Look to the Black Panthers. They have their own contradictions and failures, especially as the project fell away in later years. But they were masters of synthesising “charity” with political work.

Doing charity for the sake of alleviating some of the sharper effects of capitalism on the downtrodden is obviously a great and humanitarian thing to do. But distributing food for its own sake is meaningless if you are trying to bring about socialism.

In every action an organisation takes it needs to ask “how does this advance the cause of revolution? How does this develop the consciousness of the proletariat? How does this increase the ranks of the communist party?”. The panthers didn’t just feed people, they told those people how and why they were starving, who was doing it to them, and taught them the ideology that could free them from their condition.

If you’re just going out once a week to hand out free food you are doing just as much to challenge capital as the local church or bleeding heart liberal community group.