Charitable Capitalism

Slavoj Zizek rejects the beneficent-business ethos promoted by today's (ironically self-annointed) 'liberal communists' who promote the notion that capitalist profitability and private enterprise can support social responsibility and humanitarianism. It's foolish, Zizek argues, to believe that "the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity," because in this equation "charity is part of the game, a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation." The charitable mask simply provides the capitalists, liberal communists or otherwise, with a means of denying their "complicity in and responsibility for the miserable situation in the Third World."

We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every true progressive struggle today. All other enemies – religious fundamentalists, terrorists, corrupt and inefficient state bureaucracies – depend on contingent local circumstances. Precisely because they want to resolve all these secondary malfunctions of the global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong with the system. It may be necessary to enter into tactical alliances with liberal communists in order to fight racism, sexism and religious obscurantism, but it’s important to remember exactly what they are up to.

Etienne Balibar, in La Crainte des masses (1997), distinguishes the two opposite but complementary modes of excessive violence in today’s capitalism: the objective (structural) violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism (the automatic creation of excluded and dispensable individuals, from the homeless to the unemployed), and the subjective violence of newly emerging ethnic and/or religious (in short: racist) fundamentalisms. They may fight subjective violence, but liberal communists are the agents of the structural violence that creates the conditions for explosions of subjective violence. The same Soros who gives millions to fund education has ruined the lives of thousands thanks to his financial speculations and in doing so created the conditions for the rise of the intolerance he denounces.

Zizek is probably right about the lie underlying the logic of charitable capitalism (a term that, I think, is less confusing than the silly and misleading 'liberal communism' tag that the Davos gang adapted). It's more or less the same fantasy as 'compassionate conservatism' except that it takes more seriously the notion of corporate responsibility. Compassionate conservatives don't bother trying to reconcile corporate profitability with social responsibility; they simply propose (some sincerely, others cynically) that churches and other traditional charitable institultions, as opposed to the state, assume this role. However, I'm not certain what progressives - particularly those in the U.S., which lacks parliamentary representation and must work within the limits of a winner-takes-all two-party system, are supposed to do.