credit anyway?26 Suspiciously easy home mortgages became so simple to attain that the entire global economy somehow came to rest on them. The availability of consumer and home credit was coupled with a drastic drop in the price of many commodities due to the slave-like working conditions of globalized labor. This increase in purchasing power gave more and more people a means to feel powerful in their consumer choices just as they had less and less power in their political lives. As New Deal welfare-state labor protections were dismembered and factory-line industrial jobs were replaced with service and information work, increasing insecurity was marketed back to workers as an exciting new world of flexibility and mobility. Credit cards and easy mortgages that could be paid off just after dreams come true, cheap goods made by happy distant workers grateful to work for slave wages, a long procession of short-term jobs that one hopes will end in untold wealth—what all these changes had in common was a deferral of the essential antagonism of capitalism, between labor and capital, into the future. It is precisely this anxious faith that things would work themselves out that Barack Obama mobilized in his reliance on a message of “hope and change” during his successful 2008 campaign. The Free Association points out that the 2008 economic collapse, when investors very literally lost faith in the future as they sold off debt everyone suddenly realized would never be paid off, was the end of this deferral and “hope.” Antagonism could no longer be postponed into the distant future, and it returned to the present in full force, as a wave of protests, riots, and uprisings swept across the globe in 2011.
Although easy credit and other consumer enticements may be losing their magic in the face of economic decline, the ideological function of consumerism as the sole respectable means of exercising one’s agency remains. Nowhere is this so obvious as when social movements attempt to call it into question in protests and riots. Those who participate in consumer society, the logic goes, have no right to protest or riot against it; those who do are instantly labeled hypocrites. When, for example, rhetorical scholar Ellen Gorsevski makes a passing mention of protest “violence” in her book on nonviolent rhetoric, she quickly and confidently (and without feeling the need to cite a single source) alleges that the true motive of 1999 WTO protesters in Seattle, who broke the windows of Starbucks, was that they were shopping for coffee:
[T]he newest stereotype that is an equally challenging obstacle to be overcome by the various peace movement diaspora is that of the spoiled suburban teenager, the proverbial purple-haired punk, dressed in all black clothes, who, out of sheer boredom, takes to the street to smash things. A friend of mine who attended the “Battle of Seattle” protests in 1999–2000 observed with ironic dismay, for example, when a small band of black-garbed, face-masked protesters, self-proclaimed “anarchists,” used crow bars to smash into a Starbucks coffee chain store, then proceeded to help one another to bags of coffee, saying: “Hey! Pass me some of that Mocha Java,” or “I’ll trade you this Kenya for that Morning blend.”27
One participant in these actions assured me, on hearing this quote, “There was free coffee in the convergence center. No one needed to shop for coffee. We were good for coffee.” In Gorsevski’s view, rioters could be understood merely as coffee shoppers who were doing it all wrong. Similarly, within hours of the 2012 May Day riot in Seattle, in which hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage were inflicted on downtown banks and corporate businesses, one masked rioter who sported the characteristic Nike swoosh on his shoes while swinging a wooden stick at the windows of Niketown came to summarize the entire event in much media coverage. Twelve years before at the same Niketown building, another masked protester had climbed its awning and was kicking down its metal letters, with shoes apparently marked by a similar swoosh. Then, too, this one pair of shoes among thousands somehow was supposed to explain everything. How, we might ask, is this supposed to be an explanation? Why would one rioter’s choice of footwear somehow explain away the presence of tens of thousands of protesters? The “hypocrisy” is not simple wrongdoing, but rather the revealed individual contradiction between legitimate choice (shopping) and illegitimate choice (anything besides shopping). It is as if the rioter wearing Nikes (probably dumpstered or bought used in a thrift store, in any case) stupidly missed his one legitimate chance to voice his disapproval of the company by not buying their shoes, which is why he ended up so confused as to be smashing windows, which in turn explains why everyone else was probably rioting as well. Besides being a rather simple reading of riots, such an explanation seeks to reassert the idea of society as nothing more than the simple aggregation of individual preferences; an ascription that leaves no room for collective political action against an institution, which a riot would rather obviously seems to be. If anything, such bewildered “explanations” indicate that riots still possess a great deal of power, exactly because they are so inexplicable within these dominant frameworks and may actually work to call them into question.
Civil Society as Institutionalized Dissent
Of the various developments in the incapacitation of dissent that have undercut the power of social movements to challenge the status quo, none are quite as insidious as those developments that claim to represent and speak for the same concerns that movements do or even to speak for the movements themselves. The neoliberal era has witnessed an astronomical growth in the nonprofit sector: from 50,000 organizations designated by the IRS with charity status in 1953 to over one million tax-exempt organizations in 2012.28 According to one nonprofit advocacy group, “If the nonprofit sector were a country, it would have the seventh largest economy in the world…the nonprofit arts and culture industry generates $166.2 billion in economic activity every year.”29 Structurally, the more “progressive” among these organizations often operate by grafting the revolutionary symbolic branches of the 1960s and 1970s struggles to a consistent trunk of pluralist-prejudice approaches. The words and slogans of the nonprofit sector—not to mention the participants themselves—are often deceptive carryovers of the radical aspirations of past disruptive social movements, but they are ultimately and unavoidably beholden to the organization’s funding cycle, and hence to the political agendas of the funders themselves. What recent scholars have termed the “Nonprofit Industrial Complex” (NPIC) has been a central cause of the disruptive deficit, a fact that today’s social movements must (and do) consciously confront.
An instant classic on the topic, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, by the INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence collective, has brought together a watershed and widely referenced collection of essays bearing out this analysis.30 The history of the collective illustrates the same tensions they came to write about. INCITE! began in 2000 in an attempt to bring together efforts to end endemic domestic violence within communities of color and state violence targeting these same communities. Simultaneously taking on both institutionalized feminist groups that collaborate and legitimize racist institutions like the criminal justice system and organizations that claim to fight racism while ignoring endemic violence directed against women of color, the collective has continued to courageously put themselves squarely in the midst of the deepest contradictions of our time. In their first several years, INCITE! put on a series of well-funded national seminars and authored a widely acclaimed book that gathered the experiences of women of color organizing against the intersection of domestic and structural violence. However, when one of their key sponsors, the Ford Foundation, learned of their outspoken support for Palestinian liberation, their endowment was withdrawn, and they were forced to replace their funding through grassroots efforts. This dynamic revealed to the collective’s members the stifling effect of foundation dependency and motivated them to publish The Revolution Will Not Be Funded anthology. The book is
not particularly concerned with particular types of non-profits or foundations, but the non-profit industrial complex…as a whole and the way in which capitalist interests and the state use non-profits to [1] monitor and control social justice movements; [2] divert public monies into private hands through foundations; [3] manage and control dissent in order to make the world safe for capitalism; [4] redirect activist energies into career-based modes of organizing instead of mass-based organizing capable of actually transforming society; [5] allow corporations to mask their exploitative and colonial work practices through “philanthropic” work; [and 6] encourage social movements to model themselves after capitalist structures rather than to challenge them.31
At their most innocuous,
