Hear Us Out: Let’s Organize the Rich, with Vini Bhansali and Michael Gast

[00:00:00] Cayden Mak: Welcome to Block and Build a podcast from Convergence Magazine. I’m your host and the publisher of Convergence Caden Mock. On this show, we are building a roadmap for the movement that’s working to block the ascent of authoritarianism while building. Influence of a genuinely progressive trend in the broad front that we need to win.

[00:00:26] Before we get started, I wanna invite you to join our subscriber program. Convergence Magazine is an independent publication that relies on the generosity of our readers and listeners to create the rigorous, thoughtful takes that you’ve come to expect from us week in and week out. You can become a subscriber at convergencemag.

[00:00:42] com slash donate. Any amount helps either as a one time donation or a recurring monthly or annual subscription. This week on the show, I’m joined by two people doing some deep thinking and important organizing that may point the way forward on how we think about the financial resources our movements need to win.

[00:00:58] I spoke this week with Michael Gast, a donor advisor, who’s working to surface the deep history of organizing the rich and figuring out where we go from here. And then you’ll hear from Vinny Bansali, the executive director of The Solidarity Network, a community of donor organizers and donors mobilizing critical resources to build political power for movements for racial, gender, and climate justice.

[00:01:18] But first, these headlines. In another sign of a widening regional war, leaked documents from a U. S. intelligence agency indicate that Israel appears to be preparing for a missile strike against Iran. The timing here is, of course, very important. Escalation is unfavorable to Harris, and we know that Bibi would prefer Trump returns to the White House.

[00:01:39] Meanwhile, the horrors in Gaza continue, with chilling firsthand reports and footage coming out of the Jabalia refugee camp of men being kidnapped, schools being burned, and women and children being attacked as they attempt to flee. If you’ve been wondering what the hell is happening to your quote unquote political posts on key social media sites owned by META, like Facebook and Instagram primarily, you might be alarmed to hear that META hired a former senior advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu to head up content moderation around Israel and the Jewish diaspora.

[00:02:08] The Intercept published a report based on internal documents that raises some questions about how the tech giants of content moderation works, and why someone so close to Netanyahu’s administration has such influence over META’s content moderation policies. Jordana Cutler personally flagged posts from Students for Justice in Palestine chapters and other organizations that shared content criticizing the Israeli government, and while META refused to comment on the outcome of these flags, we’ve seen time and time again that algorithmic suppression of certain content just seems to Happen on the platform.

[00:02:42] Look, the revolving door between Silicon Valley and national governments around the world is very well documented. I like to refer folks to Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism for a great description of how this has worked within the U. S. government since the Obama administration. But commentators have raised flags about how tightly bound the Israeli government in particular and MEDA appear to be.

[00:03:04] Floridians Protecting Freedom, a coalition working to pass Florida’s Amendment 4 ballot measure, which would enshrine the right to abortion in the state’s constitution, filed a lawsuit against the State Department of Health, alleging unconstitutional government interference. The Department of Health had sent cease and desist letters to television stations, airing ads placed by the coalition, asking voters to vote for the amendment.

[00:03:25] Ads that are almost certainly protected as political speech under the First Amendment. All I can say about this is, I think they’re running scared. An interview with Florida Rising’s Ivana Gonzalez about Amendment 4 is available on Convergence now. We’ll put a link to that story in the show notes. And if you’re in a position to support Floridians protecting freedom, now is the time to pile onto the fight.

[00:03:47] And now let’s turn to today’s topic. How do we better organize the financial resources our movements need to win? Talking about organizing resources and the politics of class is often uncomfortable for movement folks, but I talked to two people who are trying to figure out ways to change that.

[00:04:04] Vinny Bonsali has been the Executive Director at Solidair Network and Solidair Action since 2018. Her work has long been focused on how we better resource our movements. And Vinny, thank you so much for joining me today. 

[00:04:17] Vini Bhansali: It’s my pleasure. So good to be with you, Caden. 

[00:04:20] Cayden Mak: Awesome. Can you tell us a little bit about Solidaire’s model and also perhaps a little bit what brought you into this work specifically?

[00:04:26] Vini Bhansali: Oh yeah, for sure. So Solidaire’s a donor network that mobilizes resources quickly in support of intersectional movement building moving resources. To the movements for racial climate and gender justice. And, our network has grown tremendously. We’re at almost 400 members now, united by a vision of an equitable society, deeply rooted in solidarity and an ethos of community care.

[00:04:56] And it’s a left of center, progressive network of donors that want to also be in right relationship with movements. I have been in this work for a very long time now. I realized the other day that I’ve been, I ran a international public foundation for nine years and have been at Solidaire now for six.

[00:05:15] At least 15 years in the social justice philanthropy and donor organizing space. And then before that, I have also run a public fund for the state of Texas. So it’s been a long time since I’ve been in this resourcing game. And, um, what brings me to it and keeps bringing me back different interludes happened in between.

[00:05:37] But what keeps bringing me back is because I do believe that resources is power and resources are power. And we need to be able to exercise and redistribute resources in the hands of our social movements. If we have any desire to win and have long term governing power. And it’s important for those of us who can and have the appetite to work with people with access to wealth and people who are able to move wealth in, in creative ways that we are part of the mix helping get resources in the hands of the folks that need them so that they can continue to do their transformative work.

[00:06:13] One of the things about Solidaire that really appeals to me is our membership has a very clear political point of view. They not only believe in the transformative power of social movements, they also know that they have a role as protagonists as well to take on some of the forces that work against movement building in the United States, and they’re willing to do that with generational commitments.

[00:06:38] With an investment in the brilliance and creativity and experimentation that’s led by our communities. 

[00:06:45] Cayden Mak: Yeah, that seems really big and perhaps a little bit of a break from the way that philanthropy usually sees itself. And I’m curious to dig into that a little bit in particular, like how, what is the difference between traditional philanthropy and this kind of donor network?

[00:07:02] And what are the ways that changes the way that you look at resources and resourcing movements? Thanks. 

[00:07:09] Vini Bhansali: Yeah. Since our inception in 2013, which really began coming out of the Occupy movement our founders all began to coalesce together during Occupy to, say, look, we have, it’s a moment of emergent social movement, it was Black Lives Matter, it was Idle No More, it was Arab Spring, Occupy, all of this was happening, in the early 2010s when solid air began to take shape.

[00:07:36] And, their point of view was that We are not investing in these emergent social movements. Traditional philanthropy is still looking for a proof of concept. It’s still looking for someone to prove that this works, and there’s going to get to XYZ outcomes at such and such time frame. The truth about movements, as you know well, and as does your audience, is that that they take their own shape and they’re not linear and they’re not going to evolve like a typical non profit organization.

[00:08:09] And so what does it mean for a group of resource organizers to mobilize quickly to get this critical funding in the hands of the people that are involved in creating the movements of our times? And to enact solidarity in a way that is truly transformative and not the limitations of traditional philanthropy.

[00:08:31] That, looks for proof of concepts and looks for a proven track record before investing in something. And, the truth about it is that philanthropy overall still remains weak at serving social movements and community organizing relative to the scale of impact we need to build a multiracial, pluralistic democracy.

[00:08:50] And Solidaire began to grow. A lot of people who have done different types of philanthropy started to Come into Solidaire because this way of moving quickly and responsibly and accompanying movements for the long term was really appealing to our base of membership. 

[00:09:08] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like that accompaniment feels like such an important word.

[00:09:13] And so like it, it feels very evocative to me about learning and growing together as opposed to just like making assumptions about what’s happening or how the field 

[00:09:24] Vini Bhansali: should look. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. We have. We have a lot of global Southern social movements to thank. I know in my own trajectory, I have so many incredible teachers in the global South that have taught me about the idea of accompaniment as truly walking the path with community leaders and walking in a way that we don’t impose our own agendas as people who work within philanthropy, but are learning from learning with and walking that journey for the long haul.

[00:09:54] Yeah. 

[00:09:56] Cayden Mak: Thinking also about this question of governing power we’re staring down yet another most important election of our lifetimes here in a couple of weeks. What do you think is the shift that we need to make in order to make space for a politics of liberation and really to think about this question of governing power, especially when it comes to resourcing movements?

[00:10:17] Vini Bhansali: Yeah I’m really grateful to Convergence and and the other left formations in this country that have advanced this block and build framework right now. We have attempted to adopt it to Solidarity’s work and to really live into some of the principles and the to align with the strategic framework in a way that makes explicit the work we’ve been trying to do.

[00:10:40] And so from our perspective, obviously, blocking MAGA and Project 2025 influence through our members involvement in everything from door knocking to phone banking to, to helping get the vote out and talk to their families about getting involved in this electoral process in the short term is really critical, but on the long term, if we are really serious about building left power and building, building the capacity and the power of key social moment formations that are engaged in this path to governing power.

[00:11:13] It feels critical that networks like solidarity make long term investments. And accompany the path. There is so much there to be learned and there’s so much of, um, approach and a orientation to movement building and movement funding that’s necessary that allows for experimentation.

[00:11:35] Cayden Mak: The 

[00:11:35] Vini Bhansali: path is not laid out. We’re not totally clear how we’re going to get there, right? And donors have to be willing to. Find innovation and to find experimentation and to find failure and to find mistakes and learning so that path to governing power can actually be accelerated. I think so often in our progressive philanthropy, we want to have a perfectly laid out plan where everything has been certain and there’s no room for ambiguity or experimentation.

[00:12:10] And that gets us into trouble. Okay. Because these processes are not all thought through yet. We have to build it as we go. And so I think my greatest hope for solid airs work in the next 10 year and we came out with a 10 year strategy last year towards governing power and really accompanying movements as they contest for governing power and for the terrain where we can actually have lasting durable power.

[00:12:37] And it’s a 10 year plan for a reason because we know that we are not starting from a place of strength, right? There’s a lot of work to be done to get us there. And the other piece that feels really important to say is in the very short term as much as we’d love to be able to only orient in this long term way, we cannot because our movement leaders and our community organizers are facing unprecedented political violence.

[00:13:03] And threats. And so in the short term. The responsible thing that we are deciding to do also is to invest deeply in movement protection. And digital, physical, and legal defense of everybody that’s getting targeted. 

[00:13:17] Cayden Mak: Yeah, that, that certainly seems like a critical piece of the block in Block and Build.

[00:13:22] That I think sometimes gets gestured at, but doesn’t necessarily get the sort of like concrete investment it really requires. Are there any like stories or punctuated moments that come to mind for you about like the way that this 10 year strategy has been shaped like what can you tell us about the thought process that’s gone Into it, and then also the process of participation with the network.

[00:13:50] Vini Bhansali: Oh yes. I love to talk about it. Um, there is a lot of inputs into the 10 year strategy. One of them was the profound work that Linda Burnham led With Project 2050 where she interviewed movement leaders from around the country and organizers from around the country. Friend of 

[00:14:06] Cayden Mak: the pod, Linda Burnham.

[00:14:08] Vini Bhansali: Yes, talking about really trying to distill the key lessons from organizers about what we would need to build towards long term. Power and what do we need right now to get out of the fragmentation and weakness of our sector? The other piece was solid air had a theory of change process between 2018 and 2022.

[00:14:28] That was. Successful beyond our wildest imaginations. And we did an evaluation of that to both see where where we met the mark and why and where did we fall short? So it was a really rigorous evaluative process. Plus a trajectory of growth during the pandemic years as people who are progressive donors wanted to coalesce together and be more coordinated to meet the political moment in this country.

[00:14:56] And so all of those things together led to creating this 10 year strategy with deep consultation from our membership. So that involved one on ones with many of our members, individual donors and trustee level members, but also foundation leaders. And funders that are wanting to take bolder, bigger risks and fund the work that really deserves to be funded a new scale.

[00:15:21] And that’s what all together came up with this 10 year frame to build left power and influence in the U. S. so that we can have outsized impact on a national scale. There’s also a component of this. This process that’s actually about examining our internal capacity to learn and grow and transform and in a rigorous way, change the systems we need to change, but also, not try to do everything right.

[00:15:49] Have an actual strategic lane. We occupy as a donor network, but also collaborate with others because it’s a really vibrant ecosystem and philanthropy that’s there. trying to transform philanthropic practices and impact the flow of resources. So all of that work has gotten bolstered, we’ve capacitated so that we can make this happen and with great humility, like we’re one force amongst many in a long liberatory struggle and we have to work with deep accountability and collaboration with others to advance these collective goals.

[00:16:23] But what it does help us do often philanthropy and donor organizing is ridden with short termism, and it feels really important for us to have a strategic long term view of the future. So we’re doing much more. Then reacting to the here and now, right? There is a long arc of possibilities. We do need to have resourcing agenda, accompaniment agenda organizing and building a movement aligned base of donors.

[00:16:54] That needs to be actually commensurate with movement strategy as well. And so this is the reason why the 10 year strategies also serve to align our network. Around some common shared goals so that we’re not just doing a lot of disparate work, which has often been the history of donor networks.

[00:17:13] Cayden Mak: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that seems really crucially important, too, because when I think about basically donor organizing in the opposition folks are very deeply aligned around a vision for the world and committed to a multi decade strategy, really around building their capacity for governing power.

[00:17:32] Which is why we are where we are. Exactly. Yeah. 

[00:17:35] Vini Bhansali: No, it was interestingly controversial when instead of like most organizations do our strategy and we are like a little bit navel gazing, okay, we’ll increase our membership by X. We’ll do such and such things by Y.

[00:17:48] Instead, what Solidarity has chosen to do is hold ourselves accountable to some movement level outcomes. Taking a page from the opposition, right? How about we don’t count our wins in just like building our own empires, but instead, we count our wins by what we capacitate movements to do. For us, it’s one of the things we’re going to measure ourselves against is Did we strengthen movement capacity to fight and win against authoritarianism?

[00:18:16] Did we take on and win against a fascist, white, Christian, nationalist, anti democratic agenda? 

[00:18:23] Cayden Mak: Yeah. 

[00:18:23] Vini Bhansali: Were our movements as a result of Solidarity’s organizing of donors able to develop? Mass numbers of people who were inspired to act from those recent mobilizations for racial justice into becoming long term organizers, right?

[00:18:41] Did we expand the electorate? Did we help create greater alignment, cooperation, coordination amongst the various partners, movement partners that we fund, like these are really important things to measure ourselves against. If you want to have. Field level impact and not just grow our own body of work.

[00:19:00] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah, it’s actually results oriented as opposed to Making you all look good 

[00:19:09] Vini Bhansali: Exactly. Yeah, it’s our job to be in service of and in alignment with movements And that’s why we have to have a higher bar. 

[00:19:18] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s a it’s, to me, it’s like deeply hopeful that there’s a group of folks who can move money who are thinking in this way, because I think for so long we have gotten trapped in some of this short termism that you describe and like a knee jerk reaction to things happening in the environment.

[00:19:36] Is there anything, is, where can folks learn more about Solidair? And, I imagine there might be some listeners who are like, wait, I want to be part of a donor network 

[00:19:45] Vini Bhansali: that works this way. 

[00:19:46] Cayden Mak: Where can folks get involved? 

[00:19:48] Vini Bhansali: Solidairnetwork. org. And we have a C4 arm of our work, which is solidairaction.

[00:19:53] org. Please check it out. We have an incredible team at Solidaire. Almost all of our staff come out of social movements themselves, out of community organizing. And we’d be delighted to onboard people. I’m a big fan of don’t go at doing any kind of giving alone. Yeah. Whether you’re a small donor.

[00:20:14] Or a mega billionaire join a community of something if this is this time is really asking for us to be better coordinated and you all have advanced this important block and build work to teach us that. If we’re going to block the forces that are coming to undermine us and build towards power, real, lasting, governing power, we are going to need to be in deep coordination across various sectors.

[00:20:43] One of the things I’m really enlivened by right now, if you’re not in a position as a listener to join Solidaire but you happen to have influence within philanthropy. We’re also building a broad funder coalition because there have been these coordinated attacks on our organizations that are challenging us complicity with the genocide in Palestine.

[00:21:08] Palestine. . There has been. Attacks on donors who are funding peace and justice anti war work. And so we have decided to build this broad based coalition that can actually mitigate these attacks and actually bolster people’s courage and resolve to continue down this path. And again, this work is really scary to do alone in this environment, but when we join forces with each other, we know we, we stand for all the right things, for human dignity for peace, for justice, for.

[00:21:40] human rights all over the world, and we’re on the right side of history. 

[00:21:44] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Thank you so much, Vini. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, and thank you so much for your work. 

[00:21:50] Vini Bhansali: Oh, thank you, Caden. We love Convergence. We love what you’re advancing, and thank you for being such a critical part of our movement in Fishtruck.

[00:22:03] Cayden Mak: Michael Gast is coming at this in a different but related way, helping rich people see the ways their safety and freedom is bound up in the system.

[00:22:14] Michael Gast is a donor advisor and organizer who has worked for over two decades helping organized resources and rich folks in service of social justice movements. He’s working on research, both from things folks have tried in the past and things folks are trying now, to inform a book project called Organize the Rich, which incidentally is also the title of his substack.

[00:22:33] Welcome to Block and Build, Mike. 

[00:22:35] Michael Gast: Great to be here. 

[00:22:36] Cayden Mak: Excellent. Let’s start with your initial instigation, Organize the Rich. Why do you think this is an imperative? And what do you mean when you say Organize the Rich? 

[00:22:46] Michael Gast: Good question. I’ve been doing this work of Organizing the Rich towards left movements and working class led movements for, I don’t know, 15 years or so.

[00:22:57] And I was a staff lead at Resource Generation for six years of that. And found At some point that I was having a lot of one on ones and small group meetings where I was sharing history of what had been tried before and people didn’t really know a lot about those experiments. And, we live in this country that’s very a historical, but I think anytime you’re in like a, owning class institution like philanthropy it gets even more a historical.

[00:23:25] And so I was feeling like, okay, instead of people feel like, Oh, I’m trying this for the first time. And I just let me show you this new thing. I figured out, be like no. There’s been a, there’s been decades long cross class experiments. And how do we organize the rich towards left movements?

[00:23:39] Let’s learn from them. Let’s document them. Let’s, and let’s make them accessible. I feel like a lot of these conversations are in nonprofit philanthropy, jargon. And so a lot of what I’m trying to do is make it more accessible for a cross class audience and yeah, share some of what’s been tried.

[00:23:54] What’s been learned so we can build off of it and do some new, more interesting experiments. 

[00:23:59] Cayden Mak: Yeah. I think that there’s also something there for those of us who don’t see ourselves in the like. Rich category to be like, Oh, people have been working on this and it’s not just even though, conventional philanthropy is what we see.

[00:24:14] That’s not the only thing that’s going on. 

[00:24:16] Michael Gast: Yeah. Let me go on a rant for a second, which is part of the intervention is that this is not a philanthropy project. Fuck that. Like it’s such a narrow. Version of what this can be and so part of the intervention is we’re not just fighting over the pennies that wealthy people have set aside To say this is my philanthropic giving and we’re gonna fight over that going to the best places We’re actually trying to organize Wealthy people as people, whole people that can bring their money, all of their money, all of their resources, all of their time, their hearts and souls to this project of collective liberation.

[00:24:53] And if we organize from that perspective, that actually wealthy people have a self interest in a more equitable, just, and fair world, then we can, move so much more power and resources towards our working class led movements. And so part of the intervention is framing the work as organizing rich people rather than a philanthropy project.

[00:25:15] And I think when we agree to the terms of philanthropy, then we way we narrow what we’re able to access and we narrow the playing field in a way that only works for the rich to keep their power and control. So I’m really. Trying to move us away from that conversation into a much bigger conversation.

[00:25:33] Cayden Mak: Yeah that seems really important and in fact is like what I was about to ask you next and also I think one of the things that i’ve appreciated about our previous conversations and a lot of your writing has also been about helping people understand themselves and their positionality while also understanding how your current class position is neither permanent nor determinative, right?

[00:25:54] And that also those class positions are the root, are the product of social relations. That those things are not coincidental. And so I’m curious how you think about dismantling a lot of the weird mythologies that people have around class when it comes to what stands in people’s way around participating in movements for liberation?

[00:26:15] And what are the kind of like new narratives that you were trying to weave around that stuff? 

[00:26:22] Michael Gast: Good question. Go a lot of places with that.

[00:26:28] When I came into movements, I was very embarrassed about coming from a sort of managerial class owning class world. I grew up in, in sort of white dominant liberal San Francisco private schools and how to trust fund to go to college. I went to Vassar college and It’s, this was the late nineties and learned about the sort of youth organizing that was happening around the juvenile justice laws that Pete Wilson was doing.

[00:26:54] And it was this sort of like mixed class, but mostly people of color, mostly working middle class young people. And I was like, Ooh, this is awkward. What’s my role as a young kid from wealthy San Francisco in this world? And. What resource generation helped me did I thought, I read this book called no more prisons by Billy wins it.

[00:27:16] And in it was a chapter called the cool rich kids movement. And I was like I 

[00:27:20] Cayden Mak: want to be 

[00:27:21] Michael Gast: cool. And maybe I’m a rich kid. And I read it and it introduced me to this whole world. And I found out about this conference called making money make change. And it turned out my sister’s best friend was on the board and I called her up and I was like, Hey, are these good folks?

[00:27:35] And she was like, yeah, you should go. I’ll be there. So I went, I was horrified by the idea of identifying as a young person with wealth and class privilege. I was doing an AmeriCorps program at the time. And I told a coworker that I was going to a conference about resourcing the left, which is like not totally a lie, but like a dodge.

[00:27:53] And but resource generation helped me move towards claiming this class identity. And seeing it as actually a powerful opportunity to organize my people. And I think there’s a lot of this dynamic in progressive movements where people think that the only right class identity to claim and have is working class.

[00:28:15] And if you’re middle class, you can say that and everybody else is middle class and we’re just going to pretend that’s sufficient analysis. And we’re gonna have this big analysis of the world and macroeconomics and how we need to have. less wealth inequality and socialism, all these things.

[00:28:30] But I do think there’s this thing that I’ve been taught over and over again, that to, to claim our class positions and to claim the relationships and the power and the access that enables for us is actually really helpful and actually makes us more powerful contributors to movements. And so I want to say around class that we have.

[00:28:53] Like the left, like everywhere, has a lot to do to heal class shame and guilt. 

[00:28:58] And people have class shame across the class spectrum, whether they’re raised poor, working class, middle class, wealthy, and it really holds us back. And I think there’s a lot of people with class privilege that have been part of left movements for generations, whether it’s Che Guevara or more recent examples.

[00:29:16] That. Haven’t totally done the work to claim their class identity and rock it and own it in a not guilty way and say, I have a particular, I have particular strengths and challenges because of this class identity and I have a particular contribution I can make to movements and let’s talk about that and let’s put that on the table so we can have multi class strategies that are actually robust.

[00:29:40] Yeah, I’ll stop there. 

[00:29:42] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah, that, that seems really I don’t know, it seems to me that one of the insights here is also in similar ways to like, ways that people experience greater social power on other axes of identity that like, A similar thing needs to happen with our understanding of class and that there are some things that are also different about class, right?

[00:30:05] Because there are actual, there’s, there are ways that class interacts with race and gender and things like that, that Do change stuff a little bit, but that and that like classic class is perhaps more mutable than other social identity categories I saw you get really excited. 

[00:30:20] Michael Gast: Yeah, I think some of the things I’ll say there is that’s absolutely right We can see big class changes in our own lives In our families and in our lifetimes.

[00:30:33] We can see huge changes in our class position and our relation to if we do the Marxist thing in our relationship to the means of production, one thing that I’ve learned that’s been helpful is sort of your class culture. The things you think about money in class really gets shaped by the first 12 years of your life.

[00:30:51] And you tend to bring that class culture with you and that orientation to money in class to everything else you do. And so for us to understand our class cultures is important because it shapes how we show up in cross class movements and then also to have an orientation that’s similar to how we orientation I’m like a white male.

[00:31:09] So I do this on multiple axis, but to any sort of oppressor identity. I want us to understand that the thing to do is not to go away from those identities and to distance ourselves, but actually go towards them in order to transform them. And if I have through my family, I’m a bachelor college graduate.

[00:31:29] And so I have the whole access to an alumni network that there, and instead of saying, Oh no, fuck those capitalists who are, whatever critique I have of those people, it’s actually helpful for me to say no, there’s something interesting I can do here. There’s something interesting I can do about going towards that and claiming that in order to use that to build more power for the movements I’m a part of.

[00:31:48] And I think. Yeah. It’s similar to how I’ve seen white people need to often move through a step where we start out saying, Oh, we need to be, we need to, I feel so bad about myself that I need to prove my own goodness by distancing myself from the bad white people. And that’s a step in some sort of content.

[00:32:05] And then at some point we’re like, Nah, it’s not that useful. I need to claim all my people. I need to go towards my people. And that’s actually more powerful position. I think a similar move needs to happen around class, around claiming our people. Yeah. Taking responsibility for them, taking responsibility for ourselves and the money or, financial sort of power and our control and take responsibility for changing, yeah, shifting that and aligning as many of us as possible with multiracial working class movements.

[00:32:33] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. That’s very interesting. And I think that like the other complicator also does feel like, not to get Again, to like Marxist analysis. Is this question about like, how we control and determine like what gets made in our society and how resources get deployed in like the larger economy, not just in our movements.

[00:32:57] And I think that there, there seems to be, to me, at least as an observer, that there seems to be like an impulse towards trying to figure out like different models of, Ownership and control that are like happening at the margins of our economy, but also the reality is like over the past, 20 30 years, wealth inequality has intensified in such a like, acute and frankly terrifying way that like it seems like there’s, I don’t know if this will resonate for you, but it seems like in some ways the the people who have consolidated the most power as the true owning class has escaped our grasp a little bit.

[00:33:39] Like, when I think about the Bezoses and the Musks of the world, I’m like, do we really contend for power in that way? 

[00:33:46] Michael Gast: Yeah, there are, there’s more and more consolidation and there’s more and more billionaires. And the way I always see organizing the riches let’s not be naive.

[00:34:00] We’re not going to actually be able to organize most of them onto the side of multiracial working class movements. We’re going to, we’re going to look for a slice. And what we’ve learned in the past 50 years is that the often the easiest slice to move towards left movements are folks that already have marginal identities or relationships.

[00:34:19] So it’s often women, 

[00:34:21] Cayden Mak: queer 

[00:34:22] Michael Gast: folks For whatever reason, it’s often inheritors. They’re a little distanced from the process of making the money. So it’s easier for them to say, Oh, that wasn’t actually fair or right. How we consolidated that amount of money and wealth in our family. We need to do something differently.

[00:34:38] It’s disproportionately Jews who are often seeing that this is an unfair system that I’ve benefited from and I need to do something differently. Yeah. And because of racism, it’s often harder, actually, for people of color with wealth to feel great about redistributing huge amounts of resources, because there’s been a huge fight to just get economic stability and they’re still fighting all the racism that tells that sort of shows them over and over again, that they’re Power is insecure and that that their safety is insecure.

[00:35:10] So basically we’ve seen that there are certain people that we can, and I joke with my friends that the widows of the rich billionaires are often our best fucking bet. Kendi Scott. Like some I won’t name other folks, but often not the widows. Sorry. That’s the run the divorcees Sorry, not the widows the divorcees the people that divorce the jerky billionaire businessman are often pissed at the patriarchy And want to do something different and those are the folks that are ready to come to our side So I think over and over again We need to look at the picture of who are the wealthy people?

[00:35:40] Where do we have relationships and who are the people we can get to our side? and if we do good relational organizing and mapping of the constellation of who we have already In our groups, like Resource Generation, like Solid Air, like Women’s Donor Network and I can name other ones too, then we can see who we can start pulling over to our side.

[00:35:58] And like all good organizing, it’s about relationships. Sure. It’s about who’s dad or uncle or grandpa or grandma Can be moved over the course of years and decades. I’ve often seen through resource generation that it takes a while I remember one conference we went to there was a young person with wealth It said I’ve been having the same conversation with my dad for ten years and finally he’s flipped and finally he’s open to me moving some of this money to some of the things that we know is necessary and 10 years now as like a middle aged guy, it feels like nothing.

[00:36:29] But at the time I was like, I don’t know, 32. And I was like, Oh my God, that took forever. But I do think it’s like that sort of long term organizing that can move. A slice of the owning class to be a surprise force to support multiracial working class movements to gain enough power to then tax the rich, change campaign finance laws and really change the playing field that cuts off the legs of the power of the rich in a much broader way.

[00:36:55] And. Musk is never going to be on our side, but if we can actually get governing power, then maybe we can change the rules. So he has less money. 

[00:37:04] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. And I, yeah, and I think therein lies the rub, right? Is that this is about more than just any one. Wealthy person, but it is about yeah, and I think that the thing that you’re describing that is, again, about a really sober analysis of like, how power works is very important.

[00:37:23] It’s seems like a very important piece of this puzzle. And there’s a reason, there’s a reason that I wanted to have, do an episode of Block and Build that is about Resourcing our movements and how we’re thinking about money in this moment before election day, right? Like I think that there’s You know, everybody always says that like power is like organized people organize money and organize.

[00:37:44] What is the third thing? 

[00:37:47] Michael Gast: Those are the two that I always remember 

[00:37:49] Cayden Mak: those are the two that I think about all the time but also that like I think that a lot of this stuff is both a long term project and also in these moments where, we’re in another, quote unquote, most important election of our lifetimes, that this is a rupture moment that, that allows us to see certain things in different ways.

[00:38:08] And so I’m curious, like, when you’re staring down this election, thinking about these very long term arcs of organizing folks that may take place. decade more to really change the way that people think about the resources they have access to. What do you think that like we should be thinking about as we move through this election cycle about where we’ve come on the question of organizing wealthy people into a multi class coalition and also where we need to go to redistribute some of this power?

[00:38:39] Michael Gast: Yeah, good question. I think like many people, or I don’t know. I think this election is going to change everything and change nothing. 

[00:38:52] Cayden Mak: Yeah. 

[00:38:53] Michael Gast: It’s like this portal into a new future and it’s going to be so dramatically different depending on if Trump wins or Trump is in power or Kamala’s in power.

[00:39:04] And the long term project is still the same terrain. I think we need to be moving. Wealthy people and middle class perfect women. One thing a pet peeve pet project of mine with some other folks is we don’t actually have good political homes for the managerial class. The middle class professionals, we have political homes for working class folks.

[00:39:24] We have political homes for the rich and we really don’t know how to have class conscious political homes for non unionized middle class folks. So I’ll leave that. And we need to have that to have this photo multi class movement, but we need to be moving wealthy folks into political homes where they’re getting intertwined.

[00:39:42] strategies that will build the power we need to change these systems. And if they’re not in political homes, then they can get very discouraged by the constant drumbeat of fundraising requests that they’re getting right now that are very sky is falling very this is the most important election ever, which it is.

[00:40:03] This is that you have to move money now. And if they don’t and whether, No matter how it goes, they can come out of that just being drained and exhausted. And I stretched so hard and what do I do now? And I’m going to retrench into my little cave of either pessimism or opt, or sort of naive optimism.

[00:40:23] And it’s not actually helpful. So a lot of it’s like, how can we communicate to folks? This isn’t the fundraising world that we want. This isn’t how we want to fund things. And this is where we’re at right now. And we have a long term strategy. I think it’s partly why Working Families Party and some of the work that they’re doing is so important.

[00:40:38] To say, we’re trying to build to something different. We’re trying to build to a world where we can win. A progressive tax system that actually can move money, not to the military, but to education to schools, to parks, to all the things we need for a just transition. And just, and yeah, I was working on an article the other day with Brayden Lance, the development director of working families party on what are the messages we need to send to wealthy donors to for them to not.

[00:41:05] Get discouraged and just feel beat up and sick of the whole thing after, a long period of skies falling fundraising coming at them. And yeah, so I’ll just circle back to political homes where they can develop their own leadership and get support to stay in this for a lifetime.

[00:41:22] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. It makes, it’s funny because it’s like. I think we all need this on some level so it’s hard to, the number of conversations I’ve been having with folks about how this moment has brought out some of the worst impulses in everybody because we do feel so powerless and because it does feel like the the sky is falling and that like we’re being swept along by forces greater and more powerful than ourselves is not in a good way, not in a fun way, because sometimes that happens in a fun way, but that’s not what this moment is.

[00:41:53] Is that try to understand the unique needs of different communities. To be resilient to that feels urgent to me for sure. 

[00:42:02] Michael Gast: Yeah, and this is, I can’t always tell what’s true for everybody and what’s true just for the rich, but for the rich, the isolation and the pull towards isolation is quite intense.

[00:42:14] And what we need to award against is there being some either Oh, we won and we get to disappear and we get to go back into our sort of protected cloistered worlds of the wealthy and keep our money and power and pretend Oh, we did it. Or we get to be so scared by Trump that we go behind our walls and say, Oh shit, I need my money more than ever to save me.

[00:42:35] And so it’s how do we keep people in community, in relationship and use those. I always use the metaphor of organizing the rich is the rich are helium balloons, and we’re trying to tie strings to them down to the ground, down to the earth. And those strings are our relationships. And if we don’t tie them down, they’re going to float off into irrelevance.

[00:42:56] While at the same time burning down the world so it’s not a great thing because like clearly they’re doing actively oppressive things but in terms of getting them connected to us we need to tie them down and keep on pulling those strings down to the ground and i feel like that’s what i’m thinking of coming through this period is how do we get all these people just like 2020 just like 2016 that are Maybe not like 2016, but like 2020, they got mobilized in this anti Trump wave and tie them down to long term projects and keep them showing up and keep them out of this sort of isolated, scared place where they’re just gonna hoard their wealth and retrench in terms of funding the work that we need to do.

[00:43:35] To get funded. 

[00:43:36] Cayden Mak: Yeah, for sure. It seems like it sounds like a non trivial task to be honest, and I’m glad there are folks working on it because 

[00:43:43] Michael Gast: like all or, every single person has a role in our movements and every single community needs to be organized and all of them, this is a particular project and it’s important.

[00:43:54] And I recently put out a post saying organize the rich is not the key project. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize. Organizing the multiracial working class is the key project. But it’s really a both and for me, it’s that, the liberation of my people, the sort of long term health and security of my people away from wealth hoarding is just as important as anything, even as we can have the analysis that the working class needs to be the lead force in our movements to transform the world.

[00:44:18] And I want to be able to hold both. 

[00:44:20] Cayden Mak: Hell yeah. If people want to keep up with you, Mike where can they find you? 

[00:44:27] Michael Gast: OrganizeTheRich. substack. com. 

[00:44:29] Cayden Mak: There it is. Awesome. Thank you so much for your time, for your insight. It’s always a pleasure talking to you. 

[00:44:35] Michael Gast: Absolutely. That was a lot of fun.

[00:44:36] Thanks.

[00:44:42] Cayden Mak: I know you know that we’re inside of two weeks out from election day. We’ve got another canvassing dispatch for volunteers with Seed the Vote. 

[00:44:51] Steve: Hi, my name is Steve, and I just returned from a three day canvassing trip in Reno with Seed to Vote. I want to now share some reasons for you to get out and do some doorknocking also, in whatever state is most accessible to you.

[00:45:04] While it’s not always easy, there are many rewards. This includes working with a large group of people. We had 99 in our group. Having caring, wise team leaders who are very accessible to respond to your questions as they come up. And most important, having really meaningful conversations with voters about issues that really matter to us.

[00:45:27] So one of my favorite stories was talking with a former Trump voter and self declared racist, who’s still going through the very painful process of questioning everything that he was led to believe after he got to know some undocumented fellow co workers. He described getting to see them as fellow human beings with the same concerns that he has.

[00:45:47] And eventually invited some of them to come to his house. He talked of how painful it was to have a couple of them eventually deported back to countries that they had not lived in since they were children. And how this was getting him to question some of Trump’s really despicable and hateful views about immigrants.

[00:46:06] With his openness, I decided to then share that I am Jewish and had experienced quite a bit of painful antisemitism when I was growing up and how I was really quite. Horrified by Trump’s tendency to blame Jews who are not already allied with him in his most recent statements, threatening that if he loses, he’s it’s because of the Jews.

[00:46:28] And how this really horrifies me for what it’d be like whether or not he wins the election. He then admitted that he was raised to be an anti Semite also, and was really glad to be questioning this fuse. When I asked if there were any other issues that were matter important to him, he shared that he and his wife are now going through IVF treatment.

[00:46:46] And wondering what things would be like for others like them under another Trump presidency. He was definitely going to vote for Harris and Rosen, and as difficult as it was, he was talking with other family members and those close to him about his changing attitudes. As we parted, I let him know that he’s the sort of person who could have a huge impact on other people with his courage and his capacity to reflect on views that were imposed on him from family members and others over the years.

[00:47:15] I’m very certain that the conversation was just as meaningful for him as it was for me.

[00:47:23] Cayden Mak: You can learn more about Seed the Vote’s work at seedthevote. org. This show is published by Convergence, a magazine for radical insights. I’m Caden Mock, and our producer is Josh Elstro. If you have something to say, please drop me a line. You can send me an email that we’ll consider running on an upcoming Mailbag episode at mailbag at convergencemag.

[00:47:41] com. And if you’d like to support the work that we do at Convergence, it’s bringing our movement Together to strategize, struggle, and win in this crucial historical moment. You can become a [email protected] slash donate. Even a few bucks a month goes a long way to making sure our independent small team can continue to build a map for our movements, and I hope this helps.