“Recent experiences have shown the effectiveness of using money to win popular support and further the interests and goals of units conducting counterinsurgency operations…
When used effectively, and with an end state in mind, money can be an effective means to mobilize public support for the counterinsurgent’s cause and further alienate the insurgents from the population.”
-US Army, “Tactics in Counterinsurgency,” FM 3-24.2
“No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them.”
-Assata Shakur
This is the third of a three part series. In the first, we discuss the importance of understanding gentrification as the grounding of all struggles in the so-called Silicon Valley. In the second, we talk about gentrification and the police. Here, we discuss the connection between gentrification and non-profits.
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So much of the world around us is consumed by the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC). This non-governmental but in many ways state-aligned sector launders stolen wealth from tech companies that litter these occupied territories known as Silicon Valley. From the Silicon Valley Community Foundation to the smallest non-profit, much of their existence relies not on protest but on the crushing of dissent. Tracing the money back to its stolen origins will be a longer endeavor we will have to take on but for now we will focus on the most visible aspects of their repression. Charity in Silicon Valley represents the repressive wing of capital and the state with a benevolent face.
The Military-Industrial Complex refers to the connection between the armed forces, defense contractors, and the state as they collaborate to wring profits from endless war. In the same way, the Bay Area Non-Profit Industrial Complex is a collaboration between government, non-profits, and the tech firms that fund them to ensure the continuance of a bankrupt social peace as displacement and exploitation continue apace.
Take for example the recent protests in downtown San Jose calling for police to be defunded and a reinvestment in existing social services. The initial rupture of May 29th as our comrade has detailed in their report back Revolt and Recuperation: Avenging George Floyd, signaled a break with the existing liberal contract of charity for the poor and safety for the rich. Unaffiliated rebels took to the streets in a clear rebuke of state orders and rehearsed protest by non-profits but the aftermath would see these organizations restore their grip on protest.
One of the most visible examples of this co-optation of righteous prole indignation was the commissioning of murals in the downtown area in partnership with non-profit Local Color. Murals with Black Lives Matter conveying support for the protest were painted in the weeks following the battle of May 29th. Local Color even took to social media and proudly thanked the property management companies in the area for allowing them to paint on plywood erected to protect property from looting. Before taking lead on allowing us to paint and not paint our rage, Local Color consistently partners with the San Jose Downtown Association, notorious for supporting the gentrification of downtown and surrounding areas. What is the possibility of localized revolt when so much of our opposition has been co-opted and repackaged for the consumption of the yuppie gentrifier? Are organizations like Local Color aiding in the destruction of a future that appears to go extinct everyday? If we have to ask our overseers for permission to express our rage, are we really confronting the material conditions we live in or are we decorating their walls for the next downtown promotional brochure?
The city is filled with non-profits that depend on the stolen wealth of Silicon Valley to run their organizations. It is no coincidence then, that in December of 2018, the San Jose city council voted to sell public land to Google while non-profits remained largely silent. There was public outrage but much of it was autonomous organizing by grassroots groups like Serve the People San Jose and not the non-profits that claim to speak for dispossessed proles in the city. Almost two years later, some non-profits now openly celebrate the coming of the Google campus to downtown San Jose. Organizations like Working Partnerships USA have taken the task to attempt to convince proles – people on the Eastside and surrounding neighborhoods on the imagined benefits of displacement and gentrification. Talk about selling snake oil.
There are political differences, and then there is treason to the class.
To understand their conspicuous silence and mumbled lies, you just have to follow the money. The list of big non-profit donors in the Silicon Valley is a laundry list of the people who are actually fucking up the Silicon Valley. The Sobrato Family Fund is the philanthropic arm of a literal real estate firm. The hulking Silicon Valley Community Foundation is a “donor-advised fund,” which means the tech companies who launder their charitable contributions through, get to specify exactly how their money is used—and under what conditions.
So it’s the case that Somos Mayfair, the east side non-profit fighting for anti-displacement policies, is funded by the exact people fueling displacement here and empire globally: eBay, Google, Intel. Sacred Heart gets money from Adobe and Google and HP.
All those people fighting displacement are funded by the displacers. The people critiquing police brutality are paid by the people police brutality protects. It’s not to say that everyone working at these non-profits is a monster. It’s to say that there are strings attached, and that power-hungry corporations don’t turn into saints when it’s time for a few charitable donations. They fund the resistance they want to control.
A few years ago, proles in the Bay were blocking tech busses and knocking the Google glasses off techies in bars. Big Tech went and bought themselves a more manageable opposition with some investments in “social justice” and now our “leaders” tell us to wait, to ask, to beg.
There’s a long list of non-profits that devour the energy of movements only to repeat the tired script of voting and civic participation. As all-encompassing as their authority on dissent appears, this is a small universe of technocrats with little influence outside their circles of happy hour buddies. Just days before the May 29th rebellion, Working Partnerships sent their subscribers a call to attend a car rally demanding the city do more for workers affected by the virus but the lack of social media activity indicates there was little engagement by proles in the city. As power goes, we know that the lack of participants in their rally doesn’t mean that they do not have access to the local political class; indeed, they are bound by shared interests.
The May 29th rebellion sent a chilling message to the local political class, SJPD, and the non-profits that do more to crush dissent than provide the direct material aid proles need. Far from feeling despair, we see this rupture as the unveiling of what we had suspected for years but had not been able to articulate yet. For these non-profits, there is nowhere to hide their commitment and investments in the status quo—city grants aren’t awarded to those setting dumpsters on fire. But what if those lit dumpsters can wring more concessions from the politicos than any combination of picket signs and petition signatures ever could? Even the liberals’ treasured votes were won by prole rebellion; Congress only got the nerve to pass the Voting Rights Act after Detroit burned.
Our struggle is not the same as theirs and we aren’t looking for an alliance. In fact, we’ve never needed saving or charity, we want everything and that is not a compromise we are willing to make. Against the non-profit industrial complex; for a praxis of autonomous leaderless confrontations. Against those who would turn our rage and blood into grants and press releases; against retreat. In the pointed words of Dylan Rodriguez, “…perhaps it is time that we formulate critical strategies that fully comprehend the NPIC as the institutionalization of a relation of dominance and attempt to disrupt and transform the fundamental structures and principles of a white supremacist US civil society, as the US racists state.”
– a prole with thoughts of liberation
