The struggle against neoliberal order has gained momentum over the last five decades---to the point that economic elites have not only adapted to the Left's critiques but incorporated them for capitalist expansion. Venture funds expose their ties to slavery and pledge to invest in racial equity. Banks pitch microloans as a path to indigenous self-determination. Fair-trade brands narrate consumption as an act of feminist solidarity with women artisans in the global South. In Capitalist Humanitarianism Lucia Hulsether examines these projects and the contexts of their emergence. Blending historical and ethnographic styles, and traversing intimate and global scales, Hulsether tracks how neoliberal self-critique creates new institutional hegemonies that, in turn, reproduce racial and neocolonial dispossession. From the archives of Christian fair traders to luxury social entrepreneurship conferences, from US finance offices to Guatemalan towns flooded with their loan products, from service economy desperation to the internal contradictions of social movements, Hulsether argues that capitalist humanitarian projects are fueled as much by a profit motive as by a hope that racial capitalism can redeem the losses that accumulate in its wake.
Lucia Hulsether is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College.
Preface ix Introduction: Capitalist Humanitarianism 1 Interlude One 19 1. May Analyze like a Capitalist: Fair Trade and Other Histories 25 Interlude Two 49 2. Ethical Vampires: Conscious Capitalism and Its Commodity Enchantments 53 Interlude Three 75 3. Marxists in the Microbank: From Solidarity Movement to Solidarity Lending 80 Interlude Four 102 4. Representing Inclusion: Humans of Capitalist Humanitarianism 106 Interlude Five 128 5. The Hunt for Yes: Archival Management and Manufactured Consent 134 Interlude Six 156 6. Hope for the Future: Reproductive Labor in the Neoliberal Multicultural Family 162 Epilogue 183 Acknowledgments 191 Notes 195 Bibliography 221 Index 239
"Hulsether combines reportage, ethnographic research, personal narrative, and social theory to look at the ways in which the 21st-century global economic system has absorbed the very movements that seek to resist it. . . . [A] stance of constant resistance to an unjust system, even in the seeming absence of alternatives, is what Hulsether-who is a union activist as well as a teacher and scholar-calls us to take on. . . . Hulsether's book models this approach beautifully, urging us to "write a history of the impossible" in which 'survival is not the end.'" - Jeannine Marie Pitas (Christian Century) "Shifting between ethnography and history, between global systems and their material impact, [Capitalist Humanitarianism] shows how easily leftist critiques are coopted to allow well-meaning elites to feel good about themselves even as they facilitate the economic exploitation that lies at the heart of our global order." - Tisa Wenger (Reviews in American History) "Capitalist Humanitarianism is a fundamental book to understand how capitalism weaponises leftist critiques, especially in its neoliberal phase. Critiques are mobilised as new business opportunities rather than breaking with the system. As expected, these new strategies do not result in ending oppression or exploitation, but simply in reshaping capitalist discourses around its practices." - Carolina Flores Gusmao (Bulletin of Latin American Research)
