capitalist humanitarianism
The struggle against neoliberal order has gained momentum over the last five decades, to the point that economic elites have not only adapted to Left 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.
Capitalist Humanitarianism (Duke University Press, 2023) examines these projects and the contexts of their emergence. Blending historical and ethnographic styles, and traversing intimate and global scales, it tracks how neoliberal self-critique creates new institutional hegemonies that, in turn, reproduce racial and neocolonial dispossession. From 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, this book argues that capitalist humanitarian projects are fueled as much by profit motive as by a hope that racial capitalism can redeem the losses that accumulate in its wake.
Winner, 2024 Cultural Studies Association Award for Best First Book
praise for capitalist humanitarianism
“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, author of Or/And: Poems
“I am grateful to Lucia Hulsether for writing the book that pounds the nail in the coffin of corporate humanitarianism. It is essential reading for everyone who refuses to be swayed by the happy talk of ‘fair trade,’ ‘conscious capitalism,’ and ‘ethical investing.’ In brilliant case studies, Hulsether shows how time after time corporate humanitarianism translates critiques of capitalist violence into neoliberalism’s raison d’être. Wry, witty, and heartbreaking, Capitalist Humanitarianism does not flinch from exposing the killing that is the disavowed cost of delusional presentations of ‘good’ capitalism.”
Jodi Melamed, author of Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism
“Capitalist humanitarianism, as a framing concept, encompasses a range of socially responsible ethical, humanitarian systems of using surplus value, forms of property, expropriation, and wage labor leveraged through fair trade companies, microfinance, corporate responsibility offices, social entrepreneurship, buy-one-to-give-one consumption schemes, etc. to consciously mitigate the effects of oppression, exploitation, and forms of colonialism. The contingencies associated with each of these terms interact and give rise to foundations and practices that–whether in trade, finance, entrepreneurship, or corporate practices–all conform to an ethic and logic expressed through the concept of capitalist humanitarianism which, across the course Hulsether’s ethnographic work and historical inquiry, becomes a concrete category. However, one element becomes less contingent than others and that is the role of progressive Protestant traditions. Hulsether’s direct personal experiences in the Calvinist tradition, her radical doubt and intensive self-criticism as she negotiates the power of and limits to critique and her position while conducting participant observation, and, last, a personal tragedy which is revealed in dialogue and reflection in the preface to the book are woven together into a complex and novel work of scholarship. Many participants on the Award Review Board were edified not only by not the direct and indirect engagement with several cultural studies threads, both theoretical and methodological, but, moreover, that these did not escape the author?s persistent critical gaze focusing inquiry into lingering assumptions about theory and narratology both in and beyond cultural studies.”
2024 First Book Award Committee of the Cultural Studies Association
“In an utterly original and individual voice, Lucia Hulsether returns ‘progressive’ Christianity to its rightful place as a handmaiden of the cruel optimisms binding us to irremediable structures. Writing against the simplistic narrative that sees right-wing evangelicalism and neoliberalism locked in a marriage of convenience, Hulsether shows instead how a wistfully leftist ‘capitalist humanitarianism’ generates powerful dreams of reconciliation amid the ruins of neoliberalism. Despite the relentless demand for hope and for redemption from our inevitable complicity, morning does not come; we are not saved. And yet, Hulsether argues, we must learn to use existence ethically.”
Bethany Moreton, author of To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise
“Intimate and searing … 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, author of Religious Freedom: The Contested History of An American Ideal, Reviews in American History
