Non-Profits Are a Silo

If we scratch beneath the surface, we can start to see an important difference between revolutionary and radical.

Radical means getting to the roots. Think radish, radius, radiate. A reformist thinks you can fix a problem by changing a small part of the existing structure. A radical understands that you need to go to the roots, that maybe the whole structure is rotten to the core.

It’s not uncommon to hear an anarchist say something like, “we can’t fix the police, because the police aren’t broken. They’re working exactly the way they were designed to.” And if you know anything about the history of policing, you’ll understand that the anarchist is right. Which is probably why reformists do their best to erase our sense of history.

Anarchists are both radical and revolutionary. We look to the roots of a problem, and we want to completely reorganize our society to do away with all structures and cultures of hierarchy and oppression.

People who believe in the State might be revolutionaries without being radicals, because they refuse to see the roots of the problem.

Is it possible to be a radical without being a revolutionary?

This is where the Non-Profit Industrial Complex comes in, one of the most devious inventions of the 20^th century for pacifying struggle.

The biggest non-profits are straight up charities, explicitly reproducing all the dominant values.

But there are many smaller non-profits, closer to our movements. Many of them started with good intentions, and none of them would work if they didn’t apply a radical lens.

After all, there are plenty of people out there who know from their own experiences that they can’t trust the police, who understand that the health problems in their family came from a lack of access to fresh food and a toxic environment; people who remember what that fancy neighborhood used to look like before rents drove them and all their neighbors out, who have done the research or live next to the new lithium mine and see that “green growth” is a lie.

So, there need to be radical non-profits talking about prison abolition, food justice, gentrification, or degrowth in order to engage the people who are too experienced and too smart to trust a huge, mainstream charity.

But to get donations, to get the money