Figure 8.4 Creation of Exam (Non-Managerial)

The critical thing about this diagram is that each of those additional lines represents an action that has to be performed, not by a computer, but by an actual human being.

on the political ramifications of bullshitization and consequent decline of productivity in the caring sector as it relates to the possibility of a revolt of the caring classes

Since at least the Great Depression, we’ve been hearing warnings that automation was or was about to be throwing millions out of work—Keynes at the time coined the term “technological unemployment,” and many assumed the mass unemployment of the 1930s was just a sign of things to come—and while this might make it seem such claims have always been somewhat alarmist, what this book suggests is that the opposite was the case. They were entirely accurate. Automation did, in fact, lead to mass unemployment. We have simply stopped the gap by adding dummy jobs that are effectively made up. A combination of political pressure from both right and left, a deeply held popular feeling that paid employment alone can make one a full moral person, and finally, a fear on the part of the upper classes, already noted by George Orwell in 1933, of what the laboring masses might get up to if they had too much leisure on their hands, has ensured that whatever the underlying reality, when it comes to official unemployment figures in wealthy countries, the needle should never jump too far from the range of 3 to 8 percent. But if one eliminates bullshit jobs from the picture, and the real jobs that only exist to support them, one could say that the catastrophe predicted in the 1930s really did happen. Upward of 50 percent to 60 percent of the population has, in fact, been thrown out of work.

Except of course, there’s absolutely no reason it should have been a catastrophe. Over the course of the last several thousand years there have been untold thousands of human groups that might be referred to as “societies,” and the overwhelming majority of them managed to figure out ways to distribute those tasks that needed to be done to keep them alive in the style to which they were accustomed in such a fashion that most everyone had some way to contribute, and no one had to spend the majority of their waking hours performing tasks they would rather not be doing, in the way that people do today.[217] What’s more, faced with the “problem” of abundant leisure time, people in those societies seem to have had little trouble figuring out ways to entertain themselves or otherwise pass the time.[218] From the perspective of anyone born in one of those past societies, we’d probably look just as irrational as the Phools to Ijon Tichy.

The reason the current allocation of labor looks the way it does, then, has nothing to do with economics or even human nature. It’s ultimately political. There was no reason we had to try to quantify the value of caring labor. There is no real reason we have to continue to do so. We could stop. But before we launch a campaign to reconstitute work and how we value it, I think we would do well to once again consider carefully the political forces at play.

---

One way to think about what’s happened is to return to the opposition between “value” and “values,” through which perspective, of course, what we are seeing is an attempt to force one to submit to the logic of the other.

Before the industrial revolution, most people worked at home. It’s only since perhaps 1750 or even 1800 that it’s made any sense to talk about society as we typically do today, as if it were made up of a collection of factories and offices (“workplaces”) on the one hand, and a collection of homes, schools, churches, waterparks, and the like on the other—presumably, with a giant shopping mall placed somewhere in between. If work is the domain of “production” then home is the domain of “consumption,” which is also, of course, the domain of “values” (which means that what work people do engage in, in this domain, they largely do for free). But you could also flip the whole thing around and look at society from the opposite point of view. From the perspective of business, yes, homes and schools are just the places we produce and raise and train a capable workforce, but from a human perspective, that’s about as crazy as building a million robots to consume the food that people can no longer afford to eat, or warning African countries (as the World Bank has occasionally been known to do) that they need to do more to control HIV because if everyone is dead it will have adverse effects on the economy. As Karl Marx once pointed out: prior to the industrial revolution, it never seems to have occurred to anyone to write a book asking what conditions would create the most overall wealth. Many, however, wrote books about what conditions would create the best people—that is, how should society be best arranged to produce the sort of human beings one would like to have around, as friends, lovers, neighbors, relatives, or fellow citizens? This is the kind of question that concerned Aristotle, Confucius, and Ibn Khaldun, and in the final analysis it’s still the only really important one. Human life is a process by which we, as humans, create one another; even the most extreme individualists only become individuals through the care and support of their fellows; and “the economy” is ultimately just the way we provide ourselves with the necessary material provisions with which to do so.

If so, talking about “values”—which are valuable because they can’t be reduced to numbers—is the way that we have traditionally talked about the process of mutual creation and caring.[219]

Now, clearly, if we assume this to be true, then the domain of value has been systematically invading the domain of values for at least the last fifty years, and it’s hardly surprising that political arguments have come to take the form they do. For instance, in many major American cities, the largest employers are now universities and hospitals. The economy of such cities, then, centers on a vast apparatus of production and maintenance of human beings—divided, in good Cartesian fashion, between educational institutions designed to shape the mind, and medical institutions designed to maintain the body. (In other cities such as New York, universities and hospitals come in second and third as employers, the biggest employers being banks. I’ll get back to banks in a moment.) Where once left-wing political parties at least claimed to represent factory workers, nowadays, all such pretense has been discarded, and they have come to be dominated by the professional-managerial classes that run institutions like schools and hospitals. Right-wing populism has taken systematic aim at the authority of those institutions in the name of a different set of religious or patriarchal “values”—for instance, challenging the authority of universities by rejecting climate science or evolution, or challenging the authority of the medical system by campaigns against contraception or abortion. Or it has dabbled in impossible fantasies about returning to the Industrial Age (Trump). But really this is something of a bitter-ender game. Realistically, the likelihood of right populists in America wresting control of the apparatus of human production from the corporate Left is about as great as the likelihood of a Socialist party taking power in America and collectivizing heavy industry. For the moment, it would appear to be a stand-off. The mainstream Left largely controls the production of humans. The mainstream Right largely controls the production of things.

It’s in this context that the financialization and bullshitization of both the corporate sector, and particularly the caring sector, are taking place—leading to ever-higher social costs, even at the same time as those who are doing the actual frontline caring are finding themselves increasingly squeezed. Everything seems to be in place for a revolt of the caring classes. Why has none yet taken place?

Well, one obvious reason is the way that right-wing populism and divide-and-conquer racism have placed many of the caring classes in opposite camps. But on top of that, there’s the even stickier problem that in many areas of dispute, both sides are supposed to be in the “same” political camp. This is where banks come in. The entanglement of banks, universities, and hospitals has become truly insidious. Finance works its way into everything, from car loans to credit cards, but it’s significant that the principal cause of bankruptcy in America is medical debt, and the principal force drawing young people into bullshit jobs is the need to pay student loans. Yet since Clinton in the United States and Blair in the United Kingdom, it’s been the ostensibly left parties that have most embraced the rule of finance, received the largest contributions from the financial sector, and worked the most closely with financial lobbyists to “reform” the laws to make all this possible.[220] It was exactly at the same time that these same parties self-consciously rejected any remaining elements of their old working-class constituencies, and instead became, as Tom Frank has so effectively demonstrated, the parties of the professional-managerial class: that is, not just doctors and lawyers, but the administrators and managers actually responsible for the bullshitization of the caring sectors of the economy.[221] If nurses were to rebel against the fact that they have to spend the bulk of their shifts doing paperwork, they would have to rebel against their own union leaders, who are firmly allied with the Clintonite Democratic Party, whose core support comes from the hospital administrators responsible for imposing the paperwork on them to begin with. If teachers were to rebel they’d have to rebel against school administrators who are actually represented, in many cases, by the exact same union. If they protest too loudly, they will simply be told they have no choice but to accept bullshitization, because the only alternative is to surrender to the racist barbarians of the populist Right.

I have myself smashed my head against this dilemma repeatedly. Back in 2006, when I was being kicked out of Yale for my support of grad students engaged in a teacher unionization drive (the Anthropology Department had to get special permission to change the reappointment rules for my case, and my case only, in order to get rid of me), union strategists considered a campaign on my behalf on MoveOn.org and similar left liberal mailing lists—until reminded that the Yale administrators behind my dismissal were probably active on those lists themselves. Years later, with Occupy Wall Street, which might be considered the first great rising of the caring classes, I watched those same “progressive” professional-managerials first attempt to co-opt the movement for the Democratic Party, then, when that proved impossible, sit idly by or even collude while a peaceful movement was suppressed by military force.

on universal basic income as an example of a program that might begin to detach work from compensation and put an end to the dilemmas described in this book

I don’t usually like putting policy recommendations in my books. One reason for this is that it has been my experience that if an author is critical of existing social arrangements, reviewers will often respond by effectively asking “so what are you proposing to do about it, then?” search the text until they find something that looks like a policy suggestion, and then act as if that is what the book is basically about. So if I were to suggest that a mass reduction of working hours or a policy of universal basic income might go far in solving the problems described here, the likely response will be to see this as a book about reducing working hours or about universal basic income, and to treat it as if it stands and falls on the workability of that policy—or even, the ease by which it could be implemented.

That would be deceptive. This is not a book about a particular solution. It’s a book about a problem—one that most people don’t even acknowledge exists.

Another reason I hesitate to make policy suggestions is that I am suspicious of the very idea of policy. Policy implies the existence of an elite group—government officials, typically—that gets to decide on something (“a policy”) that they then arrange to be imposed on everybody else. There’s a little mental trick we often play on ourselves when discussing such matters. We say, for instance, “What are we going to do about the problem of X?” as if “we” were society as a whole, somehow acting on ourselves, but, in fact, unless we happen to be part of that roughly 3 percent to 5 percent of the population whose views actually do affect policy makers, this is all a game of make-believe; we are identifying with our rulers when, in fact, we’re the ones being ruled. This is what happens when we watch a politician on television say “What shall we do about the less fortunate?” even though at least half of us would almost certainly fit that category ourselves. Myself, I find such games particularly pernicious because I’d prefer not to have policy elites around at all. I’m personally an anarchist, which means that, not only do I look forward to a day sometime in the future when governments, corporations, and the rest will be looked at as historical curiosities in the same way as we now look at the Spanish Inquisition or nomadic invasions, but I prefer solutions to immediate problems that do not give more power to governments or corporations, but rather, give people the means to manage their own affairs.

It follows that when faced with a social problem my impulse is not to imagine myself in charge, and ponder what sort of solutions I would then impose, but to look for a movement already out there, already trying to address the problem and create its own solutions. The problem of bullshit jobs, though presents unusual challenges in this regard. There are no anti–bullshit job movements. This is partly because most people don’t acknowledge the proliferation of bullshit jobs to be a problem, but also because even if they did, it would be difficult to organize a movement around such a problem. What local initiatives might such a movement propose? One could imagine unions or other worker organizations launching anti-bullshit initiatives in their own workplaces, or even across specific industries—but they would presumably call for the de-bullshitization of real work rather than firing people in unnecessary positions. It’s not at all clear what a broader campaign against bullshit jobs would even look like. One might try to shorten the working week and hope things would sort themselves out in response. But it seems unlikely that they would. Even a successful campaign for a fifteen-hour week would be unlikely to cause the unnecessary jobs and industries to be spontaneously abandoned; at the same time, calling for a new government bureaucracy to assess the usefulness of jobs would inevitably itself turn into a vast generator of bullshit.

So would a guaranteed jobs program.

I’ve only been able to identify one solution currently being promoted by social movements, that would reduce rather than increase the size and intrusiveness of government. That’s Universal Basic Income.

Let me end with a final testimony, from an activist friend whose political purpose in life is to render her own bullshit job unnecessary, and one of her fellow activists. Leslie is a Benefits Adviser in the United Kingdom, that is, she works for an NGO whose purpose is to guide citizens through the elaborate obstacle course successive governments have set up to make it as difficult as possible for those out of work, or otherwise in material need, to get access to the money the government claims it has set apart for them. Here is the testimony she sent in:

Leslie: My job shouldn’t be necessary, but it is, because of the whole long train of bullshit jobs invented to keep people who need money from having it. As if claiming any kind of benefit were not Kafkaesque, intrusive and humiliating enough, they also make it incredibly complicated. Even when someone is entitled to something, the process of applying is so complex most need help to understand the questions and their own rights.

Leslie has had to deal for years with the insanity that ensues when one tries to reduce human caring to a format that can be recognized by computers—let alone computers designed to keep caring precisely limited. As a result she ends up in much the same position as Tania in chapter 2, who had to spend hours rewriting job applicants’ CVs and coaching them on which keywords to use to “make it past the computer”:

Leslie: There are now certain words which have to be used on the forms, I call it the catechism, which if not used can result in a failed claim—but these are only known by those like myself who have had training and access to the handbooks. And even then, especially for disability claims, the claimant often ends up having to fight through to a tribunal to get their entitlement recognized. I do get a little thrill every time we win through for someone. But this doesn’t make up for the anger I feel about the colossal waste of everyone’s time this is. For the claimant, for me, for the various bods at the DWP [Department of Works and Pensions] who deal with the claim, for the judges at the tribunals, the experts called in to support either side. Isn’t there something more constructive we could all be doing, like, I don’t know, installing solar panels or gardening? I also often wonder about whoever made up these rules. How much did they get paid for it? How long did it take them? How many people were involved? To their minds I guess they were ensuring that the noneligible don’t get money… And then I think of visiting aliens laughing at us, humans inventing rules to prevent other humans from getting access to tokens of a human concept, money—which is by its nature not scarce.

On top of all that, since she is a do-gooder, Leslie can expect to make only a minimal living herself and the money to run her office itself involves satisfying an endless chain of self-satisfied paper pushers.

Leslie: To add insult to injury, my work is funded by charity trusts, a whole other long chain of BS jobs, from me applying for money up to the CEOs who claim their organizations fight poverty, or “make the world a better place.” At my end this starts with hours searching for relevant funds, reading their guidelines, spending time learning how to best approach them, filling out forms, making phone calls. If successful, I’ll next have to spend hours every month compiling statistics and filling out monitoring forms. Each trust has its own catechism and its own sets of indicators, each wants their own set of evidence that we are “empowering” people, or “creating change” or innovation, when, in fact, we’re juggling rules and language on behalf of people who just need help to fill out the paperwork, so they can get on with their lives.

Leslie told me of studies that demonstrate that any system of means testing, no matter how it’s framed, will necessarily mean at least 20 percent of those who legitimately qualify for benefits give up and don’t apply. That’s almost certainly more than the number of “cheats” who might be detected by the rules—in fact, even counting those who are honestly mistaken the number still only comes to 1.6 percent. The 20 percent figure would apply even if no one actually was formally denied benefits at all. But of course the rules are designed to deny as many claimants as can plausibly be denied: between sanctions and capricious applications of the rules, we’ve gotten to the point now where 60 percent of those eligible for unemployment benefits in the United Kingdom don’t get them. In other words, everyone she describes, the entire archipelago that starts with the bureaucrats who write the rules, and includes the DWP, enforcement tribunals, advocates, and employes who work for the funding bodies that process applications for the NGOs that employ those advocates, all of them, are part of a single vast apparatus that exists to maintain the illusion that people are naturally lazy and don’t really want to work—and therefore, that even if society does have a responsibility to ensure they don’t literally starve to death, it is necessary to make the process of providing them with the means of continued existence as confusing, time-consuming, and humiliating as possible.

The job, then, is essentially a kind of horrific combination of box ticking and duct taping, making up for the inefficiencies of a system of caregiving intentionally designed not to work. Thousands of people are maintained on comfortable salaries in air-conditioned offices simply in order to ensure that poor people continue to feel bad about themselves.

Leslie knew this better than anyone because she’d spent time on both sides of the desk. She had been on benefits herself for years as a single mother; she knew exactly what things looked like on the receiving end. Her solution? Eliminate the apparatus entirely. She is involved in the movement for Universal Basic Income, which calls for replacing all means-tested social welfare benefits with a flat fee to be paid to everyone, equally, residing in the country.

Candi, a fellow Basic Income activist—who also held a useless job in the system whose details she preferred not to disclose—told me she originally became interested in such issues when she first moved to London in the 1980s and became part of the International Wages for Housework Movement:

Candi: I got involved in Wages for Housework because I felt that my mother needed it. She was trapped in a bad marriage, and she would have left my dad a lot earlier if she’d had her own money. That’s something really important for anyone in an abusive or even just boring relationship: to be able to get out of it without being financially impacted.

I’d just been in London for a year. I’d been trying to get involved in some form of feminism back in the States. One of my formative memories was my mother taking me to a consciousness raising group in Ohio when I was nine. We ripped out pages from St. Paul’s Gospel where he was talking about how terrible women are and made a pile of them. And because I was the youngest member of the group they told me to light the pile. I remember I wouldn’t do it at first because I’d been taught not to play with matches.

David: But you did eventually light it?

Candi: I did. My mother gave me permission. Not long after that she got a job that paid enough to live on, and immediately, she left my dad. That was kind of proof in the pudding for me.

In London, Candi found herself drawn to Wages for Housework—then widely seen by most other feminists as an annoying if not dangerous fringe group—because she saw it as providing an alternative to sterile debates between liberals and separatists. Here at least was an economic analysis of the real-life problems women faced. Some at the time were beginning to speak of a “global work machine,” a planetwide wage-labor system designed to pump more and more effort out of more and more people, but what feminist critics had begun pointing out was that same system also defined what was to be considered “real” labor—the kind that could be reduced to “time” and could thus be bought and sold—and what wasn’t. Most women’s labor was placed in the latter category, despite the fact that without it, the very machine that stamped it as “not really work” would grind to a halt immediately.

Wages for Housework was essentially an attempt to call capitalism’s bluff, to say, “Most work, even factory work, is done for a variety of motives; but if you want to insist that work is only valuable as a marketable commodity, then at least you can be consistent about the matter!” If women were to be compensated in the same way as men then a huge proportion of the world’s wealth would instantly have to be handed over to them; and wealth, of course, is power. What follows is from a conversation with both of them:

David: So inside Wages for Housework, were there many debates about the policy implications—you know, the mechanisms through which the wages would actually be paid?

Candi: Oh, no, it was much more a perspective—a way to expose the unpaid work that was being done that nobody was supposed to talk about. And for that it did a really good job. Few were talking about the work women were already doing for free in the 1960s, but it became an issue when Wages for Housework was established in the 1970s—and now it’s standard to take it into account when working out divorce settlements, for example.

David: So the demand itself was basically a provocation?

Candi: It was much more a provocation than it was ever a plan, “this is how we could actually do it”—anything like that. We did talk about where the money would come from. At first, it was all about getting money out of capital. Then in the later eighties, Wilmette Brown’s book Black Women and the Peace Movement came out,[222] all about how war and the war economy affects women and particularly Black women more than anyone else, so we started using the slogan “pay women not soldiers.” Actually you still hear that, “wage caring not killing.”

So we certainly targeted where the money was. But we never much got into the mechanics.

David: Wait, “wage caring not killing”—whose slogan is that?

Leslie: Global Women’s Strike. That’s the contemporary successor to Wages for Housework. When we came out with the first European UBI [Universal Basic Income] petition back in 2013, that was Global Women’s Strike’s response: two months later, they put out a petition to wage carers instead. Which myself, I wouldn’t have a problem with, if they were willing to admit that everyone is a carer in one form or another. If you’re not looking after someone else then at the very least you’re looking after yourself, and this takes time and energy the system is less and less willing to afford people. But then recognizing that would just lead back to UBI again: if everyone’s a carer, then you might as well just fund everybody, and let them decide for themselves who they want to care for at any given time.

Candi had come around from Wages for Housework to UBI for similar reasons. She and some of her fellow activists started asking themselves: Say we did want to promote a real, practical program, what would that be?

Candi: The reaction we used to get on the street when we leafleted for Wages for Housework was, either women would say, “Great! Where can I sign up?” or they’d say, “How dare you demand money for something I do for love?” That second reaction wasn’t entirely crazy, these women were understandably resistant to commodifying all human activity in the way that getting a wage for housework might imply.

Candi was particularly moved by the arguments of the French Socialist thinker André Gorz. When I offered my own analysis on the inherently unquantifiable nature of caring, she told me Gorz had anticipated it forty years ago:

Candi: Gorz’s critique of Wages for Housework was that if you kept emphasizing the importance of care to the global economy in strictly financial terms, then there was the danger that you’d end up putting a dollar value on different forms of caring, and saying, that’s its real “value.” But in that case, you are running the risk of more and more of that caring becoming monetized, quantified, and therefore, kind of fucked up, because monetizing those activities often decreases the qualitative value of the care, especially if it’s done, as it is usually, as a list of specific tasks with set time limits. He was already saying that in the seventies, and now, of course, that’s exactly what’s transpired. Even in teaching, nursing.[223]

Leslie: Let alone what I do.

David: Yeah, I know. “Bullshitization” is my phrase.

Candi: Yes, it’s been bullshitized, absolutely.

Leslie: Whereas UBI … Didn’t Silvia [Federici] write or talk in an interview recently about how the UN and then all sorts of world bodies kind of glommed onto feminism as a way to resolve the capitalist crisis of the seventies? They said, sure, let’s bring women and carers into the paid workforce (most working-class women were already doing a “double day”), not to empower women but as a way of disciplining men. Because insofar as you see an equalization of wages since then, it’s mainly because in real terms, working-class men’s wages have gone down, not because women are necessarily getting that much more. They’re always trying to set us against each other. And that’s what all these mechanisms for assessing the relative value of different kinds of work are necessarily going to be about.

That’s why for me, the pilot study of Basic Income carried out in India is so exciting. Well a lot of things are exciting about it—for instance, domestic violence goes way down. (This makes sense because I think some 80 percent of domestic disputes that lead to violence turn out to be about money.) But the main thing is, it starts to make social inequalities dissolve. You start by giving everyone an equal amount of money. That in itself is important, because money has a certain symbolic power: it’s something that’s the same for everyone, and when you give everyone, men, women, old, young, high caste, low caste, exactly the same amount, those differences start to dissolve. This happened in the Indian pilot where they observed that the girls were given the same amount of food as boys unlike before, disabled people were more accepted in village activities, and young women dropped the social convention that said they were supposed to be shy and modest and started hanging around in public like boys… Girls started participating in public life.[224]

And any UBI payment would have to be enough to live on, all by itself, and it would have to be completely unqualified. Everyone has to get it. Even people who don’t need it. It’s worth it, just to establish the principle that when it comes to what’s required to live, everyone deserves that, equally, without qualification. This makes it a human right, not just charity or duct tape for lack of other forms of income. Then if there are further needs on top of that, say someone is disabled, well, then you address that, too. But only after you establish the right of material existence for all people.

This is one of the elements that startles and confuses a lot of people when they first hear about the concept of Basic Income. Surely you aren’t going to give $25,000 a year (or whatever it is) to Rockefellers, too? The answer is yes. Everyone is everyone. It’s not like there are so many billionaires this will come to a particularly large amount of money; rich people could be taxed more anyway; if one wanted to start means-testing, even for billionaires, then one would have to set up a bureaucracy to start means-testing again, and if history tells us anything, it’s that such bureaucracies tend to expand.

What Basic Income ultimately proposes is to detach livelihood from work. Its immediate effect would be to massively reduce the amount of bureaucracy in any country that implemented it. As Leslie’s case shows, an enormous amount of the machinery of government, and that half-government corporate NGO penumbra that surrounds it in most wealthy societies, is just there to make poor people feel bad about themselves. It’s an extraordinarily expensive moral game played to prop up a largely useless global work machine.

Candi: Let me give an example. Recently I was thinking maybe I’d foster a kid. So I looked into the package. It’s quite generous. You get a council flat, and on top of that you get £250 a week to look after the child. But then I realized: wait a minute. They’re talking about £13,000 a year and an apartment, for one child. Which the child’s parents in probably most cases didn’t have. If we’d just given the same thing to the parents so they didn’t get into so many problems they’d never have had to foster the child to begin with.

And, of course, that’s not even counting the cost of the salaries of the civil servants who arrange and monitor fosterage, the building and upkeep of the offices in which they work, the various bodies that monitor and control those civil servants, the building and upkeep of the offices in which they work, and so forth.

This is not the place to enter into arguments about how a Basic Income program might actually work.[225] If it seems implausible to most (“But where would the money come from?”), it’s largely because we’ve all grown up with largely false assumptions about what money is, how it’s produced, what taxes are really for, and a host of other issues that lie far beyond the scope of this volume. Waters are further muddied by the fact that there are radically different visions of what a universal income is and why it would be good to have one: ranging from a conservative version that aims to provide a modest stipend as a pretext to completely eliminate existing welfare state provisions like free education or health care, and just submit everything to the market, to a radical version such as Leslie and Candi support, which assumes existing unconditional guarantees like the British National Health Service will be left in place.[226] One sees Basic Income as a way of contracting, the other sees it as a way of expanding the zone of unconditionality. This latter is the kind that I would myself be able to get behind. I do this despite my own politics, which is quite explicitly antistatist: as an anarchist, I look forward to seeing states dismantled entirely, and in the meantime, have no interest in policies that will give states more power than they have already.

But oddly, this is why I can get behind Basic Income. Basic Income might seem like it is a vast expansion of state power, since presumably it’s the government (or some quasi-state institution like a central bank) that would be creating and distributing the money, but, in fact, it’s the exactly the reverse. Huge sections of government—and precisely, the most intrusive and obnoxious ones, since they are most deeply involved in the moral surveillance of ordinary citizens—would be instantly made unnecessary and could be simply closed down.[227] Yes, millions of minor government officials and benefit advisers like Leslie would be thrown out of their current jobs, but they’d all receive basic income too. Maybe some of them will come up with something genuinely important to do, like installing solar panels, as Leslie suggests, or discovering the cure for cancer. But it wouldn’t matter if they instead formed jug bands, devoted themselves to restoring antique furniture, spelunking, translating Mayan hieroglyphics, or trying to set the world record for having sex at an advanced age. Let them do what they like! Whatever they end up doing, they will almost certainly be happier than they are now, imposing sanctions on the unemployed for arriving late at CV-building seminars or checking to see if the homeless are in possession of three forms of ID; and everybody else will be better off for their newfound happiness.

Even a modest Basic Income program could become a stepping-stone toward the most profound transformation of all: to unlatch work from livelihood entirely. As we saw in the last chapter, a strong moral case can be made for paying everyone the same regardless of their work. Yet the argument cited in that chapter did assume people were being paid for their work, and this would at the very least require some kind of monitoring bureaucracy to ensure that people were, in fact, working, even if it did not have to measure how hard or how much they produced. A full Basic Income would eliminate the compulsion to work, by offering a reasonable standard of living to all, and then either leaving it up to each individual to decide whether they wished to pursue further wealth, by doing a paying job, or selling something, or whether they wished to do something else with their time. Alternately, it might open the way to developing better ways of distributing goods entirely. (Money is after all a rationing ticket, and in an ideal world, one would presumably wish to do as little rationing as possible.) Obviously, all this depends on the assumption that human beings don’t have to be compelled to work, or at least, to do something that they feel is useful or beneficial to others. As we’ve seen, this is a reasonable assumption. Most people would prefer not to spend their days sitting around watching TV and the handful who really are inclined to be total parasites are not going to be a significant burden on society, since the total amount of work required to maintain people in comfort and security is not that formidable. The compulsive workaholics who insist on doing far more than they really have to would more than compensate for the occasional slackers.[228]

Finally, the concept of unconditional universal support is directly relevant to two issues that have come up repeatedly over the course of this book. The first is the sadomasochistic dynamic of hierarchical work arrangements—a dynamic that tends to be sharply exacerbated when everyone knows the work to be pointless. A lot of the day-to-day misery in working people’s lives springs directly from this source. In chapter 4, I cited Lynn Chancer’s notion of sadomasochism in everyday life, and particularly the point that, unlike actual BDSM play, where there’s always a safe-word, when “normal” people fall into the same dynamic, there’s never such an easy way out.

“You can’t say ‘orange’ to your boss.”

It’s always occurred to me this insight is important and could even become the basis for a theory of social liberation. I like to think that Michel Foucault, the French social philosopher, was moving in this direction before his tragic death in 1984. Foucault, according to people who knew him, underwent a remarkable personal transformation on discovering BDSM, turning from a notoriously cagey and standoffish personality to one suddenly warm, open, and friendly[229]—but his theoretical ideas also entered into a period of transformation that he was never able to fully bring to fruit. Foucault, of course, is famous mainly as a theorist of power, which he saw as flowing through all human relationships, even as the basic substance of human sociality, since he once defined it as simply a matter of “acting on another’s actions.”[230] This always created a peculiar paradox because while he wrote in such a way as to suggest he was an antiauthoritarian opposed to power, he defined power in such a way that social life would impossible without it. At the very end of his career, he seems to have aimed to resolve the dilemma by introducing a distinction between what he called power and domination. The first, he said, was just a matter of “strategic games.” Everyone is playing power games all the time, we can hardly help it, but neither is there anything objectionable about our doing so. So in this, his very last interview:

Power is not an evil. Power is strategic games. We know very well that power is not an evil. Take for example, sexual relationship or love relationships. To exercise power over another, in a sort of open strategic game, where things could be reversed, that is not evil. That is part of love, passion, of sexual pleasure…

It seems to me we must distinguish the relations of power as strategic games between liberties—strategic games that result from the fact that some people try to determine the conduct of others—and the states of domination, which are what we ordinarily call “power.”[231]

Foucault isn’t quite explicit on how we are to distinguish one from the other, other than to say that in domination, things are not open and cannot be reversed—otherwise fluid relations of power become rigid and “congealed.” He gives the example of the mutual manipulation of teacher and student (power-good), versus the tyranny of the authoritarian pedant (domination-bad). I think Foucault is circling around something here, and never quite gets to the promised land: a safe-word theory of social liberation. Because this would be the obvious solution. It’s not so much that certain games are fixed—some people like fixed games, for whatever reasons—but that sometimes, you can’t get out of them. The question then does indeed become: What would be the equivalent of saying “orange” to one’s boss? Or to an insufferable bureaucrat, obnoxious academic adviser, or abusive boyfriend? How do we create only games that we actually feel like playing, because we can opt out at any time? In the economic field, at least, the answer is obvious. All of the gratuitous sadism of workplace politics depends on one’s inability to say “I quit” and feel no economic consequences. If Annie’s boss knew Annie’s income would be unaffected even if she did walk off in disgust at being called out yet again for a problem she’d fixed months ago, she would know better than to call her into the office to begin with. Basic Income in this sense would, indeed, give workers the power to say “orange” to their boss.

Which leads to the second theme: it’s not just that Annie’s boss would have to treat her with at least a small degree of dignity and respect in a world of guaranteed incomes. If Universal Basic Income was instituted, it’s very hard to imagine jobs like Annie’s long continue to exist. One could well imagine people who didn’t have to work to survive still choosing to become dental assistants, or toymakers, or movie ushers, or tugboat operators, or even sewage treatment plant inspectors. It’s even easier to imagine them choosing to become some combination of several of these. It’s extremely difficult to imagine someone living without financial constraints choosing to spend any significant amount of their time highlighting forms for a Medical Care Cost Management company—let alone in an office where underlings were not allowed to speak. In such a world, Annie would have no reason to give up on being a preschool teacher, unless she actually decided she was no longer interested in being a preschool teacher, and if Medical Care Cost Management companies continued to exist, they would have to figure out another way to highlight their forms.

It’s unlikely Medical Care Cost Management companies would exist for long. The need for such firms (if you can even call it a “need”) is a direct result of a bizarre and labyrinthine US health care system which overwhelming majorities of Americans see as idiotic and unjust, and which they wish to see replaced by some kind of public insurance or public health provider. As we have seen, one of the main reasons this system has not been replaced—at least, if President Obama’s own account is to be believed—is precisely because its inefficiency creates jobs like Annie’s. If nothing else, Universal Basic Income would mean millions of people who recognize the absurdity of this situation will have the time to engage in political organizing to change it, since they will no longer be forced to highlight forms for eight hours a day, or (if they insist on doing something useful with their lives) scramble around for an equivalent amount of time trying to figure out a way to pay the bills.

It’s hard to escape the impression that for many of those who, like Obama, defend the existence of bullshit jobs, that’s one of the most appealing things about such arrangements. As Orwell noted, a population busy working, even at completely useless occupations, doesn’t have time to do much else. At the very least, this is further incentive not to do anything about the situation.

Be this as it may, however, it opens the way to my second and final point. The first objection typically raised when someone suggests guaranteeing everyone a livelihood regardless of work is that if you do so, people simply won’t work. This is just obviously false and at this point I think we can dismiss it out of hand. The second, more serious objection is that most will work, but many will choose work that’s of interest only to themselves. The streets would fill up with bad poets, annoying street mimes, and promoters of crank scientific theories, and nothing would get done. What the phenomenon of bullshit jobs really brings home is the foolishness of such assumptions. No doubt a certain proportion of the population of a free society would spend their lives on projects most others would consider to be silly or pointless; but it’s hard to imagine how it would go much over 10 or 20 percent. But already right now, 37 to 40 percent of workers in rich countries already feel their jobs are pointless. Roughly half the economy consists of, or exists in support of, bullshit. And it’s not even particularly interesting bullshit! If we let everyone decide for themselves how they were best fit to benefit humanity, with no restrictions at all, how could they possibly end up with a distribution of labor more inefficient than the one we already have?

This is a powerful argument for human freedom. Most of us like to talk about freedom in the abstract, even claim that it’s the most important thing for anyone to fight or die for, but we don’t think a lot about what being free or practicing freedom might actually mean. The main point of this book was not to propose concrete policy prescriptions, but to start us thinking and arguing about what a genuine free society might actually be like.