Update: We’ve got copies of Issue 01 of Scapegoat Journal in our store.
The current economic crisis has turned attention toward volunteerism – as resources dry up, or are prevented from being distributed, companies turn would-be paid jobs into volunteer internships, and art/design firms increasingly offer their services to organizations trying valiantly to remedy the more dramatic symptoms of capitalism. These troubling and ambivalent dynamics are familiar to cultural producers, especially those whose work (like Groundswell’s) has been a labor of love.
Frank Chimero’s Design Won’t Save the World
Sacrificial labor is a seeming requirement of the cultural economy as currently configured. We’re required to work for free, or, as is sometimes worse, for ourselves, which requires all the more dedication, time, and labor, especially when workers collectively self-manage. Too often do radical democratic projects suffer from making this sacrifice. Can this kind of work be maintained, especially where it’s an act of solidarity?
We tend to think about pro-bono work as an expression of solidarity. The sacrifice involved is supposed to be a gesture, a show of willingness to collaborate at whatever cost, or, more materially, a small scale way of redistributing resources. However, just as internships are said to lead to a steady job, the sacrifice made in pro-bono work is itself salable – in other words, the work functions as marketing, self-promotion disguised as a good deed. Business experts themselves would agree with this claim; they’ve penned advice columns to this effect, advocating altruism as both a bolsterer of business and a pacifier of dissatisfied employees.
Characterizing pro-bono work as sacrificial labor begs the question, how is it like other service work? Because their sacrifice begets more gainful work, by and large, pro-bono workers aren’t subject to the same precarity as other service workers, as this kind of work is typically a required component of highly gainful employment. Indeed, the form their work takes – and thus their alienation from it – is remarkably different, from the knowledges required to the very way their bodies move while on the job. But, following the Carrotworkers’ Collective, it nonetheless qualifies.
Taking up the topic of service work – especially as an act of charity – in the context of architecture, the editors of Scapegoat Journal’s latest edition take these claims a step further.
The charity acts of designers, artists, and architects are, they claim, a neoliberal stand-in for for the state – where once the services being rendered were publicly provided, contemporary austerity measures have forced delivery onto the chance firm with the time and resources to spend on such a project. More, the charity act disguises a defense of the ivory tower in sheep’s clothing, as it can permit so-called experts to guard their knowledge (and ignore the participants’ knowledge), and whitewashes the issue without treating its source. Scapegoat’s response is to examine the problematic of service:
How can we develop new models for self-management and mutual aid that move beyond unidirectional forms of service as clientelism and dependency? How can we think through service provision beyond the state? How can we privilege voluntary association and ethical reciprocity rather than volunteerism? How can new approaches to training and the intergenerational transmission of knowledge be radically re-organized? How has the rise of the populist Right coincided with mechanisms of gentrification and the ideologies of the so-called ‘creative city?’ How can we counter the predominance of economic metaphors in our attempts to articulate values and commitments? How could design services work in solidarity with the labour of extraction, construction, and maintenance?
However critical, the editors are no cynics, and these questions lead in productive directions – to Brazil, for example, to explore Usina’s city-making project. Done in collaboration with popular movements and the first Labour Party administration, the area’s self-managed participatory mutual aid housing policy gives us good reason for hope, if not the satisfaction of all-out success.
Print and digital editions of Scapegoat are available directly from the editors, or from Groundswell’s store.
Disclosure: Groundswell likes Scapegoat, in ideas and in person.
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