“The assumption was everybody works and then does their political work on the side.”
Interview with Linda Burnham
Last month, I was sitting in an empty conference room in Downtown Oakland cursing an unreliable internet connection. I was interviewing social justice movement writer, leader and strategist, Linda Burnham, over Zoom. The audio and video weren’t in sync. The sound would cut out randomly. It was all distracting me from one of the most fun and compelling conversations I’ve had in some time.
Thankfully, I was able to get the transcript and am thrilled to share it with you today. This interview is a scorcher and I hope you take a read, like it and share it with others.
A big part of this project is learning the lineage within which many of us organize the rich. At the same time, I think it’s important to get a big picture view of the money and class dynamics in liberation movements over time.
In order to start doing that, I’ve interviewed two movement elders I respect and admire, Linda Burnham and Max Elbaum. Neither have been involved in organizing the rich until quite recently. And both are life-long activists and organizers.
In this interview, Linda and I talk through big questions like: How were movements funded before the rise of philanthropy and nonprofits? What were the economics of being an activist and organizer before the 90’s? What are the pros and cons of our current movement economics? What’s working and what isn’t about the left’s relationship to the rich these days?
These questions feel more relevant than ever as many debate the role of progressive nonprofits, the foundations and wealthy people who support them1, and how to stop repressive measures like HB9495.2
Linda is currently the Research Director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and has been a Black feminist leader, writer, researcher, and strategist for over 50 years. Read more about her award winning work here.
As always, the transcript below is edited for content and clarity.
Mike: What's your class background and how did you get involved in social movements?
Linda: I would describe my background as stable working class. My parents were both organizers and political. They were first-generation college students, educated. My mom was a biologist who worked in labs while we were growing up, then later became a community college teacher at Empire State. My dad was an organizer his whole life and the editor of a newspaper called Freedom.
We weren't hungry and didn't suffer financially, but we also weren't going on European vacations. We wore hand-me-downs. That was pretty typical for our broader family -- teachers, city workers, that kind of thing.
Mike: How did you get connected and involved in social movements?
Linda: I got connected because I was raised by Black communists. Politics was a big thing around the dinner table, and I got involved really young. My first independent demonstration was a ban-the-bomb peace demonstration in Union Square. In high school, we organized around Ebinger's Bakery, which had "no colored folk" at the front of the house. We boycotted the bakery.
Mike: If you don't mind me asking, what era was that boycott?
Linda: Early '60s. I was born in '48, so my high school years were '61 to '64. Then there was early anti-Vietnam stuff -- I remember hearing about US incursions into Vietnam in junior high school.
I got politicized pretty early. I went to public school in New York - Erasmus, this huge high school. Then my first year of college was at Bennett, a historically Black college in Greensboro, North Carolina. I left Bennett because it was very socially conservative, more than I could handle as someone who grew up pretty free-ranging. It was a lockdown situation, so I needed out. I went to Reed College in Portland, Oregon -- the polar opposite of Bennett.
I ended up in the Bay Area in 1969 and quickly got involved in Black feminist organizing. At that point, any five people could create an organization - I was in one called Black Sisters United. Then the Third World Women's Alliance, and onward from there.
Mike: Do you have any first memory of meeting or connecting with wealthy people in left movements?
Linda: Not really. I mean, I was in left movements with folks who might have been raised in families more comfortable than mine. But most of my friends, especially in Black Sisters United and the Third World Women's Alliance, were children of factory workers. Raytheon - Attieno's mom worked at Raytheon. Someone worked in the shipyards down in Vallejo - that was Miriam's dad. Fran's dad was a truck driver. Most folks in the Third World Women's Alliance, some went on to become doctors and such, but they came from working class families. I'm struggling to figure out when I ran into somebody with wealth.
Mike: I was imagining your social scene in the left would be primarily folks like you - raised working class, maybe raised middle class. Looking at your bio earlier, I wondered if maybe you ran into some progressive-leaning rich kids at Reed during the student activist time.
Linda: Yeah, maybe. There was one person of wealth from Texas in my college years. Most folks at Reed were from upper middle class families, which from my point of view is wealth - but it wasn't real wealth. It was wealth from the vantage point of somebody not wealthy. There might have been a couple of rich kids at Reed. It's also a time when I wasn't really thinking necessarily all that much in that way, but on reflection... yeah, mostly children of the upper middle class.
Mike: Yeah, that makes sense. My brother went to Reed. My family is sort of the managerial class people - to most of the world, we're rich. But if you're in a wealthy space, you're not that rich. You're like the single-digit millionaires hanging out with the multi-millionaires. But it's all relative.
I wanted to ask - you were on the forefront of developing these conversations about intersectionality. How much was cross-class alliance building, cross-class unity, and work around people's class background a part of that mix?
Linda: That's a great question. We didn't think about class enough, actually. I'm glad you're thinking about it now. We came more from a vantage point of "the ruling class is all the enemy - why even bother trying to sort it out?" We weren’t particularly thinking about cross-class alliances beyond maybe the upper middle class. We just didn't go there. Looking back, I'd say we had a pretty crude analysis of what we were trying to do.
This was also before the whole nonprofit industrial complex. Everything we did was based on dues - people were expected to pay somewhat proportional to their income, though you never exactly knew what that meant for different people. There was no assumption that some wealthy person in the wings was going to fund the whole thing. There are strengths and weaknesses to that kind of organizing. I've been thinking about it a lot recently as I look at some of the dysfunction in the nonprofit world.
Mike: Ooh. I’d love to hear more. What do you see as the strengths and weaknesses of that model?
Linda: In Black Sisters United, Third World Women's Alliance, the Alliance Against Women's Oppression, none of that was funded by outside folks. There was no staff. Eventually, in Line of March, a Marxist formation - not a great name, but whatever - there were maybe a couple people on staff. There were some folks working on the newspaper and journal. But everybody else had full-time jobs. It's not like you had a staff of dozens or hundreds - that just wasn't a thing. The assumption was everybody works and then does their political work on the side.
In the Third World Women's Alliance, we did bake sales, sold cupcakes for 25 cents - I mean literally - and tried to figure out how to raise enough money to get a newsletter out. The advantage of that is that everybody who's in it is in it because they actually really want to do the work. There's nobody there because they've got this much politics [holding fingers closely together] and need a job, so they're on staff at some non-profit but unwilling to do whatever’s needed. You get people who are truly dedicated to the mission, who are mission-driven and willing to give up a lot.
I was talking to my daughter a couple months ago, and I said "Yeah, you grew up pretty poor because we were." And she said "I know, Mom."
It wasn't news to her, but we didn't feel particularly poor to me. There are some reasons for that. One is that housing costs were nowhere near as crazy as they are now. Plus, people were willing to live with housemates and all that - though that only works until you're a certain age, and for some people, it doesn't work at all.
It also means that some people can't work in that way. As you get older, you have responsibilities towards kids or aging parents. I had the advantage that I was healthy, my family was healthy. I wasn't called on by a whole bunch of other family-related stuff, so I could exist on a part-time job and a limited income and be okay with that, and do all my political work on the side. But that only takes you so far.
Mike: I love hearing about this because it helps articulate something that needs to be better understood about what left movement building and activism looked like in different eras.
Alex Tom is trying to articulate this thing about movement economics - what did the economics of our movement look like in different periods? What you're saying paints a picture of a very different movement economics before neoliberalism ratcheted everything up. There was a stable working class that existed in a way it doesn't now, and there was a bit of a stable middle class that could allow people to take financial risks without feeling like they'd be underwater or in debt forever, which is so common today.
Linda: Yeah, that's true. That was a different period - my parents owned their house, my grandparents owned their houses. The neighborhood my daughter grew up in, there's no way we could be there now. The neighborhood I'm in now, I wouldn't be able to be in it had I not gotten lucky. The economics were really, really different.
I think the disadvantage now in the nonprofit world is that it's so profoundly dependent on big money and philanthropy that people really can't imagine crossing the street without $150,000 in hand. That's a real problem. The ways we're structured now... I have a really hard time figuring out how you get from where we are now to a more mass formation when everybody's looking for a salary. I actually don't get it.
Mike: How did you experience the transition from volunteer-led organizations with member dues and bake sales as the ways you paid the bills, to the non-profit and philanthropy dominant organizations we see today?
Linda: One of the few advantages of being old is having seen a few iterations of this. What I'd like to see is folks of your generation starting to understand the period from maybe mid-90s to now, which is when social justice really becomes encased in this 501(c)(3) frame.
The way I come to it is interesting. The youth and student activism of the 1960s gave rise to the idea that there will be a “revolution in our lifetime” and, eventually, to the socialist and communist parties and pre-parties of the 1970s and 80s. That basically starts to get shut down by a combination of Reaganism, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and big questions about communism. By the mid-90s, there's a new generation of activists stepping forward - thank goodness - and they really develop the 501(c)(3) form as the way to move social justice work forward.
For me, by the late 1980s, I'm trying to sort out my next move, having been a political person my whole life. I wanted to figure out how to carry forward women of color feminism into the next period. So I decided to try starting a nonprofit, which I had no idea how to do. I started the Women of Color Resource Center, first in Berkeley, across from Cal because rent was extremely cheap, then later in downtown Oakland. I had to figure out the legal structure, funding, all those questions everybody faces. I was terrible at fundraising, really very bad.
What was successful about the organization is that we managed to carry a thread forward. Everyone from my generation had to sort out what to do when the revolution that was supposed to be in our lifetime didn't happen. People made different decisions - some went into academia, others pursued their professions, some stepped back from politics altogether. Some of us decided to persist. I was one of the persisters.
Mike: That's so interesting.
I was able to do the part-time teacher/part-time activist thing in my twenties, in part, because I had a trust fund that paid for college and I graduated debt-free. So I could do something similar to the generation in the '70s [i.e., be a mostly volunteer activist], but it was because of my class privilege. Other people couldn't pull that off as easily.
Linda: Can I say one more thing about this? I've had a couple of interactions recently with young people who are a generation behind you, in their 20s. How old are you?
Mike: 44.
Linda: I've had some really interesting conversations recently with people in their 20s who see themselves as radicals. I had a deep conversation with a young African American guy, maybe mid-20s, who'd gone to Columbia, moved to the Bay, gotten involved in housing activism. We ended up talking about the nonprofit world, and there's a really deep cynicism amongst the twenty-somethings. His take was they were all "poverty pimps" - tough to hear, but that was his view. Like, people are awash in money, god knows what they're doing with it, and they’re pimping their politics.
Same thing with another young Asian man working on housing issues - basically "fuck the non-profit industrial complex, it's hopeless." Some set of people is going to have to deal with that. There's an enormous amount of talent and experience embedded in this form, but beyond the money problems, there are profound organizational and political problems. The form itself promotes fragmentation when what we need is cohesion.
And on top of it all, when people are representing their organizations, they can't talk the kind of politics they actually need to talk. They feel constrained in their ability to openly discuss political candidates or parties because it might jeopardize their non-profit status. But what are we doing here if we can't actually talk politics!?
Mike: I feel like the younger generation is rightfully skeptical about nonprofits and philanthropy - and the way they come together as a bunch of greenwashing bullshit.
But how do we help people understand that there are important political projects that are part of the world of nonprofits? I don’t want anyone to just give up on joining with others to make things better because nonprofits are limited in what they can do. There are so many important projects that live in the world of nonprofits. For example, Working Families Party has a c3 as part of their power building efforts. That doesn’t mean they are selling out. People are trying to build multi-entity political projects that matter.
Linda: But some set of people have to lead around sharing that analysis. Someone has to talk loudly about - what's positive about this form? What are its limitations? What are the workarounds? Let's not burn it all down. Let’s look at it and make an assessment.
Mike: Absolutely. For me, part of framing this work as organizing the rich rather than as a social justice philanthropy or even ‘donor organizing’ project is about trying to take this conversation out of the realm of philanthropy where it gets turned into bullshit so quickly.
What I want people to understand is that we're contesting for the hearts and minds of rich people because we want their independent money AND we want them. We want real, dynamic cross-class alliances, AND we want a stream of money that can do flexible things.
Ok. Off the soap box. Moving on.
Max [Elbaum] shared a piece of analysis that there were often wealthy benefactors financially supporting liberation movement leaders, from union leaders to Black liberation leaders and communist organizers. I mean, Marx and Engels is a famous example, but he was saying there have been many more. I want to run that by you. Do you know about individual wealthy people, whether it was the Black elite or White wealthy progressives, who were helping subsidize some of these pre-1970’s left movement formations?
Linda: Yeah, I think that's definitely true. I remember hearing about business people who were kind of affiliated or around who used the money they had to support social movements. So yes, I think that is and has been a thing. I don't know if it's a thing anymore beyond the ways that wealthy people funnel their support through philanthropy. I think that there have been periods in which that kind of support has been just more direct.
Mike: Good to know. I want to do more research into those people and funding relationships.
You have proximity now to a few of the most left wealthy people organizing projects around these days through your work with Solidaire. What do you see as the strengths and challenges of the lefty wealthy people organizing projects we’ve got going now?
Linda: Great question. It's been a two-way street. They are learning from me, and I am certainly learning from them.
For me, I’m trying to understand wealthy people as individuals with all kinds of different life experiences and political views, not just as a mass. Understanding different individual motivations and orientations, and then trying to understand what that is as a broader phenomenon.
You have to gauge people not only by their class background and bank accounts, but by how they're coming to politics and what their individual passions and interests are. That's important work that I never thought would be within my realm. But once you're exposed to people of wealth, you have to engage them as whoever they are. There's learning to be done on both sides about how to engage beyond the dollar signs.
What I've appreciated about Solidaire is the attention to really engaging people around politics and creating a space where people can get past whatever feelings they have about being born into or accumulating wealth. Helping them engage with the main social and political issues we're facing. Asking questions like, “How do we collectively understand what's the task of the moment? How can people of wealth be engaged?”
I have a lot of respect for how Solidaire and others have tried to think about the best forms to engage people so they can understand what their particular position can contribute to a social justice agenda.
Mike: Who do you look to as your teachers in that - both in learning how to engage wealthy people, and in assessing where we're at and what's needed?
Linda: I've learned a lot from Vini [Rajasvini Bhansali, Executive Director of Solidaire]. That's been my first entry to this as a set of issues and as a political conundrum to solve. She thinks really creatively about how to solve it. I first encountered Vini just as a yoga student actually. What she brings to Solidaire is this openness to engaging and trying to figure out: okay, what is this person's thing and how can it fit into a broader effort to advance a progressive political agenda?
Mike: We're almost at time. Talking to people like you who are elders in this work, who've been at it for multiple generations and are not wealthy, to give this movement economics overview is quite helpful. You and Max [Elbaum] and Alex [Tom] are three people being particularly helpful at mapping that out - though Alex isn't an elder yet. Are there other people you think I should talk to about these questions of cross-class alliance building over time in the left?
Linda: I'd have to think on that. But Michael, I'm really glad you're doing this because it's adding a level of complexity to the work we have to figure out over the next many years. It's a very complicated relationship, especially when the working class side of our movement isn't as developed as it could be and should be, and wealth holds a lot of power. How that relationship develops over time, how that engagement works, who shapes and frames the agenda - these are really important questions we're only now starting to engage. It's profound when you consider where the progressive-to-left side of the spectrum is in relation to power, where we need to go, and what it will take to get us there.
Mike: I've loved our conversation. The question you raised of how we build a broad movement when we can't pay everybody to be involved in it - that's key. And also this piece about how we have a cross-class united front, led by the working class, with the rich backing them, when so quickly it becomes the opposite [ie the rich leading the way].
Linda: Corruption creeps into the movement because people doing the work start to look at the money. Before you can even work through strategy, it becomes about "how do we get the money?" It encourages corrupt actors and can have a corrupting influence on people who maybe didn't start that way.
Folks come into movement now and expect that the movement owes them an upper middle class life. There's no fucking social justice movement that owes you an upper middle class life!
Mike: Yup. Philanthropy and individual upward mobility can be a real honey pot. We're seeing so many folks move from community organizing to philanthropy with the idea that "I'm going to be more powerful." I don’t always agree - I mean, I want money for our movements as much as anyone. I want working class organizers to have more economic power. But I think it messes with our priorities when philanthropy and ‘organizing the rich’ pays so much better than organizing the working class. How do we deal with that reality!? I want to wrestle with these questions with folks like you out loud…because we don't have the answers, but we need to talk about it.
Linda: Yeah, here we are. It's a real deal.
Thank you Linda!
Dear Reader, I’m so curious what new thoughts and questions you have. Post your comments below and help spread this conversation by liking and sharing with others.
Ezra Klein is one of many leading liberal media figures talking critically about the progressive nonprofit world, and the foundations who support them. Counter-arguments have come in from writers like Janos Morton, Waleed Shahid and one of my favorites from Ben Davis, None of the conventional explanations for Trump’s victory stand up to scrutiny.
HB9495 is a bill going through the House of Representatives as we speak that would “grant the executive branch extraordinary power to investigate, harass, and effectively dismantle any nonprofit organization — including news outlets, universities, and civil liberties organizations like ours — of tax-exempt status based on a unilateral accusation of wrongdoing.” You can find out more by reading this article, “House GOP Moves to Ram Through Bill That Gives Trump Unilateral Power to Kill Nonprofits”, and this coalition letter from civil society groups. If you have any connections to the Democrats who voted ‘yes’, please reach out to them now voicing your opposition.
So much wisdom in this interview! If you haven't read Burnham's The Absence of a Gender Justice Framework in Social Justice Organizing you are missing critical organizing theory.
https://compass.fivecolleges.edu/islandora/object/smith%3A1355811