources coming out of these formations. However, how we’ve gotten to this place in our “resistance” is important to understand.

Here are 3 foundations of the social justice sector of the Nonprofit Industrial Complex:

1. The right way to make our society more “just and fair” is for each identity group to fight for its own version of diversity, equity and inclusion. Each group has a unique set of interests that it needs to fight for on its own. 
2. Creating [insert identity group]-ONLY spaces is what leads to people feeling “safe” and “comfortable” and is the right way to organize. People would be “harmed” by having to be around others who are not part of their identity group. 
3. The backdrop of the blood-soaked, ill-gotten gains of the ruling elite is white washed through this process and they co-opt an entire layer of BIPOC “leaders” from the working class who rep them. (Conservative billionaires = bad, liberal billionaires = good) even though both sets are bound and determined to keep this dumpster fire capitalist system going for as long as they possibly can. This is not the same as rich people throwing their lot in with the working class – quite the opposite. 

So here’s what we’re left with:

1. Class struggle has taken a back seat. The entire “social justice sector” precludes class struggle because it compartmentalizes each grouping of people (largely on the basis of race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, gender, gender identity, immigration status and ability) and pretends that “liberation” is possible for each of these groups independent of a struggle to take the ruling class out of power which is necessarily a CLASS struggle.
2. The cornerstone of the ruling class’ strategy is divide and conquer. The “social justice” sector plays right into the ruling class’ hands (being as its owned and controlled by ruling class resources and strategists). There’s no way that the liberation of any specific group can take place in the context of a society based on exploitation that is well underway to structural unemployment heralded by the 4th Industrial Revolution we are living through today.
3. Demands for human rights are summarily dismissed as being “not specific enough”. There’s an accepted maxim that “people of color and marginalized people have always been thrown under the bus when we try to work in coalition” but that’s largely based on what W.E.B. Dubois called “the propaganda of history”. Numerous examples like Reconstruction, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, The Bonus Army, The Original Rainbow Coalition, the Original Poor People’s Campaign, National Welfare Rights Organizing, labor history and others provide a blueprint for how our ancestors came together across the color line and changed what was politically possible. The false propaganda of history is devoured by these loyal opposition forces who largely take their cues from the academy (particularly elite institutions) and then regurgitate it to train up new generations of miseducated yet often well-meaning leaders and organizers. 
4. White people are written off as un-organizable, not worthy of being organized, reactionary, backward, etc. Because of a faulty, flawed and idealistic understanding of reality, the assumption is either that “all white people are rich” or “no white people have a stake in changing society because they have privilege and benefit from the way things are”. This is bullshit. All this line of thinking has done is pave the way for the ruling class to develop the kind of politics of resentment that got Donald Trump elected and keeps the working class deeply divided. If people don’t see themselves in your picture of reality they will find another story to believe in. Remember the 66 million poor white people from the graphic above?

We don’t have to wonder how we got here. One of the reasons we got here is because “friends like these” are actually operating at the behest of our enemies, whether they know it or not. Many don’t know, but some certainly do. Many people are asking questions and looking for answers at this critical time. Welcome those who are.