Christmas, the season of giving, is rapidly approaching, and workers earning poverty level wages with no benefits or any job security are busy at work processing the annual flood of donations to charitable organizations and non-profits. The good intentions of donors notwithstanding, like using a band-aid to treat cancer, charity is incapable of any fundamental social change, incapacitated as it is by the socio-economic system in which it operates. Unbeknownst to many donors is how these same organizations perpetuate and profit from the very social ailments they are supposedly on a mission to end, a consequence of the non-profit industrial complex.

It is no secret that billionaire philanthropic organizations are corporate entities masquerading as charities. Even by capitalist standards one can hardly claim that an organization like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, whose questionable charitable activities are far surpassed by its investments in virtually every industry, is anything other than a corporation. With investments in private prison companies and mercenary firms to transnational oil and gas, chemical, food, construction, pharmaceutical, and retail corporations, the foundation profits from the most violent and destructive exploitation of working people and the environment that exists today, including war.

Yet hidden from the public eye through effective marketing schemes and social taboos is the anti-working class activities of public non-profit organizations. To a lesser degree, though not always by very much, these charities likewise suffer from the same contradiction between their highly publicized objectives and their less publicized quest for more wealth, power, and privilege. (more…)