I’m leading a workshop in Philly on April 5 for people with access to wealth who want to support social justice work, and I thought some Enough readers might be interested. Here’s the link – Giving and Beyond: Leveraging Privilege and Resources for Grassroots Movements (I’m privately calling it “Philanthropy for Anti-Capitalists”). Please come! Continue reading “Workshop on giving away money”
On downward mobility
A couple weeks ago I was having a talk with somebody at a coffee shop in my neighborhood, and I noticed some graffiti on the bathroom wall that said: “Downward mobility is not radical.” Incidentally, the talk I was having that day was with a young white class-privileged person who was struggling with what to do with some inherited money, and we were talking about wealth and social justice and giving away inheritance and all of these things, and the whole time I kept pondering the graffiti and thinking that actually, downward mobility is radical. Wouldn’t it be very radical if all wealthy people gave away their money and spent only what they needed to live?
[I’m talking here about the kind of downward mobility that’s chosen and intentional, not the job-loss/cuts-to-social-services/increasing-wealth-disparity kind.]
But I know what the graffiti means – it means that the writer is sick of people who act like they don’t have money when actually they do. Personally, I lived this problematic phenomenon for several years after high school, which I spent hitchhiking, trainhopping, and dumpster diving my way around the country in the company of other freewheeling punk youth who (like me) often lacked a particularly tight race and class analysis. Continue reading “On downward mobility”