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Post Capitalist Philanthropy

Post CapitalisM

PosT CapitalIST PHILANTHROPY

PosT CapitalIST 
PHILANTHROPY

Let’s start with post capitalism. It is an umbrella concept to better understand what we want to transition out of and transition into. Capitalism is not simply a system of market exchange - it is a system that measures and reduces the value of Life including human labour, living ecosystems, relationships and life-force.
Post capitalism is not simply another ‘ism’ to replace previous ideologies; it is a conceptual container for social pluralities based on shared values (e.g. reciprocity, altruism, cooperation, gifting, equity consciousness, empathy, interbeing and solidarity with all Life). It stems from the shortcomings of the existing system and the lived experience of life-centric alternatives. In short, we endeavour to find approaches, practices and models that usher in systems rooted in interconnected relationships and a broader honouring of Life, in all its diversity and mystery.
Although the prefix post can imply a “context after”, it also implies a state which is informed by the context prior to it. This is why understanding the dominant system is so critical. If we do not have a clear perspective of capitalism, we become contextually irrelevant. However, if all we have is a critique of the dominant system, we in turn become spiritually and creatively impoverished. This is why post capitalism is a necessary discourse for the collective imaginary.
Post capitalist realities exist right now, and many have existed for hundreds (if not thousands) of years despite the dominant system(s). Indigenous cultures and communities that are based in the values mentioned above are inherently post capitalist even if they were not created in opposition to capitalism; their very existence is a form of resistance in the face of the dominant culture’s desire to eradicate and undermine them.
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Five Elements Mandala

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Five Elements Mandala

Coordinates of Possibility

Five Elements

Mandala

Coordinates of Possibility

The invocation of post capitalist philanthropy1 invites a host of questions, including: How could philanthropy help transform capitalism when it was created by the very contradictions and inequities stemming from the system? Would any desirable post capitalist future still include the idea of a sector called philanthropy? How does philanthropy responsibly hospice itself in service to post capitalist futures?
One response to these questions is the Five Element Mandala. This mandala is a way to represent some “coordinates of possibility” for transition pathways. We adopted the form of mandala (which is Sanskrit for “circle”) as it represents a spiritual journey from the external world to the spiritual centre. In some traditions mandalas are believed to represent different aspects of the universe.
Our mandala is rooted in the traditional five elements of Water, Air, Fire, Water, and Ether, and two intersecting axes, the vertical and horizontal lines of action.
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Axes

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The Y-axis represents Transformation to Create with a focus on building and catalysing new-ancient-emerging ways of living, knowing, sensing and being. In short, creating post capitalist cultures, collective imaginaries, and infrastructure.
The X axis represents Restoration and Solidarity with the lens of addressing historical injustices while rebalancing and recentering right relationships.
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Elements

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The elements represent five interrelated transition pathways. This is a framework for contemplation and re-calibration. It is not a prescription of how funders or activists should spend their resources. We have purposefully not included specific examples because we are not trying to curate (.. incomplete sentence)
Indigenous peoples as the element of Water, the tributaries and veins of the planet, stewarding  the world’s biodiversity (they represent about 5% of the world’s population and steward over 80% of the world’s biodiversity). Social movements as Fire forge the pathways towards life-centric alternatives through direct experience and place-based wisdom. Creating new-ancient-emerging post capitalist cultures as Air; re-imagining and reconstituting the oxygen (i.e. ideas and consciousness) we breathe. Building post capitalist infrastructure as the Earth element, bringing imaginal into material form.(Re)cultivation of life-force as the element of Ether; healing the traumas of capitalist modernity and centering our relationship with life and death.
The X axis is about restoring right relationship as a precondition for a state change. We placed the element of ether at the center of the axis and the elements to represent the essential, interdependent nature of recultivating life force.
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Interpretation

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Water
Solidarity with
indigenous people
Air
Create new-ancient-emerging cultural contexts
Fire
Solidarity with
social movements
Earth
Create post capitalist
infrastructure
Ether
(Re)cultivation
of life-force
Ether
(Re)cultivation
of life-force
Air
Create new-ancient-emerging cultural contexts
Fire
Solidarity with social movements
Earth
Create post-capitalist infrastructure
Water
Solidarity with indigenous people
Ether
(Re)Cultivation of life-force

Five Elements

Mandala

X

Water Element

Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples

Indigenous peoples are varied and diverse in their cultures, practices, cosmologies, histories, geographies, contexts, and approaches. What many of them share is that, despite 500 years of colonial slaughter, exploitation and pillage, their communities have preserved the wisdom of place and relationship to land; generational, symbiotic knowledge of their respective terrains that continues to be necessary for human survival.

Areas of work may include:

  • Funds to and alignment with land and water protectors
  • Ongoing decolonising and practices to understand and live solidarity
  • Elders/wisdom circles and supporting the Life Plans
  • Resistance movements
  • Myriad efforts led by Indigenous communities that preserve and uplift their self-determination
  • Support food/land/water/medicine/cultural sovereignty projects
  • Rights of Nature legal jurisprudence
  • Indigenous sciences

Air Element

Create new-ancient-emerging cultural contexts

We need spaces to create, imagine, and dream together to shift the cultural conditions, the memetic landscape of beliefs and the dominant ontologies and cosmologies in order for emerging alternatives to take root and flourish.
We must engender the cultural context with compassion, empathy, service, generosity and solidarity while deepening our structural and constellational worldview. This is the realm of artists, poets, culture hackers, shamans, educators and others.

Support for new-ancient-emerging Cultural Contexts includes:

  • Physical and virtual spaces to imagine and dream together
  • Cultural narrative work (memetic and narrative work that disrupts the philanthropic sector)
  • Emerging media approaches
  • Gatherings and other ways to deepening relations
  • Artistic and creative activism (i.e. artivism)
  • Sacred activism

Fire Element

Solidarity with social movements

These are groups and peoples who are directly affected by the onslaught of neoliberalism, are often dehumanised as their lands and bodies carry the most valuable “resources'', especially movements from the geopolitical South. Funding and being in solidarity with social movements is about listening to, responding, honouring and learning from the needs of the peoples and lands that modern wealth has been built on, without their consent. Some of the most critical economic alternatives can be found amongst these groups, as they experience oppression whilst living and embodying other ways of knowing and being that in many cases already exemplify a state of post capitalism.

Some of the critical transition pathways that social movements advocate for include:

  • Evolving democratic practices
  • Economic justice
  • Solidarity networks
  • Commons justice
  • Racial justice
  • Bio-regional self-sufficiency & cultural sovereignty
  • LGBTQI rights & gender justice movements
  • Labour rights

Earth Element

Create Post capitalist Infrastructure

The root of the Transformationand Creation axis is the element of Earth, which is the necessary task of creating post capitalist infrastructure. This is the physical, cultural and societal structures necessary to transition and live outside the constraints of modernity. The aim is to create systems and infrastructure for strong, resilient localised economies, deep democracy, community sovereignty, alternative modalities for health & education, flourishing ecosystems, and vibrant communal systems.

Areas of work may include:

  • Localisation of production, consumption, and livelihoods
  • Bio-regional infrastructure and sovereignty
  • Ecological restoration and regeneration
  • Open-source knowledge systems
  • Alternative communities and experiments, including temporary autonomous zones
  • Commons-based land stewardship
  • Mutual aid networks

Ether Element

(re)cultivation of life-force

The (re)cultivation of life-force is the centre of the mandala as it is essential to and discursive with the other four elements. It also connects the axes, elements, and represent the on-going inner/outer healing journey. Ether is the invisible, ineffable, ever-present force required for Life itself and for creative, vibrant evolutionary change.

Area of work:

  • Reconciliation and restoration circles
  • Family constellations and somatic-based therapies
  • Ancestral healing work
  • Physical embodiment practices, meditation and contemplation
  • Rites-of-passage work
  • Psychedelic medicines especially those rooted in traditional cultures
  • Place-based spiritual practices (such as the Lakota Inipi or Sweatlodge)
  • Cultivation of personal and communal creativity
  • Resurgence of mystery schools
  • Grief circles and other communal rituals
  • Nature-based education
Transformation
& Creation
Creation &
Transformation
Restoration
& Solidarity
Solidarity &
Restoration
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interpretation
Five Elements Mandala
Hover & Click elements to interact.
Explore

Axes

Elements

The Y-axis represents Transformation and Creation with a focus on building and catalysing new-ancient-emerging ways of living, knowing, sensing and being. In short, creating post capitalist cultures, collective imaginaries, and infrastructure.
The X-axis represents Restoration and Solidarity with the lens of addressing historical injustices while rebalancing and recentring right relationships.
We placed the element of Ether at the centre of the axes and the elements to represent the essential, interdependent nature of (re)cultivating life force.
X

Philanthropic practices

Transition Pathways

Philanthropy often changes what it does, rather than changing how or why. Although we advocate for ontological shifts as starting points for behaviour change, there are existing practices that can start the journey. Below are examples that are part of a growing call to decolonise and transform philanthropy:
  • Provide long-term (e.g. five to ten years), flexible, general operating support to organisations, social movements and communities without burdensome, bureaucratic paperwork
  • Embrace models of spend-in and spend-down to use capital in the short period of time that capital is useful (see Part III of the book, from Pyramid Logic to Spiral Logic, for a deeper analysis)
  • Use endowment funds to transfer assets to marginalised communities and other initiatives to build local food, land, water, energy, educational and medicine sovereignty
  • Divest from equity markets and engage with the critical work of historical reparations
  • Practice relationally-based giving (giving circles, flow funding, etc.)
  • Decentralise grantmaking and decision-making by supporting or co-creating community-led foundations
  • Deploy funds to be more fluid and flexible in the ways and types of organisations and projects they can support (e.g. non NGOs, informal collectives, co-ops, etc.)
  • Engage in organisational redesign to address institutional preservation, growth, legacy and other historical entitlements of big philanthropy
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Philanthropic practices

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  • Provide Long-term, flexible, general operating support to organisations, social movements and communities.
  • Embrace models of spend-in and spend-down to use endowment funds to transfer assets to marginalised communities and other initiatives for the purchase of land, buildings, and other required post capitalist infrastructure in service to bioregional regeneration and sovereignty.
  • Practice relationally-based giving focused on generosity, reciprocity and trust (giving circles, flow funding through activists to give within their respective communities).
  • Create mechanisms to fund groups beyond not-for-profits like social movements and volunteer run groups.
  • Deploy grant dollars and endowment funds to be more fluid and flexible in the ways and types of organisations and projects they can support.
  • Divest from equity markets and engage with the critical work of historical reparations.
  • Engage in organizational redesign to address institutional preservation, growth, legacy and other historical entitlements.
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Transition Pathways

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We have decided not to highlight specific examples of peoples and organizations we believe are creating transition pathways within the various elements. There’s three reasons for this.
The first is that we are not the arbiters of the work that is happening in these spheres. The second is that for every example we point to, we limit the imagination of what else is possible. Finally, given that the core of this work are “onto-shifts”, the very way in which practioners see, relate and engage with the world, we believe that only people and organizations enmeshed in this work can truly know if the work is being done outside of the dominant ontology of separation from the natural world, hierarchy, materialism, rationalism, white supremacy, private property, certainty of outcomes, etc. Rather, we are asking practitioners to shift their lens on how they perceive what’s happening within the social ecology of philanthropy and the broader social change movement.
Here are some questions for you to contemplate:
  • What axis and elements would you include in a mandala? What does this Five Element mandala bring into focus? What is missing? What aspects do you disagree with or reject?
  • If you were creating your vision of a post capitalist reality, what practices, policies, principles, projects, social movements, narrative interventions, etc. would you support within each element? How would you go about this work, where would you start?
  • What is your point-of-view on the fifth element of Healing and Connecting to Life-Force?
  • What paradoxes would you have to embrace? How is this related to or distinct from your current areas of support and ways of working and being? Why?
  • What current ideas, programs and conditionings are preventing you from creating post capitalist realities you imagine?
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Interpreting the mandala

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Axes

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Our mandala starts with a focus on the two intersecting axes, the vertical and horizontal lines of action.
The X-axis represents Restoration and Solidarity with the lens of addressing historical injustices while rebalancing and recentering right relationships. We focus on a re-integration of humanity into the broader congress of Life (i.e. acknowledging we ourselves are Nature, not an elite species that sits upon some kind of natural hierarchy) and an acceptance & integration of multiple simultaneous ontologies. It includes a temporal lens informed by historical harms, what can be done now, and the requisite onto-shifts2 required to do so in both the present and future to reconcile and integrate the past. 
The Y-axis represents Transformation and Creation with a focus on building and catalysing new-ancient-emerging ways of living, knowing, sensing and being. We must have a point-of-view on the shortcomings and pathologies of the dominant culture to know what kind of transformation we are seeking and we must also have a felt sense of what energies need to be rebalanced and cultivated for creation, for the state change of transformation to occur. Simultaneously, we also need a point-of-view and lived praxis for how to change or nurture emerging life-centric cultures and lived possibilities.
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Elements

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We can see how these four vectors can overlay with their respective four elements - Indigenous peoples as the element of Water, the tributaries and veins of the planet; social movements as Fire blazing the way and bringing our attention towards life-centric alternatives through direct experience and place-based wisdom; seeding and building post capitalist infrastructure as the Earth element, as world-making; and creating and breathing into existence new-ancient-emerging cultural contexts as Air, re-animating and reconstituting the oxygen (i.e. ideas and consciousness) we breathe. 
The critical work of healing the traumas of capitalist modernity and centering our relationship with life and death is the (re)cultivation of life-force, both internally and externally, restoring and revitalising the energetic weave and weft of living systems that has been perpetually denigrated by the onslaught of capitalism, commodification, violence and alienated labour. We are constituting life-force as the element of Ether, the invisible, ineffable, ever-present force required for Life itself and for creative, vibrant evolutionary change.
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1. Given that philanthropy is an externality of capitalism itself, post capitalist philanthropy focuses on using capital to build post capitalist infrastructure in the short window of time that capitalist modernity continues to exist. It includes the eventual dissolution of philanthropy as part of a broader strategy of transition pathways. 
2. Shifts in ontology that correlate with consequential shifts in epistemological and ethical points-of-view.