The Price of Philanthro-Capitalism
Guest post by Carl Packman
One month ago I argued that there were certain instances where charity giving was both a way of disavowing the feeling of guilt, and that it operated like a business, trying to drive out other competition.
I argued that though this was the case, it is surely better to have charity for the many good things it has achieved, but that it must be remembered that certain wealthy individuals may use charity as a way of market dominance.
As I mentioned then, Michael Edwards, who is the distinguished senior fellow at Demos in New York, and the author of Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World said on CiF recently:
The philanthro-capitalists’ [the name, counter-intuitively, given to the likes of George Soros and Bill Gates] desire for data and control also directs the lion’s share of resources to the biggest and most accessible NGOs that can absorb large amounts of foreign funding, not the social movements that can pressure their own governments to perform in the public interest and mobilise large numbers of people to defend their rights.
A big business’ modus operandi in an age of philanthro- and compassionate-capitalism may bolster an image of kindness, but if you dig around a bit you realise that what this aims to obfuscate is business as usual or the true core of dog-eat-dog market sensibilities – corruption, by any means possible.
Last October Trafigura gagged the Guardian for reporting on an injunction obtained by “Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton Report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura”.
Labour MP Paul Farrelly put a question to the justice secretary, Jack Straw, about the injunction, that the gag also disallowed reporting on – later overturned by Trafigura’s legal firm, Carter-Ruck.
The Guardian ran a piece after Carter-Ruck went back on the order entitled Twitter Can’t be Gagged commenting on how a campaign on twitter (the action of a collective, rather than individuals or powerful organisations, which seek to outdo these grassroots, bottom up movements – the main charge of my original article on charities and philanthropists) made it possible to find out about corruption and ways of curbing the free reportage of issues that directly affect the public and the freedom of information in general.
The Third Estate in particular had a part to play in informing what the Guardian was banned from telling us. And as George Monbiot noted, Trafigura has a history of this sort of thing and a history of scandal.
But my further contention on this issue is that Trafigura operates in much the same way as those philanthro-capitalists that Michael Edwards speaks of above; launching in 2007 the Trafigura Foundation for the purposes of “charitable and community-oriented actions”.
My charge here is not against funding initiatives that will make the world better, but, rather, I’m always keen to find out what these things are there to conceal.
Call me a cynic for believing that there is always a price to be paid for in philanthropic capitalism, but as this particular company has shown, it has some dubious ethics both in the way it carries out its business, and also with regard to how it feels the free press works (for which it is not alone in the market – philanthropic or not). For me, it is no wonder that it skims off its short change to support “good causes” – it has a lot to feel guilty about.
Reader Comments
Great piece. I think we can go further and say that any charitable giving by a large company is always dubious; these things operate on a profit motive, and shareholders wouldn’t put up with philanthropy unless they were still benefiting. And corporations have a tendency to buy up pressure groups (check out johann on this: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100322/hari )
Cheers for pointing that article out Jon; I always felt that Hari was a good writer, but now that I know he is on my team as well hehe.
The truly worrying aspect of that report is this (which chimes in with what I was saying):
“Companies like Shell and British Petroleum (BP) were delighted. They saw it as valuable “reputation insurance”: every time they were criticized for their massive emissions of warming gases … they wheeled out their shiny green awards, purchased with “charitable” donations, to ward off the prospect of government regulation.”
Underneath the nicities is a cruel layer of truth.
Credit where credit is due; some people just want to give. Slavoj Zizek in his book Violence, and in other polemics against charity, notes that giving change is a way of both buying freedom from guilt, pretending to care, and convincing oneself that one is doing good. I think perhaps this is true, but I can’t see any alternative for an individual; I know what I think govt. should do (debt cancellation; fairer trade regulations etc), but what is a single person to do other than the best that they can (and, plus, there is no evidence that this petit altruism isn’t true, it is pure anecdote – true, but unquantifiable, so problematic).
But Shell, BP, Trafigura; you have to wonder why – and as I say, you dig a little deeper and lo and behold there’s dirt.