Charity Under Capitalism: The Hypocrisy of the Rich

1 Nov

Written By: Helen Paterson

“The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.” – Victor Hugo

Charities and non-profits in Australia make up a massive sector of our economy – accounting for over 8% of the nation’s GDP. According to the government, the sector generates over $147 billion in revenue per year and employs more than 1.3 million Australians, but what effects do these ostensibly charitable institutions actually have on our society?

Even without the global pandemic, life has been increasingly difficult for the average person. The efforts of nations to stop catastrophic climate change are grossly inadequate, or have fallen to the wayside altogether. Wealth inequality is ever increasing and this material disparity has made class tensions ever more obvious, even if they are never articulated by the bourgeois media. Everything feels precarious.

You’ve probably observed your boss’s salary grow substantially while your own pay has barely increased. Australia’s top 200 richest people have enjoyed a massive 53-fold increase in wealth over the past 35 years yet these very same people are celebrated for their apparently selfless displays of generosity.

The ruling class has always used its wealth for propaganda purposes, and to great effect. Under feudalism it was expected for a lord, who owned his serfs’ clothes, tools, homes and labour, to give those same serfs charity in times of famine. This served to placate the populace as the serfs likely would have asked themselves “How could we rise up against someone who takes care of us in times of strife?” Today, a landlord, the modern successor to a feudal lord, might give a break in rent during a pandemic. While charity appears to be ruling class generosity, it is coldly calculated with a view to maintaining long term exploitation; they know that if they give you a few scraps today, you will survive to generate much more value for them in the future. It’s a self-interested strategy as old as time, and it’s highly successful.

Take a more modern example; Andrew Forrest is the former CEO of Fortescue Metals group and seventh richest Australian according to Forbes. He has a net worth of $4.3 billion dollars, an amount that would take one of his workers more than 10,000 years to earn. He has also been praised for the works of his private foundation, to which he has donated more than $250 million, that aims to end disadvantages for Aboriginal peoples. However, he acquired his wealth carving up huge swaths of Western Australia, and his company has been accused of rigging land rights meetings with native title holders. In other words, his wealth comes from dispossessing Aboriginal people and directly contributing to their disadvantage.

“Historically the working class has always had to take matters into their own hands in times of scarcity, we must not wait to be saved, but work together to save ourselves”

Charity by the rich and powerful has always boiled down to the bourgeoisie trying to appease the proletariat using a tiny portion of what they extorted from those same working people in the first place. Not only do they get to live a life of luxury, exert political power, and make money off the backs of others, but they get to look good while doing it too. Never mind that so many of our problems – including poverty, the displacement and racism experienced by indigenous people, the destruction of our environment – come as a direct result of capital being hoarded by a minority of powerful people. The Band-Aid solutions provided by NGOs and foundations will never solve these problems precisely because they are set up and run by the system that creates them.

Historically the working class has always had to take matters into their own hands in times of scarcity. We must not wait to be saved, but work together to save ourselves. Mutual aid is the solidarity-based sharing of resources, or in simpler terms, looking out for each when times are tough. This tactic is most effective when it is centrally organised and orientated towards a political goal, but it can take many forms such as the fraternity groups or soup kitchens during the Great Depression, or the ACP’s affiliated organisation, the Community Union Defence League (CUDL).

One of many weekly CUDL Street Kitchens in Australia

CUDL, a mutual aid organisation that started in Sydney in January 2018, is rapidly expanding and has many different programs the most notable of which are its famous street kitchens. The street kitchen in Sydney managed to serve 14,000 meals in one year and across Australia, they are serving over one thousand and five hundred meals every week. CUDL aims not only to organise community aid for those that need it, but to also get rid of the system that created that need in the first place.

But even though mutual aid can be an effective tactic towards meeting people’s needs and building the organisational capacity of the working class, we need to take it a step further. There is always impetus for the bourgeois to attack public institutions and services and instead emphasise NGOs, private institutions and free market solutions. The only way to prevent this is for the working class, led by a vanguard party, to seize the state and re-orientate its functions towards serving the people. To liberate ourselves from the evils caused by the capitalist system, we must liberate ourselves from the capitalist system.