The Left is in Financial Crisis. We Need Money for a Revolutionary Movement.
You know what I see when I look around the dismal state of the left right now? I see a very serious financial problem. There are lots of reasons the left is abysmal shape — mainly related to reformism and electorism — but one of them is the fucking money.
The left has consistently exhibited a fundamental inability to understand or cope with the finances of the situation we find ourselves in. The left has no discipline around finances, we tend to not have concrete financial goals outside of the endless non-profit gobbling of funds, and we certainly don’t have any cohesive vision of what the finances should be like. We don’t critically think about WHERE the left’s money is and how it SHOULD be handled.
None of these things are audited or tracked by the movement. How much money has slipped through the hands of reformists and just disappeared, leaving nothing of substance and now retreating, social progress movements in this country absolutely drained?
These are extremely simple and material analyses that we should be focused on because, after all, we are fighting the capitalist financial system and fighting for, in the words of Lenin, “The abolition of classes, [which] means placing all citizens on an equal footing with regard to the means of production belonging to society as a whole”. That is what Marx was doing and is doing. We are critics, enemies, attackers, revolutionaries of economic systems. Furthermore, most people can learn to think on material economic terms, even though it is hard. The idea the financial analysis is out of the vast majority of people’s grasp is absurd. Most people on the left should have a serious working knowledge of capitalism and its application in at least one area, such as a market, industry, city, etc.. You should be able to financially map at least one system. Understanding economics is to see the beast of capitalism, in action, at the most foundational layer of society, the economic system. We WILL be economists so we can monitor and watch our enemy, to see the windows for revolution that so often open but close shut before we can get a competent team through them.
We must, must, must, have more financial literacy on the left. This is non-optional. One problem that we have is that everyone hears the term “million” and all critical or comparative thought goes out the door. People do not know the difference between one million dollars, 5 million dollars, 10 million dollars, 50 million dollars or 100 million dollars. And everything after that is just a fucking blur even though this is an infinitesimal amount of money to the system yet, properly obtained and managed, may land us at the door of the enemy, with arms. How do we propose to be materialists and critics of the capitalist system, to be economic dissenters and economic revolutionaries, without having the slightest grasp on what money even means?
For those interested in this, to get familiar with money I suggest thinking a lot more about what things cost, and you can do that very easily around you. You can try thinking about it in terms of some events that have occurred on the left in memorable times. For example, people got very upset about Bernie Sanders, for having a net worth the size of what it costs to get a 1.5 bedroom condo around the downtown Chicago region. It is really so unreasonable that he have that kind of money? Can you let the man have a fucking condo? No.
Looking down at the first sight of the word “million” is highly dangerous, because in fact, we need that kind of money. We need a lot and a lot of money. We are the revolution. We need several condos, at least. We need to feed our revolutionaries and put roofs over their heads so they may devote themselves to dying for us. I feel it is the least we can do.
So look around you and ask yourself: how much does that cost? How much does this cost? How much does it cost to run an independent revolutionary press with 4 people working full time at a wage that allows them to devote themselves exclusively to this cause for 5 years? How much would it cost to house them? How much budget do we need to start a propaganda function, the deliberant creation of revolutionary music, art, graffiti, and other forms? How much does a billboard cost? How much do 50 assault rifles cost? How many tanks are available for purchase in the United States? How much do cars cost to transport our members across state lines? How much would it cost to get health insurance for every revolutionary we got? How much does it cost to have a top law firm on retainer? Make that two law firms. Checks notes. Three firms.
Soon, simply by playing this game of “how much does it cost”, you can learn about what is possible for us. When you start taking that game into bigger levels, you will understand more about how the capitalist system works: how much is an airplane? How much is a hospital? How much is a Supreme Court seat? (Sadly, it seems we could have afforded that and did not buy one). Lol!
Worse than ignorance, there is an aversion to talking about money on the left. This is absurd because again, we are talking about GETTING RID OF A FINANCIAL SYSTEM, despite what lies the DSA has spread as it goes about its impotent reformist agenda. Getting rid of the current financial system is what we are doing. Because there is no other choice.
It is as if we are trying to distinguish ourselves from capitalists by never deigning to discuss money, there’s this passive idea that money would taint the movement. Other than that being a fundamental contradiction in terms, we need fucking money folks, that is how we obtain infrastructure and professional staffing, until we can overthrow this system. We need things we don’t fucking have, basic fucking well documented revolutionary infrastructure: independent presses, viable revolutionary teams, defenses and armaments, space, safe housing, computing supplies and technology, medical care for party members, lawyers, as many as possible, investigative units, travel to promote international relations. And there are many more.
What do YOU think we need? We need to come up with some truly beautiful economic design work here because we are out-gunned by a lot. In fact, the entire Left is still fucking unarmed after 10 years of spending on socially progressive movements.
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We are in a very scary moment in this country where the Left is incredibly weak. We took Roe v Wade lying down. The decision was a horrific breach of human rights; our response was a brutal exposure of just how weak the Left has become. The lack of response to the ongoing attacks on workers has been confirmation. What exists right now is reformist, electoralist posturing, careerism, opportunism, a sea of half dead non-profits, all things that are extensively damned in the harshest terms by Marx, Lenin and others over and over and over again. Unions are unequipped to fight this threat holistically; by all accounts definitely a piece of the picture, but the strength of management resistance using a constant influx of new “revolutions in the instruments of production” like surveillance and monitoring technology and robots and AI, has put us out of the picture if we are being honest about the threat v resistance diff. Lack of tangible improvements to worker’s lives overall to date despite supposedly massive momentum puts into increasing question the viability of this path. In my mind we are far past unions offering enough reform to even stem the bleeding. And at the very least we need to be aggressively building out the rest of our, if you will, revolutionary portfolio.
On top of our side being fucking out to lunch, no idea how much it costs to eat either, we are entering a new era of conflict with capitalists marked in particular by the acceleration of venture capitalists and the tech industry. They are currently undergoing a vast anti-worker campaign, essentially selling layoffs in the form of artificial intelligence in the enterprise while self-driving vehicles, delivery drones and factory robots are rolled out in the supply chain. The stability of people in America is under deliberant attack, the most concentrated attack on workers of our generation.
We MUST revitalize the left and that can come with a new, wisened, deliberant focus on revolutionary action, as well as an economic revitalization. It is, truly, time to build.
I’ve written elsewhere that we need a new, materialist movement built around a fundamental change in the economic system via People’s revolution. That is what Marx, Lenin and every other leftist we supposedly have been reading, demands that we do.
Positing an agreement on this new revolutionary agenda, the only way to ensure the movement’s future is to secure its financing. I think that a really big cash infusion into the left is what is needed in order to get new things started. I do not believe that just revitalizing the same old strategies and formations is going to work. When something fails, such as an electorist or reformist movement, we must be willing and eager to move forward to the next thing with the hope it will carry us. We must ESCALATE, not retreat. There must be utter willingness to pivot, abandon, try, fail, rebound, rearrange, reconsider, for the goal. There has been far too much room for pride, for clinging to sinking ships out of hubris. If they don’t wish to come along, leave them to their voting.
In this post I’m simply bringing up and circulating some ways of thinking about money that might be helpful to us. I hope you come away with less squeamishness about addressing money on the left and lead to more conversations about money on the left, how much financial resources we actually have access to, whether we are harvesting and using those funds appropriately, and how we can do a better job of managing finances to fund a vital, lush, productive, flourishing revolutionary movement. I can’t wait!! I know the time is coming for us to come out and play. It’s spring!
One of the biggest things I want to convey is that we need a lot, a lot, a lot of money, in large part because we have very little infrastructure set up. It should alarm all of us that the movements of the past ten years have not resulted in the building and retention of long-term infrastructure as those mentioned above. They have not resulted in building stability for the movement; in fact, there has been a silent collapse of all movements in this country that isn’t being talked about, much less addressed.
Because reform doesn’t work, money towards reform goes nowhere, it leads to no dynamism and no vitality. We must switch the direction of the money and we must increase it. I won’t accept that our movement must be impoverished.
There are some basic calculations we can do to come up, even by degrees of extremity in politics, to determine how many people we might be looking at that are a potential base of revolutionary funding, how much they likely make, and how much they might be willing to give.
I am not picking these numbers to be controversial or definitive, but simply to be illustrative, and certainly the information available on how many people define themselves as leftists is pretty scarce, so I’ll approximate.
A 2021 Pew Research report said that 10% of the country is “Outsider Leftists”, among their traits being "More than nine-in-ten Outsider Left (94%) say that the economic system in this country unfairly favors powerful interests.” “Nearly four-in-ten (38%) supported Sanders” in 2020. “Weaker attachment to the Democratic Party than other Democratic-leaning groups.” “Registered voters in the Outsider Left are much less likely to say it really matters which party wins control of Congress next year than those in most other political typology groups.”
It’s not a perfect approximation and I would say, to be generous, 3 in 10 of the Outsider Leftists are worth a damn for our interests, which means we’re looking at 3% of the adults in America that we can estimate to be reasonably interested and possibly motivated and to be a possible financial source.
That is over 6 million people: 6,273,842 of them.
Now if that strikes you as absurd, consider some of the numbers that turned out for the movements of the last 10 years. The 2017 Women’s March had 5.6 million people, the 2018 Women’s March had 1.5 million. The movement against police violence across multiple formations had 26 million people protesting in the streets. So it is totally believable that 6 million people on the left could be in our financial pool, which is a subset of those that participated in the various movements, hoping that they are now inclined to the TRUE vision for economic change that has been beautifully laid out by Marx and Lenin, which I highly encourage you to read. If, like so many, you were turned off from Marx because reformists in the DSA were promoting it, rest assured, Marx offers ample venom for them and his views are in no way reflected or embodied in the DSA. Weird!
So even if we got $2 from all of those per year, we would be looking at close to 12.5 million dollars per year. Of course, these things average out, but I would be totally confident that, if this many people associated with the left over the next 10 years, are willing to contribute to a new revolutionary body, sprung from the ashes of 10 years of burned movements, we could easily be raising $20 million dollars a year to go towards precious revolutionary infrastructure. Again, this includes independent presses, viable revolutionary organizations/factions, defenses and armaments, space, safe housing, computing supplies and technology, medical care for party members, lawyers, as many as possible, investigative units, and travel to promote international relations.
Now, it is sure that there may be a lot less than that willing to give us money; and it should be stated that reformist money can be funneled into the revolutionary movement and we should look to do that at all opportunities. And my point again is not to offer specifics but broad outlines; the main purpose of the above passages are to convince you that there IS a world where tens of millions of dollars are going through a revolutionary movement, that IS possible, and we should seek to capture all of that and more.
What I am proposing is not that money be centralized; certainly collected funds should be held in different accounts and managed by different people in order to ensure that not all of the money is lost at once and that there are failsafes in place. Yet vice verse, just because we maintain finances in a decentralized manner, doesn’t mean that we can’t drive COMMITED, COLLECTIVE GOALS AND AGENDAS which are committed to a specific, singular political goal: a fundamental change in the economic system of America. This far transcends the petty goals of existing reformist infrastructure and its containment in absurd structures like non-profits. It transcends them because it is a genuine financial challenge to the system. This functions as a coordinating force, including of the funds, far greater than reformism offers by way of rigged elections. With reformism there is never-ending compromise to lead us astray. Prior revolutionaries have not left us a guide book for reform. They have offered us a pathway to revolution. Along that route things are much clearer.
One major area of frustration for me has been the way we have been dividing labor in the movement up: each tiny cause has been fundraising for itself, often on a project-by-project basis, or down to individuals, which means that people are spending like 60% of their time on the action and 40% time doing fundraising that they aren’t even equipped to do — I can attest to this having run an independent tech press from 2014-2016. It also means that small projects which we COULD fund simply do not get funding.
Huge amounts of reformist movement labor is spent in piecemeal fundraising. This is a mistake we simply can’t repeat. Fundraising should be for the portfolio of interests represented by our specific cause, and flow to its agents and to its infrastructure. This allows a level of dynamism and nimbism and bounce-back that is not present on the existing “left”. We should prioritize specific, directed missions, offering funding and infrastructure very quickly to deploy new teams immediately in to active situations, such as major changes and disruptions in the economy, global windows for solidarity (I.e. that between Black and Irish people on the widely celebrated death of the Queen), and so on. It is my current thinking that the adoption of a project/skunk works/cell model, featuring small revolutionary teams built on the infrastructure backbone of the movement, would be very beneficial, because it allows us to be dynamic, responsive, and importantly, quickly deal with any divides that come up between parties. Social relationships and their boring machinations have far too long been a problem for organization. We can no longer allow interpersonal social issues and petty squabbles to take precedence in the movement and we must take steps to isolate the broader movement from any of this bullshit. By having a platform model, by putting a dynamic financial apparatus and a financial distribution apparatus in place, we have a lot more flexibility to change form factors, change and move around team members, start and shut down projects, inflate or deflate various focal areas, etc. I would suggest calling our projects “operations” for the sake of professionalism, which I hope to restore to the party.
There has been no flexibility added into the existing social movements and their infrastructure even as we saw again and again that brittle formations like the absolute tsunami of non-profits we now have were catastrophically failing us. Plenty of comprise from these folks, no bend. Weird! Non-profits have played a major role in strangling the movement not only with their reformism and constant moral compromise, but with these brittle, capitalism-friendly corporate structures. Some things should persist and others shouldn’t; this should be allowed for, “give” must be architected into the system. Yet watch non-profits thrash and screech to continue their meaningless, ever failing reform efforts!
One thing that this new proposal takes into account is that lots of projects that get money will end up imploding, that it simply how shit goes, and it is not so much that we have to reduce the failure rate, but that we need to know when to let go and try to recover or salvage as much as we can when something doesn’t work, but then move decisively on. The reformist movements have us trapped in failure with no way to eject.
I’ve been in this game for ten years against venture capitalists and participated in hundreds of projects, and the problem is not that they are failing per se, the problem is that there is no agility and buoyancy and no retention of value by the overarching cause when some of them fall through. Again, the revolutionary movement needs to be dynamic, easy to set up and go to work, easy to tear down, easy to continue and transfer through new comrades, easy to move around, each to quickly deploy into new situations, and handle the inevitable conflicts and issues and interpersonal fall-outs and project implosions that come with the territory. We must work with, not against, the reality of sometimes quickly changing circumstances and the generally unreliable nature of humanity, whom we insist in saving, and now that I reflect, I know not why.
Anyhow, when we raise and then distribute money in these ways, we are suggesting a new kind of revolutionary model, away from the ineffectiveness, bureaucracy and brittleness of the reformist movement. Flowing from the management of the finances this way also proposes that we are able to build up shared infrastructure and invest in shared infrastructure that can be used by all teams and projects as they come and go. From an intelligently managed financial infrastructure — properly aimed against capitalism — flows an infrastructure that also allows us to create core, shared, fluid infrastructure that retains value even when the time for certain projects ends.
In addition to the funding of revolutionary teams and projects executing on shared priories, the money should form an internal backbone for the movement through which we can attach relationships and funds for lawyers, to have established printing presses, to have a talent bank to i.e. easily set up websites for projects by having technical talent on hand, to staff with team members, etc. A distributed and dynamic revolutionary movement makes fucktons of sense especially when you are looking at that financial infrastructure as a way to quickly enable and disable projects of various formations. It allows projects to consume what they need and provide what they can. Projects generate infrastructure and assets of various kinds — even if only mailing lists, humble supplies, subscriptions, art work, analysis, etc. — that can be attached into the larger backbone as well at any time.
You know kindof like in [redacted].
I argue that the financial needs of an actual viable revolutionary party are very significant and that rising to that occasion will be a significant undertaking. But we must begin. We are running out of time.
We must take an aggressive stance towards pursuing funding and the revolutionary movement is never above the hunt for cash to keep us in the fight. People should be individually hounded on this matter. Particularly we must do more work on getting large sums of money from patrons. There is a ton of liberal and even some leftist money in tech, for example, which is where I focus and have done a great deal of financial giving as well as raising it. I alone have fundraised *millions* of dollars for the independent tech community and various other causes. A lot of this involves beating down doors, bullying in the back channel, consistent social pressure, and various forms of charm that we find in revolutionary women to great effect. People with a lot a lot of money have played a large role in funding the work of Marx and Lenin and much revolutionary activity has involved whales, pursued with great effort. Money has been so important to these efforts that Lenin organized a number of robberies and intrigues to get it out of people who had it. Extremely good work.
This brings us to the topic of the need for the professional revolutionary; we will discuss this in future pieces but this has been one of the greatest teachings of Lenin, arguing like other revolutionaries, that we need people who can be fully dedicated to the cause. Another problem with reformist strategies is that their people straddled the “real world” and the real world, much as in their politics. At this time I think that this is the urgent priority of building a revolutionary movement, the recruit and the support of professional revolutionaries so they can attend to these urgent tasks and devote themselves wholly to it. Their full attention is required, their total commitment is required. That means very simply giving people enough money and resources that this can be the focus of all of their time, as it is their inner lives.
Someone put a nice note in my NGL which was something along the lines of, if I had the money, I’d pay for your rent the rest of your life. I have taken great pains to secure my financial independence, so while I’m not in need of this, it was very touching and struck me because this is exactly what we need to start up a revolutionary movement, the ability to provide for revolutionaries and to provide for their work. They will be risking their lives for us; it is not so much to ask that we give them housing on the way to some as yet unknown prison sentence, assassination, death in direct combat, etc.. We should be trying to secure a revolutionary core in this country. We need a financial model that would provide the ability to act quickly and nimbly in the environment.
This is definitely an interesting area and I’m still thinking through this myself, so I am not making any definitive statements, but one thing that I do find concerning is to think about allllll the money that has been spent on the left in the past 10 years and the fact that it has effectively disappeared into quicksand. When I look at the left today I see no evidence of the massive amount of money that surged through the left over the past 10 years. We should be fucking solid. The reformists themselves set us up for never-ending struggle and yet have not planned for its sustenance. Weird.
I don’t even want to gander how much total money has gone through the system for supposedly leftist causes. Because I would start fucking puking because I have run independent infrastructure and I know exactly what could have been done with it. However, it would make another great exercise in understand our finances if any of you would like to take it up.
It is certain that the left is facing a financial crisis and uncertain if we are even aware of this fact.
There’s a capitalist saying” “you have to spend money to make money”. Our money hasn’t… made money. Or even continued to exist as money. Fuck. LOL. As a financially-minded person, I know that cash is the most expensive money. While I would argue cash is the most important focus area in the immediacy, because it is explosive, fast-moving, energizing, and extraordinarily successful at organizing and motivating activity, I at least think when you look at the past 10 years, that we must wonder why this hasn’t translated into a more viable financial future for the left. That is, the fact we are dirt broke right now despite having spent allllll of that fucking money.
While revolutionary finances may very well best be held liquid at all times, it is irresponsible to not at least consider the possibilities of setting a longer-term financial infrastructure. We don’t know when it will be and even a revolutionary movement can conceive of these efforts needing to be continuous across decades, as we join the, in the larger sense, continuous revolutionary movement purported by Marx and Lenin. Financial planning is something we need to bring in experts for and that is the type of of thing that a revolutionary party, focused on building revolutionary infrastructure to support a revolutionary movement, needs to do. Our motto: As long as it takes and as many times as it takes. People who are managing financial portfolios tend to distribute things across banks, across investments and assets, a mix of cash, stocks and bonds, CDs, real estate, and high risk investment areas like crypto. We should also look at getting things like real estate donated to us or acquiring it. Again, I would have to think a lot more about this and certainly will, but the lack of financial STABILITY or even the flow of money PERIOD is not happening under the current reformist movement. So let the movement’s energy and money flow to us instead. They had time to prove themselves and failed.
The intentionality of the revolutionary money needs to be far more disciplined. There are all kinds of financial choices and options and offerings that could be provided to the movement that is going to cut down some of these insane administrative costs and the replication of labor that is happening among the opportunists as they jostle for another non-profit appointment or pass out more campaign flyers. We can do better than them, we always have.
What we need to do is create a revolutionary movement and we need to fund that creatively, intelligently and dynamically. We need to lower the barrier to entry for new entrants into revolutionary work by providing intact infrastructure and funding. We need to enable a far more dynamic and responsive movement by organizing finances and effort around smaller scale missions, projects, teams, cells, etc. that can join, leave, combine, and interact with others in the ecosystem without dragging us all into hell. We need to fund full time, professional revolutionaries who are freed from burden of capitalist or reformist jobs. We need printing presses, we need to boot up at least SEVERAL independent presses, we need professionals who can take writing and translate it into zine or magazine format for distribution, we need technical infrastructure, we need money to promote international relationships with revolutionary parties in countries victimized by American imperialism. We need a lot of great foundational shit that we can then use to launch 1,000 intelligent, targeted and strategic attacks on the enemy. That would be so fun!!!!
Being a revolutionary body means sustaining the revolutionary funding. There is a huge opportunity to provide an acceleration platform for revolutionary work. I could even see collectives of “launch teams” with the specific goal of getting new teams onboarded, efforts to download information and coordinating efforts, uploading new folks onto our infrastructure, and overall taking a serious role of assembling new teams and projects. I am also extremely drawn to the idea of drawing up the priorities, breaking them up into individual tasks or missions — maybe that is investigating Epstein’s ties to tech, or putting together propaganda against venture capitalists — and allowing our network to put together teams around those priorities and claim those projects. Like, OK team, we’re working on these 25 things. Which one do you want to take? This is using some of the techniques that engineers use to get velocity.
No more reinventing the wheel over and over as each new effort spends a lot of money and a ton of time just getting some of the basics up and running. The brittleness, thoughtlessness, with which the reformers have used resources, is part of why we are now in this dead state. Which in my mind can only be revived by an intensive, serious, committed, and professional creation of a new movement that is actually based in revolution, and then its vitalization through money and professional revolutionaries. And because our focus on revolution is driven by ANY understanding of the economic system, our use of money can be smart, thoughtful, cunning and deliberant.
Again, the revolutionaries that preceded us, orchestrated bank robberies, romantic intrigues, courted all kinds of wealthy folks, and all kinds of shameless and debauched efforts, bless them, because they knew the importance of having money to fuel our efforts.
I am quite focused in my mind on how we can boot up a REAL revolutionary movement in this country and have every intention of helping to lead it. I also have no doubt in my mind that played correctly, we can win. This is the topic of another post coming very soon. We need something new. I need something new. But I’m definitely ready for round 2.