T E AM C O L OR S COL LECTIVE

Abandoning the
Chorus
Checking Ourselves a Decade
Since Seattle

Thoughts on a Decomposition
Ten years since the massive Seattle resistance
of 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 that
“everything fails,” we could not have foreseen
the decline.

For years we struggled to understand what was

happening. Now we struggle to understand
what has happened. The desire that captured us
and 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 validity—much of the Left is, after
all, stuck.

So, what has happened?

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

thoughts.

13
GROU NDS WE L L
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 personal
debts, 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 held
by many on the Left—implicitly and often explic-
itly—that mass mobilizations are the register of
resistance, the path to/of social change and, for
radical currents, the path of revolutionary
struggle, despite mountains of evidence show-
ing otherwise.
But there is more than this incessant stubborn-
ness.
Here we discuss two areas that rank highly in
need of serious thought and critique: the non-
profit industrial complex (NPIC) and the
Activist-identity approach to organizing and
activism.
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
14
AB AN D ON IN G TH E CHOR US
incorporation, institutionalization, co-optation
and proactive tempering of struggles for “social
justice,” as well as the parceling and
nauseatingly opportunistic use of poverty.
The NPIC has wed movement building to the
capitalist state as it has sought, with the proac-
tive involvement of many organizers and
directors, to absorb and funnel activity through
debilitating funding regimes.
The pervasiveness of the non-profit system has
meant less time spent on radical forms of
organizing and the increased professionalization
of collective resistance.
This has been accompanied by welfare
programs and services increasingly oriented
toward “self-sufficiency,” which have developed
in 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 assist
their 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 some
service providers believe it, but in large part
because of loyalty to funding sources.
In the United States, services are almost
15
GROU NDS WE L L
always distanced from organizing.
Government and foundation grants that come to
determine both agenda and activity are directly
related to the intensified professionalization and
institutionalization of social and economic “jus-
tice” more generally. The narrowness — and
often the sheer vacuousness — of terms like
justice and empowerment as 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 impose
seemingly never-ending labor coupled with
notoriously low wages in the name of a given
“cause.”
The boss/worker relation is (intentionally) mys-
tified in the process — that is until someone is
fired or warned about checking their email just
too often.
There has been increased dialog on the Left
about transcending the limits of the non-profit
model and strategizing around it, led by groups
like INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence
and 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
16
AB AN D ON IN G TH E CHOR US
need for a deeper analysis and more nuanced
critique of social service groups, government
funding, labor precariousness in the non-profit
sector, 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 collectively
organizing 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” are
necessarily an impediment — but we must seri-
ously question the ways in which vanguardism
and 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-
tics—the 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 radical
Left's self-imposed irrelevance and obscurity.
Prefiguration has come to justify the self-
limited organizing that so frequently holds the
17
GROU NDS WE L L

attention of radicals. From this standpoint, any

action, 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 in
political struggle. As old man Marx argued:

Both for the production on a mass scale of

this 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 a
practical movement, a revolution. This revo-
lution is necessary...not only because the
ruling class cannot be overthrown in any
other way, but also because the class over-
throwing it can only in a revolution succeed
in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and
become 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 will

require a reckoning with this and addressing
struggle beyond non-profits and so-called
Activists.

Ten years after Seattle, let’s hope we’re 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.

18