 Hello, I am sitting here in the studio in the World Transformed with the excellent David Graber, who has just, I believe, been on a whirlwind tour of Europe, spreading the word of bullshit jobs. And I just want to start with that, really, just to say, because this started as an essay, right? And it's an idea that seems to have really struck a nerve. Yeah, I had no idea when I wrote it. I mean, I kept meeting people when I came here. I guess the way to understand how I wrote this is I don't really come from a professional background myself. I come from a working-class background. So I've always been trying to figure out what do people actually do in offices all day? What does professional life actually consist of? And I kept winding myself in situations here in the U.K. where I would meet people and I'd say, what do you do? And they would say, oh, nothing really. You know, they thought they were being modest. Sometimes they actually admit, no, they meant it literally. They're literally doing nothing all day. So I thought, how common is this? And a friend of mine was starting a new radical magazine, Strike, and he said, you got anything really provocative, you know, something nobody else would print, potentially controversial? I thought, yeah, I could do that. So I wrote this piece saying, maybe that's the reason why we're not all working a 15-hour day like we're supposed to by now. You know, we've created all this technology, like most of the jobs that eliminated and say the 1930s have been eliminated, yet we seem to be working, if anything, harder rather than last. You know, maybe they're just making up dummy jobs to keep us busy. It was basically a joke, right? But it just went crazy. I mean, like within two weeks it had been translated into something like 13 different languages. It's up to 28 now. Excellent. It's just come out in Persian. Apparently they have a bullshit jobs problem in Europe. Wow. I'm sorry, because it does seem to me that it picks up that category of kind of left-wing theory, Marxist theory in particular, that category of alienation, which is obviously kind of important in Marx, and then picked up throughout the 20th century philosophically as well, developed, and then kind of sort of seemed to disappear as an analytical framework for a while. Do you see them as resonant? I guess the last gasp of real proper alienation theory was the situation. But they're already overlapping alienation just misery. Yeah. And this is kind of more on the misery side, because alienation is you're separated from the product of your work. Here there is no product of your work. So I mean, I talk about the trauma of failed influence psychologically. It's the inverse side of the pleasure it being caused. At least an alienated worker has the knowledge that they did do something, even though they're incredibly frustrated, because their actions don't belong to themselves. But here their actions not only belong to someone else, but they don't even actually do anything. One of the interesting questions I think this brings up is that, like a standard strategic way of thinking on the left is to say, okay, well a worker can take a special kind of political action because they can gum up the machine of capital. When workers are organized together and strike, there's a real material tangible impact. In a world that's characterized by bullshit jobs and by these kind of extremely immaterial jobs, does it mean that we have to do a kind of rethinking of that sort of strategy? Well there are workers of very, very strategic roles, but a lot of them know. I mean, one example that people trundle out a lot is the banking strike in Ireland in the 70s. One of the guys who's an efficiency expert at the bank who wrote to me when I was researching the book, said that he thought 80% of jobs in banks are just completely useless. But then there's a question of whether the entire banking industry is useful. Because, as I think Rutger Bram pointed out, there was one point where they had a strike, I think it was in the same year, a garbage strike in New York and a banker strike in Ireland. In the case of the garbage collectors, within 11 days they'd brought the city to its knees. They basically had to give in to almost all their demands. In the case of the Irish strike, after six months they gave up because nobody cares. Turns out you don't really need banks at all. You can just write checks to each other and the checks will circulate and you just created money. So this question, because obviously I'm always thinking about politics and political strategy, and this question leads me to this kind of wider sense because we're here at the World Transformed, the big kind of festival really bringing together the different sides of a kind of left politics that don't always meet. I just want to think a bit about that with you. Strategically. Yeah. I think there's a very strategic message that comes from this. I think that what we need to look at is not the people who are trapped in already completely bullshit jobs, but the bullshitization of real work as a political issue. And this is coming up because, increasingly, one of the interesting things that people don't talk about in automation is that it makes manufacturing much more productive. It has the opposite effect on anything that even vaguely resembles care work. Anything like education, health, providing social services. Of course, as automation proceeds, more and more jobs are going to be doing that simply because you don't want robots doing that. There's a wonderful example I found from the tube strike a few years ago when a lot of Marxists even were saying, well, who needs ticket booths anyway, you know, if the capitalists don't need them to hell with them, you know. And they pointed out that, all right, fine, you know, let's go to a tube station with nobody working there. Let's just hope your child doesn't get lost. Let's just hope no drunk guy starts following you around. And they went through like, you know, 17 examples of what they actually do. So even a lot of working class work already is care work, a lot more than we were willing to acknowledge. And so as that becomes more important, we need to deal with the fact that, you know, automating that stuff is just an excuse to bolsterize it. And that happens because they're constantly adding more and more layers of parasitical administrators on top. I mean, nurses, like right now in New Zealand, apparently, nurses are on strike, and partly because they haven't got a raise in 10 years, but that's largely because all the money goes to the administrators and they keep hiring more and giving them raises. But it's also because those guys aren't really necessary. So to make some excuse for their existence, they constantly have to make up more and more paperwork. So like a lot of nurses, 50 to 80 percent of their time is filling out forums. They don't have time to take care of their patients. So they're actually... Yeah. It's interesting, though. I mean, the question of bureaucracy is always an interesting one and, like, particularly its history, right, because it kind of comes out in the French, like after the French Revolution when they're trying to say, okay, what we need is a state that's kind of transparent rather than based on, like, personal favor and this kind of, like, continually paranoiac, you know, courting influence. Was that promise ever fulfilled? I mean, there's a certain degree, I imagine, where, I mean, obviously, in personal structures, there are some areas where you definitely want to have in personal structures of some kind. And I don't imagine we'd ever completely get rid of that even in a sort of libertarian socialist society. But what we have seen is that, you know, this weird dynamic for the last, at least the last century, whereby every time there's a liberal reform meant to unleash the market and get rid of paperwork, it actually creates more paperwork and more bureaucrats that existed before. My favorite statistic about this is between, I think, with 1992 and 2001, the total number of bureaucrats, civil servants in Russia, increased by 25%. That was a during shock therapy. The economy shrank by something like that. They ended up with more civil servants that they had under the Soviets. Just mentioning libertarian socialism there, I guess one of the things to talk about here at the festival is that, you know, we have here, you know, a really strange change in the British left. People like you have moved from background in movements that have been kind of historically skeptical about institutional politics, about the politics of parties generally. I guess kind of, you know, owning up to the fact that maybe we were a little too broad or categorical about that denial. What do you make of that? Particularly here at the World Transform, you have the social movements butting up against the party form and thinking about what it means to work in that sense. As someone who has spent a long time in the social movement, what do you make of that, this kind of direction? Well, I think there's a lot of things to be very, very careful about. I mean, I think if we're going to win, and I'm speaking as an anarchist, yes, I want to win. I don't think a lot of people do want to win. I've come to the conclusion at a certain point that a lot of people, purity is more important than winning. But at the same time, I do want to need, I do feel we need to acknowledge that there's real pitfalls, that preserving a space, the prefigurative space where you're not in any way dependent on funding or political power is absolutely essential to what we're doing. On the other hand, if we do not form any alliances with the parliamentary left, then we're screwed too. I mean, one thing I find so inspiring about the UK is that the mainstream left, well, not the mainstream left. Well, yeah, I mean, the Blairites aren't left at all. So, yeah. In a way, Corbyn has become the mainstream left. The institutional left here actually understands that you don't want to co-opt, you don't want to simply absorb the extra-parliamentary left. You need to have people who are completely independent of you, creating those prefigurative spaces, opening up horizons and territories that maybe they can later move into. Also, you know, that just make them seem more moderate in comparison. I mean, the right wing has always understood this. That's why the right is doing so well in America. I used to yell at liberal so much, and it's like, don't you understand? Like, you can't actually screw over your radicals on policy issues if you already screwed them over on existential issues. That's true. Yeah, right. Of course, they're going to screw over their radicals on policy issues, but like they want them to be there. And, you know, if the left in America was as religious about the First Amendment as the right is about the Second Amendment, Occupy would still be there. You know, apologists would look totally different. So, you know, here we have people who understand that, but they don't want to absorb the extra-parliamentary left. And, you know, speaking as someone who is an anarchist and feels that it's absolutely critical that there be an autonomous extra-parliamentary left, that finds some way of complementarily working with people who are working within the system. I find that inspiring and incredibly, incredible relief. However, you know, there is the danger that at one point I actually had someone call me from the Corbin camp and suggest that I write an op-ed opinion piece calling on people to stop waiting on Corbin. That's excellent. Yeah, which is nice that they would do that, but on the other hand, it shows a certain danger that the very fact that you're mobilizing on the structure creates a certain passivity. So we have to figure out how to fight that and how not to co-opt even passively about realizing what you're doing. Organizationally, momentum is very interesting that way. Because when it was first founded, it was meant to sort of, on the one hand, sort of divert resources to and encourage people working outside the system. On the other hand, I'd reform the Labor Party for Move In and you can't use the same structure for both things. As it turns out, they really ended up doing the second thing. But I think that we need to look around the world of people who have successfully integrated those two bottom-up and top-down structures. Where would you look for that? Oddly enough, I think that that's something they've managed to do fairly well in Rojava. I mean, it's kind of surprising to say because it's a kind of unique historical situation. It's a place where you have the same, you have a dual power situation with the same guy set up both the top-down and the bottom-up structures. Basically, they're in a situation where, in order to be taken seriously by the international community, by aid people, by other powers, you have to have something that looks like a government. So they set up something that looks just like a government. It's got a parliament. It's got ministers. It's got all that stuff. You go to the office, you can get forms and they'll stamp documents for you. Internally, they don't do that. When I sort of test case the last time I was there I was like, are they really serious when they say they aren't a state? What do they do about cars? Turns out you don't need a driver's license. They only give you license plates if you're intending to leave the area. And they do have traffic cops, but do you know what they do? They're basically there to pull kids out of cars and say, hey, you're aid. You can't drive. So they have the top down. They have the top down, but they also have the bottom up the Democratic and Federalist stuff, or they have delegates on different levels. And what they insist on is it's not a state because anybody who has a gun is answerable to the bottom up structures and not the top down. So there's no monopoly, of course, of force. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's intriguing. I mean, the question, of course, people say is like, well, who has time to go to all those meetings? Who has time? Is there an answer to that? It isn't just alienation is bad. It makes you think. Well, I mean, I think that in places where there is a long standing tradition of direct democracy, there's two ways of doing that. Either you reduce working hours, I mean, you do have more time and you make it fun and people want to do it. Which is the technique used in traditional societies. They have like fun rhetoric. When I was in Madagascar, I mean, the rhetoric was considered so entertaining and so much fun that people would do little sets in between music, you know, if there's a concert. So like that big kind of sense of a thick social movement movement in sort of areas. Yeah, it was beautiful, it was poetic, it was fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Democratic sublime. You really put that guy down. But it was subtle. Yeah, that kind of effect. Yeah, you can make it fun. Or the other thing you can do is you just like, I mean, this is what happened in a lot of Kabut Sim, I know of. There's like a third of people who are going to be political junkies and they go to all the meetings and everybody else is like, yeah, whatever. But they know perfectly well that if they make a decision that other people don't like, those people are going to start sharing meetings. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's equally oppressive to insist people participate than to deny them, you know. I'd leave it up to people to decide what they want to do. But the knowledge that they could show up at any time is usually enough to make all the difference, you know. Brilliant. The Democratic Sublime. David, thank you very much for joining me. Oh, it's a pleasure. And we will, I hope, have you on for a longer interview on the show. I'd like to talk about the labor implications of bolsterization because I'm thinking about that. I believe there's a revolt of the caring classes happening globally and it faces real pitfalls because the professional managerial classes who are basically like the people doing the bolsterization and the enemies of the care workers are also the guys who dominate the mainstream left political parties. Excellent. Well, that was a preview for a Navarre FM discussion soon.