An African-Centered/Black Socialist Look at the European State as it Shows Itself Through the 501-C-3 System

“The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” -Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto”

“To overcome the tremendous obstacles in the way of the economic unification of Africa, decisive political actions are required in the first place. Political unification is a prerequisite.”-Cheikh Anta Diop, “Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federated State”

Introduction

In “The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Matriarchy and Patriarchy in Classical Antiquity,” the great Senegalese historian and anthropologist, Cheikh Anta Diop (light to his spirit) offered an incisive, anticolonial, but largely overlooked critique of Karl Marx’s thought partner, Friedrich Engels, and his classic text on the origin of the (European) State “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”. Diop explains in great detail how Engels failed to see Europe’s unique history in giving birth to the twin children private property and patriarchy, and thus universalized its xenophobic, patriarchal ruling class, society, and State as if Europe’s history was the world’s. Patriarchy is inherent in property because it springs from the “northern cradle” (as Diop refers to Aryan/Greek/Europe), and its practice of delineating property to pass it from father to son, which required being able to “prove” patrilineal descent. Engels agrees on this point of transition from matriarchy (collective property ownership), to patriarchy, but attributes it to a world-historical development with no specific geographic origin.

Diop’s critique is particularly important for Black/Afrikan socialist/communists because the universalizing of European history is used by capitalists and capitalism apologists to explain that capitalism/imperialism, this specific, time-limited, dog-eat-dog system, is our collective human nature. Black/African people are justifiably suspicious of socialism’s universalizing narrative that has no explanation for Europe or Europeans. This, I believe, is one of the valid appeals of Cedric Robinson’s “Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition.” However, what is just as important to fend off the anti-communists veiled in a critique of Marx and Engels is that they also disagreed that human society was this “survival of the fittest” expression of social Darwinism or that human development should be considered similar to the world of animals, i.e., dog-eating dogs.

Diop, unlike Cedric Robinson, is not offering a fundamental criticism of Marxism, but rather critiquing Engels for using its historical materialist method with incomplete history. Diop, similar to Nkrumah, wanted to see a Federated Africa with one state and a planned economy. While there are many redeeming qualities in “Black Marxism,” a Black Radical Tradition that is not looking to synthesize and absorb what is useful is not using a Black methodology that I recognize. Diop was in dialogue with Marxism/historical materialism and did not negate it or participate in Robinson’s anti-communism, specifically his anti-Bolshevism, in his critique of Engels.

Bringing in Diop in order to stretch Marx, Engels, and Vladimir Lenin so that a critique of capitalism includes a critique of Europe and its particular path of development (a place where Diop and Robinson align), the accumulation of private property produced a Greek/European ruling class which then needed a device that works to their advantage to manage the resulting class struggles over said property. The propertied class’s struggles were both with the propertyless internal to the nations of the respective ruling classes and with the “stranger” nations with which it would war, as well as the gender class struggle that is inherent in patriarchy. All of these class struggles are embedded in capitalism’s central contradiction: the collective nature of work and production that is labor coexisting with the singular accumulation that is private property. Marx and Engels argue this early (Aryan/Greek/Euro system) based on private property eventually evolved through feudalism into capitalism, and Lenin explains capitalism’s evolution into imperialism, and Kwame Nkrumah and Robert Allen explain imperialism’s evolution into neocolonialism.

Inherent in private property (and we are talking about a society’s major resources such as land, water, energy, healthcare, education, housing, not one’s phone, clothes, car), and thus its essence, what sits below the surface of “the haves and have-nots” is unresolved fragmentation or what Nkrumah called “Balkanization.” This is to say, division, to break things apart, is necessary, but to divide, to break apart with no interest in returning to unity, is a destructive kind of fragmentation. Relying on Engels’ analysis, private property creates classes, i.e., different relations to the means of production, with a fundamental means of production being land. Thus, private property creates and is created by classes such as nation-states, gender, race/internal colonies, and the processes of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism. All of these phenomena, or surface descriptions, conceal this essence of fragmentation, including fragmentation of the earth. In Western PA, for example, we have fracking. Thus, a marker for capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, and neocolonialism, and the class that came to dominate Europe’s development as a society, a “civilization,” which I take as one of Diop and Robinson’s key points, is a general tendency to fracture. Human beings are literally the health of the soil, the air, the water, so treating the earth as though we are actually separate from it reveals a fracture in oneself and deepens it. A fractured people and personhood would describe a capital class that has brought us to the multi-genocide, earth-on-fire, oceans-overheating world that we are in today. A Black socialist, radical, African-centered critique of the European State, then, would be that it is a tool of the fracturing class, the European capital class, to manage the resulting class conflicts resulting from its never-ending desire for private property.

To demonstrate this larger analysis of the State as “phenomena,” as an expression of its essence, which is the settler, imperialist, (neo)kolonial, kapital klass and private property, I am going to transition, admittedly abruptly, to a look at a segment of the State I’ve engaged in one way or another for thirty years: nonprofits/501-C-3s. Managed by the IRS, it is a subset of the European State, and it is interacting with or implicated in three things at which we’ll look: a Zionist doxxing website called the Canary Mission, the report “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” and the “National Security Presidential Memo -7: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Political Violence.” While the 501©(3) system is implicated, the underlying driver is the private property and accumulation purpose of the European State. I’ll begin with the Canary Mission.

The Canary Mission

The Canary Mission, an unincorporated website that today has more than 5000 profiles on it, was registered in February 2015 to dox people who organize, mobilize, and speak in support of the Palestinian liberation struggle. The site primarily profiles students and professors and, although I am neither, I learned in January of 2025 that I had been posted on it as someone who “expressed support for terrorism.” My “support for terrorism” was ostensibly shared in November 2023, when, representing an organization, I said we supported Palestinians’ right to self-defense and national liberation, understood the Palestinian military actions of October 7th in that context, and linked this action to the historic struggle for Black liberation. I stand by all of this 100%.

It took the Canary Mission returning to national attention in July of 2025 to get me to want to understand what was behind this website I was on. Once I started looking, it was a ball of string, including psy ops proposals to conduct actions eerily similar to the site, an ongoing search to identify the site’s operators, information on how it all began in response to Israel’s battle against the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement (BDS), and much more. However, what caught my attention was how U.S. 501©(3) apparatus organizations and an Israeli “third sector” organization were critical to how the Canary Mission got money. This put the 501©(3) apparatus as an actor in imperialism, in supporting Israel’s settler kolonialism, and the kapital klass’s investment in West Asia (what it calls the Middle East) as a key site for its goal of “full spectrum dominance.” How this all came out was that, in addition to facilitating money getting to the Canary Mission via 501©(3) apparatus, the U.S. State was using the website for its own investigations and had looked at every single profile on the site to assess each person.

On July 9, 2025, Peter Hatch, the Trump administration’s Assistant Director of Homeland Security Investigations, testified in a federal lawsuit brought against the Administration by the American Association of University Professors, that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was using the unincorporated, likely Israel based, Canary Mission to target pro-Palestinian activists and organizers—particularly students and professors—for deportation. This tactic had led to the March 2025 arrest of Pro-Palestinian organizers Mahmoud Khalil, who was kept incarcerated for three months, and Mohsen Madawi on April 14, 2025, who was held until April 30, 2025. We should keep in mind that all this is being done while the Netanyahu administration supports further incursion and control over the West Bank and the idea of greater settler-kolonization in “greater Israel,” While the U.S. maintains its vision of Israel as a beachhead for geopolitical control of the region and its oil. Private property.

Through doxxing, the Canary Mission seeks to create an economic boycott of select people who publicly support Palestine’s right to self-determination. Looking at the psy ops document above and just inferring its goals from its structure, the objective is to cause those of us on it to lose jobs or contracts, isolate us, and make us reconsider if we really want to support the Palestinian struggle. Ironically, the Canary Mission copies and twists some of the ideas and tactics of Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS), an international campaign which has cost Israel billions of dollars, by publicly naming corporations doing business in Israel, encouraging people like artists to boycott it and others to divest. The University of Pittsburgh, where I went to school, is now a target of such a campaign. That the project’s tactics would have some similarity to BDS makes sense because the website went up around the same time Israel’s Netanyahu Administration declared BDS a strategic-level problem and dedicated millions of shekels to defeating it. The Canary Mission’s intent is evident in one of their early mantras to the managers of U.S. Corporations: “It is your duty to ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees.”

Like the Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs) I will talk about in a moment, Canary Mission is unincorporated, and so producing full financial records for it has not been possible. However, there have been slip-ups that let us piece together the basic outline of how U.S. based Zionist donors send money to support it with the full support of the IRS and the U.S. security state. In these examples, DAFs let Zionist individuals, families, and collectives anonymously give their money to a 501©(3) that takes their “advice” and sends it to Israel to support the Canary Mission. One of the principal 501©(3) s for which there have been these blips that have records is the New York-based Central Fund of Israel (CFI). The CFI sends money to a variety of Israeli settler third-sector organizations, a process that has been noted since at least 2010 by the NY Times, and this includes the Canary Mission. The Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, Natan and Lidia Peisach Family Foundation, and the Ann and Robert Fromer Charitable Foundation have also funded the Canary Mission.

Once largely a practice of community foundations, today massive investment companies have joined the lucrative business of holding DAF money and are one of the fastest-growing tools of philanthropy, holding more than $300B at this time. DAFs are very difficult to track because they are not fiscally responsible for where money goes; ultimately, that is the decision of the 501(c)(3), and they are typically offered anonymity. The Canary Mission, again, likely based in Israel, then targets activists and organizers back in the U.S. So, if this can be a successful tool to reduce dissent, then it helps both Israel and the U.S. achieve their respective imperial/settler kolonial objectives. I think about this as kind of like how, when the racial codes were first being established in the U.S., English settlers had to agree to not support/marry Black people in order to get the “wages of Whiteness.” In order for us to keep our “benefits” in the imperial core, we have to stay quiet while the U.S. and Israel kill tens of thousands of Palestinian people for land and oil. The Canary Mission is really targeted at the few that speak because the general fear of Israel and its Zionist lobby in the U.S. takes care of the vast majority, and this is particularly true in the 501©(3) apparatus where workers are at least intuitively aware of the link between kapital and Zionism.

As if the Canary Mission was not enough, it is just one of many projects for which the Central Fund of Israel (CFI) sent money to Israel. The CFI also sent millions to supportIsrael’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs’ (MSA) program Kela Shlomo (Solomon’s Sling). Kela Shlomo, which was later retitled “Concert,” began in 2018 and aimed to raise $40M or so to match the same amount of State of Israel money to defend against Israel’s “delegitimization” in foreign countries, particularly the U.S. (of course, what is “delegitimizing” Israel is we can see plainly what it is doing at the behest of the U.S.) This project was not successful because its managers failed to raise the matching $ and the Israeli government eventually froze the match. Importantly, CFI was not just sending money for propaganda activities, but it also sent money in support of the families of settlers convicted of murder and child abuse of Palestinians in the West Bank. In other words, beyond the nefarious propaganda work coming out of Israel, aligned with the ruling class, a 501-C-3 can support Israel’s active, violent, internationally illegal settler colonialism. Keep this in mind when the story turns to Cuba and NSPM-7, but this also makes clear that 501©(3) s are a far deeper problem than inequitable funding or insensitive program officers. The 501©(3) apparatus are a European state apparatus, which means they are facilitating capitalism, imperialism, zionism, and neocolonialism. Again, we return to private property as a driver of class war because CFI was founded to push settlements in the West Bank, a move other nonprofits supporting activity in Israel, like the Jewish National Fund-USA, wouldn’t touch. CFI sued them in the 80’s for falsely presenting an interest in “Greater Israel” and won.

One reason the Kela Shlomo program failed was the concerns potential donors had about the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). FARA requires anyone acting on behalf of a foreign government to register with the Department of Justice (DOJ) as a foreign agent, which none of these donors apparently wanted to do. Partly as a result of this problem, Concert only used a little more than $10M of its $80M goal. The concerns about taking or giving $ to Concert being an act of a “foreign agent” were well founded because clearly the Canary Mission and Concert aligned with the commitment Israel made in 2015 to fight BDS. Leaked documents show Israel was also concerned about FARA and considered creating a 501-C3 to circumvent this problem. This issue of the Canary Mission violating FARA has now been taken up by 70 organizations who petitioned the Department of Justice to conduct a FARA investigation on it. I am curious whether the CFI and its officers and donors would need to register as foreign agents if this were to happen. The President of CFI lives in Israel, if that is any indication. The CFI’s 2024 IRS Form 990 reports it sent more than $83M to “the Middle East” and more than $92M in 2023. “The Middle East” is all we know of where the money went or where it came from. Again, keep this in mind as we go to the next section. A 501 (c) (3) is sending tens of millions of dollars out of the country and is reporting its destination as the “Middle East,” yet in the nonprofit sector, the level of detail needed for a $10K grant can be crazy.

National Security Presidential Memo -7 (NSPM-7)

Fast forward to almost an exact year after Peter Hatch’s testimony described above to July 16, 2026, when the State Department convened the “Ministerial on Resurgence of Political Violence.” More than 60 countries were convened under the frame of the NPSM-7 that was issued in September 2025, with the only Black-led countries being Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. Among other things, NSPM-7 announces the use of Joint Terrorism Task Forces that are to surveil and disrupt activity they deem either directly involved in or likely to lead to “political violence” (getting visions of the “Precogs” in “The Minority Report”? ) The memo focuses on “left” political activity even though the majority of deaths from political violence in the U.S. have come from “right” political activity. The memo lifts “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-fascism” and “extremism on migration, race and gender” as terms and perspectives that could signal domestic terrorists. With 0 irony, it even names doxxing as a signal of domestic terrorists and goes on to make it clear that the 501©(3) apparatus can be monitored and the “evidence” found to make cases for money laundering or other financial crimes. The 501©(3) apparatus can be used to support genocide, settler colonialism, and U.S. geopolitical dominance, but not anti-capitalism; this sounds exactly right if we see them as European capitalist state entities and remember who the State serves.

State Department Report: “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism”

The July 16th convening was quickly followed on July 20th by the U.S. State Department issuing a report “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” to which Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly provides great historical context in her Substack post and in this interview with the Black Agenda Report. The issue of which klasses get to use the 501©(3) apparatus the way they like is again front and center. For example, in this report the State Department tracks the growth of “The People’s Forum” down to the dollar (the report notes the organization’s financial growth in a year, for example), but CFI can send $90M+ to “the Middle East.” The report is also very concerned about which organizations and donations in the millions came from anyone affiliated with China, points at how the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization serves as a fiscal sponsor for a number of organizations and looks closely at the Democratic Socialists of America as well. Now compare that to the way there is no similar report on Zionist organizations like Canary Mission, CFI or any number of 501 (c) (3)s funding the Canary Mission or the settlements in the West Bank. No concern for political violence of the West Bank settlements or people’s free speech being threatened in the U.S. even though that is exactly what the Canary Mission and CFI are encouraging.

What this report makes clear is that nationalism and communism are seen as very grave threats to kapitalism and kolonialism, particularly if Black people begin to consider those kinds of politics seriously. Communism and nationalism are a threat because they endanger the essence of the kapitalist state: private property and a settler imperial kolonial kapital klass. We can clearly see that the report is not concerned with 501©(3)s that are contributing to political violence or are threatening democracy, because if that was ever unclear, the genocide of Palestinians has made it as plain on the nose on our face the U.S. ruling class does not care about this issue.

Conclusion

Many of us began to think find language for our gut feeling about nonprofit work when we read INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence’s book “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Nonprofit Industrial Complex.” As a result, “the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC)” became a popular term to explain the field. However, there is a chapter in that book by Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “In the Shadow of the Shadow State,” borrowing the title from the work of Jennifer Wolch, that deserves more attention for how it looks beyond the phenomena of nonprofits as a complex and gets to its essence as a State actor. Wilson Gilmore discusses the 501 (c) (3) system in relation to the state as one of a “shadow, i.e. it would not exist were it not for the “caster” the object blocking the light that creates the shadow i.e. the state. Bringing in Diop’s critique of Engels and theorizing nonprofits as a state-like actor, we get the “European Shadow State.”

Keeping in mind the Canary Mission as one example of how the 501©(3) apparatus is an international system, and we can see that it is organized to contribute to the management and furthering of the European settler imperialist kapital kolonial klass. When connected to another chapter in “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded,” an excerpt of Robert Allen’s “Black Awakening in Capitalist America,” we can see the role of the 501©(3) apparatus in keeping Black people as an internal (neo) colony and the imperialism/neocolonialism link is complete. Allen takes great pains to show how it was a concern with the threat Black rebellions were posing to White kapitalist property that led to funding Black kapitalist programming. Seeing the 501©(3) apparatus as a State-like structure helps us to examine their activity as a part of the larger capitalist-racist mode of production focused on accumulation and private property, which the name “nonprofit” helps to mystify. It also helps us see how in creating activity for Left/Black activity in these very fractured categories: arts, housing, east neighborhood or west neighborhood, that it circumscribes our activity in ways very different from what CFI or the Canary Mission are working on and away from what NSPM-7 and the Cuban report are making illegal for the Black/Left.

Connecting Allen, Wilson Gilmore, Diop, and traditional communist analysis improves on the frame of seeing nonprofits as a Complex, as something separate to itself, as the NPIC term and life in the sector encourages. The struggles for Black liberation, and connecting it to other anti-colonial struggles, as well as for socialism, and against imperialism all greatly worry the ruling class, which is evident in the Canary Mission site and the fact that I was placed on it the first time I had ever spoken out publicly for Palestine, it is evident in the State Department recognizing how many of us are inspired by Cuba’s socialist model and how it is trying to tighten the grips on them, and it is evident in NSPM-7 and the legal architecture they are setting up, again, generally targetting the Left and Black radical activity. Rubio made sure to name the lawlessness of the Black Lives Matter movement at the July 16th meeting. In all of this, the concern is on people developing responses that look at the overall system vs the fractured responses and solutions we are shepereded into, largely by Democratic Party forces, lest we get it twisted.

Still, I am encouraged that there is a growing movement for socialism and national liberation, but we are going to need to move toward each other and support many more efforts and movements that help us overcome the fracturing, so that we can get to the essence of their attack, as called for in this message “In Unwavering Solidarity with the African and Anti-Colonial Struggle: A Call for Unified Action Among the U.S. Left” from the Black Alliance for Peace. Black Agenda Report also had a great piece on Dr Diop and the importance of China last year. #FreePalestine #FreeCuba #USOutofEverywhere #internalcolony #Blacknationalism

Did you appreciate this article, have a few coins to spare? A “coffee” would be most appreciated!