This is the second part in a two-part series looking at ways that social movements inadvertently help the oligarchy. Part 1 challenged the non-profit industrial complex for duplicating and fundraising off the work of revolutionary organizations. Part 2 challenges revolutionary movement culture for stoking an irrational fear of money and making our efforts impotent in the process.

Ask yourself these three questions: Who has more money – us or them? Who is more organized – us or them? Who’s winning – us or them?

If you aren’t independently wealthy, want to work full-time helping the real movement get concrete wins, and don’t want to work for the D.C. nonprofit-industrial complex, then you’re shit out of luck. And if you are one of the few truly revolutionary movement organizations doing important work with enough of a budget to hire a staff, your workers are likely underpaid, overworked and burned out.

All of the blame for these situations can be laid at the feet of revolutionary activist culture that teaches people to be afraid of money, to never ask for it, and to never openly say you want it or need it. And because of our own counterproductive views about money, the oligarchy continues to kick our ass and run laps around us.

Money is crucial to keeping talented people on your team who believe in the mission and want to help you succeed while also keeping their households afloat. When an organization offers people decent pay and full-time work, it makes them believe as much in the organization as they do in the general cause.

But an organization doesn’t get to the level of hiring full-time professionals by simply passing a bucket at the end of an event and calling that “fundraising.”

Real fundraising – development – is essentially community organizing. The best development professionals spend a majority of their time building relationships with people, strengthening networks, showing their face at events, and establishing trust with donors over a long period of time. It’s just like a community organizer canvassing the neighborhood: learning who the community’s stakeholders are, talking to people affiliated with other community groups, establishing trust in order to turn out large numbers at a mass mobilization.

If revolutionary organizers treated fundraising as another means of organizing rather than an afterthought that nobody is comfortable talking about, they would have a much greater capacity to accomplish their goal and fulfill their mission.

I once worked for an organization that convinced me to move to a new city and start organizing a massive anti-corporate campaign full-time. While organizing, my salary was essentially what I would fundraise on my own. This meant I was either spending all of my time organizing or fundraising, with no outside help, as the organization I contracted with lacked the staffing to raise funds independent of my own efforts.

As one might expect, I spent all of my time organizing, made very little money from the project, and chose not to renew my six-month contract. The cause, while noble and necessary, still has an unfulfilled mission because of a lack of funds, a lack of understanding about how to sustainably raise those funds, and a lack of respect for the value that money brings to the cause.

Another example: a close contact of mine, who has always wanted to work in the movement, has over a decade of experience as a fundraising professional for nonprofits. But because of revolutionary movements’ fear and lack of respect for money, she’s had little success finding organizations both doing the really important work and willing to pay her a respectable salary that can cover her expenses.

As a consequence, talented fundraising professionals like her are forced back into working for the nonprofit-industrial-complex – organizations that are in business, primarily, to stay in business – and end up jaded realizing that their work ultimately pays for cushy executive salaries and lavish office buildings. The flipside, then, is that the only people revolutionary organizations attract are inexperienced college grads willing to work for pennies, who have no family or serious expenses and who end up with burnout a year down the road.

Let’s not fool ourselves – the oligarchy is winning. We can see this in the rapid erosion of our democracy by corporate money, the poisoning of our food, water, and atmosphere, the inability of our government to do anything for the working poor, and the streamlined efficiency our government has in funneling billions in subsidies and other handouts to the same oligarchy that controls it. The reason oligarchs are winning right now is because they’re better-organized and better-funded. Their organizational prowess is largely due to their ability to attract highly-educated, highly-experienced professionals with their bottomless budgets.

While billion-dollar industries like banks and oil companies will always have more funds than us, we can still be smarter and more realistic about how we view money. Too much money can corrupt. But enough money, spent wisely, can beat back the oligarchy by hiring well-paid, experienced staff that believes in the cause and knows how to work to accomplish goals. It doesn’t mean we’ve sold out or been corrupted if we want to pay motivated professionals to do the work full-time – it just means we have revolutionary organizers whose basic needs are also being met.

Being afraid of money because those who have it do evil things makes as much sense as being afraid of food because people can eat too much and become obese. Money is a necessary resource to organize effectively, just as food is a necessary resource to be alert and productive throughout the day. We don’t need to willingly starve ourselves because we’re afraid of becoming obese. We just have to realize that if we want to win, we first have to be able to eat.

800px-weinertext.jpg