Tehila Sasson’s “argument is, roughly, that international aid organisations – influenced by a long tradition of voluntary service, a desire to find a role after empire and a dislike of the supposed soullessness and impersonality of postwar state-led development and planning – devised programmes and campaigns that relied on and promoted entrepreneurialism, consumerism, individualism and anti-statism. Non-profits weren’t simply too weak to defend against those forces of financialisation, marketisation and privatisation that we lump together under the term ‘neoliberalism’, but embraced them. This is the sense in which they were part of the ‘making’ of neoliberalism after empire, with damaging results. As Sasson puts it most strongly in her conclusion, the non-profit sector ‘helped cement post-imperial inequalities and new divisions of labour between Third World producers and British consumers. In a period marked by deindustrialisation and a crisis of unemployment, the solidarity economy not only mirrored the landscape of global labour relations but also contributed to it’.
“Voluntarism rather than regulation also underwrote the drive in the 1980s to introduce codes of corporate practice – campaigns that, Sasson argues, ‘devised a business ethics that meant to further corporate power rather than limit it’
“The kind of ‘development’ that non-profits and global financial bodies could agree on conformed both to [E.F.] Schumacher’s ‘small is beautiful’ ideals and to the imperative to train people in the kind of ‘market thinking’ necessary in a neoliberal world.”
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