In “Back Seat,” a sketch by the comedy troupe the Whitest Kids U’ Know, two elementary school students (played by Trevor Moore and Sam Brown) anger their bus driver (played by Timmy Williams) by criticizing capitalism from the back seat. They observe that socialism is “just being really nice and fair” and “everybody helping everybody else out,” as opposed to capitalism, which only “works” by “play[ing] on man’s biggest flaw…greed.” As they speak these truths, the driver threatens to punish the kids, as if criticizing capitalism is just another form of youthful misbehavior.
Like most jokes, this one works because it speaks to a deeper truth, one with which thousands of nonprofits are no doubt painfully familiar: You cannot seriously address problems like inequality and injustice without challenging late-stage capitalism.
But if and when you choose to do so, institutions react with anger or worse. President Donald Trump, for instance, recently listed “anti-capitalism” in a National Security Presidential Memorandum on “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.”
You cannot seriously address problems like inequality and injustice without challenging late-stage capitalism.
Despite this, there are organizations that continue to critique capitalism while pushing for alternatives. Democracy at Work, a 501c3 nonprofit founded by University of Massachusetts–Amherst economist Richard D. Wolff, produces media and live events advocating workplace democracy and critiquing capitalism. It is based on Wolff’s 2012 book, also titled Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism, in which he both offers a scathing breakdown of capitalism’s flaws and highlights workplace democracy as a sustainable alternative.
The Limits of Reform
Wolff shared with NPQ why he believes other nonprofits should also be boldly anticapitalist, despite the perils of institutional hostility.
“Most tax-exempt nonprofits…they are reformist in their core ways of thinking,” Wolff explained. “They identify a social problem, or more than one, and then they go to work to try to understand it and to fix it.”
On the surface, this appears practical. The problem is that when these problems involve economic inequality, private actors are often better at adapting to be able to perpetuate inequalities than reformers are at ameliorating them.
“The problems [nonprofits] have identified cannot be adequately fixed in the framework of the system we live in….Or if it can be fixed, only temporarily because those who have profited from the problems’ existence in the first place retain the capability more than the tax-exempt organization does,” Wolff observed.
Remember the New Deal
To understand how this happens, Wolff points to the New Deal, the sweeping economic and social reforms implemented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s.
In Wolff’s view, the New Deal coalition, including labor unions, private activist groups, the Socialist and Communist Parties, idealistic academics, and sometimes nonprofits (although nonprofits’ share of the economy was far lower than it is now), succeeded in raising taxes on the wealthy, increasing regulations on businesses, and reducing income inequality.
But profits were still controlled by the corporations and the superrich. Over time, those wealthy groups had the opportunity to fund far-right political movements, which weakened or removed these protections, causing previously addressed or mitigated social problems to return with a vengeance.
“Because you left the profits in the hands of the corporations who were upset by having to pay higher taxes and who were upset by the regulations, you left with them the incentive, namely, to undo the higher taxes and to undo the regulations and the means to realize these incentives, profits,” Wolff explained. “So, the next 80 years, roughly 1945 to the present as we speak, is a period of time that I would characterize as an economic historian, as a period of the undoing of the New Deal.”
Toward a Progressive Nonprofit Politics for Our Age
As the New Deal has been undone, the state’s ability to address social problems has diminished along with it. So, too, has the ability of the nonprofit grant recipients or contractors carrying out many government programs—estimated at over $600 billion a year in revenue in 2020. That number is likely significantly higher now.
On the plus side, this has increased the public space for anticapitalism, which is why today there are so many popular politicians who self-identify as democratic socialists—like New York City’s recently elected Mayor Zohran Mamdani, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Texas Rep. Greg Casar, Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
What can be done? It is important to understand the primacy of pop culture in shifting people’s political ideas. For all his faults, Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart was correct in saying “politics is downstream from culture.”
In culture building, the central goal is [to connect with] people where they live—and engage with them to think critically about the capitalist status quo.
Indeed, conservatives have been taking this adage to heart as they wage war against media with supposedly “woke” messages, from the music of Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny to the late-night talk shows hosted by comedians Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, and Seth Meyers.
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How can nonprofits and movement activists respond? We all have our own points of entry.
I’ve used my platform as a film critic to interview filmmakers and other industry leaders about using art and storytelling to illuminate our sociopolitical realities. For instance, I interviewed screenwriter Jeffrey Nachmanoff, who with director Roland Emmerich cowrote The Day After Tomorrow, a film based on right-wing denials of climate change. I spoke with experts on director Stanley Kubrick to break down Eyes Wide Shut, his magnum opus about the Jeffrey Epstein-esque depravities of the superrich. And I talked with independent filmmaker A.M. Lukas about Hollidaysburg, a little-known film about Pennsylvanian youths figuring out their identities as they come to grips with the crushing realities of modern adult life.
In culture building, the central goal is almost always the same: Speak to people where they live—and engage with them to think critically about the capitalist status quo.
Never Forget: Billionaires Are the Enemy
According to the Forbes 2025 “World Billionaires List,” as of early 2025, there were over 3,000 billionaires in the world with a total net worth of more than $16 trillion. The United States is home to 902 of those people, with a combined total net worth of $6.6 trillion. These numbers are rising; according to Forbes, billionaire wealth overall increased by $2 trillion between 2024 and 2025 alone.
Five of the world’s 10 richest people are Trump supporters (or at least show off their proximity to the president), including Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Bernard Arnault.
For nonprofits to effectively fight capitalism, they must emphasize that they are not opposing small-business owners, hard-working laborers, and everyone else that capitalists claim are being targeted. Rather, they must oppose the predatory oligarchs, the elites, the people whose very existence is, by definition, corrupt.
In short: The billionaires.
“This is a very, very old situation in human history,” Wolff explained. “If you go back to the pharaohs at the time of the pyramids, if you go back to the kings and queens at various points across the globe, you could have at the time of their power made much the same comment that wealth was highly concentrated.”
Yet systems can be overthrown. From France to Russia to Cuba to Vietnam, history is full of examples in which wealthy oligarchs and colonizers were forcibly toppled through popular revolutionary movements. Even the American Revolution, though not a class war in the same way as, say, the French Revolution, still involved ordinary citizens protesting taxes they felt were onerous and unjust.
When services are approached as attempts to reform the system…they ultimately often do a disservice to the people they claim to help.
Did these revolutions sometimes reproduce the problems they had challenged? Sometimes they did. Even so, their historical existence shows that systemic change is possible. And these days, the shortcomings of that American Revolution, too, are increasingly obvious, as the institutions that it created have been manipulated to empower a new aristocracy.
“The daunting quality of what superrich people do comes out of the fact that because they are superrich, they understand that if you are a billionaire, if you’re one of the 3,000 or so and you live in a world where the majority of people are worried about their meals and their future and their diet and their rent, you’ve got a problem,” Wolff said. “And the way you handle that problem is to become as powerful as possible in all realms, above all ideologically, because you need to prevent the mass of people from understanding that they are the mass, and that if they get together, they overwhelm the power of the superrich no matter what amount of power they have.”
The goal of anticapitalist nonprofits, therefore, must be to do more than to provide economic relief, legal services, and other tangible benefits. These things are essential, of course; for many nonprofits, they are their reason for being. Yet when services are approached as attempts to reform the system, plug up holes, and apply Band-Aids, they ultimately often do a disservice to the people they claim to help. In 2024, Emily Kawano and David Cobb wrote in NPQ about “non-reformist reforms,” a term that was developed many decades ago by André Gorz to refer to reforms that both “immediately improve people’s lives and also build power to achieve more systemic change” (emphasis in original).
Even some moderates are beginning to understand that reforms alone are not enough.
Economist Robert Shapiro, adviser to the 1992 centrist Democratic presidential campaign of Bill Clinton and later serving as Clinton’s undersecretary of commerce, agreed that capitalism will have to be at least redefined.
“We may be in a late stage of the current phase and form of capitalism, and I suspect it will be succeeded, over the next decade or two, by the next phase and form—presumably organized around the emerging information and biological/biochemical technologies, the pressures on the environment and climate from global warming, the associated large-scale migrations, the aging of advanced societies, and developments we don’t yet appreciate,” Shapiro said in an interview for Democracy at Work. “Insofar as capitalism now entails the use of using regulated market to distribute resources efficiently, as it has for two centuries, I don’t expect tectonic change, though the regulation will change.”
Unlike Shapiro, Wolff is not sanguine about the possibility of reform providing lasting solutions to capitalism’s current problems.
“The lesson of that for me is that if you want to struggle for reforms, do it; if you want to believe that you can succeed, I agree with you; I think you can, and therefore I would support that,” Wolff concluded. “But where I part company with the reformers of our world is in imagining that a reform you achieve within capitalism is durable, is ever anything more than temporary….If you don’t make the revolution, you have refrained from the only step that might guarantee the reforms you have achieved will be more than temporary.”
