Why Impact Investing & Traditional Philanthropy Are Not Antidotes to the Apocalypse
The contemporary landscape of social change is a battleground defined by a fundamental schism. On one side stands the hegemonic bloc of impact investing and social entrepreneurship, a sophisticated engine of capital preservation masquerading as moral innovation. On the other side, a slowly growing, insurgent movement for Radical Resource Redistribution (RRR), articulates a praxis of justice that is not merely about ‘doing good while not parting with your wealth’, but about dismantling the very foundations of wealth and power. This is not a friendly debate between strategies; it is a clash between a system designed to safely remain within the status quo and a movement committed to enacting liberation.
Impact Investing: The Neoliberal Capture of Conscience
Impact investing and social entrepreneurship are not alternative models; they are the logical, cynical evolution of capitalism under duress. They represent what feminist scholar Sara Ahmed would call a “non-performative” – a speech act that, in her analysis, “does not bring into being what it names,” but instead serves to consolidate the existing order. This framework is a form of sanctioned ignorance, a karma-washing that allows wealth to remain intact while performing a spectacle of concern.
The ideology is a product of what anthropologist David Graeber termed the “utopia of rules,” where business school indoctrination reframes systemic injustice as a series of “market failures” or “investment opportunities.” Poverty becomes an “untapped market” (some might remember the trope of the Fortune at the bottom of the pyramid). Colonial legacies become “emerging economies.” This logic, as political theorist Jodi Dean argues, substitutes the political goal of justice for the managerial goal of “sustainability”, a term that, in this lexicon, means the sustainable flow of returns to capital, not the sustenance of life or community. The primary metric is not justice, but the perpetuity of the venture. It is a wealth-defense mechanism par excellence, creating a philanthropic-industrial complex that functions as a subsidiary of the extractive economy it claims to challenge. It asks, “How can we make money while doing good?”, a question that inherently subordinates the “good” to the “money.”
Radical Resource Redistribution: A Movement and a Praxis of Repair
In stark opposition, Radical Resource Redistribution is both a movement and a praxis of repair. As a movement, it is a political force demanding the dismantling of the wealth defense industry and the repatriation of stolen resources to frontline, grassroots communities with political demands. As a praxis, it is the daily, intentional work of moving capital out of oppressive systems and into the hands of those building liberatory futures. It is embodied in the principles of Emergent Strategy, as articulated by adrienne maree brown, who teaches that “what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system.”
RRR is fractal and relational. It understands that the act of a foundation moving 50,000 Euros to a grassroots collective without onerous reporting is a micro-practice of the macro-political goal of abolition, the abolition of ‘power over’. Or a foundation spending down as the abolition of hoarding. It aligns with Indigenous principles of interconnectedness and reciprocity and the feminist economic vision of scholars like Nancy Fraser, who calls for a shift from a system of “progressive neoliberalism” to one centered on participatory parity and justice. This praxis is not about “investment” but about divestment and redistribution: divesting from systems of harm (police, prisons, fossil fuels, Zionist or other oppressive and racist entities) and redistributing those resources to community-led survival and resistance programs. It trusts that communities and social movements, not business school graduates, are the experts in their own liberation.
Breaking the Wealth Defense Industry: Tactics for a Just Transition
Moving more money into justice-based work requires a deliberate and confrontational break from the charity industrial complex. This involves:
Funder Abolitionism: Agitating for the dissolution of large, legacy foundations, whose endowments are tied to extractive industries and whose boards more often than not have a stake in maintaining the status quo. The goal is not to reform their grantmaking practices, but to liquidate their assets and transfer the capital directly to movements.
Funding Political Infrastructure, Not Projects: Shifting funds from discrete, apolitical “projects” to the core political infrastructure of movements: legal defense funds, bail funds, community land trusts, and independent media. This builds lasting power, not just temporary relief.
Weaponizing Redistribution as Reparations: Following the lead of groups like Resource Generation, which organize wealthy individuals to redistribute their inherited or accumulated wealth as an act of political reparations, not charity. This is about breaking class solidarity among the elite and building it across class lines, a necessary step in what Tricia Rose calls the work of “deep solidarity” required for meaningful change.
Embracing “Unsustainability” as a Virtue: Rejecting the tyranny of the “sustainable” (read: perpetual) nonprofit. As the late, great community organiser Mandy Carter often demonstrated, movement power lies in strategic, time-bound campaigns, not in maintaining an eternal organizational structure AND of course there’s lots to be said about long-term funding into resourcing community organising and the politicisation of people to awaken & bolster agency. Funding should be flexible, rapid-response, and allow for projects to successfully end. Funding that perpetuates and engorges large NGOs sustains the charity-industrial complex that maintains the status quo, that being said, these funding transitions need to be handled with care, otherwise the neoliberal stance of slashing third sector capacities/services/funding, can result in royally busted safety nets for folks who need them most.
PhilanthroAbolitionism for a Politics of Radical Repair
The stubborn dominance of traditional philanthropy and impact investing is not an accident of efficacy, but a function of hegemony. Legacy wealth models, operating under the trickle-down fantasy of the charitable-industrial complex, remain the default because they are structurally and ideologically sanctioned by the very systems that created the inequality they purport to address. As scholar-activist Dylan Rodríguez argues, the non-profit industrial complex often functions as a “counter-insurgent” formation, channeling revolutionary potential into manageable, fundable projects that do not threaten the underlying capital order. This is why exponentially more attention, social capital, and resources flow towards building a slightly more “ethical” stock portfolio or endowing another museum wing than towards the direct, unmediated transfer of resources to grassroots, Black, Indigenous, and global South movements. It is a grand, seductive distraction, what Robbie Shilliam might describe as a coloniality of time and knowledge, where the “fashionable” solutions of the privileged, steeped in business school metrics and a savior complex, continually defer the urgent, messy work of justice. The philanthrocapitalist obsession with scale, innovation, and return-on-investment is a political project to avoid the only true solution: the dismantling of their own power and the radical redistribution of their hoarded wealth. PhilanthroAbolitionism, therefore, is not a niche demand but a necessary rupture: a refusal of these sanctioned pathways and an insistence on repair that is measured not by donor satisfaction, but by collective liberation.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
The theoretical critique of the philanthropic-industrial complex is borne out by the stark arithmetic of global capital. The sums moving through “socially responsible” channels designed to preserve wealth dwarf the paltry resources directed toward genuine, political redistribution, underscoring that this is not a matter of incremental reform but of fundamental structural change.
The Scale of “Hoarder Wealth” vs. Redistributive Flows
The global volume of impact investing, capital that explicitly seeks a financial return alongside a social or environmental benefit, has ballooned into a multi-trillion-dollar field. According to the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN)’s 2022 market sizing report, the estimated market size reached $1.164 trillion in assets under management. This capital, while often doing marginal good, is structurally prohibited from the kind of non-repayable, no-strings-attached transfer that characterizes true redistribution. Its primary mandate remains the preservation and growth of the capital itself.
The Trickle of Traditional Philanthropy
Traditional philanthropy, while massive, is a mere fraction of the wealth it sits upon. In the United States, charitable giving by individuals, bequests, foundations, and corporations totaled $499.33 billion in 2022 (Giving USA 2023). While this seems large, it is critical to note that this giving comes from a base of total U.S. household wealth that exceeded $140 trillion in the same period (Federal Reserve). Philanthropy, in this context, represents a leaky faucet from an ocean of wealth, much of which is itself the product of historical and ongoing extraction.
The Radical Redistribution Deficit
In stark contrast, the scale of resources moving through explicitly political, radical redistribution channels is microscopic. For example, the international funder collaborative for social movements, Funders for a Just Economy, reported granting just $6.5 million to grassroots organizations in 2022. A study by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) found that in 2021, a shockingly low percentage of U.S. foundation funding was allocated to “social justice” strategies: only 8% of the $90.7 billion in total foundation giving. An even smaller fraction, less than 1%, specifically supported grassroots community organizing that builds power to challenge systemic inequity. This data reveals a system designed not to fund resistance, but to manage and contain it.
This quantitative chasm underscores that Radical Resource Redistribution is, in practice, a form of targeted degrowth. It is a deliberate political project to “degrow” the hoarded, oppressive capital concentrated in the hands of the few, capital that is often invested in the very systems (fossil fuels, private prisons, militarism) that create the crises, and to channel it into the social, political, and ecological power of neglected communities. The goal is not to make the hoarded wealth “sustainable,” but to dismantle it, transferring its material power to the grassroots communities who are the true experts in their own liberation. The data proves that the current system is not a failed mechanism for justice; it is a highly successful mechanism for the defense of wealth. While the aforementioned numbers are all US-centric, for Europe we don’t even have such data but from inferential experience, the numbers are even lower for politicized, grassroots funding.
From Alchemy to Autonomy
The choice is not between a “sustainable” venture and a “dependent” movement. The choice is between a model that alchemizes guilt into continued dominance and a praxis that builds collective autonomy. Impact investing is a spell cast by capital to convince us it has a soul. Radical Resource Redistribution is the deliberate, collective, and fierce work of breaking that spell and seizing the means of life and struggle.
To break the wealth defense industry is to recognize, as the Combahee River Collective did, that the only true social impact is liberation. It requires moving beyond the karmic ledger of the privileged and into the messy, just, and necessary work of repair. It is to understand that the ultimate measure of success is not a return on investment, but the irrevocable transfer of power and resources away from the hoarders and into the hands of those weaving a world where everyone has enough. The future is not built through a balanced portfolio, but through the uncompromising redistribution of everything, land, capital, and power, back to the people.
References
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press (2004)
brown, adrienne maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press, (2017)
The Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement,” (1977)
Dean, Jodi. The Communist Horizon. Verso, (2012)
Fraser, Nancy. Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis. Verso, (2013)
Graeber, David. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Melville House, (2015)
Indigenous Action Media. Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex.
Rodríguez, Dylan. Abolition Now! Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. AK Press, 2020.
Rose, Tricia. Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives & How We Break Free. Random House, (2024)
Shilliam, Robbie. Decolonizing Politics: An Introduction. Polity Press, 2021.
