 He's an author, activist, and anthropologist, and he will be speaking about his talk from managerial feudalism to the revolt of the caring class. Please give him a great round of applause and welcome him to the stage. Hello. Hi. That's great to be here. I've been in a very bad mood this last week, owing to the results of the election in the UK. I mean, 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 I 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 room. But there's 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 vast shifts that are happening in the world in terms of essential class dynamics that the populist right is taking advantage of and the left is really being caught flatfooted on. So I want to make a case of what seems to be going wrong and what we could do about it. First of all, in terms of despairing, I was very much at the point of despairing. 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. Actually, I've never seen numbers quite like this. The 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 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 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 been 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's actually in 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 Labour 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, 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 just two or three years before would have been considered completely insane and it was 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. They're still thinking in terms of bosses and workers in 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 in way of background. This is a key sort of statistic which is the kind of thing we were looking at when we first started talking about the 99% and the 1% at 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 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? Basically it goes to 1% of the population and that's what we were talking about when we talked about the 1%. The other point which was key to the notion of 99 and 1% when we developed that was that the 1% are also the people who make all the political campaign contributions. These statistics are from America which has an unusually corrupt system but pretty much all of them, and 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 manage to turn their wealth into power and their power back into wealth. So who are these people 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 use to describe the changes in class structure since the 70s is really deceptive because really since the 80s everybody's 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 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 detailed breakdown here but they remain pretty much constant. And in fact I've seen figures going back 150 years which show that it's pretty much 15% of the population that does that sort of thing. It has been for 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 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 and health because they don't 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, according to some accounts it's gone up from maybe 20% of the population in say UK or America in 1900 to 40, 50, 60%. 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 essentially if their jobs didn't exist it 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 a 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 with people of professional backgrounds. I keep warning into people at parties and saying, well who work in offices and say, well 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 actually do all day? And very often they will say, well not much. Or you ask people to say, I'm an anthropologist, what do you do? And they'll say, well nothing really. And you think they're just being modest, you know? So you kind of interrogate them, a few drinks later. They admit that actually they meant that literally. They actually do nothing all day. They sit around and they adjust their Facebook profiles, they play computer games. They sometimes they'll take a couple calls a day. Sometimes they'll take a couple 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, well does your supervisor know this? And they say, yeah, I often wonder. I think they do. So I began to wonder how many people are there like this? Is this something, some weird coincidence that I just happen 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 was starting a radical magazine and said, can 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 essay 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 existed 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 and, you know, it's 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, you mean it's true? And eventually someone did a survey, you gov, I think, and they discovered that of people in the UK, 37% 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, like, what must that do to the human soul? Do you imagine that? You know, waking up every morning and going to work thinking that you're doing absolutely nothing. If you're, you know, no wonder people were angry and depressed. And I thought about it and it explains a lot of social phenomena that if people were just pretending to work all day. And, you know, it actually really touched me and 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 a 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, right? That must be horrible. So it made a lot of political sense. Why is it that people seem to resent teachers or auto workers? 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 an hour, you know? Well, yeah, they're providing a useful service. They're making cars, you're American, you're supposed to like cars. Cars is what makes you what you are if you're American. How would they resent auto workers? And I realized that it only makes sense if there's huge proportions of the population who aren't doing anything. They were totally miserable and are basically saying like, yeah, but you get to teach kids. You get to make stuff. You get to make the cars. 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 justifies your salary. Whereas people, and I actually hear people saying this logic all the time, that, well, 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 who 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's 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 as a result of this, there is actually an inverse relationship, and 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, how obviously your work benefits other people, and how much you get paid. I mean, 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, 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 are sort of collapsed in the term service, but are really actually totally different. One is the sort of administrative clerical and supervisory work, and the other is the actual caregiving labor, 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 and 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. I mean, 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 fairly impressive looking graph there. Basically, what that sort of giant mountain there is what called a 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 a number of administrators. Over the last 30, 40 years, something similar has happened. It 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're hired as executive vice provost or assistant dean or something like that, some big shot administrative position at a British or 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, the professor. So suddenly I have to do time allocation study. Suddenly I have to do, I have to do learning outcome assessments where I describe what the difference between the undergraduate and the graduate section of the same course is gonna be. Basically completely pointless stuff that nobody had to do 30 years ago 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, digitization is being employed to make it much more efficient. Productivity goes up, the number of workers go down, the number of payment that they, the wages are actually going way up in manufacturing, but it doesn't really make a dent in profits because they're so few workers. So okay, that we kind of all know about. On the other hand, in the carrying sector, the exact opposite is happening. Digitization 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, basically, 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 what 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 and said, in 2015, only 46% of their time was spent actually doing their job. That declined by 7% in one year to 39%. 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 bullshedization of real jobs. There's a huge, there's both a squeeze on profits and wages. These more and more money's 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, where is labor action happening? Basically you have teacher strikes, all over America, you have professor 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 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 the basic class enemy of the nurses, and I believe in New Zealand, the nurses actually 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 like Clintonite Democrats, the Blairite Labor Party, you can talk about people like Macron, Trudeau, all of these guys have essentially the head of parties that used to be parties based in labor unions and in 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 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, wouldn't 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, what is it, two, three million people working for Kaiser, Blu-Clarus, Blue Shield, all these insurance companies, what are we gonna 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 allows them to maintain a bunch of paper pushers and offices doing completely unnecessary work who are essentially the core base of the Democratic Party. I mean, those guys, they don't really care if they shut down auto plants, do they? In fact, they seem to take this glee, they say, well, you know, autonomy's changing, you just gotta deal with it. But the moment those guys in the offices who are 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 characters of one kind or another, and the professionals, managerials, 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 who are really going to benefit from Brexit are precisely lawyers, right? Because they gotta rewrite everything in England. However, this is not how it was represented, it was represented by your enemies. Well, I mean, they were an appeal to racism, obviously. But there was also an appeal that 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 remainders, who then used 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 where all trans sticks or all these guys and wigs and strange people called black rod and odd costumes appealing to all sorts of arcane rules from the 16th century. And it was great drama, it was like costume drama come to life on television. But in effect, and 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 sort of angry youth in the UK into alliance with the 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 get hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches by investment firms like Goldman Sachs who obviously aren't paying politicians that kind of money unless they're expected 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 wanna understand class dynamics in a country like England or America today, that phrase almost 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 okay. It's all about form versus 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, yeah, 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 party, 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's 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 ally with the people who were 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 Boris Alexander Defeffel 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 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 do they manage to pull off being populist in any sense? 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, Johnson is clearly totally fake. He fakes disorganization. He's actually a very organized person, according to people who actually know him. But he's developed this persona of this guy, he's all about content over form and he's this sort of chaotic and disorganized. So they're basically play 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 end is how to break with that. So I have, what is it, 15 minutes in order to propose how we can break with that? It strikes me 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, well, when people say their jobs are bullshit, you know, when people say that 37% of people who say if my job didn't exist, probably the world would be better off. I'm not actually doing anything. What do they actually mean by that? In almost every case, what they say is, well, it doesn't really benefit anyone. There is a principle that, ultimately, work is meaningful if it helps people and improves other people's lives. Thus, you know, carrying 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 in a notion of production rather than carrying. And the reason we have been outmaneuvered in the past has been precisely because of that. I could talk about how this happened. I think 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, if you look at the story of Prometheus, the story of the Bible, you know, the human condition, our fallen state, is one where God as a creator, we tried to usurp his position, so God punishes us by saying, okay, you can create your own lives, but it's gonna be miserable and painful. So work 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. They're talking about 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, I mean, everything is production. Well, it's productivity of real estate. It 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 talk to a Marxist theorist, whenever they try to explain value, which is what they always like to do, they always take the example of a teacup. They'll say, well, usually they're sitting there with a glass and a bottle of a cup. So we'll look at this bottle. Certain amount of socially necessary labor time to produce this. Say it takes this much time, this much resources. There are always some production of stuff, but a teacup or a bottle, you produce a cup once. You wash it like 10,000 times. Most work isn't actually about producing new things. It's about maintaining things. We have a warped notion, which really, it's very gendered, right? Real work is like mail craftsmen 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 curse Adam to work and they curse Eve to have pain in childbirth, but that's called labor. So there's this idea that 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, first of all, think about the working classes, not as producers, but as carers. The working classes are basically people who take care of other people and always have been. Actually, psychological studies show this really well. That the poorer you are, the better you are at reading other people's emotions and understanding what they're feeling. That's because 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 care, 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. Because if we're gonna 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. I... 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're making a bridge because you care that people can get across the river. You make a car because you care that people can get around. So even like production, is it one subordinate type of care? What we do as human beings is 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 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 keeping, 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 kind of paradigm for caring 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 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 degrowth, if you're working within that paradigm, you're essentially doomed, we need to break 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 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, right? 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. That'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 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 woman's revolution going on, as you might have heard. But it's in places like that where they're trying to completely re-imagine 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 bolsterization of employment, we're 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 re-imagine 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. 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 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 one. 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 a competition outcome that the hospital with less administrators wins? Yeah, well, one of the fascinating things about the whole phenomenon of bolsterization and bolster 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. Why? That's a long story, but one reason seems to be that, and this is why actually I had managerial feudalism in the title, is that the system we have, all right, is essentially not capitalism as it is ordinarily described. The idea that you have a series of small competing firms is basically a fantasy and it's especially, 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 extraction, so that, and when you have a rent extraction system, it much more resembles feudalism than capitalism as 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 of creation of endless intermediary roles which sort of grab a piece of the pie as it's being distributed downwards. It's, and 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, and this is where you go back to the whole thing about the 1%, you're using political power to accumulate more wealth, using your wealth to create more political power. You have an extract, an engine of extraction whereby the spoils are increasingly distributed within these very, very large bureaucratic organizations, and that's essentially how our economy works. Great, thank you so much. I mean, I could talk for an hour about the dynamics, but that's basically 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. Great, awesome. Questions from the internet, please. How to best address this caregiver class when the context of the proletariat is no longer low, sorry, no longer given to awake their class consciousness? How to address the caregiver when the proletariat is no longer what? Please repeat the question. How to best address the caregiver class when the context of the proletariat is no longer given to awake their class consciousness? Given to awake? I'm not sure what you asked about. Yeah, I mean, the question is, how do you create a class consciousness for that class? Yeah, 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 I mean, the problem we have, why is it 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 the capitalist who he rarely meets, but the annoying administrator upstairs in, you know, 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 you know, I use hospitals and schools as examples, but they're actually very important ones because in, 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 know, you can't use traditional Marxist analysis. You need to actually reimagine what it would mean. Are we talking with a production of people? If so, what are the class dynamics involved in that? Is production the term at all? Probably not. That's why I say we need to reconstitute the language in which we're using to describe this because we're essentially using 19th century terminology to discuss 21st century problems, and both sides are doing that. The right wing is using like, you know, neoclassical economics, which is basically Victorian. You know, 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. Thank you, I hope that answered the question from the internet. Microphone number two, please. So, okay, I guess, so the question is basically to what extent can technology help, and the subtext here is there's actually a lot of, 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 kind of 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 self-marked ideas, but with tens of millions of funding, so. Yeah, 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 and to the point where our life becomes a living hell basically, but somehow the profits that come from that end up hiring dozens of flunkies who sit around in offices doing nothing all day. It's not, you know, I've actually, one of the guys who I, when I started like gathering testimonies, I gathered several hundred testimonies of people with bullshit jobs, or people thought of themselves as having bullshit jobs, and one of the most telling was a guy who was an efficiency expert in a bank, and he estimated 80% of people who work in banks are unnecessary, either they do nothing or they could easily be automated away. And, but what he said was that, I mean, 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. You know, he'd 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 there's no way are they gonna get rid of flunkies. I mean, that's just gonna mean, you know, the better they are at it, the less important they'll become in the operation. So somebody always blocked it. So, I mean, 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. Great, thank you. And last question, please, from microphone number five. Can we maybe have one question from a non-male person? Yeah, that'd be nice. Non-male person, sorry. No, no, that person's just left, do you want to? Sorry, I am not choosing questions based on stuff. We're kind of choosing all around the hall. Okay, have fun. Please, microphone number five. Yeah, thank you for the opportunity to speak. I heard that you, like I really liked your description of a paradigm or that a few people are stuck on production and consumption and that you would like to change the paradigm to a paradigm towards more care and freedom, so on, 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, yeah, hegemonic macroeconomic paradigm, so to speak. And I was interested in your point of view on that basic income. Ah, yeah, 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 and won't do anything or they think if they do do something it'll be stupid. Like, so we're gonna 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 that a lot of people have which is really the mindset of the professional managerial classes who think that they should be controlling people because, okay, 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. Now, first of all, the idea that people, like 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 40% to 40% of people already think that their jobs are completely pointless and useless, I mean, how bad could it be? Like, 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 like, 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? 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 just take a few minutes to answer them if you come up here. Thank you so much, David Graber for your talk and please give him a great round of applause.