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The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down

Capitalism

Zoë Beery

13-17 minutes
Credit...Photo illustration by Jesse Untracht-Oakner for The New York Times

The Great Read

Socialist-minded millennial heirs are trying to live their values by getting rid
of their money.

Credit...Photo illustration by Jesse Untracht-Oakner for The New York Times

Lately, Sam Jacobs has been having a lot of conversations with his family’s
lawyers. He’s trying to gain access to more of his $30 million trust fund. At
25, he’s hit the age when many heirs can blow their money on harebrained
businesses or a stable of sports cars. He doesn’t want to do that, but by
wealth management standards, his plan is just as bad. He wants to give it all
away.

“I want to build a world where someone like me, a young person who
controls tens of millions of dollars, is impossible,” he said.

A socialist since college, Mr. Jacobs sees his family’s “extreme, plutocratic
wealth” as both a moral and economic failure. He wants to put his
inheritance toward ending capitalism, and by that he means using his money
to undo systems that accumulate money for those at the top, and that have
played a large role in widening economic and racial inequality.

Millennials will be the recipients of the largest generational shift of assets in

American history — the Great Wealth Transfer, as finance types call it. Tens
of trillions of dollars are expected to pass between generations in just the
next decade.

And that money, like all wealth in the United States, is extremely
concentrated in the upper brackets. Mr. Jacobs, whose grandfather was a
founder of Qualcomm, expects to receive up to $100 million over the course
of his lifetime.

Most of his fellow millennials, however, are receiving a rotten inheritance —

debt, dim job prospects and a figment of a social safety net. The youngest of
them were 15 in 2011 when Occupy Wall Street drew a line between the
have-a-lots and everyone else; the oldest, if they were lucky, were working in
a post-recession economy even before the current recession. Class and
inequality have been part of the political conversation for most of their adult
lives.

In their time, the ever-widening gulf between the rich and poor has pushed
left-wing politics back into the American political mainstream. President-elect
Joseph R. Biden Jr. trailed Senator Bernie Sanders, the socialist candidate,
by 20 points among millennial voters in this year’s Democratic presidential
primary. And over the last six years, millennials have taken the Democratic
Socialists of America from a fringe organization with an average member
age of 60 to a national force with chapters in every state and a membership
of nearly 100,000, most of them under 35.

Mr. Jacobs, as both a trust-fund kid and an anticapitalist, is in a rare position

among leftists fighting against economic inequality. But he isn’t alone in
trying to figure out, as he put it, “what it means to be with the 99 percent,
when you’re the 1 percent.”

Challenging the System

“I was always taught that this is just the way the world is, that my family has
wealth while others don’t, and that because of that, I need to give some of it
away, but not necessarily question why it was there,” said Rachel Gelman, a
30-year-old in Oakland, Calif., who describes her politics as “anticapitalist,
anti-imperialist and abolitionist.”

Her family always gave generously to liberal causes and civil society groups.
Ms. Gelman supports groups devoted to ending inequality, including the
Movement for Black Lives, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network
and Critical Resistance, a leading prison abolition group.
“My money is mostly stocks, which means it comes from underpaying and
undervaluing working-class people, and that’s impossible to disconnect from
the economic legacies of Indigenous genocide and slavery,” Ms. Gelman
said. “Once I realized that, I couldn’t imagine doing anything with my wealth
besides redistribute it to these communities.”

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According to the consulting firm Accenture, the Silent Generation and baby
boomers will gift their heirs up to $30 trillion by 2030, and up to $75 trillion by
2060. These fortunes began to amass decades ago — in some cases
centuries. But the concentration of wealth became stratospheric starting in
the 1970s, when neoliberalism became the financial sector’s guiding
economic philosophy and companies began to obsessively pursue higher
returns for shareholders.

“The wealth millennials are inheriting came from a mammoth redistribution

away from the working masses, creating a super-rich tiny minority at the
expense of a fleeting American dream that is now out of reach to most
people,” said Richard D. Wolff, a Marxist and an emeritus economics
professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst who has published 12
books about class and inequality.

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He said he has been professionally arguing against capitalism’s selling

points since his teaching career began, in 1967, but that his millennial
students “are more open to hearing that message than their parents ever
were.”

Heirs whose wealth has come from a specific source sometimes use that
history to guide their giving. Pierce Delahunt, a 32-year-old “socialist,
anarchist, Marxist, communist or all of the above,” has a trust fund that was
financed by their former stepfather’s outlet mall empire. (Mx. Delahunt takes
nongendered pronouns.)

“When I think about outlet malls, I think about intersectional oppression,” Mx.
Delahunt said. There’s the originally Indigenous land each mall was built on,
plus the low wages paid to retail and food service workers, who are
disproportionately people of color, and the carbon emissions of
manufacturing and transporting the goods. With that on their mind, Mx.
Delahunt gives away $10,000 a month, divided between 50 small
organizations, most of which have an anticapitalist mission and in some way
tackle the externalities of discount shopping.

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If money is power, then true wealth redistribution also means redistributing
authority. Margi Dashevsky, who is 33 and lives in Alaska, gets guidance on
her charitable giving from an advisory team of three women activists from
Indigenous and Black power movements. “The happenstance of me being
born into this wealth doesn’t mean I’m somehow omniscient about how it
should be used,” she said. “It actually gives me a lot of blind spots.”

She also donates to social justice funds like Third Wave Fund, where grant-
making is guided by the communities receiving funding, instead of being
decided by a board of wealthy individuals. The latter sort of nonprofit, Ms.
Dashevsky said, “comes from a place of assuming incompetence, putting up
all these hurdles for activists and wasting their time on things like impact
reporting. I want to flip that on its head by stepping back, trusting and
listening.”

Of course, an individual act of wealth redistribution does not, on its own,

change a system. But these heirs see themselves as part of a bigger shift,
and are dedicated to funding its momentum.
The Revolution Starts at the Dinner Table

Any leftist trying to shake off an inheritance will, at some point, find their way
to Resource Generation; all of the heirs in this article did. The organization,
founded in 1998, is a politicization machine for wealthy 18- to 35-year-olds.

The nonprofit offers programming that encourages members to see

capitalism not as a market-based equalizer promising upward mobility, but
as a damaging system predicated on, as Resource Generation puts it,
“stolen land, stolen labor and stolen lives.” In go young people knotted by
tension between their progressive values and their wealth; out come
determined campaigners with a plan to redistribute.

Maria Myotte, the organization’s communications director, said that

membership grows each time the nation has a reckoning: Occupy Wall
Street, the 2016 presidential election, and this year’s twin jolts of the
Covid-19 pandemic and the uprising against anti-Black racism all attracted
newbies. There are currently around 1,000 dues-paying members at local
chapters around the U.S. According to the most recent internal survey, the
wider Resource Generation network, which includes some nonmembers,
collectively expects to control $22 billion in their lifetimes.

Heirs who want to redistribute their wealth said that, at first, they approached
the task with the righteous fire of revolutionaries, castigating family members
for their coziness with privilege. “There were many angry conversations
around the dinner table where I was an impatient, arrogant brat,” said Sam
Vinal, a 34-year-old in Los Angeles. But many have found that they can be
more persuasive when they treat these conversations like friendly political
canvassing.

When Mr. Vinal’s mother wanted to start a family foundation, an arrangement

typically focused on a single charitable issue, Mr. Vinal saw an opportunity to
instead create a vehicle for more comprehensive change. He set up
conversations with leaders of various social movements to convince his
mother to change the mission. “That was a light bulb moment for my mom,
to hear directly from the front lines,” he said.
Since its creation in 2017, the foundation has supported radical
organizations, with guidance from a group of activists. Mr. Vinal spends
much of his time organizing other young people with family foundations to
take theirs in this direction.

“I try to understand where people are coming from, the bubbles of race and
class we get stuck in, so that I can help them be more imaginative about
where we can go beyond capitalism,” he said.

Building the ‘Solidarity Economy’

The racial wealth gap means that heirs who want to redistribute their wealth
are overwhelmingly white. People of color who are members of Resource
Generation, for instance, tend to have access to less overall wealth, or will
not inherit until later in life. The wealthiest are transracial adoptees or those
who have a white parent. This makes the approach to redistribution a little
more complicated.

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Credit...Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times

“The narrative of giving away everything feels like it’s being framed by white
inheritors,” said Elizabeth Baldwin, a 34-year-old democratic socialist in
Cambridge, Mass., who was adopted from India by a white family when she
was a baby. Heirs in her position, she said, must decide whether to
redistribute to their own communities or others’, and what it means to give
up economic privilege when they don’t have the kind of safety net that
comes with being white. She plans to keep enough of her inheritance to buy
an apartment and raise a family, enjoying the sort of pleasant middle-class
existence denied to many people of color in the United States.

Because her adoptive family’s wealth originated in land ownership and

slavery, she donates to anti-racist groups and will soon begin making low-
interest loans to Black-owned businesses. “The money I’m living on was
made from exploiting people that look like me, so I see my giving as
reparations,” she said.

Ms. Baldwin has long-term relationships with Grassroots International and

Thousand Currents, philanthropy networks working in many postcolonial
countries, including India, whose impoverishment she sees as a symptom of
Western capitalism. It is sometimes “strange,” she admitted, to be making
reparations to her own people. “But no one else in my family talks about
where this money came from, and I feel like I have to do it,” she said.
There’s another hitch: Because the stock market is both an engine of
American capitalism and responsible in many cases for heirs’ massive
individual wealth, few want anything to do with it.

“I get rich because other people aren’t getting rich, and I don’t want to keep
making more wealth off investments in things like Coca-Cola and Exxon-
Mobil,” said Ms. Baldwin. “I would rather put my money into a community
that has been denied economic resources and disrupt the system.”

She is doing this by investing in what she and her peers call the “solidarity
economy.”

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In short, this means using their money to support more equitable economic
infrastructures. This includes investing in or donating to credit unions,
worker-owned businesses, community land trusts, and nonprofits aiming to
maximize quality of life through democratic decision making, instead of
maximizing profits through competition. Emma Thomas, a 29-year-old
democratic socialist who is also taking her money out of the stock market,
described what she’s now investing in as “an economy that is about
exchange and taking care of needs, that is cooperative and sustainable, and
that doesn’t demand unfettered growth.”

This summer, she was part of a team that organized about 250 people to
support the Black Land and Power Project, moving money from asset
portfolios to 10 Black-run land sites across the U.S. (Because of the nation’s
history of economic racism, many solidarity economy projects include a
racial justice element.)

To Ms. Thomas, the prospect of contributing to a solidarity economy is a

refreshingly tangible expression of her values, compared to the abstraction
of accumulating portfolio returns. “At some point, these numbers on a screen
are imaginary,” she said. “But what’s not imaginary is whether you have
shelter, food and a community. Those are true returns.”

A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 29, 2020, Section ST, Page
1 of the New York edition with the headline: Silver-Spoon Socialists. Order
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