“Perhaps the real problem is that we don’t spend enough time imagining what we want and then doing the work to sustain that vision. That is one of the fundamental ways the corporate-capitalist system tames us: by robbing us of our time and flooding us in a sea of bureaucratic red tape, which we are told is a necessary evil for guaranteeing our organization’s existence. We don’t have time to stop and collectively reflect on the implications of this—why are we so concerned with saving organizations if they are not fully able to truly address the root of the problems we face? Often we know that something feels off, but we feel stuck because we don’t have time to imagine how we might do it differently. We are too busy being told to market ourselves by pimping our communities’ poverty in proposals, selling “results” in reports and accounting for our finances in financial reviews. In essence, our organizations have become mini-corporations, because on some level, we have internalized the idea that power—the ability to create change—equals money. The current non-profit structure is based on a corporate model, just as most of us organize our economic lives along corporate structures that are totally integrated within a larger dominant capitalist order: through our bank accounts, consumption patterns, and the taxes we pay. Because of this, it becomes harder and harder to entertain the possibility of restructuring our lives in a radically different way. After all, capitalism is not only around us in the society we live in—it is also within us in terms of what we value how we live, and what we believe is possible.” — Adjoa Florência Jones de Almeida, “Radical Social Change,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex
Posted on: Sat, 01 Feb 2014 05:12:32 +0000
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