The revolution will not be funded: beyond the non-profit industrial complex

Their Side Is Organized; We Need to Be Organized, Too

Trump and his far-right acolytes wield their power to disinvest from public services, terrorize our neighborhoods with ICE agents, and ensure that opposition to genocide becomes a fireable, and deportable, offense. In the face of these grim and terrifying developments, it could scarcely be more urgent that we learn lessons from movements and organizing traditions that confronted repression, surveillance, and powerful opposition in the (recent and distant) past. We’ve put together a reading list of key books to help inform ongoing efforts to build and sustain durable organizations, and forge effective strategies, for both short term survival and long term social transformation. What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe. “Anyone trying to rebuild an effective U.S. labor movement needs to read Class Struggle Unionism by Joe Burns. He lays out the fundamental principles that UE has tried to uphold for the last 85 years. For a union to be worthwhile to the working class, it needs to know which side it is on and it has to recognize that the fight itself is what allows workers to gain the knowledge and power they need.”—Carl Rosen From two co-founders of the largest tenants union in the country, this deeply reported account of the resurgent tenant movement centers poor and working-class people who are fighting back, staying put, and remaking the city in the process. A collection of essays from the Stop Cop City movement on the fight for police abolition and for a liveable planet for all, with gripping reporting from activists on the ground and rousing articles from renowned radical academics. In this remarkable collaborative work, leading scholar-activists Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie surface the often unrecognized genealogies of queer, anti-capitalist, internationalist, grassroots, and women-of-color-led feminist movements, struggles, and organizations that have helped to define abolition and feminism in the twenty-first century. This guide, based on the collective experience of organizers and workers in non-unionized workplaces, is a critical tool to help you and your coworkers organize for justice at work.  Drawing from over twenty years of activism on local and national levels, this striking book offers an organizer’s perspective on the intersections of immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition. At a political moment when Liberatory Harm Reduction and mutual aid are more important than ever, this book serves as an inspiration and a catalyst for radical transformation of our world. Even the River Starts Small is a collection from the movement to stop construction of the Line 3 pipeline through northern Minnesota, featuring anonymous writing, art, and photos spanning nearly a decade, and including reflections on many of the diverse experiences that made up this grassroots resistance. “Tracing revolutionary uprisings from 1989 to 2019, this book is a map of resistance and resilience in the face of tremendous odds. The case studies, as well as the introductory essay, lead us through situations where the victory of capitalism over humanity was anything but assured. And yet the book is not a wistful history about what could have been. Rather, it is a strategic assessment of near-victories to prepare us for the fire next time.” —Tithi Bhattacharya As isolated individuals, debtors have little influence. But as a bloc, we can leverage our debts and devise new tactics to challenge the corporate creditor class and help win reparative, universal public goods. Individually, our debts overwhelm us. But together, our debts can make us powerful. What does the politics of solidarity look like in practice, and how can left-wing organizations grow—in numbers and power—while remaining accountable to the broader movements of which they are a part? An oral history and critical genealogy of “accountability,” the complex abolitionist concept that pushes us to ask: just what do we mean by “community?” Environmentalism from Below takes readers inside the popular struggles for environmental liberation in the Global South. These communities—among the most vulnerable to but also least responsible for the climate crisis—have long been at the forefront of the fight to protect imperiled worlds. This volume—the Socialist Register’s first-ever reader—grapples with the question of whether political organization is a necessary part of the struggle by the working-class to overthrow capitalism. In pieces published over the course of publication’s entire history contributors, from Ralph Miliband to Jean-Paul Satre, examine various aspects of this theme. The Socialist Challenge Today presents an essential historical, theoretical, and critical perspective for understanding the potential as well as the limits of three important recent phenomena: the Sanders electoral insurgency in the United States; the Syriza experience in Greece; and Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom. This book surveys revolutionary socialist ideas and engages a gallery of contentious political thinkers, offering an indispensable assessment of the place of revolutionary collectives in this radical tradition. A trenchant history of community organizing and a must-read for the next generation of organizers seeking to learn from the successes, failures, and contradictions of the past. In an era of stark racial injustice, Aaron Dixon dedicated his life to revolution, founding the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968 at age nineteen. In My People Are Rising, he traces the course of his own radicalization, and that of a generation. SNCC: The New Abolitionists influenced a generation of activists struggling for civil rights and seeking to learn from the successes and failures of those who built the fantastically influential Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.  Detroit: I Do Mind Dying tracks the extraordinary development of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers as they became two of the landmark political organizations of the 1960s and 1970s. It is widely heralded as one the most important books on the Black liberation movement. A landmark account of a key radical feminist organization, offering lessons for today’s women’s liberation movement. Boston Female Liberation member Nancy Rosenstock expertly weaves together the reflections of her fellow-activists, describing how they became feminists, recounting the breadth of their organizing work, and linking their achievements and experience to contemporary struggles against sexism. In this rousing and insightful participant's account, Hal Draper recounts the now iconic events of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. From the impromptu speak out atop a police car after the administration decided to clamp down on students “distributing communist literature,” to the inspiring Student Strike that shut down the entire campus, Draper's narrative captures the energy and dynamism of each twist and turn in the struggle, and offers invaluable analysis along the way. From the dawning of the industrial epoch, wage earners have organized themselves into unions, fought bitter strikes, and gone so far as to challenge the very premises of the system by creating institutions of democratic self-management aimed at controlling production without bosses. During the first two decades of the twentieth century the ideas of revolutionary syndicalism developed into a major influence within the trade union movement. Committed to destroying capitalism through direct industrial action and revolutionary trade union struggle, the movement raised fundamental questions for activists across the world. In this thorough, concise, and accessible introduction to Lenin’s theory and practice of revolutionary politics, Paul Le Blanc gives a vibrant sense of the historical context of the socialist movement (in Russia and abroad) from which Lenin’s ideas about revolutionary organization spring. What emerges from Le Blanc’s partisan yet measured account is an image of a collaborative, ever adaptive, and dynamically engaged network of revolutionary activists who formed the core of the Bolshevik party.

We Do This 'Til We Free Us

New York Times Bestseller “Organizing is both science and art. It is thinking through a vision, a strategy, and then figuring out who your targets are, always being concerned about power, always being concerned about how you’re going to actually build power in order to be able to push your issues, in order to be able to get the target to actually move in the way that you want to.” What if social transformation and liberation isn’t about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle. With a foreword by Naomi Murakawa and chapters on seeking justice beyond the punishment system, transforming how we deal with harm and accountability, and finding hope in collective struggle for abolition, Kaba’s work is deeply rooted in the relentless belief that we can fundamentally change the world. As Kaba writes, “Nothing that we do that is worthwhile is done alone.”

The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex

The first comprehensive history of American Jewish philanthropy and its influence on democracy and capitalism

Radical expectations: how the New Left changed economics

In the 1970s radical economists campaigned to reform their discipline and their universities. They became journalists and activists, moving beyond academia, to forge new models of public engagement and collaborative knowledge in economic life. Radical Expectations tells the story of how these economists set out to make economics more democratic. It traces their campaign to bring protest movements to the campuses, triggering the emergence of an alternative understanding of expertise directed at validating and empowering the perspectives and voices of women, Black Americans, labor activists, and the urban poor. It shows how a radical identity formed and how radicals helped reform disciplinary institutions. Furthermore, it argues that the radical economics' legacy was the development of a language and models of expert-lay collaboration that empowers direct action in economic affairs. The book is about the community of radical economists who championed the promise of change and what came of it

More notes on Organizing, Mutual Aid, and Activism on decentralized social networks

Part 3 of a series. See If not now, when? Mutual aid and organizing in the fediverses, the ATmosphere, and whatever comes next and Notes (and thoughts) on organizing in the fediverses and the ATmosphere for previous installments and a reading list. "Mutual aid. Organizing. Sharing, contextualizing, and making meaning

Hope in Common

We seem to have reached an impasse. Capitalism as we know it appears to be coming apart. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. Organized resistance appears scattered and incoherent; the global justice movement a shadow of its former self. There is good reason to believe that, in a generation […]

The Black Alliance for Peace

A people-centered human rights project against war, repression and imperialism. Get on our newsletter list to build the anti-war movement.

Renaissance Philanthropy – A brighter future for all through science, technology, and innovation

Renaissance Philanthropy is a nonprofit that designs, incubates, and manages time-bound, thesis-driven philanthropic funds for science, technology, and innovation. Led by Tom Kalil and Kumar Garg, the organization has catalyzed $533M in philanthropic capital since 2024.

‘We feel that we were used’: Nonprofits after Chan Zuckerberg dropped social advocacy

A year after CZI ended social advocacy grants, nonprofits share lessons on funding loss, budget gaps, and surviving donor shifts.

Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex

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Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

Welcome. I’m a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where I direct the Media Economies Design Lab and teach and learn from our students. I’ve written a book each on online democracy, cooperative enterprise, the Occupy movement, and God, and I’ve edited ones about solidarity economies, crypto, and co-ops. Reporting articles for both magazines and academic journals keeps my notebooks filled. Working with others to build a democratic economy keeps me accountable.

The corporation—a return to origins?

This paper contributes to contemporary debates in political theory about the power of business corporations by offering a genealogy of the corporation through the lens of a series of historical mutations of the corporate form. Originally, there were two corporate forms, both non-profit: member corporations (today's associations) and property corporations (today's charitable foundations). The contemporary business corporation arguably is a hybrid of both of these original forms, introducing unique commercial features (shares with profit distribution rights that are transferable). These commercial features are largely responsible for the corporation's extractive nature, that is, its tendency to prey on non-shareholder interests. The future of the corporation may well lie in a partial return to the two original non-profit forms. Two corporate forms developed in the nineteenth century can provide the format for such a return: cooperatives (which reinforce the idea of membership) and foundation-owned companies. The cooperative structure is a halfway house between a business corporation and a member corporation (association), and in a parallel fashion, a foundation-owned company is a halfway house between a business corporation and a property corporation (foundation). If we want to reduce corporations’ extractive nature, facilitating the spread of cooperatives and foundation-owned companies seems the way forward.