Abandoning the Chorus

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T E A M C OL OR S C OL L E C T I V E

Abandoning the

ChorusChecking Ourselves a Decade

Since Seattle

Thoughts on a Decomposition

Ten years since the massive Seattle resistanceof 1999, the cycle of protest that demarcated

the gathering of elites in the United States

through 2003 has dissipated. For our part, with-

out adopting the resigned position thateverything fails, we could not have foreseen

the decline.

For years we struggled to understand what washappening. Now we struggle to understand

what has happened. The desire that captured usand so many others continues on, but the ability

to act in concert and the sense that we are

winning has gone.

The politics of cynicism overwhelm at a time

when the words change and hope are

constants.

The fact is that the Left, across the board, is in a

crisis. Many feel stuck. And like all feelings,there's some validitymuch of the Left is, after

all, stuck.

So, what has happened?

We don't pretend to know, but we have some

thoughts.

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A B A N D O N I N G T H E C H O R U S

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incorporation, institutionalization, co-optation

and proactive tempering of struggles for social

justice, as well as the parceling andnauseatingly opportunistic use of poverty.

The NPIC has wed movement building to thecapitalist state as it has sought, with the proac-

tive involvement of many organizers and

directors, to absorb and funnel activity throughdebilitating funding regimes.

The pervasiveness of the non-profit system has

meant less time spent on radical forms oforganizing and the increased professionalization

of collective resistance.

This has been accompanied by welfareprograms and services increasingly oriented

toward self-sufficiency, which have developedin context of intensely precarious employment,

decreasing wages, gentrification, increasingly

expensive housing, and an explosion in feelings

of depression and isolation amongst many which have developed with a general decline in

the sense of social community.

Social service organizations that could assisttheir ever-growing list of consumers and

clients to collectively engage those responsi-ble for maintaining poverty and overseeing

misery, instead promote doctrines of self-suffi-

ciency, personal deficiency, and the deserving

and undeserving poor in part because someservice providers believe it, but in large part

because of loyalty to funding sources.

In the United States, services are almost

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Struggles encounter serious constraints, start-ing with and dominated by the impositions of

capital and the state. The list of barriers for

successful radical work in the neoliberal period

could go on for volumes: our towering personaldebts, the prison industrial complex and repres-

sions, the difficulties of health insurance and

illness, capital mobility, decreasing wages,highly exploitative salaries, declines in general

experiences of community, the success of the

organized right, and so on.

But the Left, across its spectrum, has also

played a demobilizing role.

On the one hand, and most relevant to the Seat-

tle resistance, is the nearly invincible belief heldby many on the Leftimplicitly and often explic-itlythat mass mobilizations are the register of

resistance, the path to/of social change and, for

radical currents, the path of revolutionarystruggle, despite mountains of evidence show-

ing otherwise.

But there is more than this incessant stubborn-ness.

Here we discuss two areas that rank highly inneed of serious thought and critique: the non-

profit industrial complex (NPIC) and the

Activist-identity approach to organizing andactivism.

The Non-Profit Industrial Complex

In the wake of the fires of resistance and strug-gle that shook the social field during the 1960s

and 1970s, the NPIC has been a major factor in

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need for a deeper analysis and more nuanced

critique of social service groups, government

funding, labor precariousness in the non-profitsector, and the content and function of

advocacy work in general.

Increased discussions and understandings of

the ways in which individuals and groups are

subverting the non-profit model and collectivelyorganizing within, outside, and against it are cru-

cial at this juncture.

The Limits of Activism

The development of a hegemonic and self-limit-

ing Activist-identity approach to politics is also a

troubling element of much contemporary radi-

calism. This isn't to say that Activists arenecessarily an impediment but we must seri-

ously question the ways in which vanguardismand elitism seep into radical politics and strug-

gle, obfuscating our hopes to win - a laudable

goal we also share.

Most relevant to this point is the widely-held

belief, on the radical Left, in prefigurative poli-

ticsthe belief that our organizations and ideas

must equate to the world we want to live in.Following this line, many radical efforts do not

extend beyond small and sometimes intention-ally marginal communities composed of those

who see themselves as conscious.

This has been an important part of the radicalLeft's self-imposed irrelevance and obscurity.

Prefiguration has come to justify the self-limited organizing that so frequently holds the

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always distanced from organizing.

Government and foundation grants that come to

determine both agenda and activity are directly

related to the intensified professionalization andinstitutionalization of social and economic jus-

tice more generally. The narrowness and

often the sheer vacuousness of terms likejustice and empowermentas used by many

invested in the NPIC, including service providers

and many organizers is utterly striking.

Finally, and also related, is the fact that the

NPIC often relies on, and helps to normalize,

hyper-exploitative work regimes that imposeseemingly never-ending labor coupled with

notoriously low wages in the name of a givencause.

The boss/worker relation is (intentionally) mys-

tified in the process that is until someone isfired or warned about checking their email just

too often.

There has been increased dialog on the Leftabout transcending the limits of the non-profit

model and strategizing around it, led by groupslike INCITE! Women of Color Against Violenceand movement publications like Left Turn

which itself grew out of the Seattle struggles.

Such dialog represents a space in which organ-izers and activists are strategically thinking

through the serious difficulties of organizing in

the neoliberal period.

Even with critical discussions of the NPIC, at

least as we've understood them, there is the



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attention of radicals. From this standpoint, anyaction, regardless of how self-referential and

ineffectual, is considered a win, simply

because its very existence supposedly

prefigures a world to come.

In our view, prefigurative politics should func-

tion as a goal and a possibility developed inpolitical struggle. As old man Marx argued:

Both for the production on a mass scale ofthis communist consciousness and for the

success of the cause itself, the alteration of

[people] on a mass scale is necessary, an

alteration which can only take place in apractical movement, a revolution. This revo-

lution is necessary...not only because theruling class cannot be overthrown in anyother way, but also because the class over-

throwing it can only in a revolution succeed

in ridding itself of all the muck of ages andbecome fitted to found society anew.

Non-profits are not going to develop revolution.

Neither will self-marginalizing Activist cultures.

Ridding ourselves of the muck of ages willrequire a reckoning with this and addressingstruggle beyond non-profits and so-called

Activists.

Ten years after Seattle, lets hope were up to

that task.

Conor Cash, Craig Hughes, Stevie Peace, Kevin Van Meter

Team Colors Collective | ww.warmachines.info

Tucson, DC, St. Paul, Portland January, 2010.


Abandoning the Chorus

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