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?Â
[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.]
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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. I have a multifaceted critique of this time in my life – on one hand, it was defined by the bad type of “downward mobility” that rightfully gets a lot of criticism. Many of us had access to wealthy parents, private educations, and all the other safety nets common to privileged young people, which we generally never talked about. Does anyone else remember that Crimethinc book that said something like, “Poverty, homelessness, unemployment: If you’re not having fun, you’re not doing it right”? That attitude characterized a lot of the worst manifestations of punk traveler culture: privileged white kids temporarily rejecting middle- and upper-class lifestyles without much real critique about poverty and white supremacy, and then getting really self righteous about our subcultural choices. In retrospect, I feel so regretful about the arrogant glorification of poverty that was common in that scene, and how it contributed to invisibilizing the struggles of poor people and the real violence of poverty.
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But I want to be able to have this critique while also acknowledging that a lot of the choices I made then and the lifestyle practices of that subculture still feel really relevant to the politics I have now. Do-it-yourself punk culture at its best meant rejecting the dictates of capitalist accumulation, actively seizing privatized resources that should be public, producing independent media and music and art, building cultures of collectivity outside of mainstream capitalist society, and creating independent, autonomous organizations to do everything from direct action to media-making to holistic healing to urban gardening to creating and sharing housing. So many of the practices I picked up during my years of embracing punk rock lifestyle politics are still great ideas and things that I still do.
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It seems not-that-hard to build on this and create new, more politicized cultural norms that take these practices further and base them more solidly in beliefs about movement-building and economic justice. I was talking to someone recently about our shared experience of making choices (hitchhiking, squatting, dumpstering, etc) that were very far outside our class experience, and how it felt easy and not like a hardship because everyone around us was doing it too. I draw parallels to this in my head when having conversations with class-privileged folks who are part of similar opposed-to-the-capitalist-mainstream subcultures. Like: what if instead of teaching rich people to pretend to be poor, our subcultural norms supported privileged folks to actually give away money and practice a form of downward mobility that was based on a principled choice to redistribute wealth, support grassroots organizing, and live as little as possible off the exploitation of others? That sounds good, right? Given all the people I talk to all the time who are struggling to reconcile social justice politics with having access to inherited wealth, it’s amazing to me how uncommon giving away money is as a talked-about subcultural practice in most of the circles I inhabit. But at the same time these types of conversations give me hope because I get to hear so many people earnestly struggling with these issues, and it makes it seem possible that enough young lefty rich people will start seriously giving away major portions of their capital and talking about it in a way that will start to make that choice seem normal and safe instead of risky and extreme. Does that seem possible? Is it already kind of happening?
I do think there’s something to what you’re saying. My questions are: How is this different from, say, what Bill and Melinda Gates do? What does it mean to “live as little as possible off the exploitation of others” (i.e., who determines that)? When someone gives, to whom do they give? Individuals? Institutions? What if the institutions are themselves problematic (i.e., the nonprofit industrialized complex)? Is wealth re-distribution achieved by simply giving money away? Does wealth re-distribution include the sustainability of that re-distribution? I guess I’m asking what are the next steps to making this happen. No, I’m not expecting you to have the answers. 🙂
Thanks for your awesome questions! Those are such important things to think about, and all totally part of the conversation that I imagine happening. And, I should have been more clear that what I mostly mean by giving away money is giving to grassroots social justice orgs – I talk about this stuff so much that sometimes in my head that part goes without saying, but it’s so important to emphasize.
Ooh, I have so many thoughts about all your questions – when I say “living as little as possible off the exploitation of others” I don’t have a concrete standard in mind (capitalism makes our life choices about living justly within an exploitative economy so complex and contradictory at times) – but my sentiment was about how capitalism is such that for most of us, living off inheritance means using the profits from the un- and underpaid labor of poor people to support ourselves. So I’d like to see that conversation happening a little more openly – and a big step forward seems like giving away unjustly accumulated inherited fortunes (most of which are bound up in – and profiting from – multinational corporations) to social justice work.
And I *definitely* don’t think that wealth redistribution will be achieved by rich people deciding to give away their money. I think economic justice is about fighting for INvoluntary wealth redistribution. I think of giving away money more as a good practice for people who believe in justice, and also as a form of (personal, insufficient, somewhat abstract) reparations for the deep violence and oppression perpetrated by the accumulation of wealth. I definitely don’t see young radical rich people giving away their inherited wealth as a solution or a way of ending poverty and oppression – just as an important thing to do that is useful as part of a broader struggle.
(And just for some of my personal thoughts about how to give money and to what types of institutions/organizations: http://www.enoughenough.org/article/104/what-i-gave-and-where-i-gave-it-2008-giving-plan/ – I don’t mean like Bill and Melinda Gates!)
I really appreciate your distinctions here between a privileged culture of “looking” downwardly mobile, and a practice of intentional financial ‘downward mobility’. I feel like a lot of the values informing the first (disgust with consumerism/capitalism; class guilt) could be channeled somehow into the second… except the class guilt part would somehow have to morph into something more like “responsibility”, which would enable people to have conversations about their wealth rather than just pretend it’s not there.
I don’t remember where it was, but a while ago I was inspired by Dean’s discussion of how he chose to give money. He included a bunch of really good reasons for why to give to people asking for money on the street. One of the points I think he made was that, in this context, the importance of giving is not just economic but also symbolic – the importance of stopping and listening and recognizing somebody. I have begun to try to recognize and respond (give) to people asking me for money, and I have gotten a lot of pleasure out of it.
I think there is something powerful in the fact that giving often feels good. Not ‘good’ in the charity-model sense of “I’m being so generous and amazing”, or “Oh, good, I feel less guilty now” but because there is actually a human exchange involved, and because people one gives money to have things to give as well, even though our culture tells us that they don’t. Did that make sense?
Anyway, I think the question of whether to give to people asking for money is often a useful one to start to talk about some of these issues with friends, and to start to think about some of the intense emotions I, as a class-privileged person, have about “my” money.
I’ve also recently started, as a first step, a personal policy of giving away (to community organizations) any sums of money ($50, $100, etc.) that come my way out of the blue. For instance, randomly receiving an academic award, I try not to immediately latch on to it as “my” money, but instead think that this money should have gone elsewhere – so I’ll redirect it.
Those are just some ideas I wanted to share in case they help anybody else with this stuff.
Thanks for the article! I’m actually writing this comment from the very cafe that you mentioned and have seen the same graffiti a number of times. I think the person who wrote it will enjoy your take on it.
Your neighbor,
Matt
Nat, thanks so much for your thoughts! I think it’s so important to connect money exchanges with actual human interaction and emotions and relationships – I think people’s discomfort with giving money directly to other people – especially to people asking for it on the street – is so connected to not wanting to feel things or really let in the actual impact of wealth disparity and accumulation and our complicity in it. I agree that it’s important and powerful to acknowledge and value that exchange as something that’s not about charity but about just normal human interchange and sharing and respect. It’s also interesting that the more money people have, the more freaked out they seem to be by folks asking for a dollar in the subway. Another example of how wealth can make people kind of pathological.
Matt – I was so hoping that someone would say they knew that graffiti! (Actually I was hoping that someone would say they wrote it but it’s still cool)
I didn’t know you were my neighbor!
As a “settler” society (I’m referring to Sakai’s characterization), i don’t think that american society is really capable of producing fully realized human beings. This is related to what Huey Newton was talking about when he explained how, through slavery, the white man deprived the black man of his mind, but in so doing, he deprived himself of a body. The fight for personal liberation is a *personal* fight, but also a *social* fight. There is a potential unity here that, for me, is very powerful.