It’s Giving Season
Is Charity Really a Gift that Keeps on Giving?
by Sophie Echivarre, Renato Bolo III, & Bea De Guzman
Christmas is not the only time for giving in Filipino society; it is an everyday occurrence. Whether through the gestures of passengers helping children climb into a jeep or the small request of “Pahinging piso, kulang ako!” without the need for reimbursement between friends, a culture of charity flourishes among Filipinos. The traditional value of Bayanihan shows how our culture thrives on extending a hand to one another without the forethought of a reward for a good deed done. Indeed, it is a benevolent characteristic that has contributed to our international reputation as hospitable people.
However, through the machinations of the current-day sociopolitical sphere, malevolent actors may try to manipulate such a benevolent act for their own gain and benefit. Charity, as an act of Bayanihan, has been used by capitalist forces as a facade of goodwill and as a distraction to divert our attention from the real issues that haunt the common Filipino.
Capitalism: The C in Façade
In the guise of corporations, capitalism engages with communities as a fulfillment of its corporate social responsibility. Through environmental and social projects, companies enhance their public image and influence the public’s opinions on their practices and philanthropic contributions to society.
However, what seems good on the surface may just be a façade for more shady operations underneath. A company may advertise its fundraising campaigns and manipulate the public into participating as a form of charitable act. However, it is exactly in these situations that philanthropic harm may blossom: deliberate misappropriation of funds, hoarding donated goods to be sold for profit, and mishandling of capital, among many other injustices covertly committed day by day. Yet, on the outside, corporations deflect criticism because they do the bare minimum of their corporate social responsibility.
Still, they are contradictions themselves. The ‘charitable companies’ are the same ones that underpay their workers, engage in child labor, and promote inhumane working conditions. Their fulfillment of their corporate social responsibility manipulates the sentimentality and charity of the public. They make us complacent with their hidden practices through our acceptance of band-aid solutions, through which we are swayed by donation drives and small pro-worker policies that divert our attention from the fact that such changes only do little.
Capitalism uses our sentimentality to maintain the status quo and enforce the bare minimum when corporations have the resources to go beyond the maximum we can conceive.
For whose interests?
Altruism, or the idea of selfless concern for others, is usually the presumed motive for philanthropy, but a perspective from the tenets of rational choice theory — that people often weigh the costs and benefits of their decisions and opt for maximizing the advantages — must also be considered. When corporations make a show of giving donations, there is usually an expectation of a reward, whether it be a boost in sales, a wholesome standing in the public eye, or, more insidiously, government incentives.
The relationship between the state and corporations is a two-way street, forming a symbiosis of social exchange. Through corporate philanthropy, the government can create a façade of effectiveness — an image of mutual collaboration with wealthy executives in giving to their citizens, even if they are not really doing anything of great value. In turn, corporations can easily put their heads of state inside their pockets by offering financial backing. This occurs as long as the state is equally generous with incentives and lenient in establishing policies against their questionable business practices.
The problem with charity lies in it being a band-aid solution. What the masses need is systemic change. The lack of state support is what encourages reliance on companies that will say and do anything for a profit or ‘cause,’ as they might proclaim in their newest Christmas gift box program for the children!
Fighting the good fight
We have already seen how charitable organizations solicit contributions by playing on our personal feelings of sadness and pity for the less fortunate. The capitalist backers of charity manipulate these understandable sentiments in two very insidious ways. First, exaggerating the benefits of charity makes us complacent with band-aid solutions and leads us to believe that they are the best possible option. Second, relating these exaggerated benefits to deeply held values, like care for the poor which is taught by all religions or collectivism, a major aspect of Filipino culture, leads us to feel that participating in charity is the best way to show others that we are good people by societal standards. While it is good for ordinary people to derive joy from living out their principles, this becomes dangerous in the hands of politicians or owners of corporations who use charitable initiatives to airbrush their image.
This serves the interests of bureaucrat capitalism by preventing us from questioning the actual impact of charity. Meanwhile, as we become more critical of charity, we begin to recognize the contradictions within the capitalist system. Realizing the shortcomings of charity can lead one to despair. After all, if our own individual actions and our personal desire to give are still insufficient, then what will be enough? It is also terrifying to publicly criticize charity, because this action is seen as unreasonable and too radical, especially in the current political climate where militancy is framed as countercultural and even terroristic.
The first step in overcoming this fear and undoing our romanticized, sentimental view of corporate charity is recognizing the harsh truth that depending on individual acts will never be enough under the unforgiving grind of the capitalist system. So long as big business and the Marcos-Duterte regime have their boots on our necks, we can donate all our childhood toys to Jollibee Maaga ang Pasko and donate our entire salaries to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) backed by institutions like the neoliberal Asian Development Bank (ADB). However, jeepney drivers will remain in danger of losing their franchises and farmers will remain forced to throw away excess produce due to inhumane public policy.
Nevertheless, hope emerges once more when we realize that we are not meant to be alone as we fight those who keep this system in place. This is a fight we are meant to share with the masses who are just as fed up with greed and corruption, whether dressed up as corporate social responsibility or politicians’ charity initiatives.
Paying it Forward
No matter how much capitalists and traditional politicians push the narrative that one needs to work hard to be worthy of financial freedom and that poverty is self-created, they themselves are the biggest backers of charity and the largest contributors to charitable organizations. This can be partly explained as self-serving behavior: corporations can skirt financial obligations by making tax-deductible donations, and politicians can win votes by acting like allies of the marginalized.
However, this also shows that on some level, even the owners of big business and even politicians who oppose radical ideas realize that hard work is not enough to solve poverty and that the poor, whom they always refer to as lazy, do deserve some kind of aid. This is proof that selflessness is so deeply rooted in Filipino culture that even the most self-interested people in our society are aware of the value everyone places on it.
Instead of being content with the dominant narrative on charity and letting our desire to be selfless stop at mere sentimentality, our selflessness should motivate us to directly help the oppressed and join their fight, rather than remaining content with band-aid solutions that stroke egos and feed the ruling class’s messianic complex. We can encourage our friends who are employed in big companies to visit a PUV strike center and show solidarity with the jeepney drivers who bring them to and from their offices in Manila’s glittering central business districts, instead of letting them blindly believe in their employer’s corporate social responsibility initiatives. When our parents set aside money from the household budget to donate during the holidays, we can suggest that they allot some of it to contribute to a political prisoner’s bail, rather than giving all of it to a big charity.
We can contribute significantly to alleviating poverty in our communities by participating in mobilizations against anti-poor policies like the jeepney phaseout and rice tariffication law, supporting community pantries personally maintained by our neighbors, and engaging in basic mass integration in the countryside. These actions that allow us to directly engage with the marginalized, instead of feeling sorry for them as a faceless group, are far more impactful than the isolated act of going to Starbucks and buying their products that are supposedly meant to generate income for charitable causes.
Opposing charity in favor of more militant solutions doesn’t mean we should start shaming our parents for wanting to donate during the holidays or start burning down the offices of the Ayala Foundation. This looks like agitating for a society built by and for the masses: a society that is no longer built on competing for job opportunities or accepting exploitation by wealthy employers because we feel it’s the only way to succeed, but a society where state resources are invested in the wellbeing of every single Filipino. This entails gradually creating a society where we are caring and selfless all year round, not just at Christmas — a society where charity ceases to exist simply because it is no longer needed. The only way to create this society is to realize that what the oppressed need is not our pity, but our rage and our empathy.
