In my role as a freelance SEO consultant I have been lucky enough to work with some amazing people working at some great, very worthy charities and non-profits.

This article isn't a critique of any of these people, or the charities themselves, but is meant as a pointer as to the deeper, systems level issue, and is especially aimed at those who might not have considered this as being a problem previously.
I wasn't aware of any of these topics prior to working with charities, and my thoughts here have clearly been coloured by the books, people and communities I've been a part of over the years.

I share this piece as always with good intentions - maybe for some people the topic is obvious and known - but otherwise, hopefully it helps expand the horizons for someone out there. Beginning the delearning process for the average citizen might be another way to frame this.

Sidenote; I'm not convinced people will really change their thoughts based upon one blog post (perhaps this isn't the best medium for such a topic!) especially when those thoughts may be so concrete and ingrained within ourselves. If you are anything like me, you learn on the go, from doing, not from reading random blog posts on the web! If you have thoughts/suggestions on alternative mediums to reach people here, I am all ears.

A quick thought experiment; what do most charities claim to resolve?

Here's a quick test for you to kick things off. Think of some of the biggest charities that come to your mind. What is it that they claim to resolve - what is their reason of existence and operation? All charities have one (or a few), you don't have to get it 100% accurate but just a general idea...

Let's say you thought of someone like Cancer Research UK, maybe the British Heart Foundation, or Mind (the mental health charity). Perhaps you didn't think of any of those, but we will focus on those for now, for the purposes of this exercise.

The first two are clearly focused on issues around physical health and care, whilst the last is focused on mental health. A huge amount of charities will operate in the health sector, but those were some of the larger ones within the UK based on revenue.

If we look at the British Heart Foundation (BHF) they state on their website that this is their goal:

BHF is the biggest independent funder of research into cardiovascular disease in the UK. We want to power the next breakthroughs in diagnosing, treating, and preventing the world’s biggest killer.

Now - if we can take a (relatively big) step back for a moment and think, knowing that stress is one of the biggest factors behind heart health (and also mental and physical wellbeing in general), what is one of the biggest common sources of stress in our lives?

Perhaps for many it is money related - stress of work, having to pay the rent, rising food and energy costs, etc etc.

So based on this idea (that stress is one of the biggest factors leading to health problems, alongside a lack of regular moderate exercise and a healthy diet) - I don't think it would be a huge jump to say that actually capitalism (fuelled by neoliberal policies from the late 80's onwards at least in the UK and the US) will be driving a lot of our major mental and physical health issues.

This might sound like a leap, or that I am simply trying to disregard the work of these charities (I'm not!), but it is important to realise and understand that actually a lot of the bigger charities which exist all actually have this same recurring theme - that the underlying cause here is fairly directly that of capitalism.

Now of course - in current society, the here and now, we do need such charities. We need someone working to explore improving heart health, we need someone that provides access to foodbanks for citizens (as sad as that may be), we need someone that helps to rehome animals and so on. But we should be aware and critical of the fact that, none of these big established charities will ever solve the problems that they seek to resolve. Note that I use the term someone above because - in a perfect world - this is the role humans would fulfil, instead of an externality like a charity.

We are kind of stuck in this mode of operation whereby temporary fixes are applied to absolutely gigantic structural issues. I genuinely believe this is partly because people don't wish to tackle the bigger issues - it requires too much cross-sector coordination with other groups of people, too much heavy thinking and lifting... far better and easier to stick to the easy wins or the low hanging fruit.

The further our society heads in the direction of making use of externalities to solve our problems (relying on the health sector to cure people, on the school system to educate people, on the charity sector to fill in the gaps) the more "stuck" we become upon relying upon these externalities, which ultimately makes it impossible to pull back and escape them - we become consumed by them - and this is largely the thesis of Ivan Illich within his book Tools for Conviviality where he referred to them as Radical Monopolies.

If capitalism is the root of most of societies problems, why are there no openly anti-capitalist charities?

This all lead me to question why none of these charities are openly anti-capitalist? Or at least naming this huge structural issue to overcome? Now, some readers may know the answer to this already, but I will delay the unveiling for now (in a vain attempt to build suspense).

Within the structure of a charity they are legally obliged to have a Board of Trustees, which is a group of people who have to ensure that a charity is run in a proper way, and that it does indeed seek to resolve whatever it is they set out to achieve as a charity.

So for someone like the RSCPA (the animal protection charity in the UK), their Board of Trustees will have to ensure that as a charity they continue to work towards the protection of animals. They couldn't allow them to suddenly pivot towards supporting some unrelated cause - like providing emotional support dogs for members of the Far Right.

Outside of a Board of Trustees there may also be a Director and other roles within the charity which keep tabs on performance, as well as there being external organisations that apply some checks (such as the Charity Commission in the UK).

But also critically here - many charities are beholden to any of the grants and funding that they do receive. Much of this funding will have very strict terms applied (eg you have to be very specific with how you use these funds) and of course if an individual philanthropist is funding them you can also imagine they may have some kind of input here, even if technically they aren't supposed to influence the goings on within a charity.

Let's imagine you have a very openly pro-capitalist, pro-economy person like Jeff Bezos (owner of Amazon) donating millions to a charity. You can be fairly certain that the charity is never going to speak bad of capitalism, of our growth obsessed economy, or to speak out against monopolies or against companies that infringe workers rights and so on - they wouldn't dare point the gun at their funder would they? Not just because it would be awkward, but because this would jeopardise their funding, which is needed to pay staff salaries and to help them work towards their mission.

The summary or conclusion here is basically that charities are capitalist entities. They exist in a very much capitalist society and so of course they operate in the same way. They receive funding and they are expected to generate a return for their shareholders and investors. In this case the return may not be financial (although in some cases charities do measure their return based on perceived financial benefit to the economy) and instead it might be measured through perceived social impact and environmental benefit.

In some cases the charity or foundation might have been created as a form of corporate greenwashing - Jeff Bezos created the Bezos Earth Fund as a nice example - a "10 billion commitment dedicated to fighting climate change and protecting nature" (reminder of Bezos' apparent $284 billion net worth). In this case the point is that by setting up this non profit foundation, he can launder his (and by extension Amazon's) reputation. Instead of tackling the heart of the issue (rampant overconsumption fuelled by business practices Amazon have used) he can instead setup a charity to "offset" the monumental environmental damage that he is fuelling.

The idea of charity or non-profits as capitalist entities has become far clearer in recent years with the application of for-profit business strategies within traditional charities, and modern day leftie-obsessed folk like Rutger Bregman with his School For Moral Ambition. The school basically pushes the belief that charities aren't being run in the right way, and that they need to hire better people to run them. So, charities need to become better at capitalism.

What is common with people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk (who has his own Musk Foundation), even Rutger Bregman above is that they believe humans need to be constantly innovating and inventing, and so ultimately that growth is this key to "progress".

In a socialist society, charities wouldn't need to exist

I don't believe that in a postgrowth, non capitalist society (which admittedly is still a long way off), charities will need to exist for a few reasons:

1 - Charities (in the structural sense) are capitalist and therefore require capital to run... of course we can redefine this within a socialist system, eg, the people can decide what society should be working towards collectively. We seek to solve this internally without it being some kind of externality; no need for an entity to be created to "fix" the problem of world hunger, because we tackle it directly at the source (the source of course here being inequality).

2 - Because we have shifted beyond capitalism (which I have proposed is actually the cause of many of the problems that charities seek to resolve), magically many of these problems have also disappeared! Imagine in a postgrowth world if you don't need to pay for groceries, and your accommodation is provided for you. How liberating would that be? And how much happier would you feel as a result of not having this burden upon your shoulders? Society would be free to work towards doing the things that society actually needs, not what capitalism has tricked us all into doing. How many bullshit jobs (to coin David Graeber's term) would disappear overnight?

Think of it this way - in a postgrowth world - where you didn't need to work 40+ hours per week, and your work would be meaningful and important, and you would live in a more communal and open society (not in isolation, as many of us do today), what do you think will happen to issues like anxiety, depression, stress, ill health? Do you think in a postgrowth society those issues will improve, or get worse? I like to think the answer is the former 🙂

Sidenote that when people usually question a postgrowth society in which money isn't in use (which is one possible option within a postgrowth society, not a given), they usually ironically say something like "yeah great, everything is free in a communist society but we are all just slaves to an evil dictator - nice one!!!" - this is why I personally would advocate for a more anarcho-communist society, which sounds scary to many, but basically implies a communist society (the word communist btw is derived from the word "communal" before it became an insult thanks to western propaganda) whereby there is no overarching hierarchy of leadership. This could mean a decentralised form of living where decisions are made communally at a local level. No-one can "rise" to get in power, or to become a "dictator" because that is not possible within this system.

Of course charities never publicly speak about socialism or express concern against capitalism because that would be to turn on their masters; many big charities are funded by the establishment and those who have greatly benefited from this open market capitalist society. Many famous entrepreneurs at some point start a nonprofit foundation and then soon find themselves receiving a Knighthood or some such recognition for "services to society" or to the economy - and these people also end up on Boards of Trustees and in other advisory roles within charities.

So, for charities to turn on their masters would mean they risk losing all funding, and thus the charity can no longer exist. They have to continue to tread lightly, as if walking on glass, whilst their master sleeps soundly nearby.

Sometimes I feel we are stuck in a bad pantomime; playing roles none of us really wanted, or asked for

It was a weird moment to make the realisation here that charities will never solve the problems they seek to exist - it often feels to me that we are in this make-believe-fantasy world whereby we (deep down) know there are these colossal issues that need dealing with, but due to their sheer size and incomprehensibility, we just push them out of our mind and get back to whatever it is we were doing - finishing up a spreadsheet, or popping out to the local supermarket (we're low on potatoes).

I realise we can't seriously be expected to dream, or at least advocate, for a non capitalist world because there is so much work to be done to make that happen. I personally believe we need to dismantle mainstream media, create independent decentralised alternatives, remove the establishment (don't ask me how, at least not in public) and to shift towards a system of decentralised local governance.

The alternative to thinking big is to basically continue to push the exact same stuff that has clearly not been working for the past hundred or so years - the definition of insanity if we are to expect different results. Enough of messing around at the fringes, we all need to be thinking of getting to the root of our societies problems whilst we still can.

So - what I propose - or how to tackle capitalism

Clearly me writing this blog post doesn't change a thing (although perhaps it makes me feel a bit better having written it).
And also this is not a time for heroes - not one person can push through a transition towards a postgrowth society, the likes of which wont happen overnight (this is probably what revolutions were for).

I don't really have any strong answers here except to say that we must not hide from naming the underlying structural causes of our societies problems instead of avoiding them completely, which I think most of us are guilty of doing. We don't want to risk offending anyone, ironically whilst people on the other side of the world die as a result of man made hunger, genocide or war, just 3 of the worse outputs of capitalism.

We have to lose this fear of causing offense, to name these underlying harmful structural issues, and to advocate that others do the same. And if you feel strongly about this then seek out those groups which do name those harmful structures and support them!

Seek out those (often grassroots) groups which are speaking out vocally to support feminism, decoloniality, anti imperialism, anti racism, groups that are pushing degrowth or post-growth economies, basically any groups that are positively against the western mode of operation, which is basically a consumption and growth mindset.

Ironically these groups (which can help to deschool us and to help us on this journey towards unlearning what we have been taught in the west) lack any such funding, precisely because they are (by their nature) inherently anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. Hence; they require all the support we can get if we do want to get society back on track.