What to Do About NGOs?
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.
But the conditions that sustain member-governed organizations have been eroding for decades. This article draws on the Dutch context — though the dynamic it describes is not specific to the Netherlands — 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 undermined 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 judging by the numbers, working people today 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 longterm political engagement.[3]
That frustration points to something structural. The professionalized organizations that increasingly dominate this landscape — the foundations and charities, 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 — by which I mean less the credentials or paid staff themselves than the shift in who holds agency they install — produces class relations within movements: credentialed intermediaries who exercise institutionalized, non-reciprocal power over constituencies — power held not through the wage relation but through the organizational position itself — 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.
The pillars themselves operated through hierarchical authority — condescension codes (deftigheid, tucht), episcopal or party discipline, a consociational superstructure that screened major decisions from popular view through secrecy and depoliticization — and the mature socialist pillar had already traded the early movement's organic communal breadth for institutional scale, positioning members increasingly as consumers of services rather than as participants in a face-to-face community. The SPD's party bureaucracy and Red Vienna's municipalized social infrastructure followed the same trajectory: comprehensive provision organized from above, with the membership managed rather than self-governing. A companion essay on verzuiling develops the full arc.[4] But the pillars embedded political activity in organizational structures that addressed multiple needs simultaneously: community, identity, mutual aid, education, and daily social life, all within cradle-to-grave infrastructure — schools, hospitals, unions, newspapers, broadcasting, sports clubs, housing associations. In the terms the companion essay 'Not Stages but Depths' develops through Fiske's interaction-mode ecology, what gave the pillars their reproducible organizational capacity — the part that outlived any given leadership and could not simply be staffed into being — was less the hierarchy than the communal sharing and equality matching (CS/EM — the latter the balanced, turn-taking reciprocity of roughly evened accounts) that coexisted with it: the open-ended reciprocal obligations of parish life, neighborhood solidarity, cooperative membership, and mutual aid sustained relationships that deposited organizational residue — because these relationships could not be settled up, could not be discharged through a single transaction, and therefore persisted as the connective tissue through which collective action became possible. The disciplined apparatus supplied scale and coordination; the communal substrate is what made the capacity self-renewing. The hierarchy overlaid these communal forms without wholly consuming them, which is why the pillars could generate political capacity despite their own condescension dynamics — and why the mature pillars' drift toward managing members as service-consumers was already eroding the very substrate their apparatus depended on, even as the professionalization tendencies already present within them had not yet destroyed that capacity. This is what made them 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 communal infrastructure without reproducing it durably. This was not simply an external shock to an otherwise healthy system: the pillars appear to have been undone substantially by their own success — the postwar prosperity their disciplined reconstruction produced lowered the cost of exit, and the authority forms on which pillar governance depended collapsed from within, the pillar elites facilitating rather than resisting the dissolution. (The endogenous story is developed in the companion essay; the argument here does not turn on it, since the substrate was destroyed either way.) It also removed the hierarchical authority codes that had confined and instrumentalized the communal life they overlaid. What followed was not the replacement of hierarchy with autonomy but the replacement of hierarchy-with-communal-substrate by market-pricing-without-it. The organizations that emerged in the pillars' 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. In interaction-mode terms, the substitution was specific: what replaced communal sharing and equality matching was market pricing — the professionalized NGO relating to its constituency through transactions (services rendered, donations received, grant deliverables completed) that are structurally self-liquidating. The relationship between an NGO and its 'target population' closes upon settlement as the relationship between an insurance company and its policyholder does — which is why the organizational residue the pillars deposited as a byproduct of daily communal life cannot be regenerated through professionalized advocacy, regardless of the advocates' intentions. The destruction was also gendered. The pillarized associational life that deposited organizational residue operated substantially through male-coded spaces: union halls, party branches, sports clubs, cafés. Women's CS/EM substrate ran through different institutional forms — kin networks, parish ladies' circles, neighborhood care structures, collective childcare — that were destroyed through different mechanisms: the privatized nuclear household, rising female labor force participation drawing women into the paid care sector, and suburban spatial models that eliminated the conditions for casual collective life. Depillarization therefore hit differently along gender lines. The male-coded substrate was the more institutionally legible — attached to formal organizations (unions, party branches, clubs) that left a template the professionalized landscape could rebuild itself in the image of — while the female-coded substrate, dispersed through informal kin and neighborhood forms, left no comparable organizational model. So the professionalized landscape reproduces gendered divisions less through individual bias than through what its inherited template institutionalized and what it left out: modelled on the male-coded forms, it built in the coordinating and outward-facing functions as its legible, valorized core, while the relational and care work the female-coded substrate once carried was never templated as an organizational function at all — surviving, where it survived, as unpaid maintenance. This does not exonerate individual bias so much as explain what lets it persist and take this particular shape: a division of labor the inherited form never had to institutionalize meets no organizational resistance when the surrounding society supplies it by default. The gendered division of labor inside today's professionalized organizations, discussed below, is the present-day face of that asymmetry. This was not a clean break: the professionalization tendencies already present within the mature pillars — staff managing members, expertise displacing participation, institutional scale substituting for communal depth — proliferated once the CS/EM substrate that had kept them contestable was removed. 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 market-pricing 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[5] 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.[6]
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.[7]
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)[8] or Greenpeace.[9] 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.[10]
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 to Black capitalism — funding a new elite that would manage the Black community on behalf of corporate interests. 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. Two precursors bound the claim more tightly. The observation that membership organizations tend to throw up a self-perpetuating leadership stratum is Robert Michels' 'iron law of oligarchy' (1911), and it required no concept of class; what this article adds to Michels is the specifically meritocratic logic that justifies the stratum — not merely its bureaucratic entrenchment — and the interaction-mode account of why the drift recurs and when it can be contested, which turns an 'iron law' into something cyclically contestable rather than fixed. And where Rodríguez's epistemology bounds what constituencies and organizations can imagine, meritocratic reasoning is the narrower, self-justifying logic of the intermediary's own position: expertise licenses authority, the results of that authority are cited as proof of indispensability, and the circle closes.
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. The three modes track a distinction in relational form that the companion essay 'Not Stages but Depths' formalizes through Fiske. Organizing builds and operates through communal sharing and equality matching — the organic leader who brings their network, the structure test that builds trust through shared risk, the whole-worker engagement that reaches people through relationships that cannot be settled up. Mobilizing operates through authority ranking — staff direct, members follow, the obligation is asymmetric but ongoing. Advocacy operates through market pricing — professionals transact on behalf of client-constituencies, and the transaction's completion is structurally the relationship's end. The shift from organizing to advocacy is therefore not merely a change in who holds agency but a change in the relational mode through which agency is exercised — and the relational mode determines whether the exercise deposits the organizational residue on which sustained collective power depends.
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. In the terms of this article, the Dutch polder model is a particularly refined version of this dynamic: 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. The asymmetry the inherited template installed reappears as an internal division of labor: the coordinating and outward-facing work — policy, strategy, external political representation, control over budgets and staff — is institutionalized as the paid, credentialed, promotable core, while care and maintenance work — administration, volunteer coordination, event organizing, the emotional labor of community-building — is treated as support and falls disproportionately to junior staff, to volunteers, and, within the paid tier, to women. Women hold much of the professional workforce, but the leadership — especially at the largest and best-funded organizations — and the most power-facing roles remain disproportionately male. The same de-valorization repeats 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 — the valuing of one function and the discounting of another — 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.'[11] 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 positional interests do not cancel the practical and principled reasons for refusing — declining a mandateless, near-finished proposal was also the correct response to exactly the top-down process criticized above, and an organization can refuse for practical, principled, and positional reasons at once. What betrays the positional interest is less the refusal than the shape of what these organizations were willing to affirm instead: demands that stayed procedural and single-issue, never the political commitment a broad left front would require. The class interest is positional — the stake professionalized staff have 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.[12]
In March 2023, the Volkskrant published an interview with a departing XR 'leader'[13] 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.'
Three 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. The reliance on people who have time — students, the unemployed, those who don't need to work for a living — is a filter general to all unpaid activism; formal elections would not remove it, since the time-rich can win elections and campaign for them too. What XR's informal leadership model does — no open elections, short rotation cycles, strategy delegated to insiders — is fail to counteract that filter and then launder its results as merit. This is a selection mechanism XR does not produce but does nothing to interrupt. 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 without mediation: 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. 'Not Stages but Depths' identifies two analytically distinct mechanisms behind it. The first is relational-substrate destruction: the commodification sequence shifts daily interaction from communal sharing and equality matching toward market pricing, progressively enclosing the terrain on which organization could develop — the same substitution the depillarization analysis above describes at the organizational level. The second is balance-sheet binding: the multiplication of debt obligations across commodified necessities (mortgages, student loans, medical costs, childcare) makes the cost of collective action fall on the household before it falls on the system, suppressing activism even where relational substrate survives — because disrupting any single income stream risks defaulting on all the others simultaneously, and where health insurance is tied to employment, a labor dispute becomes a medical emergency on the first day. The two mechanisms compound: 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 — while balance-sheet binding has raised the cost of action for those who retain the relational capacity to act. 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.[14] 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 XR's own organizational reflections appear never to ask it, which at least makes it a researchable question left unresearched.[15]
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 — makes the professionalization dynamic visible, 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.[16] The movement has roots in resistance to animal testing and slaughter industry conditions,[17] 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."[18] The species-specific framing allows each organization to claim a domain, attract donors, and avoid the one question that would connect them, and that none of them asks: 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 positional interests the funding environment attaches to leading such an organization — interests that select for moderation whether or not any individual leader intends it (as with XR's organizers, this impugns no one's sincerity; the mechanism is structural). What would count against the claim is a grassroots collective that took grants, hired staff, and kept its abolitionist mission while growing; Wrenn's cases do not include one, which is consistent with a structural tendency though it cannot by itself rule out that the sample was selected for consistency. 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.' In the terms the companion essay on competing solidarities develops, this is metabolization: the movement's organizational infrastructure persists while its content transforms, radical satisfiers degraded to pseudo-satisfiers, the demand converted into a system-compatible form that addresses enough of the felt need to prevent it from generating a challenge the system cannot absorb.
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 is not specific to the animal movement: it is the same pattern Allen documented in CORE in 1969 (above), forty years before Wrenn's cases — not sector-specific, but the consequence of financial dependence on the class the organization was formed to challenge.
The gendered dimensions of professionalization are visible in this movement. 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. The incompatibility between its radical feminist commitments and the conservative donor base professionalization requires is the structural reason; the ordinary hazards that kill small nonprofits — thin funding, burnout, scale — will have compounded it. 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 bias is one of measurability rather than rigged metrics: criteria that reward short-horizon, quantifiable outcomes structurally exclude approaches whose payoff is neither near-term nor countable, whatever their politics. Metacharities thus function as credentialing mechanisms for the professionalized bloc, lending the appearance of scientific legitimacy to a consensus that their own measurement choices already guaranteed.
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 expertise enrolled to legitimate an industry: her standing as a zoologist lends the compromise its authority, and the compromise in turn markets her as the indispensable expert — while the animals are still being killed. (The point is not that her expertise is circular — whether her chutes reduce stress is independently testable — but that it is put to legitimating work; and she illustrates the meritocratic motif rather than the organizational mechanism the rest of this section traces, being a consultant rather than an NGO.) 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 with its premises stated openly: 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 and shows what happens when the same dynamic is backed by direct violence. 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.'[19] 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 question — why the line between the animals that count and the animals that don't falls where it does — 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 never ask the question that would render most of them redundant.
Prison abolition
The American[20] prison system is a case where several dynamics this article describes — professionalized reform, entrenched institutional interests, the absorption of movements into the structures they set out to fight — ran their full course, alongside two the general argument does not claim to generalize: direct state repression and a fiscal shock. 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,[21] and on Heather Ann Thompson, Dan Berger, and Orisanmi Burton for the broader history of prisoner organizing and the state's response to it.[22]
The context first, briefly. From the late 1960s onward, better-paid workers were moving en masse from American cities to government-subsidized suburbs,[23] draining the urban tax base. Parts of the state were helping drug dealers introduce hard drugs into inner cities.[24] 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.[25] 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 top of the building — though the concessions Lindsay offered proved largely rhetorical, and guard reprisals against prisoner leaders followed immediately. 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 about fifty-six 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.[26]
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.
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 they won using precisely the methods this article recommends: a membership with real agency, disruptive collective action, capacity that lived in social relationships rather than in a paid apparatus. That should give pause, because it means the organizing form is politically neutral: it builds power for whoever wields it, and here it built power for reaction. That neutrality is a claim about the form, though, not a level field: the guards' win was overdetermined by two advantages the left's organizing will not share — they defended their own material position and control rather than advocating on behalf of others, and they were the state's own enforcement arm, which the fiscal crisis showed the state disposed to hear (as providers of 'essential services') where it was never disposed to hear reformers advocating for the incarcerated. Reaction did not win a fair demonstration that the form is a coin-flip; it won from inside the state, with existential stakes. What makes the left's organizing emancipatory rather than merely another competing solidarity is not the form but the content — whether the membership governs the conditions under which needs are met, and in whose interest, the distinction the companion essay on competing solidarities draws between system-serving and system-challenging organization. But 'content' is less free of form than the neutrality claim can suggest. The companion essay on organizational design specifies what the guards' content does structurally: their cohesion is built through the boundary hardening and defensive in-group/out-group coupling that essay identifies as solidarity's tend-and-defend face — a membership bound the more tightly for drawing a sharp line between those it protects and those it holds power over. On that essay's comparative finding, dimensional breadth and boundary coerciveness covary, so the reactionary valence is not bolted onto a neutral form but runs through how the boundary is drawn; the left's task is not to borrow the form and supply better content, but to hold breadth with a permeable boundary — which that essay's 3b treats as a specific achievement rather than a default the form delivers on its own. The guards are 'NGOs' in the structural sense this article uses — membership, dues, elected leadership, an intermediary position — but they sit at the opposite pole of the organizing/advocacy axis from the professionalized reformers they beat, and the non-reciprocal power they defend runs openly over prisoners rather than over a constituency they claim to represent. That we don't usually think of police and guard unions as 'NGOs,' or as practitioners of 'organizing,' is itself a sign of how both categories are 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 a specialized court to process the flood of misdemeanor arrests produced by 'broken windows' policing, preventing these arrests from overwhelming the system. 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 the CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance, which teamed up with CCI to oversee electronic monitoring and 'community supervision' programs that extended carceral control beyond the jail walls. The revolving door between the carceral state and the nonprofit reform apparatus turned openly.
What happened here compresses much of the dynamic this article has been describing — from radical movement through state repression through professionalized reform through fiscal crisis to institutional capture — into a few decades. Two of those stages, though, are specific to this case rather than general features of professionalization: the radical prisoner movement was not metabolized into moderation but crushed by force, and the reform apparatus was hollowed by a fiscal crisis rather than by its own funding incentives. This is the hostile-state variant of the dynamic — the state that crushes rather than absorbs — which is why professionalization does less of the explanatory work here than in the corporatist Dutch cases, where the state offers a seat at the table instead of a truncheon. Where the state chooses force, even genuine organizing can lose, a qualification the more hopeful passages later in this article should be read against. 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 same decoupling that turns members into an audience also has an outward face — whole sectors (IT, temp work, hospitality, retail) the union barely organizes at all. An organization that reproduces itself financially through automatic dues and contracts the state extends to non-members can survive without organizing anyone, and so it does.
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.[27] The causal reading has to be careful here: the wage share fell across the North for reasons no union's internal structure produced — European integration, the eastward enlargements, posted-work competition — so the werkorganisatie form did not cause the decline so much as leave the union without the collective power to resist it, and on pensions the companion essay shows the legal regime could not have been overturned by militancy alone. What the intermediary form determines is the capacity to respond, not the shock itself. 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 him. 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.[28]
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 NPIC literature (INCITE!, Rodríguez, Allen, Choudry/Kapoor) identified the structural position; what the cases above add is the specific ideological mechanism — the circular logic in which the credentialed professional's expertise justifies the intermediary position and the results of their decisions are cited as evidence of their indispensability. The animal movement case is especially revealing because Wrenn's research makes the stages of metabolization 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 compressed to its essentials.
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, the interaction-mode analysis explains why the trajectory is structural rather than contingent. The shift from organizing to advocacy is not merely a change in who holds agency but a change in the relational mode through which agency is exercised: from communal sharing and equality matching (open-ended, residue-depositing) to market pricing (self-liquidating, residue-destroying). This is why professionalized organizations cannot generate, through the advocacy relation, the sustained collective power that high-concession-cost demands require, regardless of the intentions or politics of the people who staff them — the operative variable is the relational mode and the locus of agency, not the 'professionalized' label as such. And it is why the professionalized form keeps persisting and dominating the reform space, which is entirely compatible with its losing every contest that actually requires disruptive power — as the prison case shows it losing to the guards: it addresses real needs through a relational mode that structurally cannot deposit the organizational capacity on which alternatives depend. The prison case cuts twice, though: the winner there was not another professionalized apparatus but an organizing formation using the left's own methods — advantaged by its position inside the state and by a membership defending its own turf rather than advocating for others. That the form built power for reaction is why the prescription to come turns on content and a permeable boundary, not on organizing as such.
This raises the question of what, if anything, can be done.
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. But positional class interest is not the only resistance these measures meet, and the difference matters for whether a politics built 'from below' can expect its constituency to want what it offers. The companion essay on distributed relational capacity identifies a second layer that operates even among members with no position to defend. Democratization does not only redistribute authority; it shifts the relational mode through which accountability, feedback, and recognition are delivered — from the impersonal metrics of market-pricing organization to the direct, unquantified register of communal sharing. People trained in market-pricing institutions often experience that directness as exposure rather than relief: the quantified screen that let them confirm their standing without relational vulnerability is withdrawn. So rotation and de-skilling threaten the official's career, while the mode-shift they presuppose asks the whole membership to give up a protection its socialization taught it to value. The first resistance is a class interest to be overcome; the second is a developmental condition to be worked with — and treating it as if it were the first, as foot-dragging or false consciousness, mistakes a design problem for a moral failing. 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. And a further mechanism reinforces the dominance: 'Not Stages but Depths' identifies an intergenerational normalization through which each generation that grows up within the professionalized organizational landscape experiences it as the natural condition rather than as a degradation. The first generation of pillar members who encountered professionalized replacements experienced the shift as a diminishment — they had the experiential reference from which to perceive the loss. By the third generation, the question 'what was lost?' has no purchase: the professionalized form is all anyone has known, and the demand for member-governed organizations appears utopian rather than restorative. The companion essay 'The Conditions of Care' identifies a reinforcing mechanism at the developmental level: the evaluative shift through which responsiveness to need is replaced by evaluation of performance installs conditional belonging and defended structure in each generation through the family. The institutional normalization (no one remembers the pillars) and the developmental installation (each generation is trained toward evaluative rather than responsive relating before any organizational socialization begins) operate simultaneously, which is why the combination is so difficult to reverse from either direction alone. 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 slowed: the interval before disruptive capacity dissipates lengthened, not the dissipation abolished. Not easily, and not permanently, but demonstrably — and whether even that much counts as 'breaking' the pattern or only deferring it is exactly what the Chicago case below forces us to ask.
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.[29]
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 the militant minority is necessary — though, as the Chicago case just showed, not sufficient: organizations without one follow the Piven and Cloward trajectory regardless of their formal structure, while organizations with one can hold coherence and disruptive power together for longer, without being immune to recapture. This claim is only non-circular if the militant minority can be identified independently of the disruptive power it is meant to explain — otherwise 'they sustained power because they had a militant minority' collapses into 'they had a militant minority because they sustained power.' What keeps it honest is that the minority has observable, pre-outcome markers — the density of identified organic leaders and the record of structure tests actually passed, both assessable before the decisive confrontation rather than read back from its result. The next section specifies these.
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.
This does not by itself discharge the second of the three requirements set out earlier — the material conditions that make professionalization attractive, the plain fact that people lack the time and energy to do this work. Whole-worker organizing and structure tests are more demanding of both, not less, and where balance-sheet binding has raised the cost of any disruption the demand does not disappear because the method is better. The wager is that organizing builds durable capacity rather than episodic effort — that it is differently costed rather than more-with-less — and that distributed relational capacity, once it exists, is carried by people who are not primarily political and so does not draw down the same scarce activist time. But that is a wager about a substrate the next section concedes must be built before it can lighten the load, which leaves the second requirement the least discharged of the three.
These practices are not emancipatory by virtue of their form. The prison case showed the same organizing methods building power for reaction — and building it more readily, because defending your own turf against an out-group is a stronger glue than solidarity across a permeable boundary, so the breadth the left needs is the harder thing to sustain, not something the method supplies on its own. And the whole prescription assumes the corporatist state that absorbs, not the hostile state that crushes: where the state chooses force, as it did in the prison case, even genuine organizing can lose. The two practices are necessary and not sufficient, and not self-justifying — what they build power for is carried by their content, not by their form.
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. One salient difference between the CTU's success and the Kloofdichters' absorption is that the CTU demonstrated power through a strike — a structure test that proved the new model worked and made the transformation irreversible — where the Kloofdichters did not; the cases differ in sector, legal regime, and scale too, so the strike is the most visible difference rather than the sole cause. 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 — where 'from within' should not be read as excluding the construction of new member-governed formations (tenant unions, workplace organizations, political formations built from scratch). That is a third path, distinct from both autonomous territorial withdrawal and the capture of existing institutions; the socialist pillar itself was built de novo out of class struggle, and the material-conditions objection above rules out only the land-based autonomy model, not new organization-building as such. The reason to centre transformation-from-within is not that building new is unavailable but that existing institutions already concentrate the constituency and the resources, whereas building new must first assemble on terrain the same commodification has thinned — the two are complementary levers, not alternatives. 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.
Beyond the militant minority
Even so, the strategy stops too early if it ends at the militant minority itself. The militant minority is the coordination layer, and coordination alone is the half of the problem that can be defeated. Concentrated capacity is targetable: a politically conscious core embedded in nothing wider than itself can be removed by removing its carriers — the recurring fate of lefts whose capacity sat in an identifiable cadre. And it is prone to the drift it forms to resist — the Chicago pattern in which professionalization re-emerges inside the reform caucus a decade on, because a minority that floats above the membership rather than being woven into it has nothing to hold it in place. What gives it durability is embedding it in distributed relational capacity: communal sharing and equality matching practiced widely enough across a constituency that the substrate regenerates itself and survives the loss of any particular cadre — woven into how people provision, care for each other, and decide, rather than carried by a designated few. So the honest framing offered at the start of this section is not the end of the story. 'Cyclically contestable' is the ceiling of the militant minority taken alone; the interval between captures lengthens — and capture stops being the whole horizon — only where the organizing rebuilds the relational substrate beneath the minority, not just a better cadre on top of it. That substrate cannot be restored from the pillarized forms that once deposited it as a byproduct; it has to be deliberately built, which is the task the first open question below names. The companion essay 'Not Stages but Depths' develops the underlying distinction — between concentrated cadre capacity, destroyed by arresting its leaders, and distributed relational capacity, which regenerates because the relational mode it depends on is practiced daily by people who are not primarily 'political' — and argues that the two have to be embedded in each other rather than chosen between.
Relating to the NGO ecosystem
The title's question — what to do about NGOs — turns out to resolve into a different one: what capacity we can build ourselves, in whose light relating to the existing NGO landscape becomes a secondary, instrumental matter. 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. But siloing does more than justify the organizations. There is an analogy with the animal charities that never ask why some animals count and others don't: the single-issue frame lets the human-facing campaigns avoid the question that would connect them too — that most of the problems they exist to fight are produced by the same class rule. Naming that common cause is what de-siloing is for, and it is what the subsidy structure most reliably selects against. 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, documents this failure in detail — a pattern that might be called '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. This article's own prescription is not exempt from that warning: the step from a militant minority inside a single institution to constituency-wide distributed capacity is itself a qualitative transition, not more of the same thing done harder, and how it is made is precisely the first of the open questions below.
There is no recipe, but the qualifications do not dissolve the positive claim. The work is concrete: identify who the organic leaders actually are, develop their capacity, test collective willingness to act through escalating risk, and weave the result into the daily relationships through which people provision, care for one another, and decide — so that what survives is not a cadre perched above a constituency but capacity the constituency carries itself. That is what a sports club, a community garden, a tenant association, or a choir already is, at its best: cooperation that exists because people value it, governed by the people who do the work. The task is to rebuild the conditions in which such forms can arise and last — and the organizational shapes appropriate to each stage of that work will differ from one another.
Open questions
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. On the remedy side the gap is partly covered elsewhere: the companion essay on organizational design develops at its 3e the apparatus this article lacks — that women's under-participation is overdetermined by the bodily-safety risk of male-coded organizational space and by the material double burden of reproductive labor, neither reducible to the meritocratic mechanism traced here, and that the answer is autonomous women's infrastructure coupled with concrete material provision (childcare on the guarderías volantes model, scheduling that does not presuppose unencumbered time) rather than diversity representation. What stays open is the descriptive question that essay does not take up: how professionalization sorts by gender and race across the specific cases above, and whether that sorting works differently from the mechanism it identifies for movement participation generally. Thanks for reading — and 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)
Bibliography
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Barron, Alice, and Sabrina Hess. "Beyond Inclusion? Perceptions of the Extent to Which Extinction Rebellion Speaks to, and for, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) and Working-Class Communities." Local Environment (2021).
Beer, Paul de, and Lisa Berntsen. "Trade Unions in the Netherlands: Erosion of Their Power Base in the Stable Polder Model." In Trade Unions in the European Union: Picking up the Pieces of the Neoliberal Challenge. Brussels: ETUI, 2023.
Berger, Dan. Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
Berglund, Oscar, and Daniel Schmidt. Extinction Rebellion and Climate Change Activism: Breaking the Law to Change the World. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Burton, Orisanmi. Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023.
Chenoweth, Erica, and Maria J. Stephan. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Choudry, Aziz, and Dip Kapoor, eds. NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects. London: Zed Books, 2013.
Elbaum, Max. Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. London: Verso, 2002.
Fiske, Alan Page. Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Human Relations. New York: Free Press, 1991.
INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, eds. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007.
McAlevey, Jane. No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Moody, Kim. On New Terrain: How Capital Is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017.
Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard A. Cloward. Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. New York: Vintage, 1977.
Schuyt, Theo, Barbara Gouwenberg, and René Hoolwerf. "Foundations in the Netherlands: Toward a Diversified Social Model?" American Behavioral Scientist 62, no. 13 (2018).
Schuur, Wijbrandt van, and Gerrit Voerman. "Democracy in Retreat? Decline in Political Party Membership: The Case of The Netherlands." In Democratic Paths and Trends, edited by Barbara Wejnert. Bingley: Emerald, 2010.
Shanahan, Jarrod. Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage. London: Verso, 2022.
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1906.
Thompson, Heather Ann. Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. New York: Pantheon Books, 2016.
Wrenn, Corey Lee. Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019.
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Meer vrijwilligers in 2022, maar nog niet terug op niveau van voor corona | CBS. The 40% figure represents a steep drop from ~50% between 2012 and 2019.
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The 40% figure is not evenly distributed across the class structure. CBS data (2018, Vrijwilligerswerk: activiteiten, duur en motieven) show that higher-educated people volunteer at significantly higher rates than lower-educated people, people with a Dutch background at much higher rates than people with a migration background, and that men and women volunteer in different sectors (women twice as active in schools and care, men in sport and youth work). The volunteer pool from which NGOs draw already skews toward the credentialed, Dutch-born middle class — which is the demographic that fills professional NGO positions. This strengthens rather than weakens the argument: the NGO landscape doesn't just compete with the left for volunteers, it draws disproportionately from a class fraction that then runs organizations claiming to act on behalf of constituencies not represented in them.
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The decline of organized political participation began earlier than this framing suggests. Dutch party membership dropped from roughly 15% of the adult population after WWII to about 4% by the 1970s — driven by depillarization — and continued falling to 2.5% by 2010 (van Schuur and Voerman, "Democracy in retreat? Decline in political party membership: The case of The Netherlands," in Wejnert (ed.), Democratic Paths and Trends, Emerald 2010). What the boomers sustained was not party organization but the residual activist infrastructure of the 1970s-80s new left — squatters, anti-nuclear, solidarity movements — which was never party-based. That infrastructure is what collapsed when its aging participants dropped out.
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A forthcoming companion essay, "The Organized Society and Its Afterlife," develops the full pillarization trajectory: the confessional pillars' cross-class containment function (class conflict channeled through internal factional negotiation within cross-class formations), the consociational superstructure's secrecy and depoliticization, the authority-form codes (deftigheid, tucht) on which pillar governance depended, the mature socialist pillar's trade of organic communal breadth for institutional scale, and the paradox of success through which the system's own material achievements destroyed the subjective conditions for its maintenance.
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The role of private foundations in the Netherlands should not be overstated by analogy with the US case. Total Dutch charitable giving in 2023 was approximately €6.19 billion across roughly 4,000 foundations; the US has over 90,000 foundations holding more than $1 trillion in assets. Per capita, US foundation giving dwarfs the Dutch case by a factor of roughly five to ten. In the Netherlands, the primary mechanism of NGO domestication is not foundation funding but government subsidy and the corporatist polder framework — organizations are absorbed through seats on the SER, subsidy relationships with ministries, and the consultative infrastructure, not primarily through Ford Foundation–style grants. Private foundation influence is real and growing (see Schuyt, Gouwenberg & Hoolwerf, "Foundations in the Netherlands: Toward a Diversified Social Model?," American Behavioral Scientist 62(13), 2018), but it operates alongside and secondary to state-mediated incorporation.
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Both with income streams ranging from tens to over 100 million euros per year; Jaarverslag 2022 — Milieudefensie
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There are thousands of examples, but consider for instance https://milieudefensie.nl/actueel/deze-brief-verandert-alles-grote-vervuilers-kom-met-een-klimaatplan
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On XR's race and class composition there is peer-reviewed evidence: Barron & Hess, "Beyond inclusion? Perceptions of the extent to which Extinction Rebellion speaks to, and for, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) and working-class communities," Local Environment (2021), based on 40 interviews with BAME and working-class people in England and Wales, found that XR's discourse and activities "tended to alienate BAME and working-class people" — who were themselves very concerned about climate change and supported urgent government action, but were not interested in being included in XR. Berglund & Schmidt's survey data (Extinction Rebellion and Climate Change Activism, Palgrave 2020) confirm that XR's activists are "typically highly-educated and middle-class." On the specific question of who does the invisible care and logistics work within XR — and whether it falls along gendered lines — no study appears to exist, despite XR's own "Regenerative Culture" and "Action Wellbeing" infrastructure making this a researchable question.
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For details, see Corey Wrenn, Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits (2019). Wrenn argues that the state actively reinforces the nonprofit model because the nonprofit sector provides essential services and jobs while functioning as a form of social control: professionalization means exchanging radical tactics for recognition and funding. The state creates the conditions for social problems to emerge by prioritizing corporate interests, then relies on nonprofits to manage the fallout. As Wrenn puts it, nonprofits thus become "intermediaries for state and elite interests" (p. 45).
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See for instance Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906).
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I should honestly admit that I know little about what Dutch radical left groups have attempted in this area, though the answer seems to be 'very little.' In that context, this is a decent article on the same question: Over abolitionisme, het afschaffen van de politie en de gevangenis | Doorbraak.eu
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See Captives: the History of Rikers Island and New York City with Jarrod Shanahan - Cosmonaut for an interview and link to the book.
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The definitive account of the Attica uprising and its aftermath is Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (2016). Thompson documents the Attica Brothers Legal Defense in detail: its formation from the ACLU, Legal Aid, and National Lawyers Guild networks; its expansion to offices in Berkeley, Rochester, Detroit, Chicago, Syracuse, and New York City; its reliance on communal houses full of volunteer lawyers and law students in upstate New York; and the decades of litigation that consumed the solidarity infrastructure that had formed around the prisoners. For the broader history of prisoner organizing and the outside networks that connected it to community movements, see Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (2014). Berger's key concept is "visibility": prisoners pursued a strategy of making confinement visible to the outside world through riots, writing, and collective rituals, and the state responded by systematically severing that inside-outside connection through isolation, media restrictions, and transfers to remote facilities. On how the post-Attica reforms functioned as deliberate counterinsurgency rather than genuine concession, see Orisanmi Burton, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (2023). Burton documents four strategies of what he calls "reformist counterinsurgency" — expansion, humanization, diversification, and programmification — through which the state co-opted ameliorative demands to pacify rebellion, sever prisoners from outside communities, and marginalize revolutionary organizing.
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[Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math \[ST07\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI)
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The definitive account of the Attica uprising and its aftermath is Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (2016). Thompson documents the Attica Brothers Legal Defense in detail: its formation from the ACLU, Legal Aid, and National Lawyers Guild networks; its expansion to offices in Berkeley, Rochester, Detroit, Chicago, Syracuse, and New York City; its reliance on communal houses full of volunteer lawyers and law students in upstate New York; and the decades of litigation that consumed the solidarity infrastructure that had formed around the prisoners. For the broader history of prisoner organizing and the outside networks that connected it to community movements, see Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (2014). Berger's key concept is "visibility": prisoners pursued a strategy of making confinement visible to the outside world through riots, writing, and collective rituals, and the state responded by systematically severing that inside-outside connection through isolation, media restrictions, and transfers to remote facilities. On how the post-Attica reforms functioned as deliberate counterinsurgency rather than genuine concession, see Orisanmi Burton, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (2023). Burton documents four strategies of what he calls "reformist counterinsurgency" — expansion, humanization, diversification, and programmification — through which the state co-opted ameliorative demands to pacify rebellion, sever prisoners from outside communities, and marginalize revolutionary organizing.
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Paul de Beer and Lisa Berntsen, "Trade unions in the Netherlands: Erosion of their power base in the stable Polder Model," in Trade Unions in the European Union: Picking up the Pieces of the Neoliberal Challenge, ETUI (2023). Wage stagnation data, organizing/staff ratio, and the "marginalization" prognosis are from this chapter.
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See "Whose Power Is It?" at beyondmeritocracy.info, which develops the FNV case in full — the 1945 founding bargain that traded workplace organization for a seat at the national table and produced the werkorganisatie; the archival evidence (Precaire polder, IISG 2018) for how every reform reproduced the officials-versus-cadre 'gulf' at a higher level; the Müller-Jentsch mechanism, by which the intermediary position tilts officials toward delivering a governable membership rather than a militant one; the pension fight and the fund-governance entanglement (the fund as capital that encases whoever administers it); the cleaners' strikes, read as mobilizing rather than organizing; the Kloofdichters rank-and-file reform movement and its absorption; the 2025 governance crisis and court intervention, and the 2026 De Kracht van Beweging plan that concedes the vocabulary of organizing while withholding its mechanisms; and the US comparative cases (McAlevey's organizing framework, the Chicago Teachers Union). Its organizing claim is the two-problem diagnosis this section names — that the organizational problem (staff displacing members) and the political problem (structural subordination to the polder model and its party relationships) cannot be solved apart.
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See "Whose Power Is It?" at beyondmeritocracy.info, which develops the FNV case in full — the 1945 founding bargain that traded workplace organization for a seat at the national table and produced the werkorganisatie; the archival evidence (Precaire polder, IISG 2018) for how every reform reproduced the officials-versus-cadre 'gulf' at a higher level; the Müller-Jentsch mechanism, by which the intermediary position tilts officials toward delivering a governable membership rather than a militant one; the pension fight and the fund-governance entanglement (the fund as capital that encases whoever administers it); the cleaners' strikes, read as mobilizing rather than organizing; the Kloofdichters rank-and-file reform movement and its absorption; the 2025 governance crisis and court intervention, and the 2026 De Kracht van Beweging plan that concedes the vocabulary of organizing while withholding its mechanisms; and the US comparative cases (McAlevey's organizing framework, the Chicago Teachers Union). Its organizing claim is the two-problem diagnosis this section names — that the organizational problem (staff displacing members) and the political problem (structural subordination to the polder model and its party relationships) cannot be solved apart.