From Each According to Her Abilities ...

 The Voluntariat

A new term for you.  One thing leftists know is donating time and energy to projects, for years on end, without pay.  It is part of cadre status. As the Jefferson Airplane said, “Volunteers of America!”  Most left groups only have a few paid staffers, so this is the way things get done.  Unions also have members who contribute outside their pay and position structure.  But what about the general economy?  What is the worth of this ‘Stakhanovite’ unpaid labor in a capitalist context?  It is massive.

Clearing trails...

As we in Minnesota grapple with an 8 day snowfall, a certain fact stands out.  That neighbor with a snow blower who just did a whole block worth of snow clearing?  Those people who help you push your car out of the snow?  The one that lends you some sand for icy spots?  The neighbor that helped the old lady shovel?  The friend that checks the heat in your house?  All outside the commodity system.

FREE LABOR

These are all part of the voluntariat.  I see volunteers as going beyond this, greasing the wheels of many institutions – activist organizations, non-profits, interest groups, museums, hospitals, music venues, some stores, charities, tribes, churches and what have you.  Volunteers guide tours, do internet work, answer phones, prepare envelopes for mailing, feed people, build homes, clean up river banks and roads, work on organic farms, repair broken items, care for animals, plant trees, teach various skills or subjects, mentor children, knock on doors, distribute emergency goods, work in nursing homes, provide free legal and medical services, help at sporting events, staff clubs and non-profits, shovel snow, mow lawns, deliver food, write and perform, work for the mainstream political parties, do health checks, clear trails – and intern at a capitalist corporation, though now that is required to be paid. Like crime, volunteer labor is not included in the ‘GDP’ or standard labor statistics or any external costs.

Families, of course, are a center for free labor and so are friends and neighbors. These 3 groups do many things for each other in uncounted ways outside the home … similar to the unpaid social reproduction occurring inside the home.  But volunteerism extends beyond personal connections to the overall economy. 

Just the value of seniors donating time and energy is said to be worth $77B in ‘pro bono economics.’  The projected value of all volunteers is $130B.  The value of a donated hour is now estimated to be $29.95 – far higher than I would think.  I’m not sure of the methodology here, but I suspect it is a vast undercount. It is not just retirees who volunteer, -though they are supposed to be useless to the economy and society after they quit work.  Working people donate some of their time, even though they are already over-worked.  The unemployed and people on disability also contribute free labor.  The amount done by family members, friends and neighbors for each other is uncountable.

That neighbor that just did your walk...

VALUE

Here are quotes that relate to the issue of the economic basis and value of a certain kind of free labor.

According to J.M. Roberts:

”Hardt and Negri argue that exploitation is now located in numerous ‘non-factory’ spheres of social life; for example, in social media websites.  To make this claim, however, Roberts says that they “conflate the exploitation of productive labour, based in the extraction of surplus value, with the oppression of unproductive labour, based in the extraction of surplus labour. Making this conflation enables some critical theorists to then argue that so-called ‘free labour’ of social media users acts as a type of ‘productive labour’ for capital.” 

According to Michael Roberts, who disagrees:  

“…this so-called ‘free labour’ is not usually productive, nor does it, in most cases, create surplus value.” 

Advertising is part of the selling of commodities and advertising and sales are at the heart of social media, so I’m not sure the M Roberts is quite right as to their lack of value.  Certainly surplus value is still centered in commodity production, not social media websites, web surfers or volunteerism. Yet social media contributes to the advertising sales effort and the collection of data, so not directly to surplus value, but indirectly.  Social reproduction plays a similar role in the home maintaining the working class, as does the voluntariat in the community at large, which serves the capitalist system in an indirect way, but also goes beyond it.  Capital could  not function without volunteerism or home reproduction.

Volunteerism is not about the Protestant work ethic, as bourgeois Weberian sociology might claim.  It is that humans and workers see beyond the wage relation, even while they are trapped in it or after they leave it.  It points to the communist idea of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" as Marx wrote in the Critique of the Gotha Programme.

Yeah, but don’t tell those churchy types.  They may get irritated.  And unfortunately religious and spiritual cults institute almost slave labor conditions for their members too.  Profit and monied non-profit entities also exploit free volunteer labor - like in profit-based hospitals.  This might take work away from paid employees.  So carefully understand what kind of ‘free work’ you are providing and to whom.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  "Mutual Aid," "Marxism, Bolshevism and Mutual Aid," "The Revolution Will Not Be Funded," “Patriarchy of the Wage” (Federici); “Marxism and the Oppression of Women” (Vogel); “Intersectional Class Struggle,” “In Letters of Blood and Fire” (Caffentzis); “From Factory to Metropolis” (Negri), “Monopoly Capital” (Baran & Sweezy); "The Long Depression" (Roberts).     

The Cultural Marxist

December 24, 2022 / Happy Stolen Christmas!