>I'm trying to get a handle on what is a reasonable amount of pay to give
>to freelance progressive writers and journalists.
A reasonable amount is more than you can afford. It will almost certainly be less than the foregone 'market value' of a progressive writer's skill, experience and effort..
My best work I do for free. Otherwise, I used to bill from $50 to $65 an hour because they're nice round numbers and I felt the kinds of organizations I wanted to work for didn't have the money -- or the at least the attitude about money -- to pay the $2000 a day I'm worth. What makes me worth $2000 a day? I just told you. My best work I do for free. Every hour of paid work I do is valorized by 10 or more hours of unpaid work. At $65 an hour, I'm making a buck fifty less than the minimum wage. Do you really want to engage a writer who spend most of his or her time "making a living"?
And I'm not just saying this to amuse myself. Consider Paolo Virno's thesis (number 4) about the falling short of "every qualitative difference between labor time and non-labor time."
And, yes, I have had a $2000 a day gig.
Sandwichman
Thesis 4: For the post-Fordist multitude every qualitative difference between labor time and non-labor time falls short.
"Social time, in today's world, seems to have come unhinged because there is no longer anything which distinguishes labor from the rest of human activities. Therefore, since work ceases to constitute a special and separate praxis, with distinctive criteria and procedures in effect at its center, completely different from those criteria and procedures which regulate non-labor time, there is not a clean, well-defined threshold separating labor time from non-labor time. In Fordism, according to Gramsci, the intellect remains outside of production; only when the work has been finished does the Fordist worker read the newspaper, go to the local party headquarters, think, have conversations. In post-Fordism, however, since the "life of the mind" is included fully within the time-space of production, an essential homogeneity prevails.
"Labor and non-labor develop an identical form of productivity, based on the exercise of generic human faculties: language, memory, sociability, ethical and aesthetic inclinations, the capacity for abstraction and learning. From the point of view of "what" is done and "how" it is done, there is no substantial difference between employment and unemployment. It could be said that: unemployment is non-remunerated labor and labor, in turn, is remunerated unemployment. Working endlessly can be justified with good reasons, and working less and less frequently can be equally justified. These paradoxical formulas, contradicting each other, when put together demonstrate how social time has come unhinged.
"The old distinction between "labor" and "non-labor" ends up in the distinction between remunerated life and non-remunerated life. The border between these two lives is arbitrary, changeable, subject to political decision making.
"The productive cooperation in which labor-power participates is always larger and richer than the one put into play by the labor process. It includes also the world of non-labor, the experiences and knowledge matured outside of the factory and the office. Labor-power increases the value of capital only because it never loses its qualities of non-labor (that is, its inherent connection to a productive cooperation richer than the one implicit in the labor process in the strictest sense of the term).
"Since social cooperation precedes and exceeds the work process, post-Fordist labor is always, also, /hidden labor/. This expression should not be taken here to mean labor which is un-contracted, "under the table." Hidden labor is, in the first place, non-remunerated life, that is to say the part of human activity which, alike in every respect to the activity of labor, is not, however, calculated as productive force.
"The crucial point here is to recognize that in the realm of labor, experiences which mature outside of labor hold predominant weight; at the same time, we must be aware that this more general sphere of experience, once included in the productive process, is subordinate to the rules of the mode of capitalistic production. Here also there is a double risk: either to deny the breadth of what is included in the mode of production, or, in the name of this breadth, to deny the existence of a specific mode of production."