Philanthropy stinks

Dr Beth Breeze of the Centre for the Study of Philanthropy, Humanitarianism and Social Justice at the University of Kent defends the wealthys' philanthropy in a letter to The Guardian. Perhaps, she ascribes to the adage that money is like manure. If you spread it around, it does a lot of good, but if you pile it up in one place, it stinks like hell.

Some capitalists feel that just being rich is not sufficiently glorious in itself: in addition, one should “do good”. As a result, some wealthy individuals wish also to be “great humanitarians and philanthropists”. The publicity given to large “philanthropic” donations suggests that in certain circles kudos may now depend on how much money you give as well as how much you have. It is like the potlatch among the Kwakiutl of western Canada, where the wealthy gain kudos by making generous gifts.

While philanthropy is often just a means of cultivating a favourable public image, some wealthy people may be sincere in wanting to “do good” (others though, attribute the giving of certain individuals to guilt feelings about how their fortunes were made.) Carnegie endowed the arts and academia, but gave nothing back to the workers who slaved in the heat of his steel mills at poverty line wages – twelve hours a day, every single day of the year except the 4th of July.The ruthless capitalist precedes, makes possible and is vindicated by the “generous" philanthropist. The capitalist drives the system that causes the misery; the “philanthropist” then does a little to ameliorate that misery. Strangely enough, the capitalist and the philanthropist turn out to be one and the same person.

The rich have complex motivations for their philanthropy; a real desire to do good may be mixed with wallet-waving competition between Masters of the World. Some hope to disarm critics who are uneasy at the gap between rich and poor. Others have so much money they genuinely don't know what to do with it.

One of the many ironies of Warren Buffett’s life is that he has accumulated capital for the sake of it, very much as the system demands, yet has never really known what to do with his vast personal wealth; he spends very little of it and doesn’t believe in inherited wealth either. So in 2006 he declared he was going to give away at least $30 billion of his fortune to the Bill Gates Foundation, so that it could be spent improving healthcare across the world.

In many ways this was indeed a "noble" gesture yet it is the very system in which Buffet is a proud defender and ‘allocator of capital’ that leads to world poverty and lack of decent healthcare in the first place. Philanthropy is no way to run a sane society. Capitalism is a system where only a minority can be winners and they depend for their position on the vast majority being losers. And no amount of well-intentioned philanthropy is ever likely to change it.

Our answer is, that socialism is not about moralistic giving and self sacrifice, but a condition of society wherein helping others is the best way of helping ourselves though working to help others. The fruits of the common effort of socialism will not be gifts but, rather, the common wealth of all. With socialism, social responsibility, that is, concern for those doing the work, the local community, the environment, won't be an "add on" to the system – it will be a central feature of it. With the pursuit of profit and the subservience of workers to capital off the agenda, we shall be responsible for the kind of world we want to build and live in.

To quote Oscar Wilde in the Soul of Man Under Socialism
"Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life--educated men who live in the East End--coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins. There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair."