*36C3 preroll music*
Herald: The next talk is by David Graeber, and he's an author, activist and
anthropologist. And he will be speaking about his talk "From managerial feudalism
to the revolt of the caring classes". Please give him a great
round of applause and welcome him to the stage.
*Applause*
David: Hello. Hi. It's great to be here. I wanted to talk. I've been in a very bad
mood this last week owing to the results of the election in the UK and I would
think very hard about what happened and how to maintain hope. Ah, there we go.
Good, good. I don't usually use visual aids, but actually assembled them. And the
thing is, what I want to talk about a little bit is what seems to be happening
in the world politically, that we have results like what just happened in the UK
and why there is nonetheless reason for hope, which I really think there is. In a
way, this is very much a blip. Probably the most... Um, and but there is a
strategic lesson to be learned, I think. Speaking as someone who's been involved in
attempts to transform the world, at least for the last 20 years since I was involved
in the global justice movement. I think that there is a real lack of strategic
understanding that there's a vast shift sort of happening to the world in terms of
central class dynamics that the populist right is taking advantage of and the left
is really being caught flat footed on. So, I want to make a case of what seems to be
going wrong and what we can do about it. First of all, in terms of despairing. I
was very much at the point of despairing. There's so many people put so much work
that I know into trying to turn around the situation. There seemed to be a genuine
possibility of a broad social transformation in England. And when we got
the results, I mean, there's a kind of sense of shock. But actually, if you look
at the breakdown of the vote, for example, it doesn't look too great for the right in
the long run. Basically, the younger you are, the more determined you are to kick
the Tories out. The core... Actually, I've never seen numbers quite like this. The
core... base of... electoral base of the right wing is almost exclusively old. And
the older you are, the more likely you are to vote conservative, which is really,
really kind of amazing because it means that the electoral base of the right is
literally dying off - a process which they're actually expediting by defunding
health care in every way possible. And normally you'd say, oh, yes, so what? As
people get older, they become more conservative. But there's every reason to
think that that's not actually happening this time around. Especially because
traditionally people who either had been apathetic or had voted for the left, who
eventually end up voting for the right, do so at the point when they get a mortgage
or when they get a sort of secure job with room for promotion and therefore feel they
have a stake in the system. Well, that's precisely what's not happening to this new
generation. So if that's the case, the right wing is actually in the long run in
real trouble. And to show you just how remarkable the situation is. Someone put
together a electoral map of the UK showing what it would look like if only people
over 65 voted and what it would look like if only people under 25 voted. Here's the
first one. Blue is Tory. If only people over 65 voted, I believe there would be
four or five Labor MPs, but otherwise entirely conservative. Now here's the map.
If only people under 25 voted, there would be no Tory MPs at all. There might be a
few Liberal Dems and Welsh candidates and Scottish ones. And in fact, this is a
relatively recent phenomena. Here's... if you look at the divergence. You know, it really
is just the last few years it started to look like that. So something has happened
that like almost all young people coming in are voting not just for the left, but
for the radical left. I mean, Corbyn ran on a platform that not just two or three
years before would have been considered completely insane and, you know, is
falling off the political spectrum altogether. Yet, the vast majority of
young people voted for it. The problem is that in a situation like this, the swing
voters are the sort of middle aged people. And for some reason, middle aged people
broke right. The question is, why did that happen? And I've been trying to figure
that out. Now, in order to do so, I think we need to really think hard about what
has been happening to social class relations. And the conclusion that I came
to is that essentially the left is applying an outdated paradigm. You know,
they're still thinking in terms of bosses and workers and a kind of old fashioned
industrial sense where what's really going on is that for most people, the key class
opposition is caregivers versus managers. And, essentially, leftist parties are
trying to represent both sides at the same time, but they're really dominated by the
latter. Now, I'm going to go through some basic political economy stuff as in way of
background. And this is a key statistic, which is the kind of thing we were looking
at when we first started talking about the 99 percent of the 1 percent are the
beginning of Occupy Wall Street. Essentially until the mid 70s, there was a
sort of understanding between 1945 and 1975, say, there was an understanding that
as way of productivity increases, wages will go up, too. And they largely went up
together. This only takes it from 1960, but it goes back to the 40s. More
productivity goes up. A cut of that went to the workers. Around 1975 or so it
really splits. And since then, if you see what's going on here, productivity keeps
going up and up and up and up, whereas wages remain flat. So, the question is,
what happens to all that money from the increased productivity? Feasibly, it goes
to one percent of the population. And that's what we were talking about when we
talked about the 1 percent. The other point, which was key to the notion of 99
and 1 percent when we developed that, was that the 1 percent are also the people who
make all the political campaign contributions. These statistics are from
America, which has a unusually corrupt system, but pretty much all of them...
Bribery is basically legal in America. But essentially it's the same people who are
making all the campaign contributions who have collected all of the profits from
increased productivity, all the increased wealth. And essentially, they're the
people who managed to turn their wealth into power, and their power back into
wealth. So. Who are these people want and how does this relate to changes in the
workforce? Well, the interesting thing that I discovered when I started looking
into this, is that the rhetoric we used to describe the changes in class structure
since the 70s is really deceptive. Because, you know, since really since the
80s, everybody has been talking about the service economy. What we're shifting from
an industrial to a service economy. And the image that people have is that, you
know, we've all gone from being factory workers to serving each other lattes and
pressing each other's trousers and so forth. But actually, if you look at the
actual numbers of people in retail. People who are actually serving food. I don't
have a, you know, detailed breakdown here, but they remain pretty much constant. In
fact, I've seen figures going back 150 years which show that it's pretty much 15
percent of the population that does that sort of thing. It has been for, you know,
over a century. It doesn't really change. It goes up and down a little bit. But
basically, the amount of people who are actually providing services, haircuts,
things like that, is pretty much the same as it's always been. What's actually
happened is that you've had a growth of two areas. One is providing, you know,
what I would call caregiving work. And I would include education and health, but
basically taking care of other people in one way or another. In the statistics you
have to look at education. Health is only have a category of caregiving in economic
statistics. On the other hand, you have administration and the number of people
who are doing clerical, administrative and supervisory work has gone up enormously to
some degree. So according to some accounts, it's gone up from maybe 20
percent of the population in, say, UK or America in 1900 to 40, 50, 60 percent. I
mean, even a majority of workers. Now, the interesting thing about that is that huge
numbers of those people seem to be convinced they really aren't doing
anything and that essentially if their jobs didn't exist, you would make no
difference at all. It's almost as if they were just making up jobs in offices to
keep people busy. And this was the theme of my book I wrote on bullshit jobs. And
just to describe the genesis of that book, essentially, I don't actually myself come
from a professional background. So, as a professor, I constantly meet people, sort
of spouses of my colleagues, the sort of people you meet when you're socializing
people in professional backgrounds. Well, I keep running into people of parties and
saying, well, who work in offices and... you know, I'm an anthropologist, right. I
keep asking, well, what do you actually do? I mean, what does a person who is a
management consultant, you know, actually do all day? And very often they will say,
well, not much. Or you ask people, I am an anthropologists, what do you do? And
they'll say, well, nothing, really. And, you know, you think they're just being
modest, you know. So, you kind of interrogate them by a few drinks later.
They admit that actually they meant that literally, they actually do nothing all
day. You know, they sit around and they adjust their Facebook profiles. They play
computer games. They were like, you know, sometimes I'll take a couple of calls a
day. Sometimes I'll take a couple of calls a week. Sometimes they're just there in
case something goes wrong. Sometimes they just don't do anything at all. And you
ask, what? Does your supervisor know this? And they say, you know, I often wonder. I
think they do so. So, I began to wonder how many people are there like this? Is
this some weird coincidence that has happened to run into people like this all
the time? What section of the workforce is actually doing nothing all day? So I wrote
a little article. I had a friend who is starting a radical magazine, said you
write something provocative, you know, something you'd never be able to get
published elsewhere. So I wrote a little piece called "On the phenomenon of
bullshit jobs" where I suggested that, you know, back in the 30s, Keynes wrote this
famous essays predicting that by around now we would all be working 15 hour weeks
because automation would like get rid of most manual labor. And if you look at the
jobs that exist in the 30s, you know, that's true. So I said, well, maybe what's
happened is the reason we're not working 15 hour weeks is they just made up
bullshit jobs. And just to keep us all working. And I wrote this piece as just
kind of a joke, right? Within a week, this thing had been translated into 15
different languages. It was circulating around the world because the server kept
crashing, it was getting millions and millions of hits. I was like, oh, my god,
do you mean it's true? And eventually someone did a survey, YouGov, I think, and
they discovered that of people in the UK, 37 percent agreed that if their job didn't
exist either would make no difference whatsoever or the world might be a
slightly better place. I thought about that. What must that do to the human soul?
You imagine that, you know, waking up every morning and going to work, thinking
that you're doing absolutely nothing if, you know. No wonder people are angry and
depressed. And I thought about it, it explains a lot of social phenomena that if people are
just pretending to work all day and then, you know, it actually really touched me.
It's strange because I come from a working class background myself. So you'd think
that, you know, oh, great. So, lots of people are paid to do nothing all day and
get good salaries, like, my heart bleeds, you know? But actually, if you think about
it, it's actually a horrible situation because, you know, as someone who has had
a real job knows, the very, very worst part of any real job is when you finish
the job but you have to keep working because your boss will get mad. You know,
you have to pretend to work because it's somebody else's time. It's very strange
metaphysical notion we have in our society that someone else can own your time. You
know, so since you're on the clock, you have to keep working or pretend to be,
make up something to look busy. Well, apparently, at least a third of people in
our society, that's all they do. Their entire job consists of just looking busy
to make somebody else happy. And that must be horrible. So. And it made a lot of
political sense. Why is it the people seem to resent teachers or autoworkers? After
the 2008 crash, the people who really had to take a hit were teachers and auto
workers. And there was a lot of people saying, well, these guys are making 25
dollars an hour, you know? Well, yeah, that's they're providing useful service or
making cars. You're American. You're supposed to like cars. You know, cars is
what makes you what you are if you're American. How would they resent
autoworkers? And I realize that it only makes sense if there's huge proportions of
the population who aren't doing anything and were totally miserable and are
basically saying, like, yeah, but you get to teach kids, you get to make stuff. You
get him in a car. And then you want vacations, too? That's not fair, you know?
It's almost as if the suffering that you experience doing nothing all day is itself
a sort of validation of... It's like this kind of hair shirt that makes you
justifies your salary. Whereas people and I truly hear people saying this logic all
the time that while teachers, you know, I mean, they get to teach kids. You don't
want people pay them too much. You don't want people who are just interested in
money taking care of our kids, do we? Which is odd because you never hear people
say you never want greedy people. People are just interested in money taking care
of our money. So therefore, you shouldn't pay bankers so much. Though you'd think
that would be a more serious problem, right? Yeah. So there is this idea that if
you're doing something that actually serves a purpose, somehow that should be
enough. You shouldn't get a lot of money for it. All right. So so. As a result of
this there is actually an inverse relationship, that I don't have actual
numbers for this, but there's actually an inverse relationship, and I have seen
economic confirmation of this, between how socially beneficial your work is and how
obviously your work benefits other people and how much you get paid. There's a few
exceptions like doctors, which everybody talks about. But generally speaking, the
more useful your work, the less they'll pay you for it. Now, now. This is
obviously a big problem already, but there's every reason to believe that the
problem is actually getting worse. And one of the fascinating things I discovered
when I started looking at the economic statistics is that if you look at jobs
that actually are useful and let's again look at caregiving. Remember, the big
growth in jobs over the last 30 years has been in two areas which have collapsed in
the term service, but are really actually totally different. One is these sort of
administrative, clerical and supervisory work and the other is the actual
caregiving labour, the work where you're actually helping people in some way. So,
education and health are the two areas which show up on the statistics. Okay, if
you look at these statistics, you discover that productivity in manufacturing, as we
all know, is going way up. Productivity in certain other areas, wholesale, business
services are going up. However, productivity in education, health and...
What's this other services? Basically caregiving in general insofar as it shows
up on the charts, productivity is actually going down. Well, why is that? That's
really interesting. Yeah, well, we'll talk in a moment about what productivity
actually even means in this context. But here's a suggestion as to why. This is the
growth of physicians on the bottom versus the growth of actual medical
administrators in the United States since 1970. That's a fairly impressive looking
graph there. Basically, what that sort of a giant mountain there is what I called
the bullshit sector. There's absolutely no reason why you'd actually need that many
people to administer doctors. And actually the real effect of having all those people
is to make the doctors and the nurses less efficient rather than more. Because I know
this perfectly well from education, because I'm a professor. That's what I do
for a living. The amount of actual administrative paperwork you have to do
actually increases with the number of administrators over the last 30, 40 years.
You know, something similar has happened, isn't quite as bad as this, but something
very similar has happened in America, in universities, that the number of
professors has doubled but the number of actual administrators has gone up by 240,
300 percent. So. Well, more than that, actually. Yeah, I mean. So, suddenly you
have like twice as many administrators for professors as you had before. Now, you
would think that that would mean that professors have to do less administration
because you have more administrators. Exactly the opposite is the case. More and
more of your time is taken up by administration. Well, why is that? The
major reason is because the way it works is if you are hired, as you know, vice
provost, executive vice provost or assistant dean or something like that.
Some big shot administrative position at a virtual American university. Well, you
want to feel like an executive and they give these guys these giant six figure
salaries. They treat them like they're an executive. So if you're an executive, of
course, you have to have a minor army of flunkies of assistants to make yourself
feel important. The problem is they give these guys five or six assistants, but
then they figure out what those five or six assistants are actually going to do,
which usually turns out to be make up work for me. Right. The professor. So suddenly
I have to do time allocation studies. Suddenly I have to do. I have to do, you
know, learning outcome assessments where I describe what the difference with the
undergraduate and graduate section of the same course is going to be. Basically
completely pointless stuff that nobody had to do 30 years ago and made no difference
at all, to justify the existence of this kind of mountain of administrators and
just give them something to do all day. Now, the interesting result of that is
that, and this is where this sort of stuff comes in, it's actually the numbers are
there. But it's very, very difficult to interpret. So I had to actually get an
economist friend to sort of go through all this with me and confirm that what I
thought was happening was actually happening. Essentially, what's going on is
just as manufacturing, digitalization is being employed to make it much more
efficient. Productivity goes up, the number of workers go down, the number of
payment that, you know the wages are actually going way up in manufacturing,
but it doesn't really make a dent in profits because there's so few workers.
So, OK, that we kind of all know about. On the other hand, in the caring sector, the
exact opposite has happened. Digitalization is being used as an excuse to make lower
productivity so as to justify the existence of this army of administrators.
And if you think about it, you know, basically, you know, in order to translate
a qualitative outcome into a form that a computer can even understand, that
requires a large amount of human labor. That's why I have to do the learning
outcome studies and the time allocation stuff, right. But really, ultimately,
that's to justify the existence of this giant army of administrators. Now, as a
result of that, you need to have actually more people working in those sectors to
produce the same outcome. These are becoming less and less productive, more
and more of your time has to be spent. Oh, yes. This is for the average company now
looks like. More and more of your time ends up being spent sort of making the
administrators happy and giving them an excuse for their existence. This is a
breakdown I saw in a report about American office workers, where they compared
2015 and 2016. In 2015 only 46 percent of their time was spent actually doing their
job. That declined by 7 percent in one year to 39 percent. That's got to be some
kind of statistical anomaly, because if that were actually true in about a decade
and a half, nobody will be doing any work at all. But it gives you an idea of what's
happening. So if productivity is going down, these people are just sort of
working all the time to satisfy the administrators. So the creation of
bullshit jobs essentially creates the bullshitization of real jobs. There is a
huge, there's both a squeeze on profits and wages. More and more money is going to
pay the administrators. And you need to hire more and more people. So what do you
get? Well, if you look around the world, whereas labor action happening, basically
you have teachers strikes all over America and professors strikes in the UK. You have
care home workers, I believe, in France. They had nursing home workers first time
ever on strike, nurses strikes all over the world. Basically, caregivers are are
at the sort of cutting edge of industrial action. The problem, of course, and this
is the problem for the left is that the administrators, who are in the basic class
enemy of the nurses, and I believe in New Zealand, the nurses wrote a very clear
manifesto stating this. They said, you know, the problem we have is that there's
all of these hospital administrators, these guys, not only are they taking all
the money, so we haven't got a raise in 20 years. They give us so much paperwork, we
can't take care of our patients. So that is the sort of class enemy of what I call
the caring classes. The problem for the left is that often those guys are in the
same union and they're certainly in the same political party. Tom Frank wrote a
book called "Listen Liberal", where he documented what a lot of us had kind of
had a sense of intuitively for some time, that what used to be left wing parties,
essentially the Clintonite Democrats, the Blairite Labor Party. Talk about people
like Macron, Trudeau, all of these guys, at essentially the head of parties, that used
to be parties based in labor unions and the working classes and by extension the
caring classes, as I call them. But have shifted to essentially be the classes
of the professional, I mean, the parties of the professional managerial classes. So
essentially, they are the, you know, they are the representatives of that giant
mountain of administrators. That is their core base. I even caught a quote from
Obama where he pretty much admitted it, where he said, you know, while people ask
me why we don't have a single payer health plan in America, would that be simpler?
Wouldn't that be more efficient? And he said, you know, well, yeah, I guess it
would. But that's kind of the problem. You know, we have at the moment, like, what is
it to 3 million people working for Kaiser, Blue Cross, Blue Shield, all these
insurance companies. What are we going to do with those guys, if we have an
efficient system? I mean, so essentially he admitted that it is intentional policy
to maintain the marketization of health in America because it's less efficient and,
you know, allows them to maintain a bunch of paper pushers in offices doing
completely unnecessary work, who are essentially the core base of the
Democratic Party. I mean, those guys, you know, they don't really care if they shut
down auto plants, do they? In fact, they seem to take his glee. They say, well, you
know, economy's changing. You just gotta deal with it. But the moment look at
those guys and the officers who were doing nothing are threatened, the political
parties leap into action and get all excited. All right. So if you look at what
happened in England. Well, it's pretty clear that the conservatives won because
they maneuvered the left into identifying itself with the professional managerial
classes. There is a split between the sort of labor union base, which is increasingly
unions representing very militant carers of one kind or another. And the
professionals, managers and the administrators, both of whom are
supposedly represented by the same party. Now, Brexit was a perfect issue to sort of
make the bureaucrats and the administrators and the professionals into
the class enemy. Now, it's very ironic because of course, in the long run, the
people were really going to benefit from Brexit are precisely lawyers, right.
Because they got to rewrite everything in England. However, this is not how it was
represented. It was represented your enemies. I mean, there was an appeal to
racism, obviously, but there was also an appeal: your enemies are these distant
bureaucrats who know nothing of your lives. The key moment in terms of where
essentially the Tories managed to outmaneuver Labor and guaranteed their
victory was precisely by forcing Labor into an alliance with all the people like
the Liberal Democrats and the other remainers, who then use this incredibly
complicated constitutional means to try to block Brexit from happening. 20 minutes?
Okay, that's easy. And it was fun to watch at the time on TV were all these you know,
like all these guys in wigs and strange people called Black Rod and, you know, in
odd costumes, appealing to all sorts of arcane rules from the 16th century. And it
was great drama. You know, it was like costume drama come to life on television.
But in effect and you know, it seemed like Boris Johnson was just being constantly
humiliated. Everything he did didn't work. His plans collapsed. He lost every vote he
tried. But in fact, what it ended up doing was it forced what was actually a
radical party which represented the angry youth in the U.K. into alliance with
professional managerials, who live by rules and whose entire idea of democracy
is of a set of rules. This is very clear in America. And again, you could see
this in the battle of Trump versus Hillary Clinton. Clinton was essentially accused
of being corrupt because she would do things like, you know, get hundreds of
thousands of dollars for speeches for investment firms like Goldman Sachs, who
obviously aren't paying politicians that kind of money unless you expect to get
some kind of influence out of it. And constantly like Clinton's defenders would
say. Yes, but that was perfectly legal. Everything she did was legal. Why are
people getting so upset? She didn't break the law. And I think that if you want to
understand class dynamics in a country like England or America today, that phrase
kind of gives the game away, because people of the professional managerial
classes are probably the only people alive, who think that if you make bribery
legal, that makes it OK. It's all about form versus, against content.
Democracy isn't the popular will. Democracy is a set of rules and
regulations. And if you follow the rules and regulations, well, you know, that's
fine no matter. And these guys, that kind of mountain of administrators are the
people who think that way. And they've become the base of parties, you know, they
are the electoral base of people like Clinton, people like Macron, people like
Tony Blair had been, people like Obama. And now. And Corbyn was not at all like
that. He is this person who had been a complete rebel against his own party for
his entire life, but what they did, was they maneuvered him into a position where
there had been a Brexit vote which represented substance: the popular will.
And he was forced into a situation where he had to, like align with the people who
are trying to block it through legalistic regulation, essentially by appeal to
endless arcane laws. Thus identifying his class with the professional managerials
and a lot of my friends who actually were out on doorsteps. You know, they actually
seem to think of Boris Johnson as a regular guy. I mean, this guy, his actual
name is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. He is an aristocrat going back
like 500 years. But they seem to think he was a regular guy. And Corbyn, who hadn't
even been to college and was was sort of a member of the elite, based almost entirely
on that. And if you look at people like Trump and people like Johnson, how did
they manage to pull off being populist in any sense? You know, they're born to every
conceivable type of privilege. Basically, they do it by acting like the exact
opposite of the annoying bureaucratic administrator, who is your kind of enemy
at work? That's the game of images they're playing, you know. So Johnson is clearly
totally fake. He fakes disorganization. He's actually a very organized person
according to people who acutally know him. But he's developed this persona. This guy
is all about content over form. And he's sort of chaotic and disorganized. And so
they're basically playing the role of being anti-bureaucrats and they maneuver
the other side into being identified with administration, rules and regulations and
those guys who basically drive you crazy. The question for the left, then is how to
break with that. So I have, what is it, 15 minutes in order to propose how we can
break...? It strikes me that that we need to kind of rip up the game and start over.
We're in another world economically than we used to be. And perhaps the best way to
do it is to think about what when people say their jobs are bullshit, you know,
when people say that 37 percent of people who say, if my job didn't exist, probably
the world be better off, I'm not actually doing anything. What do they actually mean
by that? In almost every case, what they say is that it doesn't really benefit
anymore. There is a principle that ultimately work is meaningful if it helps
people and improves other people's lives. Thus caring labor in a sense has become
the paradigm for all forms of labor. And this is very, very interesting because I
think that to a large degree, the left is really stuck on the notion of production
rather than caring. And and the reason we have been outmaneuvered in the past has
been precisely because of that. I could talk about the, you know, how this
happened. I think it really a lot of economics is really theological. It's a
transposition of old religious ideas about creation, where human beings are sort of
forced to feel like the story of Prometheus, the Bible, you know, the human
condition. Our fallen state is one where God is a creator. We tried to usurp his
position. So God punishes us by saying, OK, you can create your own lives, but
it's being miserable and painful. So work is both is both productive, it's creative.
But at the same time, it's also supposed to be suffering. Whereas so we have an
idea of work as productivity. So I was actually looking at these charts. You're
talking of the different productivity of different types of work. Now I can see
where productivity of construction comes in. But according to this, you can even
measure the productivity of real estate, productivity of agriculture. Okay.
Productivity, I mean, everything is production. What does productivity of real
estate...doesn't make any sense, you're not producing anything, it's land. It sits
there. Our paradigm for value is production. But if you think about it,
most work is not productive. Most work is actually about maintaining things. It's
about care. If you think whenever I see, talk to a Marxist theorist, wherever, they
try to explain value, which is what they always like to do. They always take the
example of a teacup. They say, well, usually they're sitting there with a glass
bottle, a cup. Well, look at this bottle, you know. You know, it takes a certain
amount of socially necessary labor time to produce this, say it takes, you know, this
much time, this much resources. It's always about production of stuff. But a
teacup or a bottle. Well, you know. You produce a cup once, you wash it like 10000
times. Most work isn't actually about producing new things, it's about
maintaining things. We have a warped notion, which really, it's a very
gendered. Real work is like male craftsman banging away or some factory worker making
a car or something like that. It's almost a paradigm for childbirth, right? Because
labor is supposed to be, the word labor is very interesting, right? Because in the
Bible they say, they curse Adam to work and they curse Eve have pain of
childbirth, but that's called labor. So there's the idea that, you know, there's
this. Factories are like these black boxes where you're kind of pushing stuff out
like babies through a painful process that we don't really understand. And that's
what work mainly consists of. But actually, that's not what work mainly
consists of. Most work actually consists of taking care of other people. So I think
that what we need to do is we need to start over. We need to realign. First of
all, think about the working classes, not as producers, but as carers. And working
classes are basically people who take care of other people and always have been.
Actually, psychological studies show this really well, that you know, the poorer you
are, the better you are reading other people's emotions and understanding what
they're feeling. That's because, you know, it's actually the job of people to take
care of others. All rich people just don't have to think about what other people are
thinking or they don't care, literally. And so I think we need to A: redefine the
working classes as caring classes. But second of all, we need to move away from a
paradigm of production and consumption as being what an economy is about is if we're
going to save the planet, we really need to move away from productivism. So I would
propose that we just rip up the discipline of economics as it exists and start over.
*Chuckles*
*Applause*
So this is my proposal in this regard. I think that we should take the ideas of
production and consumption, throw them away and substitute for them the idea of
care and freedom. Think about it. You know, thank you. I mean, even if you're
making a bridge, right, you make a bridge, as feminists constantly point out,
you know, you're making a bridge because you care that people can get across the
river. You know, you make a car because you care that people can get around. So
even like production is one subordinate type of care. What we do is, you know, as
human beings, as we take care of each other. But care is actually and this is, I
think, something that we don't often recognize closely related to the notion of
freedom, because normally care is defined as answering to other people's needs. And
certainly that is an important element in it. But no, it's not just that. Like if
you're in a prison. Right. They take care of the needs of the prisoners, usually at
least to the point of giving them basic food, clothing and medical care. But you
can't really think of a prison as caring for prisoners. Right. Care is more than
that. So why isn't a prison a caregiving institution, whereas something else might
be? Well, if you think about care, what is the the kind of paradigm for carrying
relations? A mother and a child. Right. A mother takes care of a child, or a parent
takes care of a child so that that child can grow and be healthy and flourish.
That's true. But in an immediate level, you know, you take care of a child so the
child can go and play. That's what children actually do when you're taking
care of them. What is play? Play is like action done for its own sake. It's in a
way the very paradigm of freedom, because action done for its own sake is what
freedom really consists of. Play and freedom are ultimately the same thing. So,
a production-consumption paradigm for what an economy is, is a guarantee for
ultimately destroying the planet and each other. I mean, even when you talk about
de-growth, you know, if you're working within that paradigm, you are essentially
doomed. We need to break free away from that paradigm entirely. Care and freedom,
on the other hand, are things you can increase as much as you like without
damaging anything. So we need to think: what are ways that we need to care for
each other that will make each other more free? And who are the people who are
providing that care? And how can they be compensated themselves with greater
freedom? And to do that, we need to like actually scrap almost all of the
discipline of economics as it currently exists. We're actually just starting to
think about this. I mean, because economics as it currently exists is based
on assumptions of human nature that we now know to be wrong. There have been actual
empirical tests of the basic fundamental assumptions of the maximizing individual
that economic theory is based on. It turns out they're not true. It tells you
something about the role of economics that this has had almost no effect on economic
teaching whatsoever. They don't really care that it's not true. But one of the
things that we have discovered, which is quite interesting, is that human beings
have actually a psychological need to be cared for, but they have an even greater
psychological need to care for others or to care for something. If you don't have
that, you basically fall apart. It's why old people get dogs. We don't just care
for each other because we need to maintain each other's lives and freedoms. But our
own very psychological happiness is based on being able to care for something or
someone. So what would happen to microeconomics if we started from that?
We're doing actually a workshop tomorrow on the Museum of Care, which we're going
to imagine in Rojava, which is in northeastern Syria, where there is a
women's revolution going on, as you might have heard. But it's in places like that
where they're trying to completely reimagine economics, the relation of
freedom, aesthetics and value. Because at the moment, the system of value that we
have is set up in such a way that this kind of trap that I've described, and the
gradual bullshitization of employment, where essentially production work has
become a value unto itself in such a way that we're literally destroying the
planet. And in order to actually reimagine a type of economics that wouldn't destroy
the planet, we have to start all over again. So I'm going to end on that note.
*Applause*
Herald: David, thank you so much. I think it's very interesting to also have some
political views now that we mix in all sorts of technology and it goes very good
in the theme of Congress. Please, if anyone has any questions line up by the
microphones and we'll go for that. Unfortunately, in the beginning, I forgot
to mention that you can ask questions over the Internet through IRC, Mastodon or
Twitter. And remember to use the channel #borg and we'll make sure that they get
answered. So please microphone number 1
Q: When you when you observe the productivity in healthcare going down, do
you have an explanation, according to new liberal thinking, why hospitals, one with
more administrators, one with less administrators, don't have competition
outcome that the hospital with less administrators wins?
David: Haha, yeah. Well, one of the fascinating things about the whole
phenomena of bullshitization and bullshit jobs is that it's exactly what's not
supposed to happen under a competitive system. But it's happened across the board
in every, equally in private sector and public sector.
Q: Why? A: That's a long story. But one reason
seems to be that, and this is why I actually had managerial feudalism in the
title, is that the system we have, is essentially not capitalism as it is
ordinarily described. The idea that you have a series of small competing firms is
basically a fantasy. I mean, you know, it's true of restaurants or something like
that. But it's not true of these large institutions. And it's not clear that it
really could be true of those large institutions. They just don't operate on
that basis. Essentially, increasingly, profits aren't coming from either
manufacturing or from commerce but from rather redistribution of resources and
rent, rent extraction. So that and when you have a rent extraction system, it much
more resembles feudalism than capitalism is normally described. You want to
distribute you know, if you're taking a large amount of money and redistributing
it, well, you want to soak up as much of that as possible in the course of doing
so. And that seems to be the way the economy increasingly works. I mean, if you
look at anything from Hollywood to the healthcare industry, you know what you've
seen over the last 30 years, the creation of endless intermediary roles, which sort
of grab a piece of the pie as being distributed downwards. It's... I mean, I
could go into the whole mechanisms, but essentially the political and the economic
have become so intertwined that you can no longer make a distinction between the two.
So you have a problem and this is where you go back to the whole thing about the 1
percent. You're using political power to accumulate more wealth, using your wealth
to create more political power. An engine of extraction whereby the spoils are
increasingly distributed: we get these very, very large bureaucratic
organizations and that's essentially how our economy works.
Herald: Great thank you. A: I mean, I could talk for an hour about
the dynamics, but that's that's basically at it. You know, you could call it
capitalism if you like, but it doesn't in any way resemble capitalism the way that
people like to imagine capitalism would work.
Herald: Great. Awesome. Questions from the Internet, please.
Q: How to best address this caregiver class when the context of the
proletariat is no longer given to awake their class consciousness?
A: How to address the caregiver when the proletariat is no longer what?
Herald: Please repeat the question. Q: How to best address the caregiver class
when the context of the proletariat is no longer given to awake their class
consciousness? A: Given to awake?
Q: I'm not sure what they're asking. A: Yeah. I mean the question is how do you
create a class consciousness for that class? Yeah. Well, that is the question. I
mean, first of all, you need to actually think about who your actual class enemy
is. And I mean, I don't mean to be too blunt about it, but the problem we have,
why is it that people are suspicious of the left? And people like Michael Albert
were pointing this out years ago, that one reason that actual proletarians were very
suspicious of traditional socialists in many cases is because their immediate
enemy isn't actually, you know, the capitalist who he rarely meets, but the
annoying administrator upstairs. And, you know, to a large extent, traditional
socialism means giving that guy more power rather than less. So I think we need to
actually look at what's really going on in a hospital, in a school. And I use
hospitals and schools as examples, but they're actually very important ones
because people have shown that in most cities in America now, hospitals and
schools are the two largest employers: universities and hospitals. Essentially
work has been reorganized around working on the bodies and minds of other people
rather than producing objects. And the class relations in those institutions are
not, you can't use traditional Marxist analysis. You need to actually reimagine
what it would mean. Are we talking with the production of people? If so, what are
the class dynamics involved in that? Is production the term at all? Probably not.
Why not? That's why I say we need to reconstitute the language in which we are
using to describe this, because we're essentially using 19th century terminology
to discuss 21st century problems. Both sides are doing that. The right wing is
using like, you know, neoclassical economics, which is basically Victorian.
It's trying to solve problems that no longer exist. But the left is using a 19th
century Marxist, you know, critique of that, which also doesn't apply. We just
need new terms. Herald: Thank you. I hope that answered
the question from the Internet. Microphone number two, please.
Q: So, the question is basically, to what extent can technology help? And the
subtext here is there's actually really lots of projects now whose function at
some level is to automate management and to the extent to which that can be molded
into removing this class that you're talking about or somehow making it too
painful for them to exist. And some of these projects are companies but some of
them are very independent things that have very soft Marx ideas, but with tens of
millions in funding. A: Well, that's the interesting thing,
that people talk about it all the time. And there's this, but this is where power
comes in, right? I mean why is it that automation means that if I'm working for
UPS, the delivery guy gets like tailorized and downsized and super-efficient to the
point where our life becomes a living hell basically. But somehow the profits that
come from that, end up hiring like, dozens of flunkies who sit around in offices
doing nothing all day. One of the guys, when I started gathering testimonies, I've
actually gathered several hundred testimonies of people with bullshit jobs
or people who thought of themselves as having bullshit jobs. And one of the most
telling was a guy who was an efficiency expert in a bank. He estimates that 80%
of people who work in banks are unnecessary. Either they do nothing or
they could easily be automated away. And what he said was it was his job to figure
that out. But then he gradually realized that he had a bullshit job because every
single time he proposed a plan to get rid of them, they'd be shot down. He never got
a single one through. And the reason why is because if you're an executive in a
large corporation, your prestige and power is directly proportional to how many
people you have working under you. So, no way are they going to get rid of flunkies.
That's just going to mean, the better they are at it, the less important they'll
become in the operation. So somebody always blocked it. So this is a basic
power question. You can come up with great technological ideas for eliminating
people. People do all the time. But who actually gets eliminated and who doesn't
has everything to do with power. Herald: Great. Thank you. And last
question, please, from microphone number 5.
Q: Can we maybe have one question from a non-male person?
A: Yeah, that'd be nice. Herald: Non-male person? Sorry, I am not
choosing questions based on stuff. We're kind of choosing all around the hall.
Q: Ok, have fun. Herald: Please, microphone number 5.
Q: Thank you for the opportunity to speak. I really like your description of a
paradigm or that people are stuck on production and consumption, and that you
would like to change the paradigm to a paradigm towards more care and freedom, et
cetera. And for me, it kind of sounds a little vague. And that's why I myself
think of basic income as a human right. As the actual mean to break with the current
hegemonic, macroeconomic paradigm, so to speak. And I was interested in your point
of view of that, of basic income. A: Well, I actually totally support that.
I think that one of the major objections that people have to universal basic income
is essentially people don't trust people to come up with useful things to do with
themselves. Either they think they'll be lazy, right, and won't do anything, or
they think if they do do something, it'll be stupid. So we're going to have millions
of people who are trying to create perpetual motion devices or becoming
annoying street mimes or bad musicians or bad poets or so forth and so on. And I
think it actually masks an incredible condescending elitism a lot of people
have, which is really the mindset of the professional managerial classes who think
that they should be controlling people. If you think about the fact that huge
percentages, perhaps a third of people, already think that they're doing nothing
all day and they're really miserable about it, I think that demonstrates quite
clearly why that isn't true. First of all, the idea that people, if given a basic
income, won't work. Actually, there are lots of people who are paid basically to
sit there all day and do nothing and they're really unhappy. They'd much rather
be working. Second of all, if 30 to 40% of people already think that their
jobs are completely pointless and useless, I mean, how bad could it be? It's like,
you know, even if everybody goes off and becomes bad poets, well, at least they'll
be a lot happier than they are now. And second of all, one or two of them might
really be good poets. If just 0.001% of all the people on basic income who
decide to become poets or musicians or invent crazy devices, actually, do become
Miles Davis or Shakespeare or actually do invent a perpetual motion device, well,
you've got your money back right there, right?
Herald: Great. Thank you so much. Unfortunately, that was all the questions
that we had time to. If you have any more questions, please, I'm sure that David
will answer them if you come up here. Thank you so much, David, for your time.
Please give him a great round of applause.
*Applause*
*Outro*
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