Some rich people wanna give money to the poor, here’s how we should ask for it

If you have tried organizing projects or co-operatives geared towards empowering or liberating oppressed communities, you have probably encountered the problem of a lack of money. It turns out, as Irami Osei-Frimpong aka The Funky Academic pointed, you need money to organize. One of the laws of thermodynamics tells us that you can’t produce something from nothing and so you need resources to make shit. Sometimes those resources are readily available but not readily apparent, such as edible indigenous plants, minerals, and for the interests of this article that resource is money.

There is this sentiment or understanding in Marxist and also ultra-left circles that rich people, the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie, don’t wanna give their money to the poor. I don’t contest that the bourgeoisie don’t care about poor people. But, in this article I will make the case that in fact some petty-bourgeois and moderately to significantly prosperous managerial and non-managerial working people do care about poor people, but don’t know how to spend their money towards liberating poor people, and often lack the interest in revolutionary organizations required to contribute to them. And that is OK, we can in fact work with that, and we should, because there is money to be had.

I come from a family of moderately to more than moderately prosperous South Asian people who used to be quite poor. From this personal experience talking to many branches of my family, and then also to people connected to my very extended family through friendship, I can tell you that there are actually quite a lot of people, generally speaking colonized people, who feel guilty about their wealth and so donate to organizations that they feel do important work such as building schools, or charities, or food banks, etc. They donate to organizations because they don’t want to give money directly to a poor person directly under the fear that the money will be spent on drugs and thus wasted. Fair enough.

The problem that these rich and prosperous peoples’ money faces is that their money goes into nonprofits and NGOs that invest in poverty and struggle. That is to say that they will perhaps donate to a food bank, a charity for the homeless, the RedCross, breast cancer research, Housing for Humanity, and other such organizations. Such organizations that do not strike the causes of poverty, hunger, and homelessness at the root cause of the problem. Instead, a food bank or a charity for the homeless will instead invest in the problem itself by directing money towards curing symptoms, and thereby creating a financial organization that depends on the existence of the problem in order for the organization to exist. The cash flow to food banks and charities would stop if poverty and hunger ceased to exist; thus, these organizations could not possibly be built with the intent to actually solve the problems at their core. These organizations are built on the assumption that poverty, hunger, homelessness, etc. are inevitable and nothing can actually be done to make the need for such nonprofit organizations to be obsolete. Thus is the present nonprofit complex.

Now some might say that the reason rich and moderately prosperous people donate billions of dollars every year to such organizations is because they want these problems to persist. This might be the case for some of these rich people, but I don’t believe that is the case for those who are not the union busting managerial elite. The reason so many prosperous and moderately prosperous rich people give money to such organizations is because they lack a dialectical worldview that would allow them to understand their own class status and the cause for poverty. We can help these rich peoples’ money find a way to support the revolutionary struggle of the working class.

You see, what these prosperous and moderately prosperous rich people would much prefer is for that money to be spent on creating prosperity for poor people by getting poor people out of the poverty cycle and into a stable job situation. Now, there is a need for worker owned cooperatives to transform this monopolized global economy into an economy that is run by working people. I support unions, but I don’t expect rich people to donate to unions, so, let’s move on from there. I support revolutionary communist and non-communist lefty organizations, but rich people don’t wanna support that so let’s also move forward from there.

I do believe that these rich people I talk to and about would donate to nonprofits that provide seed-capital to form worker owned cooperatives that create products and services that serve poor communities. These rich people want poor people to be employed, so as revolutionaries let’s help these rich people help these poor people, but acting as a bridge through a seemingly non-revolutionary but progressive nonprofit that “puts people to work” on projects that “uplift communities”. Those words are quotes because such should be the language. None of this liberal and yuppie bullshit language that scares people away because it seems fake because it tends to be. We won’t talk about cooperatives, we will talk about putting people to work. Putting people to work in cooperatives will help people learn useful skills. We will employ those people that others do not wish to employ. We will work on projects that are not profit, but rather community oriented. Things like free and cheap food and energy production. Landscaping to nurture and create parks. The point is to kick-start and simultaneously socialize local economies to produce circular economies that break from the monopoly drain that sucks resources out of economies. China and Vietnam reached the conclusion that you don’t socialize poverty, you socialize wealth. But to socialize wealth you need to bring in foreign capital because you need to bring in wealth. What if this was standard practice, and instead of trying to socialize poverty, you socialize, organize, and enrich poor communities. An economy kickstarted with programs staked in the people there, will necessarily defend the people it is staked in. That’s how relationships are built. Or perhaps just one of the ways. Giving life to a people is how a people become more alive. Life defends life. Socialized Black Power economics financed by “foreign investment”. You know what I mean? The Hustle is already the way, but it be invested in drugs and with a capitalist dream. We as socialists need to transform that dream, that hustle into shit like producing hydroponics or free energy systems to both feed and electrify the community. That’s what New Hustle Marxism is all about. But the New Hustle needs a financial backing to kickstart it into creating economic ecosystems that aren’t being bled out by cannibalistic monopolists.