How should Marxists think about charity?
Rachel Cohen, writing about volunteerism for Vox:
My coming of age in the 2010s coincided with critiques of individual action that were gaining prominence in media, politics, and academia…For real social progress, we’d need systematic policy shifts, comprehensive legislation, and political power… I’ve been thinking more about the cost of all this cynicism. Were the arguments against individual action even helpful?
Marxists, of course, have long been skeptical of things like volunteerism, charity, and consumer action — but when we talk about that skepticism, I think it useful to distinguish between two lines of criticism. Both begin with the point that individual action can never fully ameliorate the immiseration of capitalism, but from here their paths diverge.
Going down one path, we find what I’ll call the Žižekian critique; he didn’t invent it, but he lays it out quite clearly here. The gist of his argument is that charity does not merely fail to remedy capitalism; it actually prolongs it. As he puts it in the video,
The real aim [for socialists] is to try to reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible, [but] the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim.
This is the sort of cynicism Rachel seems to have in mind when she recalls the accusation that charity can be “harmful.”
However, I propose that we talk down a second path that’s even more cynical than Žižek — one which holds that it our choice to volunteer or do charity has no world-historical consequences either way.
Instead, I propose that what prevents us from reconstructing a poverty-free society is the ruling class. It is true that the rich take advantage of the charity of the working class to maintain social stability among the poor and ensure their viability as a labor reserve army, but they don’t have to. If workers cleverly decided tomorrow that they would stop doing charity in the hopes that the poor would rise up against the rich, the rich would just compensate for the shortfall by donating the difference themselves.
Do charity and volunteerism delude people into thinking that we can have a humane capitalism? Perhaps, though you could also argue it teaches people that the wage system doesn’t work and exposes them to capitalism’s most egregious victims — victims they might otherwise ignore. My guess is that the lessons of charity and volunteerism vary from person to person, but regardless this speculation seems irrelevant. If the rich need to teach people that we can have a humane capitalism with charity and workers try to disrupt that lesson by refusing to do charity, the rich can once again fill in the funding gap. If radicals stop volunteering the rich can just pay people to do that work instead. That’s the beauty of being one of the most fantastically wealthy ruling classes in history: you can just buy your way out of most political problems.
So the revolutionary potential of not engaging in altruism is probably negligible to nonexistent.
I have called Žižek’s analysis Marxist, but this is probably too generous. His video may be critical of capitalism, but there is precious little material analysis at work; instead, Žižek’s talk about “virtue” and “semantic loads” is pure idealism. This is not surprising; Žižek has always been a kind of post-Freudian first and foremost, someone who believes that various psychodynamic and sociocultural “forces” are the real engines of history. Marx, it seems, usually just comes in to give his analysis a transgressive edge.
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Still, the second path seems to leave Marxists in a bind. We know that charity can’t provide some final remedy to the suffering inflicted by capitalism, but now it turns out that refusing to engage in altruism won’t do much, either. Instead, it seems like we have little historical agency here at all, and are largely at the mercy of massive economic forces that are beyond our control. They will bring down capitalism eventually, we know — but it could be a very, very long time.
Until then, what obligations do we as Marxists have to the poor? This is not a political question so much as a moral question, but here’s how I think about it.
Growing up in the Mennonite faith, I was taught two seemingly contradictory lessons. The first was that God is in control of history, not man. This, John Howard Yoder writes, is directly at odds with liberal Christianity, where
Social ethical concern is moved by a deep desire to make things move in the right direction. Whether a given action is right or now seems to be inseparable from what effects it will cause. Thus part if not all of social concern has to do with looking for the right “handle” by which one can “get a hold on” the course of history and move it in the right direction.
Mennonites reject that activist view of history, which is why (for example) a certain tendency of Mennonites rejects fighting wars or even things like voting. Those are just futile attempts to wrest control of history away from God, and they come from a place of hubris and self-idolatry.
Which is all to say that Mennonites, like Marxists, are often deeply skeptical about the bounds of human agency. And yet anyone who knows anything about the Mennonites knows that they are also deeply committed to charity and volunteering. One need only visit the Mennonite Central Committee website to see just how far they take this; right now, for example, they are working around Israeli blockades to send relief into Gaza.
How do Mennonites reconcile their fatalism with their altruism? It’s simple: they believe you should help the suffering for its own sake. Not, that is, as part of some political agenda to end suffering once and for all — that is beyond our power — but simply out of interpersonal compassion. Helping the poor and afflicted is a way of expressing your love for them and God’s love for them, but even if they don’t recognize this you should do it anyway. In fact, you should even do it for people you might not want to help: thus Christ calls on us to “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”
Please do not read this as me saying that Marxists should all become Mennonites and volunteer for the sake of Christ. All I mean to suggest is that one can have perfectly coherent and admirable reasons to give to charity other than “eradicate poverty” or “hasten the revolution.” When I drive away from the bookstore and find the same homeless man asking for help at the first intersection, I usually try to give him something simply because I feel terrible for him. It’s really not any more complicated than that.