Last month, Jeff Bezos announced the creation of a 2 billion dollars fund to help homeless families and low-income communities. Amazon’s founder, who has become the world’s richest person in the world with a fortune estimated over $100bn, has thus joined the philanthropic billionaires club, where he has been preceded by Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. Meanwhile, the e-commerce giant’s workers’ conditions are among the worst and are regularly denounced: low wages, long shifts, constant pressures, some employees even talk about an “organized fear system”. If Jeff Bezos really wanted to act charitably, couldn’t he have directly enhanced his workers’ conditions, instead of founding a charity?
Capitalize the donations
The relations between philanthropy and democracy are regularly questioned, and tend to lead to this question: shall we depend upon the goodwill of a handful of rich plutocrats to govern public affairs?
The laudable intentions offered in mediatic speeches often contrast with the concrete actions undertaken by those who can allow themselves to redistribute a share of their wealth— which has often been gained in a non-laudable way. Earlier this year, Amazon won a struggle against Seattle, who wanted to implement a tax on big companies in order to finance social housing and help homeless people. Share your money, but chose how it’s going to be used — that’s the principle of philanthrocapitalism, a term coined by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green. What it consists in is leading caritative actions, but in an “ entrepreneurial disposition”, according to human geographers Iain Hay and Samantha Muller. CEOs bring in charity a demand for rentability, while (voluntarily?) diverting the attention from modern capitalism’s real problems. Furthermore, the more mediatic causes — breath cancer, for instance, in France — benefit from more donations, regardless of their real impact on society. This, in itself, is a problem: donations aren’t motivated by what is the most useful, but by what is the most mediatic.
While CEOs are more and more in the center of media attention, they also tend to embody their company, in the mind of the consumers. And here, we get into a tricky vicious circle. Jeff Bezos’s announcement has had a positive impact on Amazon’s market value — an announcement of the kind always has. Bezos’s salary is based on Amazon’s market value : as a consequence, his salary has augmented. Let us not forget, by the way, that in the United States, as in France, private donations are partly compensated by fiscal exonerations — public money, thus, being given back to the private capital of the billionaires. Finance professor David Yermack points out, in his article Deductio ad absurdum, that most of the CEOs donations happen just before the market value of their company decreases. Yermack argues (and proves) that these donations are fraudulently antidated, in the intent of maximizing the CEOs’ personal fiscal benefits. In France, the modifications of the income-based tax has, by the way, led to a 50% decrease in the donations linked to this tax.
Private interests, public concerns
Here’s maybe an explanation of Tocqueville’s “self-interest well understood”, according to which personal interest and altruism don’t exclude one another but, on the contrary, tend to reinforce each other. In a more concrete way, being invested in charity actions allows companies to invest social, and political, actions. Jeff Bezos, following Bill Gates, thus intends to shape preschools the way he sees it. In his tweet, he says he wants them to be based on “the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession. The child will be the customer”. This is rather frightening, right?
Furthermore, public services tend to depend more and more upon private donations: what would happen if Bill Gates stopped financing schools? By becoming more and more indispensable to public services, companies allow themselves full powers to negotiate with the local authorities advantageous dispositions. For sociologist Linsey McGoey, philanthrocapitalism involves “ an openness that deliberately collapses the distinction between public and private interests, in order to justify increasingly concentrated levels of private gain”. “Wealth redistribution is placed in the hands of the wealthy, and social responsibility in the hands of those who have exploited society for personal gain”.
The fact that billionaires capitalize on their charity illustrates, I think, one of French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s ideas: discovering that hostility and hospitality share the same etymology, he had suggested that any hospitality involves a share of hostility. If I received you in my house, you owe me something, and you are my inferior — my generosity only works as long as you manifest your indebtedness to me. As soon as there is a gift, there is a domination relation between he who offers, who dominates, and he who accepts, who is dominated. Derrida had coined there a concept that is, I think, particularly relevant to describe the attitude of interested philanthropic billionaires: hostipitality.
