 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. The Revolte des classes soignante. Hello. Bonjour. Hi. That's great to be here. Pleasure to be here. I wanted to talk. I've been in a very bad mood this last week for the results of the election in the UK. And I'm very hard about what happened. And how to make pain 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 it gives results like what happened in the UK. Why there is none the less reason for hope, which I really think there is. In a way, this is very much a blip. Probably the most, 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 are vast shifts that are happening in the world in terms of central flash dynamics that the populist white is taking advantage of. And the left is really being quite flat-footed 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 to vote in the long run. Basically, the younger you are, the more determined you are to take the Tories out of the vote, the core action in the scene was 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 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. It seems, especially because traditionally people who either have been apathetic or have devoted 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. 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, some people put together an 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's party. 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 who are candidates and Scottish ones. And in fact, this is a relatively recent phenomena. 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 almost all young people coming in are voting not just for the left, but for the radical left. I mean, sort of the ran-on platform of that, but just two or three years before would have been considered completely insane and it's falling off the political spectrum altogether. But the vast majority of young people voted for it. The problem is that in a situation like this, the swing voters are the people for 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 in 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 characterised by administrative 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 things. This is a key sort of statistic with a kind of figure we're 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 just in the 70s, productivity increases, wages will go up too. And they largely went up together, this whole thing since 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 split. And since then, if you see what's going on here, productivity keeps going 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're talking about with 1%. The other point, which was key to the notion of 99% and 1%, was that the 1% are also the people who make all the political campaign contributions. These statistics are from America, which is an unusually corrupt system. But all of them, in private, is basically legal in America. But some of these are the same people who are making all the campaign contributions who have collected all of the profits from increased productivity and all the increased wealth. And essentially, there are 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, you know, since the 80s, everybody's been talking about the service economy. Well, we're getting them in an industrial to a service economy. And the image that people have is that, you know, you walk on from these factory workers to serve 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 shows 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 and care products, things like that is pretty much the same as it's always been. What's actually happening is that you've had a growth of two areas. One is providing, you know, what I would call caregiving and I would include education and health, but basically taking care of other people in one way or another. And the statistics, you have to look at education and health because they 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 and administrative supervisory work has gone up enormously. According to some accounts, it's gone up from, you know, maybe 20% of the population in say, UK or America in 1900 to 40, 50, 60%. I mean, the 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. 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, sort of people you meet when you're socializing with people with professional backgrounds. I keep warning into people at parties and saying, working offices and saying, I'm going to have to apologize, 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 who say, I'm an anthropologist, what do you do? And they'll say, well, nothing really. And you think they're just being modest. 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. 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 that he wrote something provocative, something you'd never know when you get published elsewhere. So I wrote a little piece called On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, where I suggested that 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 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, and 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, I mean, it's true. And eventually, someone did survey, you go, I think, and they discovered that 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? Can you imagine that? Waking up every morning and going to work thinking that you're doing absolutely nothing. No wonder people are angry and depressed. It explains a lot of social phenomena that people are 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. So you 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 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 if you have somebody else's time, 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. 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 twenty-five dollars an hour, you know? Well, yeah, they're providing useful services. 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 auto workers? And I realized that it only makes sense if there's a huge proportion of the population who aren't doing anything. They're totally miserable and are basically saying like, yeah, but you get to teach kids. You get to make stuff. You get to make cars. And then you want to taste this food. That's not fair, you know? It's almost as if you're suffering. You experience doing nothing all day. Is it self-validation of... It's like a kind of shirt that makes you justify your salary. Whereas people... And I actually hear people saying this logic all the time that teachers, you know, I mean, they get to teach kids. You don't want people paying 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. So you think that would be a more serious problem, right? Yes, 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. 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 for a doctor if everybody talks about... 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, where you're actually helping people in some way. Education and health are the two areas which show up on the statistics. Okay, if you look at the 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 and health and other services, basically caregiving in general, and so far as it shows up on the statistics, productivity is actually going down. Why is that? That's really interesting. I mean, we'll talk in a moment about what productivity actually even means in this context. 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. It's a fairly impressive looking graph there. Basically, that sort of giant mountain there is what's called the Bullshit Sector. There's absolutely no reason why you'd actually be using that many people to administer doctors. And in actuality, 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 as a professor. The amount of actual administrative paperwork you have to do actually increases with the number of administrators over the last 30 years. Something similar has happened. It hasn't quite as bad as this, but something very similar has happened in America in universities. The number of professors has doubled but the number of actual administrators has gone up by 240, 300 percent. Well, I'm more than that actually. So suddenly you have twice as many administrators as you have before. Now you would think that that would mean that professors have to do less administrative work to get more administrative work. Exactly. The opposite is the case. More and more of your time is taken up by administration. Why is that? The major reason is because of 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 Berkshire American university, you want to feel like an executive and they give these guys these giant figures 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, and 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 study. Suddenly I have to do learning outcome assessment where I describe what the difference between the undergraduate and the graduate section of the same courses will be. I'm basically completely great with 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 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 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 implicated, much more efficient. Productivity goes up. The number of workers go down. The number of payment of the wages are actually going way up in manufacturing, but it doesn't really make a dent in profits because there are so few workers. So okay, that we kind of... On the other hand, is the caring sector the exact opposite is happening? Is the organization 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 on the time allocation stuff. But really ultimately, that's to justify the existence of this giant army of administrators. 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 their time has to be spent. This is what the average company now looks like. More and more of your time ends up being spent sort of making people as happy and giving them an excuse for their existence. This is a breakdown I just wanted to 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% when what we did was 39%. That's got to be some kind of statistical anomaly because 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. Productivity is going down because people are just sort of working all the time to satisfy the administration. We need to bolster jobs to satisfy the bolsterization of real jobs. There's both a squeeze on profits and wages. There's more money when you pay your workers and you need to hire more and more people. So what do you get? Well, if you look around the world, where is labour action happening? Basically, you have teacher strikes all over America, 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 the 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. In New Zealand, there's all of the hospital administrators on these guys. Not only are they taking all the money, so we have to raise money for the workers, 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 class. The problem for the left is that most of those guys are in the same union, and they're certainly in the same political party. Tom Frank, part of 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 Blairites, left-wing parties, the left-wing parties, but people like Macron, all of these guys have essentially the head of parties that used to be parties based in labor unions and working classes by extension caring classes, as I call them, but have shifted to essentially be the classes of the professional, the parties of the professional managerial classes. So essentially, they are the representatives of that giant mountain of administration. That is their core base. I even bought a quote from Obama where he pretty much admitted it, of where he said, well, 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. We have at the moment, what is it, two, three million people working for Kaiser, what are we going to do with those guys? We have an efficient system. So essentially, he admitted that it is an intentional policy to maintain the marketization of health in America. He wants it less efficient and that allows them to maintain a bunch of companies and offices doing completely unnecessary work who are essentially the core base of the Democratic Party. You know, 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 is changing, you just got to deal with it. But the moment that the load guys and the offices were doing nothing or threatened, couldn't afford to leave it at that, they 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 themselves with the professional managerial classes. There is a split between the labor union base, which is a secret union represented by militant carers of one kind or another. And the professionals managed the administrators, both of whom were supposedly represented by the same party. Now, Brexit was a perfect issue to make the bureaucrats and the administrators and the professionals into the class enemies. Now, it's very ironic because, of course, in the long run, people who are really going to benefit from Brexit are basically lawyers, right? Because they got to rewrite everything in England. However, this is not how it was represented. It was represented by your enemies. I mean, they were killed racism, obviously. But there was also the appeal of bureaucrats who know nothing of your lives. So, it was identified as an enemy, the bureaucrats, Brussels, distant, and who were essentially the Tories in a doubt to maneuver 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 used this incredibly complicated constitutional means to try to block Brexit from happening. It was a very complicated situation to try to block Brexit. And it was fun to watch at the time on TV where all the friends, you know, like all these guys and wigs and strange people called flashbots and odd costumes appealing to all sorts of arcane roles in the 16th century. And it was great drama. It was like costume drama coming to life on television. But in effect, what it ended up doing was it enforced what was actually a radical party which represented sort of angry youth in the UK into a alliance with a federal managerial who lived by rules and his entire idea of hypocrisy of a set of rules of what was actually a radical party of a set of rules. This is very clear in America. And again, you can 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 from people who are owned by local investors like Goldman Sachs who obviously aren't paying politicians that kind of money unless they're paying a politician that kind of money if we don't expect to say yes, but it was perfectly legal. Everything she did was legal. Why are people getting so upset? And I think that if you want to understand class dynamics in a country like England or America today that phrase almost kind of gives the game away because people of professional managerial classes are probably the only people alive who think that if you make privately legal that makes it okay. But it's all about form versus time against content. Democracy is in the popular will. Democracy is a set of rules and regulations. Well, you know, that's fine no matter how happy these guys, that kind of mountain administrators are taking things that way. When they become the base of party, you know they are like the base of people like McDonald's 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 made him into a position that would represent, you know, 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 they actually seem to think of Boris Johnson as a regular guy the 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 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 they're born to every kind of evil 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 Johnson was clearly totally fake he fakes disorganization he's actually a very organized person according to people who actually know him but he's developed his persona this guy is all about content and reform and he's a sort of chaotic and disorganized and they basically play the role of being anti bureaucrats and they maneuver the other side and those guys basically drive you crazy the question for the left then is how to break with that so I have one of the 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 when people say their jobs are bullshit 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 it doesn't really benefit anyone there is a principle that ultimately work is meaningful if it helps people it improves other people's lives 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 a notion of production rather than caring 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 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 okay you can create your own lives but it's going to 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 with productivity so I was actually looking at these charts to come with a different productivity 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 productivity I mean everything is production productivity of real estate doesn't make any sense you're not producing any of this land that's it sir our paradigm for value is production most work is not productive most work is actually about maintaining things it's about care whenever I see talk to a Marxist theorist and they try to explain value which is what they always like to do they always take the example of a tea cup they'll say usually they're sitting there with a glass and a bottle of cup so we'll look at this bottle it takes certain amount of socially necessary labor time to produce this say it takes this much time this much resources there always some production of stuff but a tea cup 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 is really very gendered real work is like male craftsmen banging away or some factory worker making a car or something like that it's almost a paradigm for childbirth labor is supposed to be the word labor is very interesting because in the bible they curse at them to work and they curse eve to have pain in childbirth so there's idea 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 realize first of all think about the working classes not as producers but as carers 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 rich people just don't have to think about other people thinking 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 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 um think about it um I mean even if you're making a bridge you make a bridge as feminist constantly point out you're making a bridge because you care that people can get across the river um you make a car because you care that people can get around so even like production is a one subordinate type of care what we do is 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 um and certainly that is an important element in it but um 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 you know to the point of keeping giving them basic food clothing and medical care you can't really think of a prison as caring for prisoners right um care is more than that why isn't a prison a caregiving institution uh whereas something else might be um well if you think about care what is the kind of paradigm of caring relations a mother and a child right um a mother takes care of a child or parent takes care of a child uh so that that child can grow and be healthy and flourish that's true but in an immediate level the 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 um so a production consumption paradigm for what an economy is is a guarantee for ultimately destroying the planet each other i mean economy even when you talk about degrowth if you're working within that paradigm um you're essentially doomed we need to break away from that paradigm entirely care and freedom on the other hand are things you can like increase as much as you like without damaging anything um so we need to think what are ways that we need to care for each other more free and who are the people who are providing that care um and and how can they be compensated themselves of greater freedom and to do that we need to like actually scrap almost all of of the discipline of economics as it currently exists um 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 um there have been theoretical tests of the basic sort of fundamental assumptions of the maximizing individual that economic theory is based on it turns out you know they're not true it tells you something about the role of economics that um this has had almost no effect on economic teaching whatsoever um they don't really care that it's not true but um but one of the things that we have discovered which is quite interesting is that um you know human beings have actually a psychological need to be cared for but they have an even greater psychological need to care for others um or to care for something if you don't have that you basically fall apart that's why old people get involved um 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 um so what would happen to microeconomics if we started from that um we're doing actually a workshop tomorrow on the museum of care which we were going to um to imagine in Rojava which is um in north in northeastern Syria um where there is a women's revolution going on as you might have heard um but it's in places like that where they're trying to completely reimagine economics relation of freedom, aesthetics um 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 where essentially production work has become a value unto self in such a way that we're literally destroying the planet um 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 David thank you so much thank you very much David 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 um please if anyone has any questions lined 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 when you observe the productivity in healthcare going down do you have an explanation according to new libel 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 um 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 happening across the world equally in private sector and public sector um that's a long story but one reason seems to be and this is why actually I had managerial feudalism in the title is that the system we have alright is essentially not capitalism as it is ordinarily described you have a series of small competing firms it's basically a fantasy and it's especially 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 profits aren't coming from either manufacturing or from commerce but from rather redistribution of resources and rent so that um and when you have a rent attraction system it much more resembles feudalism than capitalism as normally described you want to you know if you're taking a large amount of money 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 and I mean I could go into the whole mechanisms but essentially the political and the economic have become so intertwined that you can 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% the wealth accumulates more wealth using your wealth to create more political power you have an an engine of extraction whereby the spoils are increasingly distributed within these very very large bureaucratic organizations and that's the subject of how the economy works great I mean I could talk for an hour about the job you can talk for an hour you can call it capitalism if you like but it doesn't in any way resemble capitalism in a way that people like to imagine capitalism would work great awesome questions from the internet please how to how to best address this caregiver class when the context of the proletariat is no longer lower, sorry no longer given the way 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 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. I don't mean to be too blunt about it but but I mean the problem we have why is it people are suspicious of the left and people like Michael Albert we're 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 rarely meets but the annoying you know administrator upstairs and you know to a large extent traditional socialism means giving that guy more power rather than less so you need to actually look at what's really going on in a hospital in a school and hospitals and schools as examples but they're actually very important 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 constellations 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 the production of people if so what are the last dynamics involved in that. Is production the term at all? Probably not. That's why I say we need to reconcrete the language in which we're using to describe this because we're essentially using 19th century terminology to solve 20th century problems and I both sides are doing that. The right wing is like you know neopascal economics which is basically Victorian you know it's trying to solve problems that no longer exist but the left is using 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. 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. Some of these projects are companies and some of them are very independent things that have very self-marked ideas but with tens of millions of funding. Yeah well that's the interesting thing that people talk about it all the time and this is where power comes in right. I mean why is it that automation you know means that if I'm working for UPS you know the delivery guy gets like tailorized and downsized and super efficient and you know to the point where our life becomes a living hell basically but somehow the profits that come from that end up hiring like you know 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 got there's 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 the bank and he estimated 80% of people who work in banks are unnecessary either they do nothing or they could easily be automated away. 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 that'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 all the time but you know 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. Non-male person. Sorry. Sorry I am not choosing questions based on stuff we're kind of choosing all around the hall. Please microphone number five. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. I heard that you like I really like your description of a paradigm or that your 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 etc. 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 that was interesting. Yeah well I actually totally support that I think that one of the major objections that people have universal basic income is essentially people don't trust people to come up with useful things to do 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 like you know 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 you know so forth and so on. I think it actually maps 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 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 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. Second of all 30 to 40% of people already think that their jobs are completely pointless and useless. I mean how bad could it be? 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 you know one or two of them might really be good poets you know. If like just you know .001% of all the people on basic income who decide to become poets or musicians or you know invent like crazy devices actually do you know become Miles Davis or Shakespeare or actually do invent a perpetual motion device. Well you know you've got your money back right there. 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. Thank you so much David for your talk and please give him a great round of applause.