Giving Tuesday, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, kicks off an annual season of pleading for funds from groups and individuals. Like Mother’s Day,
Giving Tuesday is an invention, begun in 2011 to inspire what one website calls “radical generosity.”
If you’re on social media, your feed will consist almost entirely of organisations asking for money. The idea, broadly defined, is to give ordinary people (the un-wealthyones not invited to the big gala fundraisers) an opportunity to donate to organisations they care about. This, supposedly, helps your local museum, food pantry, or anti-violence group boost its funding profile and, more to the point, get more money.
The reality is that Giving Tuesday is as poisonous as any other kind of philanthropic project. Philanthropy, by its very nature, is designed to do little more than provide tax havens for the wealthy and it allows the ultra-rich (whose immense fortunes can only be enabled and sustained by gigantically exploitative systems) to meddle in societal structures. This has meant that some, like Bill Gates, are given permission to literally dictate how populations might live or die by delving into public health crises like malaria and AIDS.
The word “community” comes up a lot: Anyone can give any amount and all of this community-wide giving creates, we’re told, a general and even radical sense of empowerment. Organisations feel comfort in knowing that their communities are willing to step up and help them stay afloat.
In fact, there are few financial advantages to Giving Tuesday, for the organisations. My friend, H, who has worked in the arts funding arena says that the effort “is a “waste of time” and that it’s “only useful for getting gifts from folk who don’t usually give, and that’s a pretty small set.” Over at ArtsJournal, Alan Harrison refers to it as a gimmick and points out, as H. also did, that it’s prudent to ask, “Given its extremely close proximity to any end-of-year campaign, might you raise that amount in December instead of November?” The Fundraising Authority writes that organisations tend not to raise much money after a lot of effort, while jostling for attention in an increasingly crowded field.
Giving Tuesday is also a huge waste of resource and person power as employees have to spend their precious (and usually underfunded) time crafting fundraising emails and social media posts, responding to endless and often useless queries, and then following up with people to make sure all the promised money does make its way towards their organisations. All of this time, energy, and intellectual work could be better spent on a more sustained and sustainable year-long effort to keep funds flowing. The day also becomes an opportunity for pressure from unexpected quarters: organisations have been known to forcefully suggest to their employees that they can donate via payroll deductions, which is a little bit like asking a Thanksgiving turkey to please carve itself. I had to completely unsubscribe from a publication’s emails because I was getting solicitations every hour, and the last one was a gun to the head: I could make the emails stop—but only for three days—if I agreed to make a donation.
While Giving Tuesday is presented as a democratic, community-led effort and thus somehow separate from the large billionaire-friendly gala fundraiser world, it is actually wedded to the latter. The basic idea is the same: that issues like hunger, poverty, and arts funding should be largely sustained through private resources, not by the state. Anarchists and other leftists tend to be suspicious of state funding, and often with good reason, given how severely politicised it can be (recall, for instance, the infamous NEA Four controversy that has since marked the art world, for better and worse, mostly the latter), which is why they seek alternatives like Mutual Aid (not entirely satisfactory, as I explain in my current book project). Historically, philanthropy has been a tool of class ascension (consider the Medicis), allowing people to direct their money not just towards organisations but to an entire structure that grants them access to networks of social and cultural power. In effect, Giving Tuesday is a starter kit for neoliberalism, schooling people in the lesson that the government is unnecessary for a vibrant sphere of culture and the arts, and that privatisation, in the shape of individual donations, is key to its survival.
With the second election of Donald Trump, conversations on such matters will increasingly be more polarised. In the context of Giving Tuesday, Trump is a boon to fundraisers who use his impending presidency to stir up fear and paranoia amongst their would-be donors. Give us money or watch the world die, is the gist of many of the pitches, couched in more genteel language like, “these troubling times.” Not all of this fear-mongering is unwarranted. Trump’s broad agenda, aided by proposed Cabinet members and advisors who seem to have been picked from the very bowels of Reddit comment sections, is simple: burn the planet down by destroying or selling all its natural habitats, loot every place of money, and then escape to Mars in a rocket ship with his friend Elon Musk to spend the rest of his years in retired bliss.
We could continue to be distracted by all the talk of his evil agenda, but a key reason that Trump is here in the first place, one that the mainstream media is only now, hesitantly, willing to look at, is the matter of funding. The Right funds its efforts and the people who lead them with generosity and few questions as long as the job—of asserting supremacy in the polls and elsewhere—is done. The left, meanwhile, still thinks that everyone should work for free and that anyone who asks for financial support or, horrors, something so crude as pay is clearly just selfish and evil and unworthy of inclusion in civil society.
Consider this article in the New York Times, “Republicans Built an Ecosystem of Influencers. Some Democrats Want One, Too,” about the many Democratic “content creators” who worked, usually for free or very little, to help boost the failed Kamala Harris campaign. Some, like Zackory Kirk, have been “churning out mostly progressive content for more than four years,” and only got paid work in the months leading up to the election. The Times reports:
It was only in the final stretch of the 2024 election that any real paid opportunities for him emerged from Democrats seeking to boost support for Vice President Kamala Harris, down-ballot candidates and issues such as reproductive justice. Nearly all the money Mr. Kirk made — and it wasn’t that much, he added — came in the nine weeks between Labor Day and Election Day.
“Up until the end, everything was pretty much free work,” he said.
And since Ms. Harris lost?
“Nothing.”
In contrast, it appears that “Republicans have helped incubate a highly organized and well-funded ecosystem of influencers, podcast hosts and other online personalities who successfully amplified and spread pro-Trump content.” Now, progressive “content creators” are trying to create a viable and sustainable network that could help deliver victory to the next Democrat candidate. This is echoed by widespread calls to find the equivalent of Joe Rogan, but on the liberal/progressive side.
All of this is deeply silly, infantile, and pointless. Harris didn’t lose because of a dearth of progressive podcasts: she lost because she was a terrible candidate, with no discernible agenda that set her apart from Trump (and I warned you she would lose, the day after she accepted the nomination). While she refused to appear on the Rogan podcast, she did show up on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show where the famously liberal host asked her a perfectly simple question about how her administration might differ from Biden’s: “What would the major changes be, and what would stay the same?” Her response was, “I’m not Joe Biden, and I’m not Donald Trump.” She then said, quite pointlessly, “Frankly, I love the American people, and I believe in our country.” The rest is mostly babble, with no specifics about what she might do: she was clearly rattled by the most basic query that every politician is prepped for. Building some massive and well-funded podcast empire around a Democratic agenda will not help one bit if your presidential candidate literally, actually cannot articulate why people should vote for her.
But putting that aside, the report provides a glimpse into what we on the left have long known and understood: you can’t expect to succeed on free or cheap labour. Goodwill can only get you so far.
And yet, this has long been a massive failure of the left: its failure to understand, first, that cultural writing and podcasting are forms of labour, not hobbies, and that they need to be sustained by that thing called money, which they always claim to despise. (Here, I’m referring to the actual leftist left, all the commie pinkos and socialists and Marxists, not liberals and progressives, who can just wither away and die for all I care.) Even when not asked for money, the left consistently fails to draw people in with the simplest of enticements, like food and transportation costs.
I’m reminded of my college days when a half dozen of my dorm-dwelling friends introduced me to the Hare Krishna centre nearby. They had discovered that it opened its doors to offer free lunches to outsiders, a welcome relief from the food in the dorms. I went with them a couple of times and it was clear that they were all on friendly terms with the very welcoming and genuinely kind hosts. There were no questions asked, no one inquired about the lone girl in the midst of all these boys, and the food wasn’t just free but absolutely delicious. There was no means testing of any kind: no one asked why a clearly well-fed girl was showing up for free food. I learnt afterwards that they had made one convert from within the group, the sweetest, shyest person of them all, a dear and kind soul who, I hope, is doing well wherever he is. I know there were many others.
This is how the Right and various kinds of cults generally operate: they know how to bring people in by offering to fulfil their most basic needs. I once went to a fundamentalist church to support someone’s conversion. I was there for support, and I sat quietly and watched her baptism, something she clearly needed and wanted. Again, the food was plentiful, and rides back home were generously offered. It didn’t make me want to join, but it showed me how right wing institutions have understood how to recruit and keep its members in the fold.
In contrast, leftist political gatherings and meetings usually offer very little more than hairshirts at the door. Back in my more active organising days, it was not uncommon to have to travel great distances to meetings that began around 6 p.m to accommodate people’s workdays, only to find little more than dried up pizza and warm soda, if we were lucky. Chicago is run like a plantation: its public transportation is deliberately designed to keep people of colour from the west and south sides away from the predominantly white north side. This means that traveling between these racialised zones can mean a bus, a train, and then another bus and up to two hours of your time, each way.
Most of my life, on both the personal and the political level, is spent in queer radical circles, where there’s a lot of talk about nourishing connections, growing community, and building trust. But you can’t build a movement with tired people who also have to struggle just to get to meetings. I was once part of an art-funding effort that involved many hours of reading proposals and interviews. It included some of the brightest people I’ve met, and that was the best part of the experience. But it was headed up by an actual millionaire, who thought it would be ever so fun to have us all bring our own food in some kind of potluck situation. I had already explained, before joining, that I was perennially broke and lacking in funds but, clearly, this had made no impression upon said millionaire. As I literally scrounged for bus fare in my sofa and contemplated what I could afford to make or buy for the communal potluck, I asked no one in particular, “Why the hell isn’t this millionaire just feeding us all for our time and effort?”
As if that wasn’t annoying enough, I found myself looped into emails from her as she traveled to Central America on some kind of live-with-poor-people-to-experience-their-issues trip, the kind of poverty tourism that wealthy people sometimes undertake. I had no interest in any of it, I was struggling with my own life, and I didn’t want to be a friend or penpal: I just wanted to do what I could to get money to artists. But this is also symptomatic of left funding for causes: it is often a pretext to form social networks that derive their energy not from actual bonds of friendship but from dependency and no little amount of Mean Girls energy (to be clear, no one in the group deferred to her which seemed to cause her some irritation). The relationships between funders and fundees are often mired in histories of racial domination, even—and perhaps especially—when the former claim to be trying to rectify ancient wrongs.
There have been many excellent satirical depictions of such wealthy and clueless people in recent years, indicating that there is at least a general willingness to examine the problems on a cultural level. In an episode of Desperate Housewives, Virginia Hildebrand (Frances Conroy) becomes so enamoured of the children of Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria) that she effectively tries to become their controlling grandmother, using her massive wealth as a tool. More recently, in the Australian series Deadloch, Margaret Carruthers (Pamela Rabe) is the largely self-appointed matriarch of the town who uses her immense family wealth to try and control the area’s Aboriginal residents, all the while clucking that she simply wants to empower their young women.
“What do people need, and how do we get it to them?” This is a question I asked in “A Manifesto,” while trying to outline what a real left utopia should look like. It’s a question the left fails to ask as it keeps designing ways to sift through categories of people. Who, it keeps asking, is truly deserving of our compassion, our time, our funds? Certainly, funds are much scarcer on the left—the actual left—than on the right where the world’s richest man now seems to be roaming the world to determine which governments need overthrowing. But the problem has less to do with money-money, the actual thing itself, and more with a historical disdain for the very idea that people might need to have their basic needs met if they are to be persuaded to work to make change. I, for instance, am often asked to volunteer my time on this or that radical project and my usual answer is some version of, “Mate, I’m just trying to keep this roof over my head and I haven’t dropped the habit of checking my bank balance before I step into the grocery store, so, no.” Some years ago, I was asked to contribute free and original work to some ticketed literary gathering and when I had the temerity to ask if I would be paid, the response was, “No, but we will donate all the proceeds to this wonderful food depository!” “Well, that’s nice,” I thought of responding, truthfully, “since that’s the one I’ll be using soon.” (Instead, I simply ceased communications, exhausted.)
Anyway, Giving Tuesday, the holidays, people in need, and all that. The left has naturalised philanthropy and nonprofits to such an extent that we have to resort to them to survive. The nonprofit industrial complex, or NPIC, was originally created as a stopgap measure, and meant to make itself disappear once it achieved its goals for a more equitable society, but it has increasingly become an end unto itself, a gigantic, rapacious entity that feeds itself with high salaries for its upper level management, exploitative conditions for all others, and very little to no progress at all on any of its lofty aims.
Give if you can, but feel no shame or regret if you can’t, or don’t want to. Give to your local museum, your favourite writer or two, your favourite magazine, but give with an eye on the larger question: how might we work to obliterate the very idea of Giving, on Tuesdays or any other day, once and for all?
Here are three places I recommend, if you have the extra resources.
Current Affairs, the world’s best magazine.
Chicago Freedom School (they were actually raided in 2017 and falsely charged with selling food, when they were feeding youth: you can read about that here).
Moms United against Violence and Incarceration, here and here.
Paws between Homes helps to make sure that people suffering from homelessness or any kind of housing instability can be assured that their beloved pets have a safe place until they can be reunited.
See also:
Make Art! Change the World! Starve!: The Fallacy of Art as Social Justice – Part I
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