On Solidarity and Capitalism

CAPITALIST HUMANITARIANISM. By Lucia Hulsether. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2023. Pp. ix-248. Paper, $26.95. For many years, missionaries, social entrepreneurs, microfinance bankers, and venture capitalists have been reforming neoliberal capitalism by attaching ethical and humanitarian reasons, hopes, and ideals to capitalistic projects. Lucia Hulsether's theoretically rich and insightful book, Capitalist Humanitarianism, is a critique of this self-critique of capitalistic reforms that unfolds through a remarkable cultural history of these projects. The book draws on a range of materials, including fair trade archives of entrepreneurship programs, which were missionary responses to the US Cold War, and fieldwork in microfinance institutions in the United States and Guatemala. Integrating the work of “Left cultural studies” scholars such as Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams into discussions of religion and capitalism, Hulsether intervenes in ideas about the co-constitution of religion and economy with a groundbreaking theoretical contribution that she terms “interdisciplinary hermeneutics” (12). Echoing the work of feminist and critical race scholars on the connection between the economy and politics of human differentiation, especially in terms of the dispossession of racialized and gendered communities, Capitalist Humanitarianism also goes beyond other critiques of neoliberalism that detach the economy from the social. According to Hulsether, the core issue with neoliberalism is colonial racial capitalism, and capitalist humanitarianism is an “adaptation” of this system that needs to be dismantled (6). Because colonial racial capitalism disrupts relationalities by creating and perpetuating inequalities, my reflections will focus on how forms of sociality, especially solidarity, operate in these capitalist humanitarian projects. Capitalism reorients our relations not only with our labor but also with human and more-than-human beings in a broad cosmological sense. As Jodi Melamed notes, following Ruth Wilson Gilmore, racial capitalism “is a technology for reducing collective life to the relations that sustain neoliberal democratic capitalism” (Melamed 2015, 78). In this regard, capitalist humanitarian projects reorient relationships to serve capital through humanitarian reasons. One notable example of capitalist humanitarian projects' redirection of relations is connected to commodity relations. In that regard, Hulsether revisits Marx's concept of commodity fetishism, wherein the understanding of the commodity as a fetish involves the way “social life is displaced through relationships with inanimate objects” (58). So, from a Marxian perspective, collective liberation would require liberating from the commodity form through a working-class revolution. In capitalist humanitarian projects, as is particularly evident in fair trade archives, the commodity is revalued “as a reparative force” (59), and commodity relations are reenchanted (68). Hence, fair trade translates the occupier and occupied as the consumer and producer (43). A similar logic is observed in capitalist humanitarian projects' extension of these relations to the “biological family as a site of economic activity” (167–168). Beyond commodity relations, Hulsether critically examines various ways in which solidarity is promoted and practiced in capitalist humanitarian projects. For example, Hulsether discusses the way Central American solidarity activists repositioned liberation theology within microfinance institutions. These institutions established a usurious debt-based interdependence between money lenders and potential entrepreneurs, most of whom were living below the poverty line and were predominantly Indigenous women. Consequently, a solidarity movement became intertwined with solidarity banking, creating debt-based structures in the global south. On one hand, these microfinance institutions were initiated with the intention of expressing solidarity with the Central American agricultural workers. On the other hand, through solidarity lending, they caused these workers to become indebted to their lenders. As Hulsether points out, “care and solidarity are not mutually exclusive with colonialism” (45). Hulsether's remarks on solidarity resonate with Herbert Marcuse, suggesting that not all forms of solidarity and cooperation are liberating. However, it remains crucial to note that “solidarity” is a “precondition for liberation,” so solidarity needs to be practiced for collective liberation (Marcuse 1969, 13, 56–63). What should be emphasized, then, is not solidarity per se but rather liberatory solidarity that aims to eliminate all forms of exploitation and expropriation. Through these complicated approaches to solidarity, Hulsether encourages us to question the Durkheimian understanding of solidarity, especially because this Durkheimian paradigm has been utilized in scholarship on religion and capitalism. Hulsether reminds us that Durkheim was writing at the turn of the twentieth century and was concerned with collective instability primarily caused by the Industrial Revolution. For example, one of Durkheim's concerns was the rising suicide rate in Europe at the time. Even though Durkheim connected the suicide rate to the Industrial Revolution, his solution of building solidarity to strengthen social bonds avoided any direct confrontation with the Industrial Revolution. One example of Durkheim's solution, Hulsether points out, was the establishment of worker corporations to strengthen social relationships in the workplace, among workers and between workers and bosses, to ensure mutual understanding. Unlike unions, these worker corporations had the goal not of improving workers' material conditions but rather of preventing any social incohesion. According to Hulsether, this Durkheimian understanding of solidarity resonates with modern corporations, which refer to themselves as families and cultivate a sense of a unified attachment to the brand. Crucially, this Durkheimian understanding of solidarity finds echoes in capitalistic humanitarian contexts because the cultural and political projects of capitalist humanitarianism aim to create an odd form of solidarity between financiers of the global north and poor indigenous communities of the global south. Hulsether also revisits a contemporary turn to Durkheim in the field of the study of religion that observes affinities between corporate forms and religious forms. Instead of searching for these affinities, Hulsether approaches religion as part of the “historical-material process” in the tradition of Stuart Hall and critical cultural studies and is interested in developing a vocabulary around religion for “the critique of ideology” (8). I would add that this Durkheimian framework in scholarship on religion and capitalism has been used in conjunction with other frameworks, such as Foucauldian ones, to explain how corporations reorganize social relationships, much like religion, considering capitalism as a structure of domination. Beyond recognizing the pitfalls of a Durkheimian understanding of solidarity, we might broaden the dialogue on religion and capitalism beyond Euro-American theoretical frameworks by, for instance, exploring theories developed in Latin American contexts to critique capitalism, especially theories that have emerged from social movements. In addition to offering a riveting discussion about the theoretical conversations that guide our works on religion and capitalism, Hulsether's work sheds light on certain questions about ethnographers' relations with their interlocutors, especially for fieldwork conducted in capitalistic organizations. Hulsether's fieldwork at a microfinance institution in Central Guatemala that aimed to assess the poverty level of its members to confirm their eligibility for financial loans is one instance. The institution's goal was not only to save women of the south through capitalist intervention but also to collect data to promote their business. Hulsether shares a particular moment in which a 16-year-old girl was asked if she could be photographed for use in the promotional materials of the microfinance institution. Like Hulsether, I would have wanted to tell the girl to decline the request. And the girl, who was the breadwinner of her household, in fact chose to decline. I would have wanted to pursue the conversation with this girl further. Does conducting ethnography in capitalist settings limit our relations with our interlocutors? Hulsether encourages scholars to prioritize the critique of ideology because “the moment that critique settles on resolution is the moment of its arrest” (187). The reader might be tempted to interpret critique as the only task. However, Hulsether also writes, “When I say there is no way out, this is another way of saying: begin” (18). The call to “begin” gives the reader an opportunity for imagination and action in conjunction with critique. Hence, Capitalist Humanitarianism's brilliant, nuanced call to “begin” encourages me to imagine building relationalities through “abolition geography” (Gilmore 2022), “a grounded relationality” (Byrd et al. 2018), and more

Capitalism · Economic system · Economics · Political science · Solidarity · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Law · Political Economy and Marxism · Social Policy and Reform Studies

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