<p>Charities are essential to addressing the social problems of political economic crises. Key to this work are independence and a focus on public benefit as opposed to making profit for shareholders. This article tests these ideas, exploring the interrelation of charity, state, and mode of production. Marxism insists that processes such as charity and capital accumulation are internally related and driven by contradiction. Through a Marxist dialectical and historical materialist approach, the article considers how law and policy bind charity to private property. The aim is to discover whether and how the charity form reproduces the social relations that lead to crises, better to understand this form and its limitations. This involves looking at the extent to which charity depends on the state for funding, and the way the legal and policy framework is curated and administered in accordance with political economic need. The analysis reveals that the charity-state nexus is reciprocal. The article explores the role of charity law reforms in facilitating the state’s neoliberal reconfiguration. The argument is that problems in charity arise from its internal relation to capitalism and the state, with implications for the possibility of resolving crises.</p>