Post-Wage Politics and the Rise of Community Capitalism

WES0010.1177/0950017018755663Work, employment and societyvan Dyk 755663research-article2018

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Work, Employment and Society 2018, Vol. 32(3) 528–545 Post-Wage Politics and © The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permissions: the Rise of Community sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017018755663DOI: 10.1177/0950017018755663 Capitalism journals.sagepub.com/home/wes

Silke van Dyk Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany

Abstract This article discusses new patterns of precariarization and informalization beyond waged labour. Against a backdrop of multiple social changes, there is a new era of social reproduction based on the interplay between a politics of post-waged work and a politics of community, involving activities outside the realms of market, state and family. Whereas the implications of family- based care work have long been highlighted, the community-based political economy of the ‘post- wage regime’ has yet to be analysed. Taking Germany as an example, the article describes how the state is actively involved in promoting and exploiting post-waged work. At the same time, community projects and grassroots activities contribute to the social reproduction of livelihoods, often becoming an active part of the precarious post-wage regime. The question is raised whether or not these interweaving developments herald a new era of community capitalism.

Keywords community, conviviality, post-wage politics, precarity, resistance, social reproduction, volunteering

Introduction Much has been written about precarious work and job insecurity, with particular attention being paid to the deregulation of waged labour. This article shifts the focus beyond precarious paid employment to look at the governance and practice of non-waged work that contributes to maintaining the public infrastructure and securing livelihoods. There is currently a growing interest in and promotion of voluntary work, neighbourly help, sharing economies, active ageing, multi-generational co-housing projects as caring communities, prosumer activities and open-source projects. The argument put forward is

Corresponding author: Silke van Dyk, Institute of Sociology, Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena, Carl-Zeiß-Straße 2, 07743 Jena, Germany. Email: [email protected] van Dyk 529 that, although these activities are highly heterogeneous and seemingly unconnected, they are nonetheless pillars of a new post-waged work regime that ‘tops up’ and in some cases even replaces paid employment. This regime is fuelled by a new politics of community that offers values such as conviviality and voluntariness rather than monetary value in the form of wages. The prevailing view is that community spirit and voluntary activity are noble pursuits; meanwhile, the potential precariousness and the informality of these activities is quietly ignored – as is their systemic role in late modern capitalism. To be sure, neither the importance of non-waged work nor the recourse to community- based ideas is entirely new. However, major socio-economic changes are bringing about a qualitatively new form of precarious post-wage regime. Taking up the Marxist-feminist argument that ‘capital’s lifeblood is unpaid work’, Dowling and Harvie (2014: 882) argue that we are witnessing ‘the attempt to extend the realm of unpaid work that can be appropriated’ (Dowling and Harvie, 2014: 882); yet this realm is itself being restructured by social, technological and demographic forces. Whereas (women’s) care work has increasingly come under critical scrutiny as an unwaged social resource (Daly and Lewis, 2000; Federici, 2012), the political economy of the post-waged work regime beyond private households has yet to be analysed. To explore these issues, this article offers a conceptual framework that brings together apparently unconnected phenomena. It posits the idea that the growing importance of post-waged work is fuelled by the bewildering multiplicity of activities involved and that the common factor underlying these activities is a new politics of community. Contrary to popular debates about the decline of wage labour and the rise of postcapitalism (Mason, 2015; Rifkin, 2014), it is argued that the post-wage regime does not transcend capitalism but instead provides a new basis for value extraction, appropriation and exploitation. Is there a new era of community capitalism on the horizon?1 The argument is developed in several stages.2 First, the socio-economic processes of transformation mentioned above are outlined briefly in order to indicate how they contribute to the post-wage regime. This is followed, second, by some general remarks on the appeal of the community concept. Third, the concept of post-waged work is clarified and explicated using examples of post-wage policies from the German context. Fourth, the diverse roots of the nascent post-wage regime are discussed: alongside a state-led politics of post-waged work, there is also a growing grassroots post-wage movement ‘from below’. The article argues that the affirmation of community connects the diverse actors with one another and might be a reason why the problematic implications of post- waged work tend to be overlooked. The article concludes by considering whether community capitalism might develop into a future hegemonic project.

Social transformations leading to the rise of post-wage politics Without a doubt, fundamental changes to the welfare state in most industrialized coun- tries are a key to understanding the growing importance of post-waged work. Although country-specific in practice, these changes generally involve a ‘decentralization of social policy’ (Möhle, 2001: 271), a ‘return of social insecurity’ (Castel, 2009: 21) and an ‘imperative to participate’ (Bröckling, 2005: 22). The existence of a social ‘safety net’ 530 Work, Employment and Society 32(3) based on citizens’ rights and a ‘no questions asked’ approach is no longer taken for granted. There has been a transition from state-led provision to greater self-reliance and from collective to individual risk management. The politics of activation and retrenchment is accompanied by an underfunding of public social infrastructure (Gornig et al., 2015: 1023) along with a state-led deregulation of labour relations, resulting in the rise of precarious work (Castel and Dörre, 2009). There is a wealth of literature on welfare state change based on activation and austerity that links these shifts to the revival of informal, community-building mutual support and voluntary work as a gap filler (e.g. Lessenich, 2008; Milligan and Conradson, 2011; Muehlebach, 2012). However, the heterogeneity of post-waged work is rarely addressed, and many authors identify welfare state retrenchment as the driving force behind community governance. Current social transformations are far more multi-layered than this suggests, though. For one thing, fundamental changes are underway in gender relations, with more and more women entering the labour market. As a result, the amount of time available to them to serve as a full-time, unpaid ‘secret resource of social policy’ (Beck- Gernsheim, 1991: 66, author’s translation) is significantly reduced; as empirical research shows, men do not step in to fill the gap (Koppetsch and Speck, 2015). However, the true extent of the crisis of social reproduction (Jürgens, 2010) only comes to light if demographic changes are addressed concurrently. Of course, the wide- spread notion of an ‘old age crisis’ (World Bank, 1994) is problematic, since it suggests a naturalized crisis rooted in old age itself and not in the socio-economic conditions of the ageing society. However, in Germany, for example, about 3.4 million elderly people are dependent on care while there is an estimated shortfall of 500,000 professional care workers (Haubner, 2017; Prognos, 2012). Even considering such dramatic changes, the picture of the emerging post-wage regime is still not complete: current post-wage practices are further fuelled by technological change, first and foremost by digitization and new virtual networks and communities. The ‘internet of things’ (Rifkin, 2014) increasingly connects everything and everyone, relying on diverse forms of non-waged activities. Users establish self-help and counselling networks, they act as prosumers and share information to improve goods and services, they offer music, cars and flats on internet platforms, and they share knowledge. Although there is disagreement over which of these activities should count as labour and which as social interaction (Terranova, 2000), Srnicek convincingly identifies data as the raw material of the digitized economy ‘and the activities of users [as] the natural source of this raw material’ (Srnicek, 2017: 40, emphasis in original).3 Finally, and importantly, the economic crises from 2008 onwards are proving to be a threat to the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism, creating a new context for the political economy of post-waged work and community politics. These multiple crises, accompanied by ‘the alchemy of austerity’ (Clarke and Newman, 2012: 299), have aggravated social inequalities and divisions. Even though Crouch (2011) rightly identified ‘the strange non-death of neoliberalism’ immediately after the crisis erupted and even though there is ample evidence of the ongoing influence of neoliberal ideas and politics (Bischoff and Steinitz, 2016: 67f.; Schmidt and Thatcher, 2013), the system’s hegemony has come to be contested. Social protests around the world (Sitrin and Azzelini, 2014), the electoral victories of radical left-wing parties in Greece and Spain, controversies within the van Dyk 531

European Union about (German-led) austerity policy, and the problematization of growing inequalities by former neoliberal ‘hardliners’ such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF, 2014) – these are signs of a dwindling hegemony and of ‘a problem of consent’ (Clarke and Newman, 2012: 306) regarding radical austerity. At the same time, the current rise of right-wing political movements and parties may herald ‘the end of progressive neoliberalism’ (Fraser, 2017), including its emancipatory promises. Against this backdrop, it shall be discussed whether community capitalism might evolve into a new hegemonic project that stabilizes capitalism on a new basis.

On community: Conceptual remarks The term ‘community’ is frequently introduced to explain why people (should) pursue non-waged activities. Zygmunt Bauman (2001: 1) stresses that ‘community’ has not just a meaning but also ‘a feel’: ‘It feels good: whatever the word “community” may mean, it is good “to have a community”’. In whatever context, the term is loaded with positive implications and affective power; it is ‘a warmly persuasive word’ that ‘unlike all other terms of social organisations (state, nation, society, and so on) […] seems never to be used unfavourably’ (Williams, 1976: 76). The term is mostly used in a common-sense way, resulting in a feel-good potpourri containing ‘qualities of harmony, homogeneity, autonomy, immediacy, locality, morality, solidarity, and identity, as well as the idea of shared knowledge, interests, and meanings’ (Creed, 2006: 5). Very basically, community refers to ‘a group of people, a quality of relationship (usually with a positive normative value), and a place/location’ (Creed, 2006: 4). Thus, community entails rather small numbers, face-to-face relations and concrete social bonds. Bringing the big picture into view, community is positioned as the Other of modern capitalism and therefore the Other ‘of alienation, bureaucratization, rationality’ (Joseph, 2002: 1). The foundation of community with its local basis and close social bonds ‘is supposed to be values, while capitalist society is based only on value (economic value)’ (Joseph, 2002: 1). Variations of this dichotomy have characterized sociological thinking from the start, and the notion that small-scale, specific communities give way to large-scale, abstract modern society is embedded within modernization theory. However, although most classical soci- ologists were pre-occupied with the social ills of the emerging capitalist modernity, their analyses were more complex than contemporary nostalgic narratives of ‘community lost’. Despite its long discursive history as an antidote to the modern condition, more recent history reveals cyclical deployments of ‘community’. Rose (1996: 332) argues that, back in the 1960s and 1970s, community was a concept of resistance, a ‘language of critique and opposition directed against remote bureaucracy’. However, within a short period ‘critique was transformed […] into an expert discourse and a professional vocation’ (Rose, 1996: 332). Rose (1996: 352–353) points out that the politics of community is far from novel per se, but he identifies a new quality of governmental action: ‘Community is made calculable by a whole variety of reports, investigations and statistical enquiries, is the premise and objective of a range of governmental technologies.’ The social, previ- ously institutionalized in a social security system, gives way to a new ‘government through community’ (Rose, 1996: 332), through which ‘micro-moral relations among persons are conceptualized and administered’ (Rose, 1996: 331). 532 Work, Employment and Society 32(3)

Governance through community manifests in various ways, as the German case indicates. With regard to the popular debate about ‘the end of work’ (Rifkin, 1995) and extensive early retirement programmes, governance in the 1980s and early 1990s involved designing community programmes to integrate those segments of the population that had dropped out of the workforce. This had changed by the late 1990s with a shift towards labour market policies based on activation; civic engagement was now increasingly addressed in its bridging function between voluntary activity and waged labour (Stecker, 2004). Far from being entirely replaced, the exclusive focus on employability is currently being supplemented by a newly framed interest in non-waged activities: these are now being discovered as a precious social resource to be extracted and not just as a springboard towards employment (Denninger et al., 2014: 127–162). Against this backdrop, the connection between post-waged work and community is obvious: communalism is considered to be the engine to pursue these activities, it is ‘the jargon used to recruit unpaid labour’ (Caffentzis and Federici, 2014: 97f.).

Post-waged work and the community The concept of post-waged work is rooted in feminist critiques of the narrow concept of work as paid employment (Dowling, 2016; Federici, 2012) and takes up ideas from the debate about immaterial labour that refers to activities in the ‘social factory’ beyond employment ‘that are not normally recognized as work’ (Lazzarato, 1996: 133). Together with the increasingly blurred territory between production and con- sumption (Terranova, 2000: 34), these approaches help to address the wide field of non-waged activities that are relevant to the process of capital accumulation – be it by value extraction, the externalization of reproductive costs and exploitation of non-waged activities, or the appropriation of data based on user activity. Given the need to ‘decentre wage labour in our conception of life under capitalism’ (Denning, 2010: 80), it is crucial to consider not just the group of ‘wageless people’ (Denning, 2010: 80) but also to address post-waged work performed by employees. Contrary to studies of post-work and anti-work politics (Weeks, 2011) that discuss the liberation of work in a (future) post-work society, the focus here is on post-wage politics and its implications for precarity and exploitation in the present. Like other uses of the prefix ‘post’, the term sensitizes us to the fact that there is neither a clear-cut sequence nor a simple contrasting juxtaposition between employment and non-waged work but rather fluid transitions. As will be shown, volunteer work is non-waged, however, sometimes volunteering is remunerated based on allowances far below the minimum wage. Or, in other cases, volunteers receive quasi-employment contracts.4 As to the blurring boundaries between employment and post-waged work, this perspective supplements existing studies on flexibilization of work (Voß and Pongratz, 1998), which address the blurring as an effect of changing working conditions and their core feature, namely, the co-optation of life-world resources such as social or communicative skills for waged labour. Analysing post-wage politics expands the view and asks how the sphere of (formal) non-employment is itself governed and what its own blurring effects are. van Dyk 533

Perspectives from ‘above’: The governance of post-waged work Addressing the politics of post-waged work in Germany draws attention to the voluntary sector, which has come to be seen as a new pillar of the welfare state (Opaschowski, 2008: 556).5 Contrary to the Anglophone debate, this development is not so much influ- enced by communitarian thinking but is embedded in the tradition of subsidiarity thinking. The way this principle manifests has changed over time: whereas in the 1970s subsidiarity addressed the state’s responsibility to enhance the competences of smaller political and social units, the ‘new subsidiarity’ is a matter of unburdening the state by addressing the responsibilities of citizens (Klie, 2014). As to the question of responsibility, there are parallels to Etzioni’s (1996) idea of three-stage responsibility, with self- responsibility and family responsibility as the first and second stages along with a new third stage of neighbourhood and community responsibility. In Germany, the state has opted to govern the third stage of responsibility, doing so through various attempts to establish a volunteer society. In 1999, the government established a Parliamentary Commission on The Future of Civic Engagement and Voluntary Work; in 2009, a governmental national strategy to promote civic engagement was published, followed by a new law in 2013 to promote volunteering. This is in addition to the system of national voluntary service, a six to 12-month period of service to society, replacing civilian service for conscientious objectors when military service was compulsory (Bibisidis et al., 2015). Since 2006, there has been substantial support for multi-generational housing in order to establish intergenerational caring communities (https://www.mehrgenerationenhaeuser. de). A glance at the wording of government programmes reveals the recurrent emphasis on civic engagement as a citizen’s duty: ‘A new sharing of responsibilities is required nowadays in civil society, meaning that citizens must take on more responsibility […] Diverse forms of voluntary commitment are even more necessary at a time when the state is reducing its statu- tory commitments’ (Deutscher Bundestag, 2002: 77; see also: Deutscher Bundestag, 2012). The title of a government report on the ageing society (Deutscher Bundestag, 2016) signals this re-orientation of social welfare: ‘Care and mutual responsibility in local municipalities – Establishing and maintaining sustainable communities.’ To be sure, attempts by government to establish a volunteer society are no guarantee of success in practice. The empirical evidence for the German case is complex: the rep- resentative, government-funded Survey on Volunteering6 reveals a significant rise in rates of civic engagement from 35.9% in 2009 to 43.6% in 2014, meaning that volunteer numbers rose by more than 7 million over five years (Simonson et al., 2017: 21f.). However, these data must be handled carefully, since the definition of volunteering was changed slightly after the 2009 survey, with more activities being counted as civic engagement. Critics do not doubt the rise of civic engagement rates per se, but the significant increase claimed is held to be a statistical artefact created by a government inter- ested in creating a flourishing volunteer society (Roth, 2016). At present, programmatic approaches are starting to be included in educational curricula: the introduction of school lessons in serving others is an attempt to socialize pupils towards civic engagement (be it gardening in public parks or social services in elderly care homes) (Seifert et al., 2012). Beyond programmatic and educational approaches, civic engagement is being expanded by new rules that serve to facilitate its co-option. Of particular interest is the 534 Work, Employment and Society 32(3) field of care for the elderly, which is turning out to be a kind of ‘forerunner’ for the volunteer society of the future (Haubner, 2017). Several law reforms in 2013 and 2015 relating to long- term care enabled volunteer caregivers in care homes as well as in private households to be paid an allowance. In 2013, 10% of private households involved in caring for an elderly person relied on voluntary caregivers (Zentrum für Qualität in der Pflege, 2013). Apart from these measures, austerity policies are also a driving force behind the boom in post-wage activities. Tight budgets at the local municipal level due to cutbacks coupled with new responsibilities have led to a severely underfunded local infrastructure (Gornig et al., 2015). Retirees in rural areas are beginning to organize ‘community buses’ to com- pensate for the lack of public buses (see, for example, www.buergerbus-westerstede.de), volunteers are stepping in to renovate and run local swimming pools in order to prevent them being closed down, while libraries are increasingly being run by amateur volunteers after professional librarians have been made redundant (Pinl, 2013: 104f.). More than 60,000 volunteers organized in 900 food banks provide 1.5 million people in need with groceries and goods for their daily needs (www.tafel.de). Another major field of post- waged work is voluntary help for refugees. About 10% of Germany’s adult population were involved in helping refugees during ‘the long summer of migration’ (Kasparek and Speer, 2015) in 2015. The volunteers did not just provide emergency assistance but have become an indispensable long-term resource, organizing language courses, housing, legal and administrative advice and medical treatment (Karakayali and Kleist, 2015; van Dyk and Misbach, 2016). Interestingly, due to the publicity surrounding the volunteer-led ‘welcome culture’, the exploitation of unpaid volunteers who take on tasks that nominally lie within the state’s responsibility has become a public issue for the first time (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2015); some commentators have even called it the ‘communitization of asylum policy’ (Prüwer, 2016: 25).

Who cares? Historically, various social groups have been considered particularly suited to perform the emotional care work necessary for the social reproduction of labour and life (Federici, 2012). Up to now, this has applied first and foremost to women, who currently spend significantly more time than men on non-waged reproductive work in private households and beyond (Miranda, 2011). Nevertheless, with women’s growing labour market participation on the one hand and increasing long-term care duties in the ageing society on the other, the crisis of reproduction (Jürgens, 2010) is coming to a head. Against this backdrop a new answer is emerging to the question ‘Who cares?’: healthy retirees who receive a pension and have a considerable amount of free time. To date, the debate on active ageing (European Commission, 1999; Moulaert and Biggs, 2012) has tended to focus on the extension of working life to the neglect of reproductive resources. Based on empirical results from the research project ‘Living in retirement’,7 it seems clear, however, that the reproductive implications of active ageing are crucial. The German post-wage regime has a life-course dimension, which has not been fully under- stood to date. Pensions that used to be legitimized discursively as ‘wages for a lifetime’s work’ are increasingly regarded as the financial basis for a ‘second shift’ – namely, reproductive post-waged work past retirement. Empirical discourse analysis has revealed that the young elderly in their third age are viewed differently from both the dependent very- old in their fourth age and from ‘normal’ adults in midlife.8 They are held to possess van Dyk 535 wisdom and experience, to be loyal and reliable, as well as less competitive, warm- hearted and more charitable than their younger contemporaries (Denninger et al., 2014: 103–106). The young-old appear as the caring and selfless flipside of a capitalist society – ideal characteristics for becoming the new reproductive resource of contemporary capitalism (van Dyk, 2016b).9

Monetary value and service quality. Despite politicians and academics repeatedly declar- ing the priceless value of civic engagement (Röbke, 2012: 30), money plays a key role when it comes to voluntary activities, namely, in the form of allowances on the one hand and as savings and social returns on the other. Few calculations exist for the German context that measure benefits based on equivalents to full-time employment, taking account of rates of civic engagement, average volunteer hours per month and assumed minimum or average wage per hour (e.g. Fritz et al., 2010). A calculation of costs and benefits for the Bavarian context reports a return of 600 to 700% for each euro invested in civic engagement (Kral, 2010: 57f.), prompting Catholic charity Caritas to proclaim: ‘Civic engagement is relevant to the system, it is sustainable and it yields excellent returns – without risk. A clear recommendation to buy.’10 As to the monetization of voluntary work, there is the 372 euros a month ‘pocket money’ paid to those doing a period of national voluntary service, a flat rate of 2400 euros a year (tax free under § 3 Section 26 of the volunteers tax law, EhrAmtsStg) for volunteers working as trainers, supervisors or caregivers, and government incentives to pay allowances, institutionalized in the form of long-term care insurance. These allowances are not necessarily a problem, as long as they are allowances for expenses incurred while volunteering. However, combined with welfare benefits or the 450 euro tax-free flat rate for a mini-job, they end up establishing a hidden low-pay sector. In the Länder belonging to what was East Germany, the long-term unemployed are the biggest group to be engaged in the national voluntary sector (Beller and Haß, 2013: 58f.), with hourly wages of 1.50 to 3 euros. The allowances for long-term care assistance play an increasingly important role for those elderly women who are affected by poverty in old age (Rock, 2016). Against this backdrop, there is empirical evidence of a growing informal labour market (Beller and Haß, 2013; Roth, 2012), hidden beneath the ‘cloak of poorly compensated civic engagement, which is not regulated or protected according to labour and social insurance law’ (Beyer, 2015: 16). The recoding of work as voluntary activity opens up an opportunity to frame modest allowances as a generous appreciation of civic engagement. Viewed from this perspective, volunteering – no matter how highly praised – is an instrument of informalization, at least in some fields.11 It seems obvious, then, ‘that the de-linking of work and wages does not signal the end of exploitation’ (Dowling, 2016: 463). The image of the volunteer as a ‘near-sacred figure’ (Eliasoph, 2013: 2) and the association of volunteering with good citizenship (Deutscher Bundestag, 2016; Muehlebach, 2012: 50f.) serve to silence any critique of its role in lowering the costs of social reproduction. Moreover, these developments affect not just the conditions of post-waged work but also have consequences for the quality of social services. The proclaimed ‘new culture of helping’ is part of the dismantling of social rights, and establishes personal dependencies and uncertainty based on charity to which people in need are not entitled. Social 536 Work, Employment and Society 32(3) ties characterized by closeness and tenderness become problematic when they supplant a crucial achievement of the modern welfare state, namely, the de-coupling of social security from social bonds and the establishment of reliable, anonymous mechanisms of com- pensation (Ewald, 1989). This is not about glorifying the welfare state, which always was and still is the institutionalization of both social rights and social divisions (Lessenich, 2012: 25ff.). However, the basic principle of social rights is the institutionalized rejection of the idea that compassion and pity are a solution to social inequality. As overwhelming as, for example, volunteers’ support for refugees is, this non-guaranteed help is subject to fluctuation and swings in the public mood and can be withdrawn at any time without explanation (van Dyk and Misbach, 2016: 221). Finally, yet importantly, the voluntary post-wage regime challenges standards of professionalism and furthers the de-skilling of reproductive activities beyond private households (Baines, 2004; Haubner, 2017: 355–364).

Perspectives from ‘below’: Post-waged work and alternative movements In addition to state-led policies, we are currently witnessing a boom in community-based alternative projects ‘from below’ whose core elements include sharing, subsistence and commons-based economies, open-source projects and neighbourhood organizing. As diverse as these fields are, activists are united in criticizing the anonymity of state struc- tures and the profit orientation of market economies as they strive to revitalize community- based ideas as a critique of contemporary capitalism (David, 2017; Habermann, 2016; Helfrich and Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, 2014). In addition to alternative projects with a pro- nounced middle-class character, the grassroots renaissance of community is often rooted in the breakdown of public infrastructure. This is particularly true for southern Europe, although it is even evident (to a lesser extent) in Germany as well: ‘Indeed, at a time of permanent crisis and with constant assaults on jobs, wages and social spaces, the construc- tion of commons – “time banks”, urban gardens, […], local currencies, “creative commons” licenses, bartering practices – represents a crucial means of survival’ (Caffentzis and Federici, 2014: 95). This sensitizes us to the blurring boundaries between post-wage politics pursued from ‘above’ and from ‘below’, since austerity policies are a major driving force behind those forms of community renaissance that are critical of capitalism. Commoning is regarded as a contemporary post-wage practice, and has been defined as

the institutional, legal and infrastructural arrangement for ‘convivial cooperation’ […] involving shared organization of and responsibility for the use, maintenance and production of multiple kinds of resources. […] This ‘convivial cooperation’ has been and is practiced by diverse communities all over the world. (Acksel et al., 2015: 134)

The tendency to anthropologize cooperation as a human principle per se (Terkessidis, 2015: 328) lays the foundation for a specific version of the nostalgic ‘community lost’ narrative, namely, a return to prior human principles that have been destroyed by capitalism. Probably the most notable example of a programmatic emphasis on community is the ‘Convivialist Manifesto’ (Les Convivialistes, 2014), whose illustrious authors include Chantal Mouffe, Ève Chiapello, Serge Latouche, Alain Caillé and Éva Illouz. The manifesto calls for an appreciation of interdependence and revolves around the idea of van Dyk 537 community-based mutual care, based on the ‘principle of common humanity’ (Les Convivialistes, 2014: 30). Its aim is the enhancement of cooperative activities beyond market and state, and the introduction to the manifesto accentuates: ‘Free and gratuitous exchange between people can serve as the basis for a convivial social order that distances itself from a version of prosperity and the good life defined in purely material and quan- titative-cum-monetary terms’ (Adloff, 2014: 13). The implications of non-waged activities for social and professional life and working conditions are not addressed at all. Alternative community approaches are fuelled by digitization, particularly by new opportunities for (virtual) proximity as the basis of sharing economies and cooperative associations (David, 2017; Rifkin, 2014). At the same time, Airbnb and Uber demon- strate how the initially grassroots post-waged work of suppliers (of flats/cars/services) is increasingly being monopolized and becoming subject to extensive commodification (Scholz, 2016). This leads to blurred boundaries between precarious employment and digitally organized post-waged work, with workers being addressed as independent con- tractors (Srnicek, 2017: 75–78). Despite its stated aim to criticize capitalism, the grassroots ‘romance of community’ (Joseph, 2002) conceals the structural implications of post-waged work (such as precariousness) and obscures the connections between alternative projects and the state-led politics of community. To be sure, commoning and alternative ways of caring and sharing are not only compliant instruments of capitalist interests; they might well contain emancipatory seeds – ‘the embryonic form of an alternative mode of production in the making’ (Caffentzis and Federici, 2014: 95; Exner and Kratzwald, 2012: 92–123). However, allowing these seeds to grow requires a careful analysis of how alternative post-waged activities fit into the existing system and under what conditions they might develop transformative potential. At present, such close analysis is largely lacking (van Dyk, 2016b): the ‘bottom–up’ protagonists are failing to analyse the political economy of contemporary capitalism, instead tending to detach ‘community from the social, economic, political, and historical conditions that enabled the particular forms of sociality that would seem to be so appealing’ (Joseph, 2002: 9). Communities are placed in an idealized past or in a utopian future. This de-contextualization is accompanied by a critique of capitalism that mistakes it for a pure market economy, with all other economic forms being loaded with romantic social appeal. The popular juxtapositions – fuelled by capital itself – between the (capitalist) abstract and the (communal) concrete and between exchange value and use value bring about:

forms of anti-capitalist thought that remain bound within the immediacy of this antinomy [and that] tend to perceive capitalism […] only in terms of the manifestation of the abstract dimension of the antinomy. […] The existent concrete dimension is then positively opposed to it as the ‘natural’ or ontologically human, which presumably stands outside the specificity of capitalist society. (Postone, 1986: 309)

However, as Marxist and feminist scholars point out, ‘capital’s lifeblood is unpaid work’ (Dowling and Harvie, 2014: 882), and the system depends on non-marketized areas. This holds true not just for processes of further commodification of (former) non- marketized areas but also for the colonization of new reproductive resources. Both the Convivialist Manifesto and JK Gibson-Graham’s (2006: 57) popular call to queer the 538 Work, Employment and Society 32(3) economy in order to allow non-market activities ‘to fully exist’ tend to romanticize (existing!) economic diversity, thereby failing to recognize the possible exploitation of post-waged work. Furthermore, such truncated critiques of capitalism are often accompanied by a nostalgically framed anti-statism that prioritizes close social bonds over abstract social rights (e.g. Kratzwald, 2014), thereby revealing striking overlaps with the ideology of the voluntary society that supports the politics of retrenchment and idealized civic duty (van Dyk, 2016a: 255–257). Interestingly, numerous commentators have warned that voluntary workers and community projects must be careful not to be co-opted. However, the question of co- option is not one of vigilance but of structural fit; co-option is not a possibility in a remote future but is being proclaimed – as demonstrated by the above-quoted extracts from German government programmes – and practised here and now. As always, exceptions confirm the rule, with some critics stressing the strategic function of commons:

For years, part of the capitalist international establishment has been promoting a softer model of privatization, appealing to the principle of the commons as a remedy to the neo-liberal attempt to submit all economic relations to the dictate of the market. It is realized that, carried to an extreme, the logic of the market becomes counterproductive even from the viewpoint of capitalist accumulation. (Caffentzis and Federici, 2014: 97; see also de Angelis and Harvie, 2014)

The Economist (2008), to name just one example, explicitly addressed the future potential of commoning: ‘The economics of the new commons is still in its infancy. […] it may yet prove a useful way of thinking about problems […] on which policymakers need all the help they can get.’ The ‘breaking news’ is that post-wage politics from above and from below are not as antagonistic as it might seem at first glance. The most obvious overlap is the concept of caring communities, which is part of post-welfare government policies in the field of long-term care and communal civic engagement (BMFSFJ, 2013) as well as part of feminist grassroots movements towards a ‘care revolution’ from below (Federici, 2012; Winker, 2015). Despite being critical of contemporary capitalism, the structural fit of alternative projects produces a ‘dilemma of governmentally desired solidarity’ (Bröse and Friedrich, 2015; author’s translation) that may not erode but does challenge the critical position. Interestingly, practical solutions are gradually emerging within the field of refugee assistance. Action groups and voluntary networks are trying to do two things at once: to develop alternative support networks and to critique the exploitation of post- waged work that seeks to plug the gaps in public provision at the same time (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2015; www.medibuero.de). With Alex Law and Gerry Mooney, this could be called ‘recalcitrant voluntarism’: unlike conformist voluntarism with its focus on charity, conviviality and harmony, ‘recalcitrant voluntarism is […] necessarily adversarial, unpleasant and polarizing’ (Law and Mooney, 2006: 265f.). These activists reject hon- ours and awards for their civic engagement and are starting to organize resistance: they have reached out to volunteers in other fields and have founded the grassroots Trade Union for Civic Engagement and Voluntary Work (GEFA, gefa.online), which fights for the social rights of post-waged workers. van Dyk 539

Conclusions Contrary to analyses of the apparently endless marketization of all social domains (e.g. Dean, 2015 for the voluntary sector), the analysis of the nascent post-wage regime high- lights a new era of social reproduction based on non-marketized activities beyond market and state and thus adds to the already well-investigated sphere of family care work. Neither post-waged activities outside private households nor their contribution to social reproduction are entirely new, and women’s integration into the workforce is an ongoing process that started decades ago. Nonetheless, this article claims that we are facing a new set of circumstances deriving from three major trends. First, demographic change and a major care cap are aggravating the crisis of social reproduction induced by changing gender relations, welfare state retrenchment and limited local government budgets (Haubner, 2017; Jürgens, 2010). Social care services are additionally being stretched at a time of substantial infrastructural gaps with regard to social, medical and educational provision for refugees (van Dyk and Misbach, 2016). Second, technological change, the new relevance of data as a crucial resource in digital capitalism and technologically driven sharing economies are enhancing the significance of the digital post-waged work done by online communities, users and (software) producers (David, 2017; Srnicek, 2017). Third, although neoliberal politics are still dominant in many respects (Bischoff and Steinitz, 2016) there is ample evidence that the system is increasingly contested in terms of functionality and legitimacy. With almost continuous conflicts following the 2008 economic, financial and currency crises, austerity has ceased to be the undisputed remedy (Clarke and Newman, 2012); at the same time, more and more authors, including Wolfgang Streeck (2016), have claimed that the unbounded capitalism of our times is heralding its own end. By substantially penetrating non-marketized spheres, it risks undermining its own conditions of reproduction. Interestingly, the combination of post-wage politics and community politics is proving to be an answer to all three of these trends, one that links a solution to functional reproductive crises with a response to declining consent and hegemony, while fuelling the practice and spirit of new cooperative forms and networks in the digital economy. The emergence of a new political economy of social value extraction and cost reduction is accompanied by a moral economy that utilizes the emotional ladenness of voluntarism and community12 – an emotional ladenness that veils the precarious and exploitative implications of this ‘solution’. As Muehlebach (2012: 12) rightly claims, voluntary work is ‘much more than merely cheap. It has […] become the pathos-laden vehicle through which collective transcendence and meaning and value get conjured.’ Taking this appeal seriously and facing the crisis of neoliberal hegemony, the question arises of whether or not community capitalism might develop into a new hegemonic project. Just as neoliberal capitalism has never spawned a pure market economy, community capitalism does not mean the rise of a pure community economy restricted to voluntary post-waged work. It rather addresses an era of capitalism in which non-waged reproductive forces are re-organized, governed and exploited in new ways, offering at once social value and legitimacy to the system. Without a doubt, grassroots post-wage utopias and state-led attempts to establish a volunteer society are far from congruent. However, ‘community’ works as an empty signifier (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) with overly positive 540 Work, Employment and Society 32(3) connotations that link these trends; by virtue of its openness, it has the potential to merge different meanings and evocations behind a veil of equivalence. Actors who refer to specific virtues of communities – to the emancipatory aspects of autonomy and self-organization, say – ‘may unavoidably, if not intentionally, invoke the other qualities popularly associated with it’ (Creed, 2006: 5) such as homogeneity and harmony. Taking into account the power relations of contemporary capitalism, one must assume further that specific evocations of community may become hegemonic in the end – with some ‘feel- good’ elements of community being deployed strategically by leading actors as a conces- sion to popular demands, which nonetheless, as Gramsci’s theory of hegemony indicates, leave the foundations of contemporary capitalism untouched. Indeed, state-led ‘efforts to separate volunteers from politics’ (Eliasoph, 2013: 57) are attempts to combat those post- waged activities and emancipatory community politics that challenge the system. Voluntary aid to refugees in Germany is a good example, with charitable activities being praised by the government and political actions against deportations being criminalized (Prüwer, 2016). The idealistic romance of community ignores these power relations and conflicts of interest while enthusiasm for conviviality tends to overlook its instrumental governance, thereby fostering the hegemonic potential of community capitalism. To understand this hegemonic potential, people’s longing for communal alternatives has to be taken seriously. The best way to do this, however, is to drop the romance, to analyse the political economy and to explore traces of rebellion in voluntarism that do not mistake present exploitative post-wage politics for an emancipatory post-work future.

Funding The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes 1. The term ‘community capitalism’ was coined in joint discussions with Emma Dowling and Tine Haubner. It serves to highlight the common conceptual roots of our (separate) research on affective labour and the political economy of care (Dowling, 2016; Dowling and Harvie, 2014), the exploitation of caring communities (Haubner, 2017) and on active ageing, civic engagement and commoning in an era of demographic and welfare state change (van Dyk, 2015, 2016a; van Dyk and Misbach, 2016). The term was used once before (but in a different sense) in a report by the American Assembly (1997) headed Community Capitalism. Rediscovering the Markets of America’s Urban Neighborhoods. 2. The conceptual considerations derive from two research projects headed up by the author: ‘From retirement to active aging? Images and practices of old age in the transformation of the German welfare state’, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, 2008–2012) and ‘Shadow economy or a new culture of cooperation? Voluntary work and civic engagement in times of welfare state change’ (Hans-Böckler-Foundation, 2017–2020). 3. For a discussion of the implications of this for precariousness, see Codagnone et al. (2016); for cybernetic capitalism and its ‘disposable working class’ see Dyer-Witheford (2015). 4. This is true for example of the charitable organization ‘Diakonie Deutschland’. 5. The argument is developed on the basis of the German case, but the governance of volunteering and community spirit is not a German peculiarity. On ‘the community turn and the changing role of the voluntary sector in the UK’ see Macmillan and Townsend (2011); on David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ approach see Dowling and Harvie (2014). van Dyk 541

6. https://www.dza.de/forschung/fws.html 7. The results are published in the monograph ‘Living in retirement’ (Denninger et al., 2014). In addition to 55 in-depth interviews with ‘young-old’ people, the project encompasses a systematic analysis of the public discourse on old age and ageing in Germany. 8. The discourse analysis is based on more than 2200 texts published between 1983 and 2011 on the topics of retirement, old age and ageing in four German daily newspapers, several special interest magazines, administrative and expert reports as well as political party programmes. Articles from digitized media were selected by keyword research; non-digitized media were checked with regard to key events and for randomly selected years and months (on methods and methodology, see Denninger et al., 2014: 48–62). 9. Whether or not they really do perform in the ways expected of them is another question; empirical research reveals that many prefer to claim their right to a peaceful life post-retirement (Denninger et al., 2014: 224–232). 10. Author’s translation; https://www.caritas.de/neue-caritas/heftarchiv/jahrgang2010/artikel/ gewinnbringer-ehrenamt 11. The literature on informal work names voluntary work as a third informal pillar alongside private care work and so-called undeclared work, indicating the increasing importance of this pillar (Williams and Nadin, 2012: 3–4). 12. On ‘affect as remuneration’ for volunteering, see also Dowling (2016: 457–459).

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