Volunteering is a political act
| April 19th, 2010Volunteering is a political act. I don’t mean in the narrow sense, such as volunteering in campaigning or supporting a political party. Volunteering is political in the sense that it has a profound impact on our political economy (our political and economic system).
This phenomenon translates into hot topics in the volunteering world, such as: job substitution of paid staff for volunteers [giving vs exchanging], volunteering in the private sector [giving within a commodity based system], the state’s role in promoting volunteering [state deciding between gifts and commodities] or how volunteering’s contribution to the UK’s economic activity is measured [converting value of gifts into the value of commodities]. These, and other issues, I claim are controversial because volunteering is, by it’s very nature, a political act in that volunteering as an act of giving forms part of a particular kind of political economy: the gift economy. This point is too often overlooked, perhaps because it is too important for volunteering as an issue to be regarded as politically neutral.
For many, the web has led to the development of a new political economy. In fact, this is a broader debate way beyond this post. But it’s pretty clear our society’s factors of production (resources employed to produce goods and services) have been transformed with the web, and there is no shortage of discussion on this. What I want to look at here is how, as the web changes the way we think about political economy, it’s changing the way we think about giving. This has profound implications for volunteering, as a giving activity.
Getting political
As always, I’m interested in how the general debates about the nature of volunteering fit into this bigger picture, as we can learn a lot from these discussions about the web and its effect on political economy. For this post, I wanted to come at the discussion slightly left field to provide a contrast to the usual mainstream discussion. To kick off, I’ve been looking at contributions to this critique of the web-influenced political economy from a neo-Marxist perspective.
This is to contrast many of the more mainstream (many US based) writers about the new economy driven by the web who tend to come at the subject from either a neo-liberal perspective, such as Kevin Kelly, Chris Anderson or Don Tapscott, or with a more social democratic flavour such as Lawrence Lessig or Yochai Benkler. All of whom we’ve mentioned on this blog already.
To put it very simplistically, the ‘right’ generally views the gift economy of the web as providing more opportunities than threats to the current capitalist system. Giving, as an economic model enabled by the web, is something that capitalism can incorporate and subsume. The perspective from the ‘left’ is generally the opposite: the gift economy made possible through the web, ultimately challenges the very nature of capitalism.
As a result, I think, how volunteering engages with the new web-enabled political economy is incredibly politically significant.
Cooperation and Competition
This discussion raises many issues that are very relevant to the way our understanding of volunteering is changing. A great place to start is to dip into the growing body of work from social theorist Christian Fuchs. He’s written the book, ‘Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age‘ (2008).
For Fuchs, there is an antagonism between cooperation and competition (PDF) within ‘transnational informational capitalism’. This tension comes about because within the structure of contemporary capitalism, there’s a germ of a new form of society. Fuchs explains this in the following way:
The productive forces of contemporary capitalism are organized around informational networks. It is due to three specific characteristics of such structures that they come in contradiction with the capitalist relations of production and are a germ form (Keimform) of a society that is based on fully cooperative and socialized means of production:
- Information as a strategic economic resource is globally produced and diffused by networks. It is a good that is hard to control in single places or by single owners.
- Information is intangible. It can easily be copied, which results in multiple ownerships and hence undermines individual private property.
- The essence of networks is that they strive for establishing connections. Networks are in essence a negation of individual ownership and the atomism of capitalism.
These three characteristics are also affecting large not for profit organisations that have been behind a lot of the organised volunteering opportunities. Information is an economic resource that provides many big not for profit organisations with their competitive advantage, and as a result, many have not been as forthcoming in looking to see how such information could be used to encourage collaboration.
Clearly, this is a theory that focuses on the role of information and knowledge producers, and how the means of production are structured as networks. What’s particularly interesting in our discussion on volunteering is how, as Fuchs points out, this new political economy centres on a new relationship between gifts and commodities:
Although the principle of the gift points towards a postcapitalist society, gifts are today subsumed under capitalism and used for generating profit in the Internet economy. The Internet gift economy has a double character: it supports and at the same time undermines informational capitalism. Applications such as file-sharing software question the logic of commodities, whereas platforms such as Google and MySpace are characteristic of the capitalist gift economy.
The volunteering sector is being hugely changed by this idea that actually the role of giving that’s most effective, is that which also happens to meet the corporate interest. On a simple level, that might be corporates sponsoring voluntary sector activity which may influence the nature of the giving activities to a greater or lesser extent. Even accepting free services that are supported by online adverts can lead to altering the sense of the giving or the way the giving activities are perceived. The broader question is: to what degree are the gift and exchange cultures compatible?
Open source advocate Eric Steven Raymond in his article, ‘Homesteading the Noosphere‘ explores how hackers come together and develop gift cultures. Raymond represents this libertarian spirit found in many open source communities coming together through the web. He has an interesting take on understanding why this online gift economy has come about in the first place:
Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance. They arise in populations that do not have significant material-scarcity problems with survival goods. We can observe gift cultures in action among aboriginal cultures living in ecozones with mild climates and abundant food. We can also observe them in certain strata of our own society, especially in show business and among the very wealthy.
Abundance makes command relationships difficult to sustain and exchange relationships an almost pointless game. In gift cultures, social status is determined not by what you control but by what you give away.
Thus the Kwakiutl chieftain’s potlach party. Thus the multi-millionaire’s elaborate and usually public acts of philanthropy. And thus the hacker’s long hours of effort to produce high-quality open-source code.
I think Raymond is on to something with the connection between abundance and gift economies. But he misunderstands the role of material abundance. The wealthy may give, but it ignores the fact that often their giving is limited because their wealth is wedded to an exchange system. Likewise, it doesn’t explain how many of the most deeply embedded gift economies exist in communities that are materially poor. It’s crucial to understand giving as a response to having access to an abundant means of production, not an abundant material product.
A volunteering equivalent of this idea, is that of Edgar Cahn’s exploration of the ‘core economy’ developed in Time Banking. The concept of the ‘core economy’ was originally coined by Neva Goodwin. It’s this idea that the “ability to care for others is something that all of us have, and this means that in terms of money, it is worth very little”. One reason volunteering develops where and how it does is because it builds on our abundant ability to support and help each other.
It is really important to make the distinction between the abundant existence of a product, and the abundant access to the means of production of the product. There is no guarantee that abundant products will be shared, if there is no accompanying abundant access to the means to make that product. In fact, more often than not, abundant products wind up being scarce when subject to the forces of command economies or exchange economies.
I can think of photographers deliberately destroying copies of their works and running limited edition print runs to maximise the financial value of their work. Conversely, the fact that so many can act to help positive change or volunteer, should not devalue the vital contribution of those who do. For example, often volunteering experience is undervalued by employers when compared to equivalent experience that has been financially remunerated. I guess a Marxist take on this is that employers generally take their lead from exchange value, rather than just use value.
This idea of linking social status to what you give away, than to what you control, is important in distinguishing between exchange relationships and giving relationships. Fuchs distinguishes non-profit gifts and commodities, in relation to exchange and use value. Gifts just have use value and no exchange value.
Volunteering and the voluntary sector have arguably been massively affected by this commodification of goods and services that have traditionally been given as gifts. In a very real sense, in volunteering, we are working out many of the issues that arise where gifts and commodities meet. For example, charging service users for services that are based on giving activities, agreeing a basis for local authority contracts with the voluntary sector, running commercial activities alongside charitable activities, and so on and so on.
Historical context: the case of the Situationists
However, it is really impossible to make much progress understanding the meaning of this debate about gifts and commodities without some historical context. Richard Barbrook has written about the so-called Situationists who believed that everyone could control their own destinies. Wikipedia has this choice summing up of the Situationists connection here: “Drawing from Marx, which argued that under a capitalist society the wealth is degraded to an immense accumulation of commodities, Guy Debord argues that in advanced capitalism, life is reduced to an immense accumulation of spectacles, a triumph of mere appearance where “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation”.
The spectacle, which according to Debord is the core feature of the advanced capitalist societies, has its “most glaring superficial manifestation in the advertising-mass media-marketing complex”. Barbrook writes:
These New Left activists wanted to create opportunities for everyone to express their own hopes, dreams and desires. The Hegelian ‘grand narrative’ would culminate in the supersession of all mediations separating people from each other. Yet, despite their Hegelian modernism, the Situationists believed that the utopian future had been prefigured in the tribal past. For example, tribes in Polynesia organised themselves around the potlatch: the circulation of gifts. Within these societies, this gift economy bound people together into tribes and encouraged cooperation between different tribes. In contrast with the atomisation and alienation of bourgeois society, potlatches required intimate contacts and emotional authenticity. According to the Situationists, the tribal gift economy demonstrated that individuals could successfully live together without needing either the state or the market. After the New Left revolution, people would recreate this idyllic condition: anarcho-communism.
However, the Situationists could not escape from the elitist tradition of the avant-garde. Despite their invocation of Hegel and Marx, the Situationists remained haunted by Nietzsche and Lenin. As in earlier generations, the rhetoric of mass participation simultaneously justified the leadership of the intellectual elite. Anarcho-communism was therefore transformed into the ‘mark of distinction’ for the New Left vanguard. As a consequence, the giving of gifts was seen as the absolute antithesis of market competition. There could be no compromise between tribal authenticity and bourgeois alienation. After the social revolution, the potlatch would completely supplant the commodity.
For the Situationists in the 1960s and 1970s, the gift economy represented the antithesis of capitalism. The two were absolute opposites. But now, particularly with the development of gift economies on the web, it’s clear that there’s a complex relationship between the two. For Barbrook the giving evolving through the web is a more authentic approach to anarcho-communism.
Barbrook argues that the web has grown out of a gift economy of a very different sort. Academics have used and built the internet to share their work and build their reputations. The web has spread out of this function for academics, but also in the very practical way it has depended on developers to have given their time and skills to the process. That the web developed through giving is a contingent happening. It did not have be like this.
In France, the nationalised telephone monopoly has accustomed people to paying for the on-line services provided by Minitel. In contrast, the Net remains predominantly a gift economy even though the system has expanded far beyond the university. From scientists through hobbyists to the general public, the charmed circle of users was slowly built up through the adhesion of many localised networks to an agreed set of protocols.
Crucially, the common standards of the Net include social conventions as well as technical rules. The giving and receiving of information without payment is almost never questioned. Although the circulation of gifts doesn’t necessarily create emotional obligations between individuals, people are still willing to donate their information to everyone else on the Net.
Even selfish reasons encourage people to become anarcho-communists within cyberspace. By adding their own presence, every user contributes to the collective knowledge accessible to those already on-line. In return, each individual has potential access to all the information made available by others within the Net.
The web has been built on the new economy where information is at the centre. For Barbrook giving (as developed on the web) is a natural consequence of its structure (of localised networks and agreed protocols). It’s a semi-conscious kind of giving that doesn’t necessarily create emotional obligations or question why there isn’t a charge attached to information there. The web is a different kind of space. In fact this idea of emotional obligations playing a lesser role might explain why it has been challenging to transfer and evolve many volunteering activities online.
It’s also important to remember that the web economy is built on the value of knowledge. In many cases, it is harder to abstract the human interconnection that’s at the core of much volunteering. Coming back to Christian Fuchs:
“Knowledge is in global network capitalism a strategic economic resource; property struggles in the information society take on the form of conflicts over the public or proprietary character of knowledge. Its production is inherently social, cooperative and historical. Knowledge is in many cases produced by individuals in a joint effort. New knowledge incorporates earlier forms of knowledge; it is coined by the whole history of knowledge. Hence, it is in essence a public good and it is difficult to argue that there is an individual authorship that grounds individual property rights and copyrights. Global economic networks and cyberspace today function as channels of production and diffusion of knowledge commodities; the accumulation of profit by selling knowledge is legally guaranteed by intellectual property rights.”
Fettering the gift economy
Johan Soderberg is another writer who has expanded this discussion of the Marxist critique of the political economy of the web. He talks about the commodification of information itself, and the place of knowledge as the basis for a new kind of gift economy. He pulls out this quote from Christopher May (A Global Political Economy of Intellectual Property Rights: The New Enclosures?):
“The contradiction that lies at the heart of the political economy of intellectual property is between the low to non-existent marginal cost of reproduction of knowledge and its treatment as scarce property”
This contradiction is not just about the low cost of reproduction of knowledge, it’s also because of the increasingly easy access to the means of production of knowledge and it’s treatment as scarce. In fact we’re essentially fettering our knowledge to make it scarce. Back to Fuchs:
“Networks are forms of development as well as fetters of capitalism; paraphrasing Marx one can say that informational capitalism is a point where the means of production have become ˜incompatible with their capitalist integument’ (Das Kapital 1, Marx, 1867: 791).”
In other words, for Fuchs, there’s a fundamental contradiction at the heart of informational capitalism: it needs to both commodify knowledge and gift knowledge. It needs appropriate knowledge to generate exchange value, but at the same time rip down the fetters of knowledge, such as intellectual property rights to maximise the productive capacity of social labour. In much of the voluntary sector, the fetters of knowledge are not normally intellectual property rights, but may perhaps be more akin to bureaucratic method, financial resource and the limitations of partnership working across big not for profits organisations.
Soderberg presents the example that “the free software community provides the first and most complete example of how a collective learning process, communication, or the general intellect, becomes a producing entity in itself. Code is essentially a language, and thus offers a pure model of the network externalities assumption. That assumption, stating that comparability rules over excludability, is a consequence of non-rival goods”.
These thoughts need breaking down.
Network externality is really the idea that a product’s value to a consumer changes as the number of users of the product changes. Take Wikipedia as an example of networked knowledge. It’s clear that it’s value as knowledge increases as more people use it, because more readers generally translate into more contributors to the knowledge, just as Barbrook pointed out in the passage above.
The idea of the ‘general intellect’ is far more problematic, but it links this thinking about knowledge and networks, to Marx’s own thought about the relation between capital and labour. Nate Hawthorne has done a really great summing up of this on his blog, “What in the hell…“:
General intellect is a term used by Marx in the Grundrisse in a section referred to as The Fragment On Machines. In this section Marx speculates on the role of intellect, specifically scientific knowledge and technical expertise, in present and possible future versions of capitalist production. For Marx general intellect essentially resides in fixed capital, in machines and objective factors of production. Thinkers of the late 20th century onward have expanded the concept to refer to the role of intellect within variable capital, that is, skills and knowledges within the bodies and brains of workers and how these capacities relate to capitalist production and radical possibilities. .
Soderberg’s point is that immaterial social labour (e.g. production of knowledge through networks) is making inroads within capitalist production itself, “which needs to utilize the cooperative and communicative capacity of the workforce in order to stay competitive”. In fact, I think there’s a case for saying that immaterial social labour is something that the voluntary sector has been involved in for many years- and has a great deal of experience in.
Coming back to Fuchs it clear that there is a tension that goes way back about knowledge as a gift and knowledge as a commodity: “In society, information can only be produced jointly in cooperative processes, not individually. Hence, Marx argued that knowledge ˜depends partly on the cooperation of the living, and partly on the utilisation of the labours of those who have gone before’ (Marx, 1894: 114). Whenever new information emerges, it incorporates the whole societal history of information: that is, information has a historical character. Hence, information in essence is a public good, freely available to all. But in global informational capitalism, information has become an important productive force that favours new forms of capital accumulation. Information is today not treated as a public good, rather as a commodity. There is an antagonism between information as a public good and as a commodity. ”
Web’s changing giving
There is a lot still to learn and understand about how the web is changing our political economy. For this reason it’s important to still be able to think of the web as something so new and different, that it may just mean that by volunteering we’re engaged in potentially revolutionising our political economy. In this sense volunteering is a political act. For thinkers on the left, just by taking up the challenge and volunteering, volunteers are demonstrating that there is a different way- and perhaps even hinting at a post-capitalist system built on cooperation, rather than competition, and on gifts, rather than commodities. The associated danger on the other hand, is that this volunteering experience becomes corrupted and ultimately subservient to the drive to commodify our social relations.
This perspective also suggests that those involved in volunteering need to begin this work of thinking through the implications of how the web is changing our conception of political economy, and how it is changing the way we give. And at least on this point, I think there’s agreement from both the ‘right’ and the ‘left’.
We need to think this through anew. Volunteering is entering new territory.
As John Perry Barlow states in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: “Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no matter here. Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.”
