On Saving the World
Good intentions are important but not enough. It has to be structural change and nothing less.
Doing good is often equated with ‘doing development’ and improving the lives of ‘others’. It seems now anyone who is either white or wealthy (or both) can do it. The development worker archetype has expanded; now everyone does good to save the other – the banker through Corporate Social Responsibility, the corporate ‘thought leader’, the super rich and famous through philanthropy and self-promoting rock star roles on boards and UN special panels, the marketer through telling stories of success over hardship everywhere, even the ordinary white middle class shopper through buying fair trade and sponsoring a child.
Here, capitalism, individualism and consumption are the tools of emancipation.
This is all laudable intent. It is important that people try to act towards the good.
Yet, there is much to say about how good intentions can fertilise the growth of the very ills that need to stop. There are some inconvenient truths about making change. The development worker in all its manifestations needs to come to terms with the complexity and complicacy of our lives.
I have learned that development and doing good, despite great intentions, has consequences, and that these actions don’t always lead to good outcomes. Especially for the those with the most to lose.
I know that raising these points is much less sexy than joining over-paid musicians, elite world leaders and capitalist ‘thought leaders’ on the Great Lawn in Manhattan to Make Poverty History. These movements draw thousands of New York residents to congregate and listen to some of the flashiest entertainers in the Global North. All in the name of Making Poverty History. Don’t get me wrong, I am in awe at how well the organisers are able to mobilise support and money alike. But what really comes from these Global North celebrity movements? No matter how alluring promises of global solidarity are – as soon as Monday comes around, these elites go back to their offices and mansions to continue to reproduce a system that breeds inequality and injustice. We must look beyond their shaky promises that they will achieve the Millennium Development Goals – which actually failed in 2015, and have now been replaced with the Sustainable Development Goals[i].
We must aim for much more.
And just who are these poor others? They are the 1.4 billion who weren’t able to attend the Great Lawn Festival, people who don’t generally even get asked what they think about the trajectory of their lives, what they value and aspire towards. The rich always know better. The so called ‘global’ make poverty history movement tends to be focused on the noise coming from only one part of the globe – the late capitalist economies of the US, the UK and Australia.
But all three countries are part of a political economy underpinned by power and hegemony locked into an unjust and failing economic system. While this system exists, there will always be poverty, human suffering and inequality. Worse still, we are all complicit in it and unfortunately just buying fair trade, signing a few petitions and dancing to Bono on a Saturday evening in Central Park, whilst this glitz and glamour feels good, is never going to be enough. In fact, the very glitz and glamour of the lucrative celebrity industry surrounded by corporate sponsorship is tied to keeping the fight against poverty in business.
This cosmopolitism that the Make Poverty History campaign tries to ignite through terms like ‘global citizen’ and ‘global village’ seem only to empower those already privileged. It keeps the status quo in place; a few things may change around the edges, but that is all. A line in the Communist Manifesto is important here, as if Marx and Engels saw this coming:
“The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country[ii].”
Even the elites see this. Son and heir to billionaire Warren Buffett and his fortune, Peter Buffett wrote an opinion piece that featured in the New York Times in July 2013. In his piece, Buffet reflected on why the goodwill of charity isn’t enough. He said,
“As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to ‘give back.’ It’s what I would call ‘conscience laundering’ – feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity. … But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place. The rich sleep better at night, while others get just enough to keep the pot from boiling over. Nearly every time someone feels better by doing good, on the other side of the world (or street), someone else is further locked into a system that will not allow the true flourishing of his or her nature or the opportunity to live a joyful and fulfilled life[iii].”
He has a point.
Volunteering, doing charity, ethical consumerism and giving donations are also about making something happen out there for the ‘good’, and away from disrupting the day-to-day motions of the do-gooder. Helping does not take away from our experience of comfort and routine in the day-to-day. This do-gooding through charity, ethical consumerism, donations or volunteering is contained and controlled because the proximity of the issue is out of sight. Donate the money and move on. Volunteer between 6–9pm and then go back to the rest of your life.
Also attractive is how the work of charity is generally solutions focused and sold through neat marketing to make us feel there is an end or solution in which the donor or volunteer are in control (whilst at the same time, making change)[iv]. The solution is always discrete – $50 donation can save a life. So said person gives $50 and saves a life. Done. Easy. Let’s get on with the next series of Married at First Sight!
Yet, something is different when the ‘issue’ cannot be controlled in a discrete manner. When people feel that the solution takes too much away from them, leaving said people with feelings of the situation being ‘out of control’.
This is the case with the narrative carefully constructed about refugees that arrive on the shores of Australia. The media and right-wing politicians have played on this fear of the uncontrollable nature of migration. They paint the picture that Australia will be swamped – this was exactly the word used by Pauline Hanson and inferred by her counterparts[v]. Then immigration minister Scott Morrison and current immigration minister Peter Dutton’s use of illegal immigration and past Prime Minister John Howard’s declaration for government to choose who can come to Australia are all examples of how immigration on boats means the other has gone too far and the situation is out of control[vi].
This feeling of being ‘out of control’ gives people the feeling of being in extraordinary times. Under siege, as Ghassan Hage puts it[vii]. That being out of control means that ordinary measures of humane dealings with all people suffering go out of the window. Living in a state of exception, as Giorgio Agamben calls it[viii]. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, such as indefinitely locking up, torturing, starving or denying satisfactory healthcare to people seeking help through the International Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Despite the utter cruelty that means people will kill themselves in order to escape this regime. The good people of Australia feel like the emergency has been contained and everything is back under their control. We can continue to donate and to volunteer and feel good about ourselves.
We do charity, yet close the borders.
We need to get used to the messiness of things that matter. Echoing we need to stay with the trouble[ix].
Charity and volunteering have long been mechanisms of the net beneficiaries of global capitalism to do good in the world and feel good about it. People continue to do these in such horrid times, yet it does very little to contend with the challenges of our time. It is effectively the cornmeal fed to the child in the closet.
So, where does this leave us?
Definitely not to discard ethical consumerism, volunteering, donating money and all of that. That would be too simple. But we must go much further. One possibility is: why don’t we focus on reconfiguring the underlying global systems of oppression and inequality? We need to face up to the fact that our global economy needs to change. It needs to change for the sake of those living hand to mouth; it also needs to change for our very survival, as the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports on Climate Change continue to show.
It is all connected.
So, whilst the energy behind doing good is a good thing, we have to be bolder in our demands. It has to be structural change and nothing less.
Originally written 2019-2020
[i] Anna Childs, "How the Millennium Development Goals Failed the World’s Poorest Children," The Conversation, no. https://theconversation.com/how-the-millennium-development-goals-failed-the-worlds-poorest-children-44044 (2015).
[ii] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin, 1848).
[iii] Peter Buffett, "The Charitable-Industrial Complex," The New York Times, 20130726 2013.
[iv] Mathew Snow, "Against Charity," Jacobin2015.
[v] AAP, "Hanson Says She Will Work with Abbott," The Advertiser https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/national/hanson-says-she-will-work-with-abbott/news-story/4ed7ea73a6ef6ff134789823e26c57b9, no. June 4, 2013 (2013).
[vi] Weston Phippen, "Australia’s Controversial Migration Policy," The Atlantic April 29,2016, no. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/04/australia-immigration/480189/ (2016).
[vii] Ghassan Hage, "État De Siège: A Dying Domesticating Colonialism?," Americal ethnologist 43, no. 1 (2016).
[viii] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
[ix] Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.