What is it?
How? The Anti-Oligarchy Fund (AOF) uses crowdfunded donations from people like you to buy shares in major corporations. Dividends from these shares are subsequently collected and used to support the labor movement and unions, including at the very companies it owns stock in.
Our strategy defeats the selfish logic which presently funnels wealth up, away from working families, and into the pockets of the oligarchy. History proves that if we choose solidarity and cooperation, we can undermine the machine of economic control and domination that has been allowed to grow at our expense.
The AOF reverses the typical flow of capital by re-directing corporate profits to the working class - who produced those profits in the first place - instead of giving the workers’ profits away to the donor class.
Our investment strategy multiplies your support, enabling us to recover more and more stolen wages and to use them to counteract the class war waged by the rich against everyone else. By collaborating in this way, we increase our power in the workplace, clawing back our autonomy, dignity, ownership of our work, and sovereignty. Our hard work is what produces society, so shouldn’t we be granted some ownership in it?
The more capital the fund manages, the more power it can redistribute from elites to workers like you. Progress is only made possible by average people taking action and supporting one another.
So Donate to the Anti-Oligarchy Fund if you want liberty-and-justice-for-all instead of liberty-and-justice-for-the-rich.
Donate if you’ve ever been laid off while executives collected massive bonuses.
Donate if you want autonomy and self-determination for average people instead of a free ride for the rich.
Donate if you think homeowners should have been bailed out in 2008 instead of banks and bankers.
Donate if your wages haven’t kept up with prices or worker productivity (they haven’t).
Most of all, donate if you want a true merit-based society instead of the rigged one we currently have. Donate if you think it’s morally wrong and socially destructive that cartels and trusts can buy politicians, price-gouge the public, and funnel record profits away from the workers who produced them. Donate if you want to be free from a system that turbocharges inequality, making working people poorer and allowing non-working billionaires to hoard everything. Donate if you’re tired of having this entire pyramid scheme blamed on you for “not working hard enough” or some other made-up fairy tale that hides the systemic theft keeping you financially insecure.
If you want to support the cause but can’t donate right now we totally get it. You can still help spread the word by sharing and following the AOF on social media.
Or, instead of a one-time donation, you might like to join our Substack where you can contribute a small amount on a regular basis or connect with other members.
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The Nitty Gritty
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Capitalism has hit a wall. It has shown that it is no longer able to improve conditions for average people. As a result, stagnation and decay are running rampant and causing collapse. In this landscape of decay and despair, financial vultures are feeding on the corpses of main street and the working class.
The only way to achieve socio-economic progress and move toward a prosperous future is for the working people who run the economy to impose their collective interests via the inherent power of labor. We must collaborate with one another and stop obeying the vultures. This is essential for restoring the social and economic balance that existed before the hubris of the wealthy and the passivity of the working class allowed power and prosperity to be stolen away and concentrated in the first place.
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The United States is going through a renaissance of class-consciousness due to the failures of capitalism and its pet politicians to maintain or improve the real economy. These elites sacrifice average working people at the altar of Wall Street, Monopolies, and Cartels. Capitalism’s failures have destroyed the American Dream, thrown people out of work, out of their homes, flattened wages, and inflated the cost of living so that most hard-working people have little chance of getting ahead in life.
Workers have realized that they have to fight back against these economic predators. This shift toward class-consciousness is a huge achievement, but it is only the first step in repairing the American Dream. There is a long and brutal fight that will have to take place to undo the counter-revolution of capitalist governance that accelerated during the second half of the 20th century.
It is this fight for social progress that the Anti-Capitalist Fund (AOF) seeks to support. In order to promote the prosperity of the average worker, family, and child, the working class has to be organized and united against the powers that actively divide and disempower us to maintain a hierarchical society characterized by concentrated power and extreme wealth inequality.
Our power comes from organized collaboration. For this reason the AOF sees value in supporting labor unions and the labor movement more broadly. To be clear, labor unions are not a panacea to the social or economic woes facing humanity. Due to the fact that unions - in their present configuration - seek only to improve conditions and not to fundamentally redefine or restructure social relations, they are unlikely to end the underlying problem of wage slavery in which individual liberties and freedoms are limited by dependent bondage to employers. To begin to solve these sorts of problems, solutions like worker co-operatives, collective ownership, and collective management will need to be pursued.
These projects of democratizing economic power can only be fought for and implemented by an organized working class. Unions are a step in this direction and in the view of the AOF, this is their primary service to the project for a truly democratic, non-coercive society. Add to this that along with mobilization and organization, labor unions support the financial well-being of workers, and in-so-doing, they empower workers in the fight to seize power back from the minority who concentrate wealth and power under capitalism.
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The AOF is run at-cost by a very small team of working class people who are tired of waiting for a savior to come along and do the hard work for us. We believe only the people can help themselves and cannot rely on a metaphorical father figure to fend off danger on our behalf. Politicians, government institutions, wealthy entrepreneurs - and even union leadership - cannot and will not save us. They are too invested in the social order to overturn it. The only path forward is for the people to take back ownership of society and the economy by their own efforts and imagination.
We, the working majority, are the economy. The productive force of our labor is the source of real economic value and growth (as opposed to speculative bubbles, artificial scarcity, etc.) Therefore, all of society depends on us utterly and completely. This dependence includes the donor class which appropriates the profits we produce and uses them to buy political influence which it then weaponizes to further dominate us and steal even more of our wages, in turn buying more political influence, and so-on. This snow-balling process exemplifies why extreme wealth is incompatible with democracy; it is a vicious cycle wherein the power and agency of the citizenry is stolen away and over time, concentrates into fewer and fewer hands. Whose hands? The hands of monopolists, the big banks, and the politicians who serve them like self-important butlers.
It is by feeding off the general population in this manner that the financial and political elites derive their power. If we stopped cooperating with them, they would lose everything. Short of this, the only way to force public-interest concessions out of them is to threaten them with the loss of their status. It is only when threatened with losing their advantageous position - and a willing subordinate workforce - that they will consider compromise.
But this begs the following question: why should we be willing to compromise? Our ability to win concessions from the .1% is an indication that we actually have the power to fully dethrone them. If we didn’t have that capability, they wouldn’t feel threatened or make any concessions at all. This means we can change the distribution of wealth and power in society. It bears repeating: why should we merely pursue concessions when we could instead use our power to create a new order of liberty and freedom to replace the current order of hierarchy, violence, fear, and coercion?
These are the questions we should be asking if we truly want to be free from economic or political masters. Questions like “Who are you going to vote for in the next election?” are a red herring, misleading us into believing that freedom consists in giving away our power of self-determination to politicians who, in reality, are nothing more than managers of elite interests.
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Are you interested in supporting the working class over the long-term and not just in a one-time donation? Consider joining our Substack where you can read our articles and interact with other members.
If you have suggestions for specific labor organizations that are worth supporting, please let us know!
Are you worried about corrupt union leadership? Whistleblowers can submit specific reports here. Your submissions will help us keep the recipients of our funds accountable to the interests of workers.
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The AOF is a fundraising project with the mission of supporting organized working class movements.
While this is not a journalism or educational outlet we do believe that investigative journalism and historically grounded economic education are of critical importance to individual liberties, economic justice, and democratic self-governance, especially given the class war that the rich are waging against human civilization and the rest of our earth’s life systems.
Sharing knowledge and empowering our communities is particularly relevant given the escalating campaigns of censorship being waged by the rulers of the ‘free and democratic’ west, actions that expose their true intentions of control, domination, and profiteering.
With this in mind, we recommend the following books and journalistic outlets for their commitment and contributions to truth and the public interest.
Selected Books:
Democracy Incorporated - Sheldon Wolin
Silent Coup - Matt Kennard & Claire Provost
American Exception - Aaron Good
Economics - Ha-Joon Chang
…and Forgive them their Debts - Michael Hudson
The Collapse of Antiquity - Michael Hudson
The ABC’s of Capitalism - Vivek Chibber
A People’s Guide to Capitalism - Hadas Thier
The Capital Order - Clara Mattei
Surveillance Capitalism - Shoshana Zuboff
Technofeudalism - Yanis Varoufakis
The Politics of Time - Guy Standing
Against Ambition - Bill Peel
Slavery and Capitalism - David McNally
Systemic Corruption - Camila Vergara
These are the Plunderers - Gretchen Morgensen
Our Lives in their Portfolios - Brett Christophers
Left is Not Woke - Susan Neimann
Pedagogy of the Oppressed - Paulo Freire
Anarcho-Syndicalism - Rudolf Rocker and Noam Chomsky
Debt: the First 5000 Years - David Graeber
The Dawn of Everything - David Graeber and David Wengrow
How Empires Fall - Peter Heather and John Rapley
Nickel and Dimed - Barbara Ehrenreich
Manufacturing Consent - Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman
News and Analysis: