March 19, 2014 
By Mikkel Thorup:
(…) “The term ‘philanthrocapitalism’ expresses the idea that capitalism is or can be charitable in and of itself. The claim is that capitalist mechanisms are superior to all others (especially the state) when it comes to not only creating economic but also human progress; that the market and market actors are or should be made the prime creators of the good society; that capitalism is not the cause but the solution to all the major problems in the world; that the best thing to do is to extend the market to hitherto personal or state processes; and, finally, that there is no conflict between the rich and the poor but rather that the rich are the poor’s best and possibly only friend.”
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One can interpret philanthrocapitalism as the latest expression of the modern era anti-revolutionary, pro-capitalist claims that a rebellion against capitalism will only end in misery and that there is actually no opposition between the market and the common good.
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The purpose of this article is to analyze the interrelations between present day philanthropy and a new form of ‘creative capitalism’. My claim is basically that philanthrocapitalism is a sub-form of a new creative capitalism in practical terms and even more forcefully in legitimizing intent. We should then not understand it as a mere appendix to capitalism, or as an insignificant advertising trick, but as a fully integrated part of the way in which capitalism is operating and legitimizing itself at present (Žižek, 2009; Nielsen, 2009).
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What may be an indication of something new in contemporary philanthropy is exactly this emotionalization on the part of the giver, this refusal to keep the recipient a stranger, the need to familiarize oneself with the one in need. Personal commitment (real or simulated) is the new entry point of the giver just as empowerment is the new supposed exit point of the recipient.
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The purchase of products labelled ecological, fair trade and consumer philanthropy are all expressions of political consumption but should also be understood within the framework of what ‘the new spirit of capitalism’ promises to produce, namely an emotional and moral dimension to purely economic activity. By buying these ‘philanthrocapitalist products’ you get in a sense more than you pay for. You get the product and its utility value but you also get to do some good. There is an added dimension to the purchase, which mirrors a larger trend in contemporary capitalism. The immediate output is no longer enough. Pay is no longer enough reward for one’s work. There has to be personal growth as well. The product is no longer enough. There has to be an added dimension of experience, meaning or morality to go along with it. The logic of ‘Get two, pay for one’ is no longer reserved for the quantitative part of shopping but is now also applicable in its qualitative part, in what we can call the moral surplus value of shopping.
This moral surplus value is embedded in the shopping situation itself, at the heart of the basic market relation of buying and selling. Charity is here directly and positively correlated with private consumption. The more you purchase the more good you do. To choose this product rather than that, to click the charity button rather than get the money yourself, are doubly charitable. They are charitable for the ones getting the money but also for the one doing the shopping or clicking. Consumer philanthropy is therefore the individual-psychological component in the ideological complex which claims that there is today no opposition between consumption (enjoyment) and charity (morality), just as the work-organizational logic says that there is no opposition between work for pay and work for individual growth. Both are indicative of a shift in capitalism, moving from the society of scarcity’s promise of welfare through the state, to the post-scarcity society’s promise of liberation and morality in and through capitalism itself.
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The bottled water company Thirsty Planet uses the slogan ‘Buy a bottle. Change a life!’. Vinicius Brei and Steffen Böhm, who have analyzed the CSR-strategies for ‘ethical’ bottled water of companies such as this, emphasize that these consumer philanthropic
campaigns are always emotional and persuasive, trying to closely connect the bottled water consumer to the African problem of lack of water. The campaigns urge consumers to ‘get involved’ and ‘participate’ in solving this problem by buying a bottle of branded water. (Brei and Böhm, 2011: 244)
Involvement, participation and compassion are translated into consumption. The difference one can make, so these campaigns tell us, is through buying stuff. The ethical dilemma of our abundance (here of water) and others’ lack thereof is paradoxically solved through us consuming more of it. Inequality becomes the solution rather than the problem.
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This is emotionality without cost, caring at a distance, resulting in an acute depoliticization of the reasons for the suffering. What philanthrocapitalism is aiming at are ideal victims (Christie, 1986) or, rather, ideal sufferers, whose story (and purpose) is one of suffering rather than repression or injustice.
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The ruling idea – or rather ideology – behind this is that businesses, through the profit motive, are organized rationally and pragmatically, unlike the political and private charity organizations ruled by ideological prejudice and vested interests. Corporate philanthropy is heavily dependent upon an impatient technical fix-approach to the world and a near-total dismissal of ‘traditional politics’ as a way to solve problems.
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Businesses, the argument goes, are tuned into getting a ‘return on their investment’. Only businesses are able to respond quickly, efficiently and responsively to philanthropic needs because that is what they do to all their customers. Here it is not only the profit and business model being universalized, but also the customer as the general human being. People in need are just like customers: Identify the need and satisfy it. This connects very precisely to the market value of appropriating social life and ethical demands, namely a way to get into the welfare market from which the state is currently retreating and for which it is actively seeking both market and civil society replacements. Shedding its pure market profile for a caring one is one way to approach the ‘market’ of welfare. It is what Gerard Hanlon and Peter Fleming very precisely call a ‘soft power form of extending corporate influence’ and it emerged to ‘fill the legitimation breech left in wake of a reconfigured state’ (Hanlon and Fleming, 2009: 939, 942; see also Hanlon, 2008). A simultaneous upsurge in ethical demands and abandonment of the state (receiving its first ideological name as Tony Blair’s Third Way) is both verbalized and responded to by corporations today.
Corporate philanthropy is then to be understood as a sub-category of Corporate Social Responsibility, meaning an active embrace of social responsibilities by companies. Ronen Shamir identifies an all-important element in this when he says that ‘corporations have assertively embarked on the Social Responsibility bandwagon, gradually shaping the very notion of Social Responsibility in ways amenable to corporate concerns’ (Shamir, 2004: 675-6). Like all the other examples given in this article, CSR is among other things also a way to answer the ethical demand in a way that doesn’t hinder but promotes capitalist processes. ‘The new formula’, Giorgio Armani said when launching his RED Emporio Armani product line at the summit at Davos, ‘is that this is charity to the world of course, but particularly it is the fact that commerce will no longer have a negative connotation’ (quoted in Richey and Ponte, 2011: 5).
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The market approach to philanthropy tells you to look at philanthropic needs as you would any other need on a market and at donaters as you would any other customer. As a member of Google’s charity fund Sheryl Sandberg said: ‘We look at the most efficient ways to solve the world’s problems’ (quoted in Lee, 2006). And that is increasingly presented as the way of the market. This is why philanthropy has to copy the methods and organizational designs of capitalism and private business in order to develop what an American center calls ‘effective philanthropy’. The center ‘provides foundations and other philanthropic funders with comparative data to enable higher performance’ (www.effectivephilanthropy.org). Another such center, the British Impetus Trust defines ‘venture philanthropy’ thus:
Venture philanthropy is an active approach to philanthropy, which involves giving skills as well as money. It uses the principles of venture capital, with the investee organisation receiving management support, specialist expertise and financial resources. The aim is for a social, rather than financial, return. (http://www.impetus.org.uk/about-venture-philanthropy/)
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Corporate philanthropy and philanthro-business are therefore symptoms of what many perceive or describe as a ‘state crisis’. The suggested solutions are a symptom or expression of the general marketization that most non-profit enterprises and activities experience at present where the devaluing of non-markets go hand in hand with a near-total confidence in the market, the innovative entrepreneur and the efficient leader as the new ‘social fixer’.
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Plutocharity is the most extreme version of the present confidence in the ‘over-competent individual’, the leader or manager. This individual has proven his or her worth on the market – the measure of all things – and this market competence is now considered a universal competence applicable across the full spectrum of the social, including philanthropy.
Plutocharity has received a lot of media attention, not least because it is often about flamboyant individuals giving very huge amounts of money and promising grand and quick results. But plutocharity is not first and foremost an expression of extreme charity but of absurd inequality. The significant fact to observe is the relation between new forms of charity and a massive and growing inequality. On a personal level it may be motivated by moral concerns but at a structural level it is a way to manage the legitimatory and possibly also social challenges of extreme inequality. Keeping the money exclusively for oneself is no longer an option. One cannot possibly explain to oneself and the rest of the world why one has so much when so many other people have so little. It needs a justification other than merit and that is philanthropy. It is not that one thinks one has not earned the money. But what Thorstein Veblen a hundred years ago called ‘conspicuous consumption’ must now be supplemented by conspicuous non-consumption in the form of charity in order for the consumption to be both legitimate and enjoyable.
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Philanthropy and celebrities were decisively united at the LiveAid-concert in 1985 when musician Bob Geldof brought together a string of artists for the biggest TV-event of its time. Charity was hereafter an ever more integrated part of celebrity status (Poniewozik, 2005). It often takes on a slightly comic or embarrassing form when celebrities wander about in places and problems they do not understand (but, honestly, do we know more? And does it not equally condemn us for watching not the catastrophe but the celebrity watching the catastrophe?). Or it can take on a more ominous form, as when the pop star Madonna brought home a child after a trip to Malawi in 2006. This is not the place to discuss or criticize celebrity contribution to the alleviation of the world’s problems. But what is of interest here is celebrity philanthropy as yet another symptom of how also the global attention-economy needs an explicated moral dimension in order to appear legitimate. It is becoming increasingly difficult to be just a celebrity enjoying the spotlight. The attention has to be redirected to something beyond oneself.
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Philanthrocapitalism is part of the present rediscovery of civil society, not as the place of public yet non-state and non-market interactions and deliberations, but rather as the site of efficient problem-solving. Civil society is functionalized and in that process also de-democratized. It is therefore inherently anti-political because politics is identified as part of the problem and because solutions are deliberatively phrased in un- or antipolitical terms. Even as billionaires like Warren Buffett lobby for higher taxes on the rich to fund state initiatives in education, health and other public services, the philanthrocapitalist idea is basically about marketization-through-moralization and depoliticization-through-counter-bureaucracy. ‘Politics have failed’ gets repeated endlessly. Markets and morality is all that is left. Luckily they are basically just two versions of the same effort to do good to people.
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This linkage between inequality and entrepreneurial capitalism as well as the opposition between politics on the one side and philanthropy and free market ideology on the other is exactly at the core of my argument above and is the dominant idea behind philanthrocapitalism, both as to why it is supposedly badly needed at present and how it will answer that need. The morally just and the capitalist benefit seem to converge in the call for more philanthropy.
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The main conclusion is that the various philanthrocapitalist practices investigated above are different expressions of the same adaptation to the demands of a capitalism where emotional, relational, cognitive and imaginative resources are not only mobilized but also valorized as the main productive force of economic practice. This new constellation we can call ‘cognitive capitalism’ (Boutang, 2011) or ‘immaterial capitalism’ (Gorz, 2010), the main point being that ‘personality and subjectivity’ (Lazzarato, 1996: 133), qualities of the self, are not only being capitalized. It is not only, and possibly not primarily, a move from inside the companies out, but it is rather the companies having to go beyond the internal profit logic, that is, to the realm of everybody’s daily life. The personal has not only become the political, as the 1970’s slogan put it. The personal has become everything. The emotional, relational and creative qualities of the self have become the guiding principles of private and collective organization.
Read full article in Ephemera Journal
Baierle & Co. 
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