Introduction

People organize together because there are things they want to do that they cannot do alone — and that the market will not do for them. A sports club, a community garden, a choir, a tenant association, a solidarity campaign: at their best, these are forms of cooperation that exist because people value them, governed by the people who do the work. The Dutch language preserves a distinction that matters here: a vereniging is an association governed by its members; a stichting, goed doel [good cause] or nonprofit is almost always a foundation or charity run by professionals. Most people intuitively understand the difference — and prefer the first.

But the conditions that sustain member-governed organizations have been eroding for decades. This article draws on the Netherlands — though the dynamics it describes are not specific to it — where for much of the twentieth century, the pillarized system (verzuiling) embedded political activity in organizations that addressed multiple needs simultaneously: community, identity, mutual aid, education, and daily social life. Depillarization destroyed this from the 1960s onward, and what replaced it was different. Roughly 40% of the Dutch population still reports doing volunteer work at least once a year, across some 150,000 associations and a comparable number of foundations.^[1] But since the disappearance of the pillars and the professionalization of politics, most volunteer work is done in a depoliticized fashion even when the topics are directly politically relevant.^[2] And nowadays it's true across the board that working people are barely politically active, especially when they have children — partly because of justified frustration with professionalized and unresponsive political parties, partly because rising work pressure, housing costs, and the erosion of social infrastructure leave little room for political engagement.^[3]

That frustration points to something structural. The professionalized organizations that increasingly dominate this landscape — the stichtingen and goede doelen of paragraph one, but also professionalized membership organizations and unions — are what the rest of this article calls NGOs. The argument it develops is that the problems with them are not merely strategic — not just a matter of wrong tactics or insufficient radicalism. Professionalization produces class relations within movements: credentialed intermediaries who exercise power over constituencies, justified by the same meritocratic reasoning that sustains class rule everywhere. That is a different kind of problem than the usual calls for 'better strategy' or 'more political will' can address.

What are NGOs?

Non-governmental organization is an extremely broad term — it covers basically everything that isn't a direct part of government or the private sector. In this article I'll focus on organizations with socio-political or advocacy goals: environmental organizations, animal welfare charities, trade unions, political organizations, and the foundations that fund them. But to understand the current landscape, we first need to understand what it replaced.

What today's socio-political NGOs have in common, functionally, is that they occupy an intermediary position: between the state and popular constituencies, between capital and the people affected by its operations, between funders and 'target populations.' This intermediary position is what makes them politically significant. But this was not always the dominant organizational form. For most of the twentieth century, the Netherlands had something very different.

The history of this organizational landscape is inseparable from verzuiling — the pillarized system that, from the late nineteenth century until roughly the 1960s, organized Dutch society into parallel institutional universes along confessional and ideological lines: Catholic, Protestant, socialist, liberal. The socialist pillar came first, modeled on the comprehensive working-class infrastructure that labor movements across Europe were building in this period — the party, the union, the cooperative, the newspaper, the cultural association, all interlocking. Catholic and Protestant elites responded by constructing their own pillars to retain the loyalty of their constituencies against the pull of class organization; the liberal pillar followed the same logic from the other direction. Verzuiling, in other words, originated in class struggle: it was the institutional form that competing social forces gave to the contest over who would organize working people's lives.

Whatever its other problems, verzuiling embedded political activity in organizational structures that addressed multiple needs simultaneously. Each pillar provided cradle-to-grave infrastructure — schools, hospitals, unions, newspapers, broadcasting, sports clubs, housing associations — governed by its own community. This meant not just advocacy on a single issue but community, identity, mutual aid, education, and daily social life, all within institutions that the community itself controlled. This is what made the pillars powerful as competing solidarities — they didn't just represent their constituencies, they organized substantial parts of their members' lives.

Depillarization, which accelerated from the 1960s onward, destroyed this infrastructure without replacing it. The organizations that emerged in its wake were structurally thinner: single-issue, professionally managed, funded by grants and donations rather than by member dues, and independent from the communities they claimed to serve. Most of the socio-political NGO landscape as it exists today took shape after the pillars crumbled — and it took shape in the image of professionalized advocacy rather than community-controlled organization.

A special type of NGO that has played an ever-larger role in structuring this landscape is the charitable foundation — nonprofit capital funds established by members of the propertied class and by corporations. These have existed since the late nineteenth century, but their influence expanded dramatically from the 1980s onward, as neoliberalizing governments privatized public services and shed social responsibilities. Foundations like the Triodos Foundation, the Philips Foundation, the Shell Foundation, and Stichting de Verre Bergen^[4] stepped into the resulting gap — not as neutral benefactors but as actors with interests of their own: sheltering wealth from taxation, rehabilitating corporate reputations, and shaping the political landscape by making conditional grants to organizations that meet their criteria. The foundations don't simply fund existing movements. They actively select which organizations grow and which don't, rewarding professionalization, quantifiability, and political moderation while starving organizations that refuse those terms. Understanding this supply side is essential for understanding why organizations adapt as they do.^[5]

How do NGOs operate?

NGOs with socio-political goals overlap significantly with what political parties do — especially when parties still had extra-parliamentary wings. This overlap has narrowed as both worlds have professionalized. Revolving doors between NGO leadership, party politics, and the private sector mean that more and more of the people running these organizations — and the parliamentarians who oversee them — are career professionals who have never done anything other than parliamentary, lobbying, and organizing work. The result is an increasingly closed ecosystem in which the same class of credentialed professionals cycles between positions in government, party politics, and civil society.

While many NGOs are still membership organizations, a large proportion of the better-known socially and politically active ones are structured as foundations. From the early 1980s onward, many organizations rapidly began to 'professionalize,' hoping to increase their impact and attract additional funding. This happened in a changing funding landscape: governments were simultaneously cutting public services and expanding subsidy programs that channeled money to organizations willing to deliver those services on the state's terms, while corporations and charitable foundations took on an increasingly active 'social' role, showing a strong preference for organizations with private, apolitical, and/or right-wing orientations. The expanding university system fed the process: ever more graduates looking for jobs that matched their social commitment and 'professional' education level found them in the growing nonprofit sector.^[6]

The commodification of care work compounded the process. The process has deep roots — domestic service, nursing, and teaching were already gendered and stratified occupations long before the welfare state formalized them — but the acceleration since the 1980s is distinctive. As neoliberalizing governments privatized public services and pushed women into the labor market, more and more people, disproportionately women, were pulled into paid work in healthcare, education, social work, and youth services, where their labor is disciplined by market logic and institutional funding requirements. In earlier decades, some of this work was done by volunteers within pillarized organizations or local care structures — though that volunteer work was itself unevenly distributed, weighted toward women and toward the middle class within each pillar. As those structures disappeared and women entered paid employment in large numbers, the pool of people available for unpaid organizational work shrank — while those doing similar work for a living became dependent on the professionalized organizations that employ them.

The result was depoliticization. Organizations grew dependent on funding streams that all demanded moderation: government subsidies came with reporting requirements, performance targets, and the implicit expectation that funded organizations would not challenge the policy frameworks that sustained them; foundation grants and corporate sponsors demanded political respectability and measurable results. In the Dutch case, government funding is the larger channel — many prominent NGOs depend more on ministry subsidies and municipal contracts than on private donors. But the effect is the same regardless of source: leadership oriented itself toward funders rather than constituents. And as more people were employed by these growing organizations, the stakes of alienating any funder rose: keeping the job mattered more as social safety nets eroded and costs of living increased.

We tend to associate this professionalization primarily with foundations and national organizations like Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth Netherlands)^[7] or Greenpeace.^[8] But something comparable happened at membership organizations like the Vegetarian Society, and even at a political party like the SP — where the national organization increasingly reduced members to audiences for mobilizing campaigns and photo-op stunts, even as some local chapters retained a more participatory culture. The pattern holds across organizational types: members became less and less involved in actual organizational work, public actions grew increasingly tame over the past 30 years, and an ever-larger share of activism now takes place behind the scenes and through 'polite' and 'civilized' forms like petitions, lobbying, referenda, letter-writing campaigns, and demonstrations.^[9]

Professionalization also narrowed what organizations fight for. Single-issue campaigns can be wrapped up quickly, making it easier to claim successes — and allowing more 'specialized' organizations to coexist, each with their own niche, their own board, and their own staff who can put it on their résumés. The preference for 'low-hanging fruit' follows the same logic: animal welfare organizations, for instance, scan the trade literature for innovations that increase industry profitability while theoretically improving welfare, then campaign for their adoption. The industry gets regulations it wanted anyway plus the claim that 'self-regulation works'; the organization gets a 'win' for its marketing materials and fundraising letters. Everyone benefits except the animals. And the cycle is self-reinforcing: moderate goals are easier to fund — whether by government, by foundations, or by corporate sponsors — funded organizations hire more staff, more staff means more livelihoods dependent on continued funding, and continued funding means continued moderation. The bigger questions — like whether your 'activism' is helping the industry grow — go unasked because asking them threatens the jobs.

The cumulative effect is that the horizon of the possible shrinks — for members, for volunteers, and for political organizations that increasingly got stuck in reactive mode, demonstrating in support of lobbying campaigns if they formed at all.

The common mechanism across these cases: the shift from organizing to advocacy follows predictably from any organizational feature that decouples the organization's material survival from its members' active participation — whether through grant dependency, automatic dues checkoff, or the replacement of activism with donation. Once the organization can reproduce itself without the membership doing anything, the membership becomes an audience rather than an agent, and the staff whose positions depend on the decoupled revenue stream develop interests in maintaining the arrangement.

What's happening here goes beyond 'bad strategy.' The credentialed NGO professional who controls access to resources, who claims authority on the basis of expertise, and who derives income and status from an intermediary position between funders and 'target populations,' exercises power over others without meaningful reciprocity. The reasoning used to justify that position is a circular logic in which the expert believes they are better qualified to make decisions than volunteers or members, and in which the results of those decisions are then cited as evidence that the expert is indeed indispensable — the meritocratic reasoning the introduction named.

This is not a new observation. The INCITE! collective's The Revolution Will Not Be Funded (2007) identified what they call the Nonprofit Industrial Complex: a set of symbiotic relationships linking state and ruling-class control with the management of social movements. Dylan Rodríguez argues in that collection that the NPIC constrains not just what organizations do but what they can imagine doing — that it functions as an epistemology, not just an institution. And Robert Allen documented the mechanism in 1969, showing how the Ford Foundation systematically coopted the Congress of Racial Equality by channeling it from confrontation into managed 'community development.' The analysis in this article builds on that work and extends it by identifying meritocratic reasoning as the specific ideological mechanism through which the class relations within movements are sustained and justified.

Jane McAlevey's research on US labor organizing provides the vocabulary for what happens in this process. McAlevey distinguishes between advocacy (professionals act on behalf of a constituency that remains passive), mobilizing (staff direct existing supporters toward actions the staff have designed), and organizing (agency rests with a continually expanding base of ordinary people who develop the power analysis, design the strategy, and lead escalating collective action themselves). What this article describes as 'professionalization' is, in McAlevey's terms, the structural shift from organizing to advocacy — from member agency to staff agency. This distinction matters because it reframes the problem: the issue is not that NGOs pursue the wrong goals or use the wrong tactics, but that their organizational model places agency in the hands of professionals rather than the constituency, making certain kinds of demands — the ones that require sustained, mass-based disruptive power to win — structurally unreachable regardless of anyone's intentions.

Professionalization is not only an internal organizational process driven by funding incentives. It is also deliberately imposed. Choudry and Kapoor's comparative research documents how 'NGOization' functions as a tool of neoliberal governance across the Global South and North alike: states channel dissent into manageable institutional forms by funding professionalized organizations and marginalizing those that refuse the terms. The Dutch polder model is a particularly refined version of this: it doesn't repress movements so much as absorb them, offering a seat at the table in exchange for giving up the capacity to overturn it.

There is a gender dimension here too. As NGOs professionalize, an internal division of labor emerges that mirrors broader societal patterns: 'strategic' work — policy, lobbying, fundraising, media contact — is typically done by the (usually more highly educated, more often male or 'professionally' socialized) paid staff, while care and maintenance work — administration, volunteer coordination, event organizing, the emotional labor of community-building — falls disproportionately to female staff and unpaid volunteers. The same division repeats itself along ethnic lines: organizations that claim to stand up for marginalized groups are often led by white professionals who justify their position on the basis of their credentials and 'networks,' while the people they claim to serve have little influence over the organization's direction. That this is rarely named as a class problem — and almost always framed as a 'diversity issue' — is itself part of the problem.

Some examples

The *-beweging (the *-movement)

This network was set up in 2023 by the foundation De Goede Zaak (DGZ, roughly: 'The Good Cause'). It was originally planned with the 2025–26 elections in mind but was rolled out on an accelerated timeline after the fall of the Rutte IV cabinet. DGZ describes itself as a 'network organization' that brings other organizations together.

The Dutch name is a wildcard: the * stands for all sub-movements at once — LGBTQ+, environmental and climate, feminism, anti-racism, class struggle, and animal rights. DGZ says they took this initiative because traditional political parties barely organize people anymore and seem to have little interest in building relationships with unions, social organizations, and movements beyond backroom deals and lobbying.

The goal was to bring 'left' and 'progressive' organizations together and forge a network to push the left side of parliament further left. To this end, they approached a large number of social organizations in mid-2023. They presented a largely finished proposal full of radical-liberal demands 'with room for feedback.' Under two weeks later the 'final' version was emailed, considerably less concrete in its demands. The *-movement referred to their website for the definitive text.

Beyond the objections to the tail-wagging-the-dog political tactics and the sloppy execution, what happened here is the meritocratic dynamic described above in organizational form. A small group of paid professionals at a foundation — without a base, without a mandate, without a democratic structure — took it upon themselves to set the agenda for a broad coalition of organizations they did not represent. They designed a near-finished proposal, presented it as 'open for feedback,' and expected the rest to follow. Meritocratic reasoning always contains an implicit claim about the incapacity of those being managed — what Kant called the 'immaturity' that authority figures attribute to those they govern in order to justify governing them. Here that logic takes organizational form: we see the big picture, we know what the movement needs, you may respond within our framework. That the proposal had some genuine radicalism in its demands doesn't make this less problematic — it makes the dynamic more visible, because it shows how the claim of political urgency is used to obscure the lack of democratic legitimacy. In McAlevey's terms, this wasn't even mobilizing — it was pure advocacy: professionals designing an agenda for other professionals, with no constituency involved at any stage. The people the *-beweging claimed to unite were never consulted, never organized, never asked what they needed. They were the absent referent that justified the professionals' work.

The initiative appears to have been stillborn. The 2024 annual report doesn't mention it at all. DGZ's normal work is running an online petition platform — the *-beweging was the exception, an unusual attempt at coalition-building. That it was dropped without public reflection on why it failed or what was learned suggests the organization has returned to what it knows: mobilizing email lists, not building relationships between organizations.

The standard explanation for the failure — the plan was too vague, the demands too radical for the intended coalition — is not wrong but incomplete. The demands now on their site are almost all procedural: 'supporting coalition partners and allies,' 'conducting a shared lobbying effort' aimed at 'the parties on the left side of the spectrum.'^[10] But the question of why the organizations they approached refused to commit to anything more substantive deserves a sharper answer than 'too busy' or 'doesn't fit the mission.' The NGO professionals who were approached had material interests in refusing. Joining an openly political coalition threatens the claim to apolitical expertise on which their fundraising depends. It jeopardizes funding relationships — donors and foundations want 'quantifiable results' on one circumscribed issue, not political positioning in a broad left front. And it undermines organizational autonomy: joining a coalition you don't control means losing control over your own narrative and agenda. These aren't practical objections — they're class interests: the positional interests of professionalized staff in preserving their position, their funding relationships, and their claim to expert status.

DGZ's proposal — despite explicitly covering feminism, anti-racism, and LGBTQ+ rights — also nowhere reflected on the question of who was actually at the table when it was being designed and on whose behalf they were speaking. A coalition that claims to unite 'all sub-movements' but was designed by the staff of one foundation reproduces precisely the pattern it claims to want to break: professionals speaking on behalf of others without involving them, and treating the absence of those others not as a problem but as a practical inevitability.

Extinction Rebellion (XR)

XR emerged in the vacuum left by the professionalization of environmental and climate NGOs. Organizations like Milieudefensie and Greenpeace still mobilize — they organize marches, stage direct actions, run petition campaigns — but these are staff-directed events within an advocacy model, and for a generation radicalized by the climate crisis, they feel wholly inadequate. That XR filled this gap is itself evidence of the problem this article describes: when existing organizations offer only mobilizing within tightly controlled parameters, the demand for more confrontational collective action doesn't disappear — it finds other outlets, often less structured and more volatile ones.^[11]

In March 2023, the Volkskrant published an interview with a departing XR 'leader'^[12] that laid out XR's internal organization. Although many in the organization were angry about this interview, they didn't really dispute its substance. The story described how the organization deliberately doesn't use open elections for leadership roles and instead assigns people through informal lobbying. In one sense this is logical — it's not a membership organization to begin with. But the question is why you would organize a serious organization this way, when all structural decisions were made by others and responsibilities are oddly divided across multiple opaque 'circles.'

Two features of XR's design compound this. First, the organization uses short terms for key functions, partly to protect against burnout — but this means people cycle out before they've had time to reflect critically on the organizational structure, let alone change it. Institutional memory stays with the informal core, not with the rotating officeholders. Second, XR delegated its multi-year strategy to a small group of insiders, after which everyone else was expected to throw themselves into 'execution.' The combination concentrates strategic thinking in a self-selected few while treating the rest of the organization as a delivery mechanism. Third, because XR has no formal membership and no democratic structures, there is no mechanism through which this concentration of power could be challenged — accountability requires a constituency with standing to demand it, and XR's design ensures no such constituency exists.

What's happening here is more than organizational sloppiness. XR's informal leadership model — no open elections, short rotation cycles, strategy delegated to insiders — systematically selects for people who have time: students, the unemployed, and those who don't need to work for a living. This is a selection mechanism, not a coincidence. The people who can show up most often, stay latest, and take on the most responsibilities are the ones who end up in positions of influence — not because they're more committed, but because their material circumstances allow it.

The class dimension emerges once this selection is normalized. People who are selected come to see their availability as evidence of their greater commitment or ability, while the structural reason — that they can afford to be there — goes unmentioned. This is meritocratic logic in its purest form: unequal access reinterpreted as a difference in merit. None of this impugns the intentions of the people who take on these roles — most of them are genuinely committed and work hard. The problem is that the organizational structure makes their class position invisible to them and to the organization, and that invisibility is what allows the selection to reproduce itself unchallenged.

The reliance on people with 'free' time is not unique to XR — it's a structural problem across the left. Proletarianization and depillarization have together eliminated most of the institutional bases from which working people once organized: the pillarized associations, the neighborhood structures, the workplace cultures that sustained collective action between upheavals. What remains are campuses — where the social role permits freedom and detachment, shared frustrations concentrate, and the costs of involvement are lower when you don't yet have dependents or a career to protect. But student activism is inherently fragile, because it depends on a life stage that ends. Movements that rely on a constantly turning-over student base cannot accumulate institutional memory, which creates exactly the vacuum that professionals fill. The pattern feeds NGOization directly: each cohort of graduates either drops out of politics or enters the professionalized sector, carrying energy but not continuity.

One consequence of XR's approach is that it treats participants in many respects as extras, and fails to retain the majority. In McAlevey's terms, this is a textbook mobilizing organization. XR seems to care little about this, which on the one hand makes it difficult for the organization to grow, and on the other causes the remaining core to start seeing themselves as an elite that has to 'do it,' while telling themselves it's fine because they accept Erica Chenoweth's widely cited claim that resistance by '3.5% of the population' is enough for social change — without ever asking how meaningful the 'change' was that serves as evidence for that claim.^[13] This in turn encourages the organization to fixate on forms of action that mean nothing to 95% of the population, such as occupations and blockades during working hours.

Who does the logistical and care work that makes XR's spectacular actions possible — the cooking, the emotional support, the legal coordination, the cleanup? These roles are largely invisible precisely because XR's self-image centers on the dramatic public action. If the pattern holds, we should expect this invisible work to fall disproportionately to women and to go unrecognized in the informal status hierarchies that determine who gets selected for leadership roles. I don't have the data to confirm this for XR specifically, but the question needs asking — and the fact that XR's own organizational reflections appear to never ask it is itself telling.^[14]

From abolition to management: the animal movement

The animal movement — in the broad sense, including its different wings and how they relate to each other — illustrates the professionalization dynamic with unusual clarity, because the gap between what the movement was founded to do and what its organizations actually pursue is so wide. I'm drawing primarily on the American situation, both because it's been better researched — particularly in Corey Lee Wrenn's Piecemeal Protest — and because most of the 'charities' also raise money in Europe and organizational models regularly cross the Atlantic.^[15] The movement has roots in resistance to animal testing and slaughter industry conditions,^[16] and in membership organizations promoting vegetarianism and veganism — the Dutch Vegetarian Society has existed since 1894, the Dutch Vegan Association since 1979. Alongside these, action groups focused on 'animal liberation' through sabotage, destruction, and direct confrontation emerged from the 1970s onward. What has proliferated since, however, is something different: hundreds of professionalized charities focused on 'welfare improvements' for specific species, each occupying a narrow niche. "Four Paws" rescues bears, big cats, and orangutans — not the billions of four-legged animals on farms. "Bird Protection" has nothing to say about the billions of chickens, turkeys, and ducks in agriculture. Sea Shepherd opposes catching whales and tuna but takes no position on other marine animals; its founder says animal agriculture is fine "because no protected species die from it."^[17] The species-specific framing allows each organization to claim a domain, attract donors, and avoid the question that connects all of them: why some animals count and others don't.

What Wrenn documents in detail is that professionalization is not something that simply happened to this movement from outside. It is an internal process with identifiable stages, driven by the material interests of the people who lead it. The trajectory is remarkably consistent across organizations: a grassroots collective achieves nonprofit status; it begins accepting grants and cultivating donors; its mission language shifts from 'rights' and 'abolition' to 'suffering' and 'compassion'; it abandons veganism for 'veg' or 'plant-based'; it reframes activism as donation; it treats democratic participation as inefficient; and it marginalizes radical critics as 'divisive' or 'unrealistic.'

The case of Compassion Over Killing makes this process visible in almost laboratory fashion. In the late 1990s, COK published a newsletter called The Abolitionist. Its mission statement declared that exploitative institutions "are inherently unethical, no matter how they may be modified, and must therefore be abolished." It celebrated illegal direct action, trained activists in civil disobedience, and maintained an editorial section open to opposing viewpoints. By 2002, the newsletter had become a glossy magazine. By 2003, the leadership had replaced references to veganism and rights in the mission statement with vegetarianism and cruelty. The 'Try Vegan' campaign became 'Try Veg.' The 'Vegan Starter Guide' became the 'Vegetarian Starter Guide.' The abolitionist mission statement disappeared. The editorial section disappeared. Support for direct action disappeared. In its place: reformist campaigns against factory farming, cooking recipes featuring sponsored products, and campaigns to get vegan menu items into Subway restaurants — presented without any explanation of why this was relevant to animal liberation, because by this point no such explanation was expected. COK's founder ended up working for the Humane Society of the United States, later explaining that he had been drawn by "the opportunity to access more resources and a larger platform." The resources and the platform had become the point.

Vegan Outreach followed a parallel trajectory. In 1998 its mission statement declared that "each sentient animal has a right to his or her body and life" and committed to promoting "the lifestyle of veganism." After incorporating as a nonprofit in 2007, this became promoting "living so as to contribute to as little animal suffering and death as possible." The newsletters thinned from seasonal to annual publication, serving solely as fundraising tools. The organization began telling supporters "You don't need to start a group" — just donate, and let the professionals handle it. The diversity of skills and resources that volunteers might bring went untapped as the organization squeezed all participation into its single branded tactic: leafleting at college campuses with its own materials.

This redefinition of activism as donation is not incidental — it is structural. PETA nominally asks supporters to go vegan — a genuine ethical commitment — but in practice this message is buried under the real ask, which is money: donation links are embedded in every page, every email, every campaign update. FARM, which began with sit-ins at slaughterhouses, now tells supporters: "You didn't even have to leave the couch." The shift from protest to patronage is the logical endpoint of professionalization: the organization needs donors more than it needs activists, because donors sustain the staff positions that are now the organization's real purpose. The organization replaces democratic participation — which might produce demands the staff can't control — with consumer participation, which produces revenue the staff can.

This trajectory is not specific to the animal movement. As noted earlier, Allen documented the identical pattern in CORE in 1969 — the same shift from confrontation to managed accommodation, driven by the same foundation funding mechanism. What Wrenn documents for COK and Vegan Outreach in the 2000s, Allen documented forty years earlier. The pattern is not sector-specific. It is a consequence of what happens when organizations become financially dependent on the class whose interests they were formed to challenge.

The gendered dimensions of professionalization are visible in this movement with unusual clarity. The 1990 March for Animals — a founding event for the modern movement — was majority female in attendance, but almost all speakers were male. Feminists for Animal Rights, which maintained feminist principles and abolitionist politics, struggled for fifteen years to achieve nonprofit status and folded within two or three years of getting it — because maintaining radical feminist commitments was incompatible with the conservative donor base that professionalization requires. More broadly, Wrenn documents how charges of 'emotionality' are systematically used to silence radical critics (who are disproportionately women), while 'pragmatism' — the depoliticized, male-coded professional style — is embraced as the movement's self-image.

Meanwhile, professionalized organizations appropriate radical language — 'animal rights,' 'liberation,' 'abolition' — while emptying it of content. They use radical symbols for fundraising resonance while pursuing welfare reform in practice. Anyone who points out the gap is dismissed as divisive. The circularity is applied to language itself: the organization claims the radical label to attract support, then uses that support to justify the moderate approach, and cites the moderate approach's 'results' as proof that the label is deserved.

The emergence of 'metacharities' like Animal Charity Evaluators has added another layer to this dynamic. These organizations position themselves as objective arbiters of which nonprofits are 'effective' and worthy of support. Their staff are heavily networked with nonprofit elites and their criteria structurally exclude radical and grassroots approaches — which don't produce the kind of quantifiable, donor-friendly 'results' that the evaluation framework measures. The research they produce is circular: validating the professionalized method using metrics designed to measure the professionalized method. Metacharities thus function as credentialing mechanisms for the professionalized bloc, lending the appearance of scientific legitimacy to what is in fact a self-serving consensus.

There is a structural explanation for why professionalized animal organizations calibrate to the specific targets they do — Subway vegan patties, cage-free pledges, Meatless Mondays — rather than to the demands the movement was founded to pursue. The power an organization needs to win a demand is proportional to what it costs the opponent to concede. Adding a vegan option to a fast-food menu costs the chain almost nothing; it may even open a new market segment. That is a low-concession-cost demand, winnable through the methods professionalized organizations have: media campaigns, corporate negotiations, consumer pressure. Abolishing animal agriculture — or even substantially restricting it — would cost the industry its existence. That is a high-concession-cost demand, and winning it would require the kind of sustained, mass-based disruptive power that only organizing can generate: not staff directing supporters, but a continually expanding base of people with the power analysis, the social infrastructure, and the demonstrated collective willingness to impose real costs on opponents who refuse to concede. Professionalized organizations structurally cannot generate this power, because they have replaced member agency with staff agency. They choose moderate targets because moderate targets are the only ones their organizational model can reach — and this will reproduce itself in any movement that makes the shift from organizing to advocacy.

The state's role in this domain is worth specifying, because it differs from the general pattern. Animal welfare standards are codified in law and enforced (however weakly) through state regulation — the state does not need NGOs to manage animal exploitation on its behalf. What the state does is set the legal floor, which professionalized organizations then campaign to raise by increments. The result is that moderate organizations position themselves as relevant by lobbying for changes the industry was often prepared to accept anyway, while radical organizations that challenge the legality of animal use itself face marginalization — and in some cases active state-industry cooperation to pressure moderates into policing radicals on the state's behalf.

Consider, against this backdrop, Temple Grandin — the well-known zoologist who presents herself as deeply concerned about animals. She put her empathic abilities to work 'for the animals' by designing slaughterhouses in which animals are led more docilely and with less stress to their death. As a result, supposedly fewer carcasses need to be discarded, they can be sold at higher prices, and the industry can market its mass-killing factories as 'designed by Temple Grandin.' Grandin's position is a textbook case of meritocratic circular logic: her expertise as a zoologist justifies the compromise with industry, and the compromise with industry confirms her status as an indispensable expert — while the animals are still being killed. Or consider the ban on 'battery cages,' pushed through with the help of the 'animal welfare lobby' on the grounds that it was better for chicken welfare. What replaced the small cages is a single large enclosure per barn — marginally more space per bird, offset by increased aggression from crowding unfamiliar animals together — plus a small door leading to a tiled area that counts as 'outdoor.' The chickens are still confined, still debeaked, and still killed after a year and a half to two years of laying. The reform changed the container, not the condition.

The Netherlands has its own version of this ecosystem. The Dierenbescherming (Animal Protection Society) runs the Beter Leven label — a star-rating system printed on animal products that grades the degree of suffering involved, from one star (marginally less brutal) to three (supposedly acceptable). Wakker Dier ('Woke Animal') campaigns for supermarkets to phase out the lowest-tier products. The shared premise is that animal use is legitimate and the only question is how much suffering consumers are willing to pay a premium to avoid. This is the professionalized welfare model at its most explicit: the organizations position themselves as consumer guides to ethical purchasing, not as challengers of the system that produces the suffering in the first place.

The WWF operates at a different scale but illustrates the same dynamic in its most extreme form. In the Global South, WWF-managed nature reserves have promoted birth control programs — including sterilization — for indigenous populations living near protected areas. Its anti-poaching operations in India have resulted in local inhabitants being wrongly accused of poaching, tortured, and in some cases killed by park guards who state on camera that they are authorized to shoot 'unwanted people.'^[18] What justifies this is the familiar meritocratic claim: expert conservationists know better than local inhabitants how to manage the land those inhabitants have lived on for generations — and the lives of endangered animals are implicitly valued above those of the indigenous communities who share their habitat. The difference is that here the immaturity claim is enforced not through funding conditions or institutional pressure but through direct violence — and it is funded by the same donor ecosystem that sustains the rest of the professionalized bloc.

The cumulative effect of this organizational landscape is that a single moral question — whether it is justifiable to harm sentient beings for reasons of pleasure, convenience, and habit — gets fragmented into dozens of separate 'issues,' each managed by its own organization. The fragmentation is not accidental. It is what allows each organization to define a niche, claim expertise over it, and avoid the question that would render most of them redundant.

Prison abolition

The American^[19] prison system is a case where every dynamic this article describes — professionalized reform, entrenched institutional interests, the absorption of movements into the structures they set out to fight — played out to its most extreme conclusion. It is also a case where the left lost completely. I'm drawing primarily on Jarrod Shanahan's Captives for the New York City narrative,^[20] and on Heather Ann Thompson, Dan Berger, and Orisanmi Burton for the broader history of prisoner organizing and the state's response to it.^[21]

The context first, briefly. From the late 1960s onward, better-paid workers were moving en masse from American cities to government-subsidized suburbs,^[22] draining the urban tax base. Parts of the state were helping drug dealers introduce hard drugs into inner cities.^[23] The relative number of city residents dealing with addiction, joblessness, hopelessness, and war trauma grew sharply, while resources to address these problems shrank. Right-wing politicians responded by cracking down hard on drug use and petty theft, producing enormous growth in policing, police violence, and the prison system.^[24] This was not purely imposed from above: parts of the communities suffering most from addiction, violence, and disorder supported punitive measures — not because they were duped, but because no one was offering them an alternative that addressed the real deterioration of their daily lives. The left had no credible response to the violence people were experiencing, and law-and-order politics filled that vacuum.

What did exist, however, was a radical prisoner movement. Throughout the late 1960s and into the mid-1970s, Black Panthers, Young Lords, and affiliated organizers conducted political education, organized rebellions, hunger strikes, and work stoppages inside New York's jails. In August and October of 1970, prisoners at the Tombs and the Branch Queens House of Detention seized entire cellblocks, took hostages, and demanded to speak to the press. The October rebellion ended with prisoners flying a red, black, and green flag of black liberation from the roof and winning a signed agreement from the commissioner. In subsequent years, prisoners conducted further rebellions, escapes, and acts of organized resistance. This was not a polite reform movement — it was a direct challenge to the carceral order, rooted in revolutionary politics and connected to broader movements for black and brown liberation.

State repression (COINTELPRO, prosecutions, targeted killings of Panther leaders), internal splits within the Black Panther Party, and the broader defeat of the American radical left destroyed this movement. Reform promises did not simply "depoliticize" it. The state crushed it.

The outside solidarity infrastructure followed a different but equally instructive trajectory. After the 1971 Attica uprising, lawyers from the ACLU, the Legal Aid Society, and the National Lawyers Guild formed the Attica Brothers Legal Defense, which at its peak had offices in six cities and fifty people on staff. Community organizations provided bail and burial funds; churches, student groups, and movement figures held fundraisers. But the legal organizations channeled this radical solidarity energy almost entirely into legal defense — fighting 1,289 criminal charges, then pursuing a civil case against the state that was not settled until 2000. By the time the litigation ended, what had begun as a political solidarity movement had been converted into a professionalized legal apparatus: coordinated by attorneys, funded by bar associations, staffed by law students — managing cases on behalf of a constituency that remained, by definition, behind bars.^[25]

What took the place of both — the radical prisoner movement inside and the solidarity networks outside — was a professionalized reform apparatus. After the 1970 rebellions, Mayor Lindsay revitalized the Board of Correction and a wave of civilian organizations flooded into the jails: the Clergy Volunteer Program, the Fortune Society, the Vera Institute of Justice, the Legal Aid Society, various church groups. This was explicitly understood as reconstituting the earlier penal welfarist infrastructure, but now operated from outside the Department of Correction and dependent on DOC's cooperation for access. The reformers had no control over how the jails were actually run — they could advise, monitor, and provide services, but the guards held the operational power.

And the guards defended that power ferociously. What they were defending was not 'capitalism' — it was their autonomy, their control over prisoners' lives, their organizational power. This is a class relation in the broad sense I described earlier: institutionalized, non-reciprocal power over others, not through the wage relation but through the organizational position the guard occupies. The guards had concrete material interests in keeping the system as it was — not just because of their jobs, but because of the control, status, and autonomy those jobs gave them. Social workers and reintegration experts threatened this not merely instrumentally ('maybe we'll become redundant') but fundamentally ('our power over the daily lives of prisoners will be curtailed'). Throughout the 1970s, the guard union (COBA) fought the reform apparatus at every turn — conducting slowdowns, blocking civilian access, staging sick-outs, and eventually blockading the bridge to Rikers Island itself. The progressive politicians who had introduced the reforms saw guard resistance as a 'practical' obstacle, not as a class interest — and were caught completely off guard by its intensity and effectiveness.

What was taking shape here is what Dylan Rodríguez, writing in the INCITE! collection The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, calls the symbiosis between the Nonprofit Industrial Complex and the Prison Industrial Complex. These are not opposed systems — one reforming, the other repressing — but complementary ones. The PIC overtly represses: it cages, surveils, and kills. The NPIC manages the dissent that repression produces: it channels outrage into grant applications, translates structural demands into policy recommendations, and provides a career infrastructure for the people who might otherwise organize resistance. The two systems need each other. The PIC generates the problems — mass incarceration, prison violence, recidivism — that justify the NPIC's existence. The NPIC manages public discomfort with those problems without threatening the carceral apparatus that produces them. Rodríguez's point is not that reform organizations are cynical. It is that the structural position they occupy — funded by foundations, dependent on state cooperation for access, accountable to donors rather than to the imprisoned — makes them functionally part of the system they claim to oppose. The Vera Institute did not become an administrator of punishment because its staff were careerists. It became one because the position it occupied left no other trajectory available.

Then came the fiscal crisis of 1975, which decided the contest. Wall Street bankers refused to continue funding New York City's expenditures, forcing the city into a regime of austerity that gutted public services while leaving the carceral apparatus intact — or rather, strengthened it. The austerity regime eliminated the paid correction aides who had served as intermediaries between prisoners and the system. Clergy volunteers were pressured to absorb their duties without pay or training. The Board of Correction itself was nearly dissolved. Drug treatment programs were slashed at exactly the moment the Rockefeller drug laws were being implemented. Meanwhile, the guard and police unions, following a strategy of positioning themselves as providers of 'essential services,' escaped the worst of the cuts. By the time the fiscal crisis played out, the reform organizations that survived had become dependent on the carceral apparatus they were supposed to reform — needing DOC's permission to access the jails, needing city and foundation funding to continue operating, needing to demonstrate 'results' in terms acceptable to the law-and-order coalition that now controlled city politics.

It's worth pausing to note that the organizations that won this contest — PBA and COBA — are themselves NGOs by any definition this article uses. They are membership organizations with dues, elected leadership, lobbying operations, and a direct action tradition that put anything on the reform side to shame: wildcat strikes, bridge blockades, sick-outs, and in 1992, a full-blown race riot at City Hall where thousands of off-duty cops blockaded the Brooklyn Bridge, menaced journalists, and hurled racial slurs at the city's first black mayor. These were grassroots organizations fighting for the material interests of their members — interests that happened to include maintaining non-reciprocal power over prisoners and the communities they policed. They outcompeted the reform NGOs not because they had better arguments but because they offered their members something structurally more robust: direct defense of their autonomy, their control, and their material position. They are the competing solidarity that won, and the fact that we don't usually think of police and guard unions as 'NGOs' is itself a sign of how the category is used to obscure rather than illuminate class dynamics.

The endgame followed logically. By the late 1990s and 2000s, organizations like the Vera Institute of Justice and the Center for Court Innovation had become sophisticated partners in the administration of punishment and surveillance. The Center for Court Innovation opened specialized courts to process the flood of misdemeanor arrests produced by 'broken windows' policing, preventing these arrests from overwhelming the system. The Vera Institute oversaw electronic monitoring and 'community supervision' programs that extended carceral control beyond the jail walls. Michael Jacobson — the DOC commissioner who had overseen the militarization of Rikers under Giuliani, including the expansion of an elite squad that conducted random shakedowns and beatings — left DOC to become president of the Vera Institute, and later founded an academic institute applying neoliberal managerial principles to public-private partnerships. The revolving door between the carceral state and the nonprofit reform apparatus turned openly.

What happened here is the full arc of the dynamic this article has been describing — from radical movement through state repression through professionalized reform through fiscal crisis to institutional capture — compressed into a few decades. The people who ran the surviving organizations had stakes in the arrangement: careers, institutional prestige, funding relationships. And the reasoning that sustained their positions followed the familiar pattern: their expertise justified their intermediary role, their results justified continued funding, and anyone who questioned the arrangement was dismissed as unrealistic.

The trade union

The trade union is the case where the dynamics described above matter most — because unlike an advocacy NGO or a charitable foundation, a union literally cannot fulfill its stated function without the active collective power of its members. A union that cannot organize a credible strike threat is failing at its core function, and the failure is measurable: in wages, in working conditions, in pension terms.

The FNV — the Netherlands' largest trade union federation — illustrates this with uncomfortable clarity. On paper, a democratic organization; in practice, a werkorganisatie of two thousand paid staff holds the real power. Real contractual wages have been virtually stable since 1979; the wage share of GDP fell from 58% to 48% between 1980 and 2018; the organizing department amounts to roughly 100 people out of 2,000 staff.^[26] The pension system was hollowed out over a decade without serious resistance — and when the chair of the Seniors' sector criticized the deal publicly, the board expelled her. The trade union official is the archetypal intermediary whose position is justified by the presumed incompetence of members to represent their own interests, and whose material interests lie in maintaining the intermediary position, not in resolving the conflict it mediates — a class relation concealed by the fact that the official formally 'works for' the members. A companion essay develops this analysis in full: the founding bargain that produced the werkorganisatie, the archival evidence for how it maintained itself, the US comparative cases that show what organizing looks like when it works, and the two-problem diagnosis the FNV case demands — organizational reform without political independence is insufficient, and political independence without organizational transformation is empty.^[27]

In summary

First, the specific mechanisms differ — XR's informality produces a different kind of capture than FNV's bureaucratization — but the underlying dynamic is the same: people in intermediary positions develop material interests in maintaining those positions, and rationalize them through meritocratic reasoning. The animal movement case is especially revealing because Wrenn's research makes the stages visible: from radical grassroots collective to nonprofit status to grant dependency to mission drift to the redefinition of activism as donation — with each step rationalized by the professionals whose positions it secures. The COK trajectory, from The Abolitionist to Subway vegan patties in under a decade, is the process at its most compressed and legible.

Second, the prison case reveals that the material interests at stake aren't only about money and careers. The guards weren't primarily defending their wages. They were defending their control — their autonomy, their authority over other people's daily lives. When we talk about the class interests of NGO professionals or union officials, we should not think only of salaries and CV lines, but of status, networks, influence, and the experience of being the person who decides. These are use values that people don't give up easily, and they are invisible to an analysis that only looks at economic incentives.

Third: if professionalization keeps winning because it addresses real needs that left organizations don't — and if every case study shows the same trajectory regardless of sector or organizational form — then is there anything to be done beyond documenting the pattern?

Conclusions — how can we strengthen our own politics?

The standard organizational 'solutions' need to be understood in the light of this analysis. Term limits, rotation, de-skilling — these are sound in principle, but they treat resistance to these measures as a practical complication, when in fact it is a class interest. Rotation threatens the career of the sitting official. Democratization threatens the authority of credentialed staff. De-skilling threatens the scarcity premium of 'professionals.' These are not side effects — they are the core of the problem. And even when these measures are implemented and resistance is overcome, the companion essay on organizational design argues that they keep professionalization contestable rather than preventing it: the structural features enable reform caucuses to form and challenge incumbent leadership, but they do not prevent the professionalization pattern from re-emerging within the reform caucus itself. The honest framing is not 'if we implement these measures, the problem is solved' but 'if we implement these measures, the problem becomes cyclically contestable rather than permanent' — and the interval between reform captures may be the more useful measure of what the measures actually do.

But the analysis is incomplete without its other half. Professionalization keeps winning because it addresses a real problem: people lack the time, the energy, and the skills to do this work themselves. Under conditions of rising work pressure, stagnant wages, and the erosion of every structure that once gave working people room to organize, the professional who says 'leave it to us, just donate' is offering something that meets a genuine need. The left currently responds to NGO dominance in a largely unorganized and uncoordinated fashion — sometimes setting them up (whether or not as fronts), more often ignoring them, occasionally trying to infiltrate them. This approach, which typically involves concealing one's own politics, contributes to keeping apolitical organizations apolitical. And the problem is not limited to individual comrades losing themselves. Entire organizations do the same: even coalitions set up and led by political organizations often lean toward avoiding 'too' political demands.

The disruption dilemma

Any serious response has to address three things at once: the class dynamics professionalization produces, the material conditions that make it attractive, and the inherent tendency of formal organization to dissipate the disruptive power on which any real leverage depends. Prescriptions that amount to asking volunteers to do more with less will fail for the same reason they always have. But prescriptions that amount to building better organizations may also fail, for a different reason.

Piven and Cloward's research on poor people's movements in the United States suggests that the poor win their greatest concessions during the disruptive phase of a movement — through strikes, riots, occupations, mass refusals to comply — and that formal organizations, however well-designed, tend to channel that disruptive energy into institutional forms that dissipate it: lobbying, litigation, negotiation, and the management of a permanent organizational apparatus. In every case they study — the unemployed workers' movement, the industrial union movement, the civil rights movement, the welfare rights movement — the turn from disruption to organization coincided with the decline of the movement's actual power. The CIO captured the energy of the wildcat sit-down strikes and channeled it into union contracts that prohibited local strikes; within a decade, the unions had become more dependent on their relationship with management than on the militancy of their members. These are not failures of organizational design. They are consequences of the fact that organizational maintenance — securing funding, retaining members, managing external relationships — structurally conflicts with disruption.

This is a serious challenge. But it is not the unresolvable dilemma it appears to be — because there is a crucial distinction that Piven and Cloward do not make. These were all mobilizing organizations: professional staff directed members toward actions the staff had designed. Members showed up, followed instructions, and went home. When the staff shifted from disruption to negotiation, the members had no independent capacity to sustain disruptive action on their own, because they had never been the ones designing it. The shift from disruption to institutionalization happened smoothly precisely because the members had never held the agency in the first place.

Jane McAlevey's distinction between mobilizing and organizing cuts through this problem. What Piven and Cloward describe is not a consequence of organization as such, but of mobilizing organizations — where agency rests with staff rather than members. When unions organize in McAlevey's sense — when the members develop the power analysis, design the strategy, and lead escalating actions themselves — the Piven and Cloward pattern can be broken. Not easily, and not permanently, but demonstrably.

The Chicago Teachers Union is the strongest evidence: a rank-and-file caucus transformed a hollowed-out mobilizing organization into one capable of a nine-day strike against a powerful Democratic mayor, by building organizing infrastructure rooted in organic leaders at every school rather than in a professional apparatus. The power survived the strike because it lived in the membership's social relationships. But the case has a second phase: fifteen years later, the professionalization pattern re-emerged within the reform caucus itself — evidence that organizing keeps the problem cyclically contestable rather than solving it permanently. The companion essay on unions develops this trajectory in detail.^[28]

Kim Moody's concept of the 'militant minority' names the mechanism. What sustains disruptive capacity through institutional pressures is not organizational form per se but the presence of a politically conscious core embedded in the membership, capable of sustaining an organizing culture between upheavals. The evidence suggests that the militant minority is the decisive variable: organizations with one can sustain both organizational coherence and disruptive power; organizations without one will follow the Piven and Cloward trajectory regardless of their formal structure.

What this means concretely

This reframes what organizational design can and should do. The question is not primarily about structures — accountability mechanisms, term limits, rotation — though these matter. The deeper question is whether the organization's way of working builds a militant minority within its membership or substitutes professional staff for one. Two sets of practices distinguish organizing from mobilizing:

First, who gets identified as a leader. In mobilizing organizations, leaders are the people who volunteer first, who are already sympathetic, who are easiest for staff to work with. In organizing, the organic leaders are the people other workers naturally turn to — for advice, for help, for direction — regardless of whether they're sympathetic to the union or the movement. These are often not the most politically conscious people; they're the most socially connected. Identifying them requires what McAlevey calls 'whole-worker' engagement: reaching people through their family networks, their congregations, their sports clubs, their neighborhood relationships — the social infrastructure that exists independent of any organizational decision. When organic leaders are won over and developed, they bring their networks with them. When self-selecting activists are treated as 'the base,' the organization remains a bubble.

Second, how collective power is tested. In mobilizing organizations, actions are designed by staff and members are asked to show up. The question 'how many bodies can we turn out?' substitutes for the harder question: 'would these people actually strike?' Structure tests — escalating collective actions that ask members to take increasing risks, from signing public petitions to refusing overtime to walking out — are the organizing method's way of answering this honestly. An organization that doesn't test its own power doesn't know whether it has any, and is therefore always vulnerable to discovering at the decisive moment that it doesn't.

These are not abstract principles. They are the concrete practices that distinguish organizations that sustain disruptive power from organizations that dissipate it. They apply to unions, but they also apply to political organizations, solidarity campaigns, and any other formation that claims to represent a constituency. The FNV's werkorganisatie — two thousand paid staff mediating the relationship between the union and its million members — is what happens when neither practice is followed for decades.

The limits of importing models

There is an understandable temptation, when diagnosing these problems, to look for existing models that have resisted professionalization — and to find them in movements operating under very different conditions. The Zapatista autonomous communities, the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement (MST), Argentine unemployed workers' movements, and indigenous governance structures in North America all demonstrate that professionalization is not inevitable and that non-professionalized organizational forms can sustain themselves for decades. But these models depend on material conditions that are absent in my context and cannot be wished into existence: geographically concentrated communities with pre-existing collective governance, land-based economies that permit a degree of autonomy from wage labor, or a hostile rather than corporatist state. Importing organizational designs from Chiapas to Amsterdam faces the same problem as importing revolutionary strategy from Vietnam to the United States — a problem the US New Communist Movement's trajectory documents at painful length. The material conditions that make the model work aren't present, and no amount of organizational will can substitute for them. That is precisely the voluntarism this article's framework is designed to resist.

The models that do transfer to the Dutch context share a common feature: they operate from within existing institutions rather than building autonomous alternatives to them. The CTU rank-and-file caucus captured an existing union through internal elections and transformed its practice. Teamsters for a Democratic Union did the same over a longer period. The Dutch Kloofdichters won a board majority in the Abvakabo FNV in 2010 through exactly the same method. What distinguishes the CTU's success from the Kloofdichters' absorption is not organizational design but a strike — a structure test that proved the new model worked and made the transformation irreversible. A reform caucus that wins internal elections but cannot demonstrate power through collective action is a reform caucus whose gains can be administratively reversed.

This tells us something important about where to focus. Dutch workers are fully integrated into wage labor, the market economy, and the corporatist state. There is no territory to occupy, no subsistence economy to fall back on, no pre-existing autonomous governance structure to revive. The available lever is transformation from within — of unions, of workplaces, potentially of political organizations. The strategic task is building a militant minority within these institutions: a politically conscious core that can sustain organizing culture, identify and develop organic leaders, test collective power through escalating actions, and resist the inevitable pressures toward domestication. This is not a quick process — the CTU's transformation took two years, TDU's took decades — and it cannot be prescribed from outside. But it is the path that the available evidence supports.

Relating to the NGO ecosystem

None of this resolves the immediate question of how to relate to the existing NGO landscape. But it changes the frame. Collaboration with NGOs is useful insofar as it provides access to people we can't reach on our own, and counterproductive insofar as it absorbs our cadre into structures where they substitute for member agency rather than building it. The question is not 'should we work with NGOs' but 'does this particular collaboration help us identify organic leaders, build real relationships, and develop the collective capacity of the constituency — or does it absorb us into someone else's mobilizing apparatus?'

Part of the groundwork is thinking through how we counter the methodological single-issue mindset — how we 'de-silo' struggles in a public sphere where many organizations will defend siloing because they derive their reason for existence from it. Even when we initially succeed, we often face 'competition' from the NGO sector later when a struggle gains visibility, as it becomes attractive for left-liberals and social democrats to claim a slice of the subsidy pie or to capture existing organizations out of a desire to 'professionalize' them.

Then there's donor and foundation money. We need to find a way as a movement to put some of it to use without letting it overly influence our politics and organizational goals — while recognizing that capitalists hire staff to monitor how their money is spent. The question is whether the money flows through member-controlled structures. If not, the dynamic this article describes will assert itself regardless of intentions.

One warning is worth stating explicitly. The history of the US left includes a sustained effort — the New Communist Movement of the 1970s and 1980s — that correctly diagnosed many of the problems this article describes and threw enormous energy into solving them. Roughly ten thousand committed organizers, the most racially integrated tendency in US left history, devoted years to building organizations rooted in working-class communities of color. They failed, not because their diagnosis was wrong but because they treated organizational form as the solution — believing that building the correct kind of small organization today would produce a large revolutionary party tomorrow. Max Elbaum, a participant and historian of the movement, calls this 'miniaturized Leninism': the assumption that the difference between a sect and a mass party is merely quantitative, to be overcome by determination and correct ideas. In fact the differences are qualitative — what works for an organization of a hundred is not a scaled-down version of what works for an organization of ten thousand.

There is no recipe. What there is, is the patient work of building power from below — identifying who the organic leaders are, developing their capacity, testing collective willingness to act, and accepting that the organizational forms appropriate to each stage of this work will look different from one another.

Open questions

Thanks for reading. Several questions remain open. First: how do we build a militant minority in the Dutch context, where depillarization has destroyed most of the institutional infrastructure (churches, neighborhood associations, cultural organizations) that historically provided working people with spaces for collective life outside the workplace? Migrant communities retain some of this infrastructure, but native Dutch workers' non-workplace social networks are thinner than they once were. Second: does the dynamic play out differently in sectors I haven't covered here? Housing movements, ecological struggles, and solidarity campaigns may face different structural pressures than the examples I've discussed. Third: the article argues that professionalization produces class relations, but it has not adequately addressed the gendered and racialized dimensions of who gets professionalized and who gets pushed out. The animal movement evidence is suggestive; the other cases raise questions I haven't answered. If you have examples, ideas, or think I've got something fundamentally wrong, I'd like to hear it.

WATCH: Victim of the WWF (World Wildlife Fund)

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