On December 1, 2015, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, Facebook owners, announced a great gift to everyone: 99 percent of Facebook's shares, exactly the value of 45 billion dollars, to promote human progress.

A very rich, philanthropic marriage celebrated with a gesture of generosity the birth of her son Max. In the letter, disseminated by Facebook, Zuckerberg's parents explained to the child the two main objectives of the donation. On the one hand, to improve human life to the last limits, promoting projects focused on medicine, economic opportunities and the ability to access information. On the other hand, improve poverty and empower marginalized groups.

The Zuckerberg, or people like Bill and Melinda Gates, who own another prestigious foundation, form what's called philanthrocapitalism. The concept was coined in 2008 by Matthew Bishop of Weekly The Economist. Beginning to analyze the charity of the age of globalization, but as the English sociologist Linsey McGoey has put in the title of his book, “There is no free gift: The Gates Foundation and the price of philanthropy.”

Interviewed in the advanced space In These Times, McGoey has made it clear that this charity, which awakens so much admiration for today, is nothing new. The great classical foundations known today in the world, Carnegie, Rockefeller, were organized by the large industrialists of the same name with a structure similar to that of their corporations. The results-based philanthropic strategy, so famous for Gates' foundations, Warren Buffett, George Soros, etc., is modern but known since the early 20th century.

It is true, however, that the head of Facebook has taken a new step. If a classical foundation such as that of the Gates subsidizes a commercial enterprise in exchange for tax relief for the State, it has legal conditions to ensure that that money has been earmarked for charity rather than for private profits.

On the contrary, Zuckerberg has not created any foundation, but has transferred almost all of its shares to a limited liability corporation (LLC Limited Liability Corporation) that allows it not to make public who has used the funds of the alleged charity. Despite public disclosure of goals, use money without anyone's control. Regardless of the donations it can make to any commercial enterprise, citizens will be able to believe that the plutocrat has given its treasure to humanity.

“Behold, McGoey says, the birth of a new philanthropy: the rich make gifts directly to the rich, something I have never seen before. The concept of ‘corporate philanthropy’ is radically changing. It was previously stated that corporations granted part of their profits to non-profit entities. It is now very different: the philanthropy of corporations makes the alleged charity subsidising commercial companies who claim that subsidies are needed.”

Rich without borders

Another global justice expert, Cynthia Peters, wrote in the journal The Change Agent: “Corporate Charity Is Corporate Power”. He has advanced the reasons why he believes that this charity "strengthens" the power of the multinationals. A corporation relieves taxes, even relieving those who hire them: Zuckerberg, one of the 10 richest in the world, will barely pay taxes when passing the shares to the new LLC, or companies doing work.

On the other hand, the oligarchy is strengthened. So far, citizens could decide something about how to spend tax money, putting pressure on politicians through mobilizations. It is now up to people like Zuckerberg to decide what to spend wealth on.

Philanthropists weaken democracy. Improving the lives of the most vulnerable people goes from being in the service of the State to relying on the “generosity” of the oligarchs: that is financing a new service from a hospital, a gift to a school... among all the diseases of the poor what is premium is malaria or what is other, not by public debate, the chief decides.

After all, these philanthropic strategies for Peters are the gigantic public relations operations to brighten capitalism. “Because we have extreme inequality, we also have extreme philanthropy.”

Data recently released by the NGO Intermon-Oxfam show that the lack of extreme equality is not an exaggeration. The 62 richest people in the world have more property than the 3,600,000,000 of the poor. Even more serious is to see that the situation is going to get worse: to complete a good like half of the mundane in 2010 was needed 388 rich, in 2011 was needed 177... 80 in 2014 and 62 in 2015.

How do we citizens allow philanthroquapitalism? Sociologist Linsey McGoey makes some explanations. In the last decades of neoliberalism it has become an undisputed truth that it is said that private enterprise is more efficient than public enterprise and that its gaps have finally to be filled. Hiding the true truth: That Bill Gates and the rest of the oligarchs have been enriched fundamentally with state aid, thanks to patents, public contracts, privatizations, etc. By complicity with politicians and businessmen who get fat on their doorstep, profits have been brought by corporations, leaving all losses to the states.

With globalisation, moreover, the bloodiest damage of savage capitalism has shifted to remote countries, demobilizing people from rich countries. It wasn't like that in the 19th century, the 20th century. “When Andrew Carnegie, king of the steel, says McGoey, for the first time spoke to other rich people about the need to use some of his treasures to help the poor, the workers complained about the harsh working conditions of Carnegie’s bars in strikes and fights. These workers were part of the citizenry.”

These so-called rich chariters were also supporters of the citizens, as well as loyal propagandists, but scepticism had spread with respect to their deepest intentions. At that time there were great writers, like Oscar Wilde or Charles Dickens, who, as in the essay, satirized and denounced in fiction the philanthropy of that time, because they didn't blur inequality but they increased it. “In today’s most read literature, you will hardly find such a thing.”