Looking again at Ron Rogowski’s book Commerce and Coalitions: How Trade Affected Domestic Political Alignment, it has occurred to me that his theory might explain something I have long known about but have never even attempted to explain.
This question is about why traditions of private charity are so geographically restricted. Despite the commendation of private charity in all or almost all traditional religious systems, large-scale traditions thereof are exceedingly restricted. They are extremely well developed in the United States, marginally developed in the United Kingdom, well developed in the wealthier Muslim nations (zakat is a Muslim pillar), but almost absent everywhere else in the world.
Throughout my life, I have romanticised private charity, despite the fact that, as groups like Resistance [now part of Socialist Alliance] demonstrated to me a quarter of a century ago, its primary purpose has always been to prevent either:
- rebellion by the oppressed and/or
- money getting into the control of the immense majority, as this quote from Socialist Worker demonstrates:
“Every dollar in Mark Zuckerberg's private charity is a dollar wrested from public coffers and from democratic control, writes Jason Farbman, in an article published [originally ]at Jacobin.”
I have always felt, without any sense of logic, that a society based on private charity would be softer, friendlier, more hospitable, and less selfish than one based upon taxation, despite the refutation of this argument by countless socialist groups over almost two centuries. Even among non-Marxists, Emory Paul alongside Jordan Weissman and Mike Konczal demonstrate private charity has never been able to eliminate poverty, whilst Kathleen Wellman in her recent Hijacking History: How the Christian Right Teaches History and Why It Matters notes on page 286 that:
“private charity never provided an adequate social safety net before the Social Security Act of 1935 [Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), page 460]”
In fact, I will plainly confess that my romanticism noted above comes from the idea that private charity might provide a completely adequate social safety net — implicitly viewed possible by such books as the
Politically Incorrect Guides.
If we follow from what socialist groups say, and from Rogowski, the geographically restricted nature of private charity becomes no surprise. Although the very rich will always prefer private charity to taxation, and most likely prefer private charity to paying rents to government, private charity still costs them a lot of money. Thus, something must be gained by the extremely rich from large-scale private charity before they will offer it. Under most economic conditions, very low wages for labour will cost the wealthy less than large-scale private charities — after all, the rich must exploit workers to become rich. The exception will occur when the profits from using labour are limited by scarcity and the rich can gain much more from owning and profiting from capital and/or land. This will occur when goods that use labour significantly can be more economically imported than produced locally, and low-skill labour becomes restricted to a limited range of nontradable industries. Under these conditions — export of capital- and land-intensive goods and import of all even modestly labour-intensive ones — the ruling class can gain politically by demoting to private charity. Charity here:
- prevents local labour from politically organising in the absence of employment opportunities
- prevents the governments of labour-abundant societies from becoming independent of capital- and land-abundant ones
- serves to allow the local ruling class(es) to justify its views via philosophy
- e.g. right-wing think tanks in the US and jihadist groups funded by Saudi, Qatari and Emirati charity
- allows the ruling class to discriminate in whom it gives its donations to, so as to divide the lower classes by race and ethnicity and eliminate the possibility of a unified nonelite
Where labour is abundant, contrariwise, the ruling class will always profit most from employing it, while much less potential profits exist from labour-
efficient production. Such a ruling class has neither the ability nor the incentive to encourage charity: it requires abundant labour to engage in the colonialism found when both capital and land lose from free trade and restrained foreign policies. Thus,
enduring abundance of labour in Europe and monsoonal Asia is enough of itself to explain the absence of large-scale private charity in these societies — exactly as
with anarcho-capitalism. In fact, large-scale private charity appears to require
extreme scarcity of labour.
Commerce and Coalitions notes in its discussion of the long sixteenth century that in 1750 Latin America was ten times less sparsely populated than North America. This suggests that, although Latin America imported labour-intensive goods, there was not the same incentive to economise on labour and for owners of land — whose ownership was much more concentrated than among whites in North America — to engage in private philanthropy amongst the lower classes.
Another factor unrelated to Rogowski’s book that may explain the absence of traditions of private charity in Oceania and Latin America is that immigration was much more tightly controlled by colonial governments than in the United States. Thus, persecuted religious groups, who are important in the evolution of private charity, had less opportunity — and in the case of ancient Australia, ability — to escape persecution in these regions. This cannot be a full answer given that Canada, which had the same sort of settlement by such groups as the United States, did not develop the same traditions of private charity. Even so, it is a very reasonable hypothesis that significant private charity will invariably be confined to societies that are, or historically were, exceeding land-abundant and labour-scarce.
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