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Today is Giving Tuesday, so here’s a 1913 article by Eugene V. Debs, never before republished, about why the charity balls of the rich will never deliver justice for the poor. As Debs declared, “What the poor need is that the rich shall get off their backs.”
Rather than creating an individualized “culture of giving,” we should be challenging capitalism’s institutionalized taking.
Every dollar in Mark Zuckerberg's private charity is a dollar wrested from public coffers — and democratic control.
Justin Trudeau is facing a conflict of interest scandal, in which the Canadian prime minister stands accused of steering public money towards a favored charity. But the details of the case lay bare the singularly hypocritical style of Canadian neoliberalism: a surface patina of progressivism covering up the cynical machinations of the corporate elite.
Wall Street–backed charity funds provide ultrawealthy donors with massive charitable tax breaks — yet operate without any requirement to ever distribute the money to working charities.
We were told that the generosity of the rich would make up for cuts to government services. But those at the top are increasingly using dubious “charitable” ventures as vehicles for profit and influence.
Homelessness isn’t an accident. It’s the result of a brutal economic system and conscious state policy.
Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, has donated $100 million to food banks during the current crisis, but he won’t even pay his own workers sick pay. Instead of charity, we need rights we can rely on — and as Unite leader Len McCluskey argues, the best way to win them is to organize with our coworkers.
Finance giants like Fidelity and Schwab are pushing “donor-advised funds” that enable the ultrawealthy to funnel cash to far-right extremist groups anonymously under the guise of charitable giving. Project 2025 has benefited enormously.
Private charity will never cure capitalism's ills. Only working-class organizations can do that.
The Knick sharply captures American health care's historic inequities.
Once a year, the rich decide that “the undeserving poor” need help after all.
Harvard University has always been a key site in which wealthy elites learn how to defend their class. But it has also been home to students who refuse to enroll in that project and opt instead to fight for the ethic of solidarity.
Nurses at two hospitals in New York City are on strike, fighting for wage increases and against chronic understaffing. Meanwhile, executives of these nonprofit institutions are making millions of dollars at the expense of patient care.
A British bus company recently reversed its plans to cut a bus route, but only after a wealthy local offered to fund it himself. A decent society can’t rely on wealthy do-gooders to save public services.
Individual acts of holiday charity by the rich are a hustle. Real altruism is collective.
The current round of partisan shadowboxing around unemployment benefits misses the point: the purpose of a real welfare state is to free people from the drudgery, precarity, and misery of low-wage work.
Eugene Debs was famous for excoriating the barbarities of capitalism, including the right-wing notion of the “unworthy poor.” As Debs writes in the following 1915 article, republished here for the first time, every human deserves to be free from poverty.
In the US, patients recovering from life-threatening illnesses often find that their first concern is not their health but the massive medical debts they’ve incurred. Right-wing politicians, insurers, and hospitals have worked to maintain this status quo.