Abstract
“During the 90s there was a big shift, from . . . giving people fish, to teaching people how to fish,” a staff member from one of Brazil’s leading philanthropy advisory organizations recounts in Sklair’s new ethnography of Brazilian elites’ philanthropy. “Now in the 2000s we’re learning how to reorganise the fishing production chain as a whole,” they go on to add (p. 125). As businesses are increasingly getting involved with poverty, they are pursuing the commodification, monetization, privatization, and fungibility of the assets (or the “public” ones they rely on) of the poor, the goods and services they produce and consume, etc.—all to generate ever more profits. Leading this growing marketization of the poor and their poverty is elites’ philanthropy—which is financing, engineering, and propagating ever newer forms of financial, technological, and institutional innovations (Brooks and Kumar, 2021). To the effect that one might argue that the sub-title of Sklair’s book could just as well have been the other way round: “Development at the service of wealth.”
But I quibble.
Building on growing critical analyses of philanthrocapitalism (McGoey, 2015 onwards), this book is a part of emergent studies of non-US philanthropic foundations which, as Sklair astutely points out in her short Introduction, have a distinct relationship both with developmentalism and with the national form. At a time when inequalities deepen and widen all around us, the book is part of a reinvigorated interest to “study up” in order to understand how elites appropriate and accumulate ever more resources, concentrate political power, and so control over different institutions in our societies (Khan, 2012). Focusing on family foundations, Sklair skillfully interrogates how privilege works, how elites impart meaning to their wealth and their place in society, in which philanthropy plays a crucial but under-researched role.
In this brilliant, short, and eminently readable book, Sklair skillfully tracks the changes in elites’ imaginaries of giving: from what it means to them, its role in making sense of the wealth (they have inherited in most cases), their place within their family and out with in society, and how it allows them to fashion particular forms of development, entrepreneurialism, and social mobility—all with a view to “incorporating” the poor into the local and global circuits of power. In chapter 5, for example, she outlines how particular forms of depoliticized development find favor with elites while sidestepping structural forces that cause and exacerbate poverty in the first place. The poor are expected to replicate hagiographic “bus journeys” that elites themselves once took decades ago (both literal and symbolic: away from idyllic hinterlands and factory floors dotting urban outskirts toward the centers of power and wealth, all while riven with modernity’s anxieties). Lest the poor complain about the time spent on buses or seek different but no-less risky work within the informal economy, their entrepreneurialism—according to the elites Sklair encounters—does not count. In short, elites’ philanthropy is as much about getting the poor “moving” out of poverty as it is about fashioning the right kind of the poor who deserve their charity in the first place.
Returning for a second time in 2018–2019, Skalir finds that financialization (both the wider economy and that of development) has only intensified the earlier elite impulse from the recent past. The collapsing boundaries between charity and business, together with the “assetization” of development and the attendant rise of rentier capitalism all work, as one of Sklair’s respondent notes, to transform “things to make them more palatable for the corporates to buy, easier for them to swallow” (p. 152, emphasis mine).
In addition to the foundations themselves that are pushing for this marketization and corporatization of development, a whole new range of emergent advisory and intermediary organizations—like those championed by the likes of Porter and Kramer, albeit on a national and not global scale—are contributing toward what can be called “upstream solutions” to poverty. Overall, such “solutions” work to move the spatializations of development further away from the poor and into the homes of the rich and the powerful. Despite the personal and professional anxieties of their philanthropoids, such intermediary organizations end up doing little, apart from their seemingly benign push to make philanthropy ever more “strategic,” to challenge elites’ self-perception and their understanding of the inequalities all around them, to which Sklair dedicates chapters 2 and 3.
Tracing Brazilian elites’ philanthropy from its colonial era origins, and within the wider historical context of dictatorship and democracy in the country and civil society’s responses to it from the twentieth century in chapter 1, Sklair moves onto the back-gardens and minds of the super-rich in the present day to probe the motivations and meanings for their charity. Working through their self-proclaimed “rejection of the trappings of wealth” (p. 60), their family’s moral values, and the responsibility of keeping their wealth for those that inherited it versus the autonomy that comes with those that “earned” it, etc., Sklair offers an interesting insight into the role of philanthropy in the making of elites’ identities. Building on which in chapter 3, she interrogates the role of philanthropy in making of corporate identities through hagiography and history to create usable pasts (Linde, 2009). Drawing on published secondary sources, Sklair makes an important point on the role of philanthropy in managing tensions between the factory workers and its owners even as demands for workers’ and work-place rights were frequently sidestepped and seen, unsurprisingly so, as unwelcome efforts that did little more than foment conflict. Nostalgic about times past when the workers depended on elites’ beneficence, the latter have now fallen to celebrating their past efforts as part of their businesses’ unique DNA. Tracking Brazilian elites’ philanthropy from the time of Lula’s poverty-reducing neoliberalism to that of the right-wing populist Bolsanaro, Sklair masterfully emplaces and evaluates individual expressions and meanings of elites’ giving against its wider political economic contexts, never failing to present a more structural (and necessary) analyses of elites’ and their intermediaries’ claims she collected during the course of her fieldwork, which warrants a comment of its own.
History has been particularly germinative in developing critical analyses of elites’ philanthropy, least of all for the access it enables to subjects otherwise given to secrecy and machinations behind closed doors despite extensive hagiographic media coverage. Sklair’s work is remarkable for the ethnographic peep it offers into the lives of the super-rich with their hubris that they possess the “solutions” we need as well as the money to finance them. She manages to hold her nose and patience long enough—which I must admit I was never quite able to and preferred the “distance” that the archives offered—to arrange access, interview, make notes, travel and in some cases work with elites for her rich analyses of Brazilian elites’ philanthropy.
And so, we must ask ourselves—as I was during a talk on philanthrocapitalism’s malaise—on the “transformative” potential of philanthropy and if it really has any potential to address poverty and inequality, meaningfully? Throughout her book, Sklair is attentive to the fragmented nature of civil society organizations in Brazil, where elites’ foundations (mostly operating foundations as against grant-making ones) work on selective causes and in quite restrictive ways that are not only not representative but also a relatively minor part of the wider constellation of such organizations. And so, while foundations have engaged in formalized entrepreneurialism, institutional and technological innovations, other civil society organizations have carried on with the challenging task of tackling racial and economic inequalities, workers’ rights, social housing, education and healthcare, and other human rights. Toward the end of her book, Sklair notices an emergent trend, albeit “timid” in her words, where elite foundations are engaging more in grant-making toward such civil society organizations. But even this, as one of Sklair’s respondents notes toward the end of the book, requires a change from the civil society organizations. The latter, they remark, “need to change their discourse too, it can’t just come from one side . . . but we do have the potential to work towards less conflict” (p. 157). In short, accessing the elites’ millions requires a change in the more confrontational, radical approach adopted by Brazil’s civil society organizations—a Gramscian “buy-in” of sorts.
