[lbo-talk] Political Economy of Non-Profits

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

The political economy of liberal non-profits probably works like this  
(it probably works in the same way on the right, too, except that non- 
profits on the right are funded better):

1.  Non-profits seek grants from wealthy liberals and philanthropic  
foundations;

2.  Equipped with a little money, non-profits go "organize" various  
campaigns, employing "grassroots" means ranging from lobbying to  
emailing/letter-writing/faxing to petitioning to holding demonstrations;

3.  Those who actually do the main part of campaigns are generally  
unpaid volunteers.  Not only are they not paid by non-profits, they  
dip into their own pockets to finance their activities (xeroxing,  
phoning, etc., bills for which can add up quite a bit) and even send  
in donations to non-profits;

4a.  Unpaid volunteers' personal data -- useful for more direct-mail  
fund-raising and other campaigns by other non-profits and political  
organizations -- gets converted into salable commodities;

and

4b.  Results of unpaid volunteers' activities -- e.g., the numbers of  
emails/letters/faxes sent, signatures collected, participants in  
demonstrations, etc., illustrated with nice action photos -- get  
converted into salable lines in grant-seeking applications.

4a and 4b pay for the salaries of paid staff of non-profits.

This is probably not exactly "exploitation" in the Marxist sense of  
the term -- not much surplus value is produced by all the frenetic  
activities of unpaid volunteers -- but unpaid volunteers do look like  
they are exploited to pay for the salaries of non-profit staff at least.

Yoshie Furuhashi
<http://montages.blogspot.com>
<http://monthlyreview.org>
<http://mrzine.org>