For as long as I can remember, I’ve believed in philanthropy. It was sad to see people on the side of the street, sick children, starving children, etc. I felt it was a moral obligation to help those less fortunate than us.
This is why in 2010, I started participating in Extra Life. For those who don’t know, Extra Life is a gaming-based charitable organization. While it started as an independent charity in 2008, it has since become an arm of the Children’s Miracle Network.
After being just a fundraiser for 4 years, I began recruiting local gamers through its guild program. We would go out to local game shops, conventions or anywhere gamers, geeks, and nerds might congregate.
For the first few years, I thought I was doing great work. Don’t get me wrong. Raising hundreds if not thousands of dollars for my local children’s hospital was rewarding. But something just felt off the more I got involved.
There was always a need for more. More money. More recruits. I initially went along with all this because of my gamer mentality. The numbers kept going up and I was contributing to it. I needed to work harder and harder to get recruitment numbers and funds up.
Then it hit me!
While we were being asked to do all this labor, nothing was actually being given back to the hundreds of people out in the streets making these asks a reality. Not even in exposure. At least with exposure, it could help bring in more money because more people would be watching.
Another thing that occurred to me was that certain people were getting opportunities. Most didn’t look like me. However, they did look like the majority of Extra Life participants. According to a former CMN employee, Extra Life’s demographics were about 90% cis white male.
The parts started connecting for me. And that’s when my eyes finally opened. While. at face value, charity appears altruistic, underneath it was a corporation set up to fix problems created by capitalism. Because it is a corporation, it deals with the same issues that actual corporations deal with, just with extra steps.
As a socialist, you struggle against capitalism and all that enables it. This includes charity. Unfortunately, struggling against something that looks altruistic is a tall order. For those not plugged into the greater class struggle, going against charitable organizations seems wrong.
However, these organization are just corporations. They have boars, presidents, and CEOs. While they are focusing on bringing money in by way of donations, that’s just another name for profit. This isn’t to say the money doesn’t get to where it needs to go. But some funds still work to enrich a select few. This could be the aforementioned CEOs. Some of the money goes into for profit businesses. It is also used as a way to help subsidize the lives of the wealthy by way of tax breaks.
All of this is done while providing little relief for the cause. On a small scale, sure, material conditions have changed. But, looking at the big picture, the problems still persist. You have only put a bandage on a gaping wound. You’ve treated a symptom, but not the root cause.
Now, this isn’t to say that we should all stop donating or even raising funds. What I’m trying to say is we should be cautious as to how we give. Instead of giving to big, faceless entities, give to a local organization. Find mutual aid posts online and help someone directly. Maybe even participate in tangible activities where there is someone directly receiving the aid like shelters and food banks. Personally, I’ve been doing a mix of these things.
Ultimately, we should all be striving to dismantle capitalism so we can combat financial inequality in our society. If access to our vast number of resources were more distributive, things like charity would be a thing of the past.