Hulsether, Lucia (2023) Capitalist Humanitarianism, Duke University Press (Durham and London), xvi + 248 pp. $99.95 hbk, $25.95 pbk.

In this new book, Hulstether critically examines how humanitarian development interventions – especially those performed by progressive members of faith communities – are shaped by and contribute to the wider dynamics of neocolonialism and neoliberalism. Lucia Hulsether is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the Skidmore College whose analyses are founded in critical race studies, queer studies and feminist studies. This powerful combination sharpens Hulsether's insights, exposing the intricacies of power structures under capitalism. Hulsether defines capitalist humanitarianism as a perspective that champions neoliberal strategies to address critiques of capitalist marginalization. She highlights how fair-trade corporations and various international organisations involved in projects for development in the Global South have mobilised feminist, decolonial and antiracist critiques in attempts to reshape ‘free trade’ to create a fair-trade market. The book is based on interviews with practitioners with humanitarian, fair-trade microfinance and responsible-investment organisations conducted at conferences, events and projects based in Guatemala (2015–2017) and throughout Latin America, as well as the United States. She analyses the dynamics between US-based organisations and their counterparts in the Global South, demonstrating how religious leftists inspired by liberation theology have abandoned their once-radical critique that advocated for ‘democratic socialism or a feminist anti-work politics’, in favour of ‘the installation of a more humane capitalism’ (p. 31, original emphasis). Thus, capitalist humanitarian projects posit the problem not as capitalism and its inherent dynamics of dispossession – which involve historical and current Global South exploitation and expropriation for the benefit of Global North beneficiaries – but focus narrowly on its most predatory practices. Such organisations argue that the solution to the problem is to advocate for the production of supposedly truly fair-trade commodities. Capitalist humanitarianism places the citizen-consumer at the centre of the analysis as the key agent of change. Once awakened, the citizen-consumer from the Global North can alleviate their guilt for being a relative beneficiary of the spoils of neoliberal ‘free’ trade and, at the same time, promote social justice by buying ethically sourced goods from the Global South (p. 30). The author emphasises the links between such strategies and US soft-power, which through its state agents and mass media portray ‘Western-dominated markets as a privileged domain where “free choice” and “democracy” [are] uniquely achievable’ (p. 31). Hulsether conceptualises the citizen-consumer idea using the lens of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism. She provides a lucid explanation of what exchange value is and how it turns relationships between people into relationships between objects (pp. 57–59). She thus points to the way that capitalist humanitarian projects focus on the commodity, which posits that commodities themselves are supposedly effective political weapons capable of repairing capitalist injustices. In this sense, ‘It is not the commodity's quality of third-party mediation that is the problem. It is that commodity has been mediating bad relationships’ (p. 59). In this reformist perspective, Marx's analysis of the commodity as an allegory of an abusive relationship vanishes, giving place to the commodity as a reparative force, enacting the idea that it is easier to imagine the end of the world as we know it than to picture the end of capitalism (p. 182). Capitalist humanitarian ventures are advertised as being guided by solidarity. These humanitarian reformist movements quickly understood the power of solidarity lending. Hulsether describes how finance capitalists capitalised on the opportunity opened by microlending schemes as a form of empowering Global South women and their families. Beginning in the early 1970s, microfinance institutions have since spread throughout Latin America helping to intensify debt-driven models of development (p. 88). Small loans have become a token through which multinational financiers taught Latin American women how to become entrepreneurs ‘worthy’ of loans. The author calls attention to the way that this analysis reinforces the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor (p. 117), emphasising that this debate about creditworthiness is not at all divorced from racist practices of allocating credit, for example, the targeting of racialised people for subprime loans (p. 120–121). In fact, as she demonstrates, the language of creditworthiness serves to reinforce the unequal power dynamics between microfinance institutions and borrowers (p. 139) rather than challenge them. 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. As the scope of the book is to analyse and understand capitalist humanitarian practices, a follow up work by Hulsether on how to deal with the commodity form, as well as capitalism as a value-inducing system, would be welcome.

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