Face-to-face fundraising and the dialectics of appearance

Face-to-face fundraising (F2F) emerged in the 1990s as an innovative mode of charity fundraising, whereby paid fundraisers – often employed through for-profit agencies – solicit members of the public to sign-up for monthly direct-debit payments. Despite its everyday visibility – and public critical reception – this instance of the ubiquitous intersection of humanitarianism and commodification, integral to contemporary capitalism, remains unexplored. This paper fills this gap but, in the process, draws some theoretical lessons germane to this literature and to materialist critique more generally. I argue that the peculiar dialectics of appearance operative in the political economy of F2F resists interpretation in terms of extant conceptual appreciations of other modalities of ‘commodified compassion’ and in materialist conceptual vocabularies in political economy scholarship more broadly. Far from ‘mere appearance’, F2F’s abstract form of ‘shared humanity’ is not simply an ethical veneer to be bypassed in unveiling the concrete (re)production of inequalities in humanity, as is the general tendency in materialist critique. Rather, this appearance is essential for its functioning and those concrete inequalities are written into this form, rather than existing behind/beyond it. This, I suggest, is captured effectively by a ‘dialectical materialist’ take on the Marxian theory of the commodity form.