Can Philanthropy be bad? If someone is donating money from their own pocket then how can it be bad. If Azim Premji is donating so much money from his own pocket then how can it be something which is not good for the society. We have seen in the past two decades a stark increase in philanthropic initiatives. From capitalists donating money in education, healthcare and whatnot. But let us ask some important questions, if philanthropy is good then why is inequality increasing? How are the rich becoming richer and the poor poorer? Is the money they are donating really from their own pocket? And is it bringing any structural change in society? Or is it stopping any structural change from happening?
The government consistently supports the corporates in various ways, including waiving their loans, providing them with resources meant for all citizens, and through various schemes. This support involves hard-earned taxpayers’ money, a part of it reinvested by them as ‘philanthropy’. Rather than waiving off loans for farmers and workers, the government has waived loans worth lakhs of crores for big corporations. The government continues to serve them by altering labour laws and not enforcing existing ones. Workers often work more than 8 hours without overtime pay, too few receive the minimum wage, and can be fired anytime because they are not made permanent. They work in the most terrible conditions possible for any human being.
The money philanthropists donate is accumulated through the exploitation of human and natural resources. For instance, Wipro fired more than 500 employees in February to improve its profit margin, while Narayan Murthy promotes working for 12 hours a day, claiming India’s productivity level is low, even as he makes his grandson the youngest millionaire before he turned one. Companies owned by Adani, Azim Premji, Ambani and others have tie-ups with Israeli companies, profiting off genocide. The money Azim Premji has donated for the mid-day meal program for the children of Karnataka comes from genocide and multiple other exploitations they engage in daily. Adani has single-handedly looted resources in Central India and other states, leading to thousands of deaths and the displacement of lakhs of people. The war drones he makes have been used on citizens in Chhattisgarh, Kashmir, and Palestine. After committing so many atrocities on multiple levels, it is easy to donate some money to create good optics for themselves. No matter how much money they donate, it will always be blood money, money that came from the exploitation of the masses. Some argue that if something good comes from this exploitation, it should be supported. However, these philanthropist organizations invest in social sectors like education and health, which are supposed to be run by the government. This shift allows the government to escape its responsibilities, suppressing the anger that was supposed to emerge from citizens and diluting it. As Marx said, “charity deflects the proletariat’s attention from the class oppression they were supposed to overthrow.” He argued that many things blind the working class, but “the greatest of these is charity.”
Digging deeper into these philanthropic initiatives reveals they are not doing good for anyone but themselves. For example, at Azim Premji University, fees have more than doubled in the last five years, while scholarships have decreased. Scholarship students are haunted by the fear that their scholarships will be taken away if they dissent against the authorities. The scholarship process is not transparent. These kinds of organizations aim to train students to be ‘neutral’ and then send them to vulnerable areas as development practitioners, preaching the same politics. The money Azim Premji has, comes from the exploitation of human and natural resources, and students should not feel that the foundation is doing any charity for them.
If these philanthropists really want to do good for society, they should turn their companies into co-operatives and redistribute all their private property. But this will not happen. Their philanthropic activities help in reducing public anger that can boil into a revolution. They will use all their power to stop it from happening. If donating a small fraction of their money and resources to tokenistic ‘social causes’ helps, so be it. As Engels said, “If I spend this much upon benevolent institutions, I thereby purchase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery. You shall despair as before, but you shall despair unseen; this I require, this I purchase with my subscription of twenty pounds for the infirmary.”
We shouldn’t be deceived by this. We must understand that these philanthropic initiatives do not bring any good to society. Rather, they stop or slow down progress. Substantial change can only happen through structural change when the current ruling class including these philanthropists is overthrown and a state of the working class is built.
