By The Blast
January 17th 2022
Shortly before the pandemic, workers of the nonprofit PASO[1] passed a petition around to gain support in their struggle against the hierarchy of that nonprofit organization.[2] They afterwards went on strike.
The Blast has heard through the grapevine that a fraction of these workers have beat a new path by pushing forward to develop a worker cooperative[3] in Melrose Park, IL with very encouraging work so far as is evident by their Instagram account.
They are paving the way for nonprofit workers to become class conscious, to begin to shake off many of the injurious misconceptions and abuses that nonprofit workers are often corrupted with, and to develop workers self-management independent of the hierarchies that oppress them.
Nonprofit workers in Illinois should pay very close to their development, support them, and draw inspiration from them.
Whereas the power of the oppressed and working-class power grows from our own direct management of our economy and society as whole,
Whereas the power of the oppressed is completely distinct from the power of politicians and political parties who “represent” the oppressed with these two types of power usually being mutually opposed to each other,
We can only wish these workers success in their continued development and in the sloughing off of other false notions common among our class if and wherever they present themselves, a task none of us can ever give up.
Endnotes
[1] http://www.pasoaction.org/
[2] Some people in the Spanish-speaking communities felt awkward in this conflict (and perhaps pretty quiet about it) because of the intersection of so many conflicting issues, which, from a radical perspective, really boil down to how nonprofits assist in the management of artificial scarcity (that is, limited resources that don’t have to be limited) in our communities, which leads many of us to believe that they cannot be criticized because they appear to be selfless nourishers rather than chokepoints of resources that communities shouldn’t even be begging for.
[3] https://www.instagram.com/boconas21/