“While we must challenge the obliteration of wages for the sake of profits, we should not argue simply for the restitution of the wage labor regime of last century’s capitalism. The growing corporate exploitation of spontaneous, voluntary activity brings into view a truth that capitalism could more readily obscure in an era of stable wage labor: that all social activity, whether or not it commands wages on the market, produces value — the message of both Wages for Housework and Wages for Facebook.The goal, then, should not be to channel that value back into a market-driven wage system, but to socialize it, to restore it to the commons.”
Excerpted from Geoff Shullenberger:
“The voluntariat performs skilled work that might still command a wage without compensation, allegedly for the sake of the public good, regardless of the fact that it also contributes directly and unambiguously to the profitability of a corporation. Like the proletariat, then, the voluntariat permits the extraction of surplus value through its labor.
But unlike the proletariat’s labor, the voluntariat’s has become untethered from wages. The voluntariat’s labor is every bit as alienable as the proletariat’s — Coursera’s Translator Contract leaves no doubt about that — but it must be experienced by the voluntariat as a spontaneous, non-alienated gift.
And the voluntariat is not, like the proletariat, the instrument of its own dispossession. Rather, its contribution of uncompensated work accelerates deskilling and undermines the livelihood of those who do not have the luxury of working for free — in this case, professional translators who cannot afford to give away their labor.
In recent years, companies have made enormous use of two major strategies for extracting economic value without compensating those who originate it: unpaid internships and social media. Coursera’s invention of a translation voluntariat synthesizes some of the most effective aspects of both of these strategies for the empowerment of capital and pauperization of labor.
Unpaid internships have allowed companies to command an-ever expanding labor force at no cost, but the potential of unpaid internships to devalue work further and further up the skill ladder has intrinsic limits. The very institutional existence of internships, after all, entails the (usually false) promise of essential skills acquisition that will lead to future paid work. In other words, unpaid internships will always require there to continue to be paid positions somewhere in an organization, because employers lure candidates into them in large part by dangling before them the possibility of eventual promotion to one of those positions.
The GTC presents no similar difficulties for the capitalist: it solicits the voluntariat’s labor with the sole assurance that that labor constitutes its own reward. The “Do What You Love” mantra central to unpaid internships plays a role here, but the illusion of a career-building apprenticeship that persists as the justification of internships has been removed. For the moment, Coursera is still offering salariesto some workers (mostly engineers), but there is no reason in principle why all the “careers” the company currently advertises could not be reimagined as “global communities” of volunteers.
Social media (and related Web 2.0 platforms) are machines for the extraction of value from uncompensated human activity. Nicholas Carr dubbed the “free” activity that contributes value to such platforms “digital sharecropping,” and the observation that “with every like, chat, tag, or poke, our subjectivity turns them a profit” is at the basis of Laurel Ptak’s “imaginary political campaign,” Wages For Facebook, as well as Jaron Lanier’s 2013 book Who Owns the Future?
It is unsurprising, then, that the central hub of the GTC is a “translators’ portal” that allows participants to “communicate directly with Coursera staff and with other volunteers from around the world.” The GTC software platform closely resembles a social media network in its selling points of “community” and “connection.”
Indeed, the privilege of using the portal would appear to be the “good and valuable consideration” in “exchange” for which the GTC volunteers are signing over rights to their translations in their non-employment contract with Coursera. Yet unlike the major Web 2.0 enterprises, which use social media to appropriate value generated by unskilled “playbor,” the GTC deploys the same strategy to gain free access to skilled labor.
One can assume that the GTC portal is also driven by AI algorithms that improve automated translation software through the aggregation of human-generated models. The efforts of the GTC’s voluntarian scabs, themselves participants in a novel deskilling strategy, will enable an even more systematic devaluation of the work of human translators.
Internships have made work more like non-work by uncoupling it from the expectation of wages. Social media have made non-work more like work by permitting the commodification of spheres of activity previously never conceived of as labor. The emergence of the voluntariat follows logically from both of these developments.
Like interns, the voluntariat performs an activity once defined as skilled, waged work for the sake of “intrinsic rewards”; like “digital sharecroppers,” they do so in order for capital to appropriate 100% of the “extrinsic rewards” produced by their work. More and more realms of work are now supposed to resemble spontaneous activity done for its own sake — such that, as Astra Taylor has remarked, “we are encouraged to think of ourselves as artists no matter what our line of work” — and yet our spontaneous activity is increasingly the source of corporate profits.
If we want to resist voluntarianization, therefore, we have two tasks. We should continue to expose the expanding extraction of profit from labor forms premised on “intrinsic rewards.” And we should seek the liberation of activities and energies captured by the alienated non-labor of social media.
Yet while we must challenge the obliteration of wages for the sake of profits, we should not argue simply for the restitution of the wage labor regime of last century’s capitalism. The growing corporate exploitation of spontaneous, voluntary activity brings into view a truth that capitalism could more readily obscure in an era of stable wage labor: that all social activity, whether or not it commands wages on the market, produces value — the message of both Wages for Housework and Wages for Facebook.
The goal, then, should not be to channel that value back into a market-driven wage system, but to socialize it, to restore it to the commons.”