sheer spite press

Description

“A 50 page zine compiling personal/political writing (blog posts, essays, and correspondence) from 2008-2009 about capitalism, class,
philanthropy, and the nonprofit industrial complex. Includes my annotated giving plan, a letter to my dad about giving away money,
reflections on movement funding in post-Katrina New Orleans, connections between philanthropy and anti-imperialist revolutionary movements of the 60s and 70s, and more.”

From the introduction:

“Not to sound dramatic, but I view institutional philanthropy (very much including “social justice philanthropy,” which is all I’ve really had significant contact with) as a soul-sucking tentacle of neoliberal capitalism. As such, it tends to co-opt the rhetoric of justice even as
it functions to consolidate wealth and power into private hands and undermine movements that pose any real threat to institutional power. Most organizers know this because they engage with philanthropy as fundraisers and grantwriters. I was in the uncomfortable (for me) position, during the years I wrote most of this zine, of trying to engage with it as a donor.

Philanthropy and its associated networks of state and owning class power, combined with the corporate structure of nonprofits and NGOs, is now often referred to as the :nonprofit industrial complex.: There’s this thing about industrial complexes (if we are defining industrial complex as a profit-driven system in which oppressed and marginalized people experience violence in major and minor ways as a result of the system): within most of them, there are many people with truly liberatory goals doing valuable and lifesaving work. Currently, it is impossible to separate many of these systems from the mechanisms that support our lives (like healthcare,
social services, education), just as it is impossible to separate them from the power structures (white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy) that harm and disenfranchise us.

Instead, we are dealing with a giant clusterfuck of capitalism, neoliberalism, white supremacy, colonization, imperialism, and patriarchy. None of these can be isolated: they are all connected to each other and connected to all of us. They are constantly present in our world, our cultures, our communities, and even our heads and hearts. For all of the easily identifiable external effects of these systems, there are internal effects that we don?t even notice because they are such a part of us.

I tried so hard to order and organize the good and bad of things, to somehow repair the injustice of having grown up in a rich family and inheriting money. Actually, there’s no repairing that, just the lifelong work of trying to live a good life and change the circumstances that created it. I learned that there is no “perfect” way to live within capitalism, just an infinite set of flawed choices that we have to either make or imagine alternatives to.

I still so badly want these things to be talked about. I so badly want people with social justice politics and financial wealth to be open to and initiate challenging conversations, and to actively move and redistribute money rather than being silent, secretive, afraid, isolated, and frozen with shame and inertia. As always, feel free to write me: I will be happy to talk about any of these things, anytime.”