Category: Blog

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A different kind of morning.

Is it just me, or have things been particularly rough recently? I got back from a winter vacation a couple weeks ago to news of attacks on Gaza, Oscar Grant being shot in an Oakland BART station, and a well-known activist from my hometown admitting to being an FBI informant. The economic crisis (and its devastating effect on communities) is ongoing, neoliberal fundamentalism is as out of control as ever, organizers are still being targeted, state-sponsored murder of people of color is happening everywhere.

Meanwhile, Obama was inaugurated yesterday, but that’s not what’s giving me hope. I’ve been thinking about the tirelessness of the organizers in my life, many of whom worked hard get Obama into office, and who are still organizing – in solidarity with Gaza, to stop police violence, against privatization, gentrification, war, homelessness – mostly organizers who are affected by these things so much more directly than I am, and are inspiring me endlessly with joy, art, camp, attitude, and resilience in the face of ongoing crises.

I thought Enough readers might appreciate this wonderful statement by the Audre Lorde Project: A Different Kind of Morning in America – so helpful in thinking about the interconnectedness of these crises and how to approach them in our work.

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A year of giving away money

Happy new year, folks! I wanted to post my giving plan for the past year, as promised: here it is, with some background info and some of the thinking that went into creating it.

Giving away all this money has been such a weird experience. One one hand, it’s been so great to have so much money to support organizations I know are doing amazing work. But also, it’s been really hard and frustrating to observe/participate in philanthropy culture and continue to learn more and more about how much philanthropy screws over social justice movements. Having lots of money to give away is such a palpable experience of how horrifyingly unjust wealth distribution, capitalism, and social justice funding are. But I’ve also gotten to have so many amazing conversations with friends, family, and other organizers in my community about all the things I love to talk about that we write about here all the time. I’m trying to get more comfortable with navigating those complicated spaces that exist when trying to act in just ways in totally unjust situations.

There are lots of things I could have spent a lot more time thinking about: whether to give a lot to a few places or less to more places, how much to give nationally vs. internationally, to give through activist-advised re-granting institutions or just give directly to organizations, to give all at once or to spread my giving out over a few years, etc. I never found satisfactory answers to any of these questions, and I tried to just move forward instead of getting caught up in doing things perfectly. I’m so excited for when every wealthy social justice activist is giving away their inheritance and talking about it openly with the whole movement, because then it will be so much easier to make these kinds of decisions. Actually, I’m so excited for when capitalism ends and we find ways to take care of ourselves that aren’t based on oppression and exploitation, and social justice organizations have all the resources they need without having to rely on the whims of a handful of lefty rich people.

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Letters and plans

I was talking to Dean the other day about the usefulness of sharing certain kinds of personal letters as public documents (I think we were talking about coming out letters) – and because people often ask me for advice about how to talk to their families about things related to money and giving it away, I thought I’d post this old letter I wrote to my dad. I never know if sharing this kind of stuff is useful, but it feels from a lot of the conversations I have that family stuff is a big sticking point for lots of us when it comes to talking about/dealing with money in our lives. So if you’re wanting to start potentially hard conversations specifically about wealth accumulation in your family and anti-capitalist divestment, maybe you will find this helpful. I was also thinking about co-writing or doing an interview with my dad about our relationship around money and how it’s developed and what’s been hard and how we’ve dealt with me wanting to give away a large chunk of the money he accumulated and set aside to help make my life easier. Is that interesting?

I’ve also been planning to post my 2008 giving plan on Enough once I have all the numbers straight. I hope Enough can be a space where lots of us can share these kinds of tools and plans and letters and strategies, and get and give feedback about them.
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101 ways to write about the same thing

Do I say the same things over and over again? Sometimes I feel like I can’t let go of these questions and so I keep analytically pounding on them from different angles searching for some new insight. After I wrote that last post, I realized that I wrote an essay about very similar things last year and forgot about it. I wrote it after reading the book Outlaws of America by my new friend Dan Berger. Have you read it? I really recommend it – Continue reading “101 ways to write about the same thing”

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Ranting doesn’t always help

I keep meaning to write about Making Money Make Change, which I’ve been massively processing since I returned from the Bay Area. There are a million things to say about this conference, and I’ve written a little about it here. One of our Enough correspondents who was in attendance is compiling notes from MMMC for us to post, so look for a more detailed description soon. But meanwhile, I wanted to share a little piece of what I’ve been thinking about.

Continue reading “Ranting doesn’t always help”

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Economic justice in the workplace

Jessica Hoffmann sent me this link to an interesting article about participatory economics in the workplace. I really enjoyed reading it particularly because this year I started working part-time at a collectively run consensus-based cooperative. Learning more about participatory economics and collectives and worker-owned co-ops feels pretty crucial to developing practices of economic justice and resistance to capitalism. Despite the slowness, constant meetings, and sometimes painful or challenging consensus process, the joy of working in a collective has not waned. It feels like a really human, experimental, resistant, trial-and-error process. I love that our dysfunctional workplace dynamics feel more likely to be about conflicting personalities than institutionalized exploitation. Dean probably has good stuff to say about workplace collectives too.

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Makezine move

Hi Friends,

I wanted to let you know that Craig and I unfortunately lost the domain name we’ve used for years for our zine/website Make, so we’ve moved the site to a new spot. In the process, I’ve learned a lot about the horribleness of how capitalism runs the internet, but I won’t trouble you with what is probably obvious about how webspace is owned.