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This lecture marks the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the events that came to be known as May ’68, the most dramatic moment of what Immanuel Wallerstein has referred to as “the world revolution of 1968,” and I am here, I imagine, in part because of my own modest role in what he has also termed “the world revolution of 2011.”

So I thought it would be appropriate to consider some things that have changed between the two. Nineteen sixty-eight is often presented as the last magnificent gasp of the insurrectionary dream of workers and intellectuals combining forces to rise up against bureaucracies of both state and capital. Its aftermath saw the lighting of a kind of vast intellectual bonfire, onto which all the tenets of previous radical orthodoxy, and particularly Marxist orthodoxy, were thrown one by one: dialectics, alienation, emancipation, critique, above all, the notion that the proletariat, or probably anyone (the people, humanity itself), could be the proper revolutionary
subject—or even be said to really exist. This put those inclined to rise up against the system in the obviously uncomfortable position of not knowing precisely in whose name they are rising up.

Of course, there have been a variety of efforts to solve this problem, from the post-workerist “multitude” to the more recent 99 percent. But rather than offer a critical appraisal, I thought it would be more interesting to start by looking at the sort of movements that have emerged leading up to 2011—starting those I’ve been involved with myself, from the Alter globalization “movement of movements” to Occupy Wall Street— and in their immediate wake, to consider their common features, and to understand why they’ve taken the form they have. Generally these are not proletarian movements in the classic sense, though generally they contain strong working-class support, but neither have they been identity-based. Most are organized around an activist core that is fairly
typical of the composition of nineteenth- or twentieth-century revolutionary vanguards—that is, a confluence of rebel children of the professional classes, and frustrated upwardly mobile children of the popular classes who have discovered that acquiring a bourgeois education does not actually win one entry into the bourgeoisie. (I would be a textbook example of the latter category.) What’s really crucial, however, is the shifting nature of the primary constituency or support base for the movements, which was still somewhat opaque during the Alterglobalization movement, but had really become apparent a decade later, as the class of caregivers—that is, in the broadest possible definition, as anyone who saw their work primary as helping, caring for, or furthering the development or flourishing of other human beings (or, arguably, living beings)—what I called the caring classes, or the class empathiques (Nafe Krandi-Mayor) or coeurgoisie (Holly Wood).

 

I was particularly struck by surveying the “We are the 99%” tumblr page created in the early days of Occupy, where supporters too busy working to take part in the occupations could express support by holding up handwritten placards describing their situation, always ended with “I am the 99%”—there were several thousand of these and I once spent an afternoon systematically reading through each and every one of them, and discovering that not only were they something like 75–80 percent from women, the overwhelming majority of them were involved in teaching, health, social service provision, or some field that directly involved helping or caring for others. And the complaints expressed were surprisingly uniform: essentially, that if one insisted on pursuing a career that allowed one to care for others, one considered socially useful, or even not socially destructive, one is inevitably paid so little, and left so deeply in debt, that one could not even take care of one’s own family. This is how I first came to think of Occupy as “the revolt of the caring classes”—but it opens up a series of important questions about the changing organization of capitalism, the changing nature of work and assumptions about what is valuable about it, and of the composition of the workforce.

 

THE NATURE OF CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM, IF IT CAN EVEN BE REFERRED TO AS SUCH

Here I am afraid I am obliged to move very quickly over a series of interlinked arguments that I have made elsewhere and which, though they depart somewhat from conventional understandings, I will have to simply summarize rather than demonstrate in any way. I will simply beg my audience’s indulgence and list them.

1. ruling class—since the ’70s and ’80s, there has been a fusion of the upper echelons of corporate bureaucracies with finance, to which it had been previously opposed.

2. role of the state—since this new ruling class based its income increasingly on rent-taking, debt creation, and debt-trading
(“financialization”), it changed the relation of state and capital; no longer primarily a guarantor of the property rights that
allowed surplus extraction through the wage, the state increasingly played a direct role in that extraction (“by jural-political
means”) and this in turn in turn meant state and corporate bureaucracies not only expanded, but fused, until the point where in many cases it’s impossible to say where one starts and another ends. This was most dramatically illustrated in the “too big to fail” bailouts in 2008, but it has become a basic feature of the new economic order.

3. organization of the workforce—the popular discourse was one of the rise of the “service economy,” but in fact, the numbers
of actual service providers, in the sense of waiters or hairdressers, have remained effectively unchanged for the last
century at roughly 20 percent; what has changed dramatically is the number of clerical, administrative, information, and supervisory workers, which has expanded to well over half the workforce in wealthy countries over the last several decades. The remarkable thing about many of these jobs—and this includes whole industries that have ballooned, such as corporate law, telemarketing, lobbying, and university administration—is that the vast majority of those who work in such fields, at least in the lower echelons, are convinced their jobs are totally pointless.

 

This latter is the most surprising discovery of my own research on work, which was carried out at first in a relatively haphazard fashion,
less as part of my academic work than it was political in motivation. It had long struck me that many of the standard justifications for capitalist inequalities having largely evaporated (I’m referring here to arguments based on capitalism producing rising living standards for the poor, a growing and politically stable middle class, or rapid technological advance), it is largely held in place to moral imperatives, the most powerful and universally accepted of these being the moral power of work
and the moral power of debt. My research on the morality of debt, like that on contemporary forms of work, was essentially meant as political interventions: to try to understand the opponent’s strengths as well as weaknesses. What I discovered was that over the course of the twentieth century, most people in developed economies really have internalized the morality of work—that is, that anyone not laboring harder than they would like to at something they do not much enjoy, preferably under the supervision of a hard taskmaster of some kind; is not really a full moral person, and probably does not deserve the support of his or her community—this very moral impulse had produced a perverse and paradoxical situation where enormous percentages of the workforce were convinced they were employed at absolutely nothing, and that were their jobs to disappear, it would make absolutely no difference
whatsoever. The original piece I wrote in this regard, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” in 2013, was more in way of a thought experiment than anything else: I speculated that this was the reason Keynes’s predictions of a fifteen-hour work week never ended up coming about; perhaps, what Keynes called “technological unemployment”—which we’re all supposed to believe was a false alarm warning of something that never really happened—actually did happen, but that, instead of reducing hours and redistributing the necessary work, we had, collectively, instead decided to make up meaningless jobs to keep unemployment rates steady at 5–8 percent. At the time I didn’t much speculate on who the “we” in question really were, other than to observe that those running things were aware, and undoubtedly pleased, that, as George Orwell put it, “a population busy working, even at completely useless occupations, doesn’t have time to do much else.” The response was overwhelming and more than confirmed the premise: not only did the piece, published in a very obscure venue, go instantly viral, being translated within weeks into more than a dozen languages, but actual surveys followed that confirmed that, at least in the Netherlands and the UK, between 37 and 40 percent of employees in all occupations were convinced their jobs were completely unnecessary and pointless, and perhaps only half were entirely convinced their jobs served some viable social purpose.

The reasons for the rise of bullshit jobs are complex, but appear to be directly related to financialization: I have myself coined the term “managerial feudalism” for the endless multiplication of intermediate levels of administration, whether it’s the dramatic increase of administrative staff in universities, since reorganizing education on corporate grounds has largely meant shifting power to a new faux-executive class of administrators who immediately insist on each commanding a small army of subordinates as a basic mark of status, to the creation of new layers of functionaries in corporate middle management, the creative industries (producers, curators, etc.) whose main jobs often seem to be forcing actual producers to devote increasing proportions of their time to internal marketing rituals. The surprising thing revealed by my own research is the intensity of the misery and social suffering these jobs create—a suffering all the more acute because there’s almost no acceptable way to talk about it.

It also raises very interesting questions about popular theories of social value, because, of course, for a worker to believe her well compensated administrative position to be socially “worthless” means she believes there is some standard for measuring worth other than market diktat. In fact, not only does the market assessment of the value of different forms of work not correspond to popular conceptions of what they actually contribute to society, but there actually seems to be an inverse relation: with few exceptions, the principle seems to be, the more one’s work is seen as socially useful, the more it is recognized as helping others, the less one is likely to be paid for it. I should emphasize that this is not simply an effect of supply and demand—even though the initial instinct of economists, or those who believe our society really is governed by a market logic, would be to say that it must be. For instance, at the moment the United States has for some years been experiencing an acute shortage of trained nurses, and a glut of law school graduates. Yet the relative salaries of nurses and corporate lawyers remains unchanged. Clearly the real reasons for the price of labor, as with the price of most things actually, have little to do with market forces, and much to do with various forms of institutional power. But what I really want to draw attention to here—the really remarkable thing—is the degree to which people seem to feel that this is precisely as things should be. Perhaps the most well-articulated example of this are attitudes toward primary or secondary school teachers, who, it is often said, shouldn’t be paid too generously, because, after all, “we wouldn’t want people motivated primarily by money to be teaching
our children.” But this is seen to extend more generally: it’s not just that employers feel that, if there’s a task that anyone would conceivably do for any reason other than the money (for instance, translation work or graphic design) they really ought to contrive a way to get someone to do it for free; but that those who enjoy their work, or even are able to take pleasure in the fact that their work does indeed help others, shouldn’t be paid, or at least, not nearly so much—it’s only people who are working only for the money who deserve any appreciable amount of the stuff. It’s almost as if the old Stoic dictum virtus ipsa pretium sui, that virtue is (or ought to be) it’s own reward, has become a guiding principle for our economic life.

These sentiments have dramatic political repercussions. I genuinely believe it is impossible to understand the politics of austerity without them. In the UK, for instance, eight years of “austerity” have seen effective pay cuts to almost all of those who provide immediate and obvious benefits to the public—nurses, bus drivers, firefighters, railroad information booth workers, emergency medical personnel . . . It has come to the point where there are full-time nurses dependent on charity food banks. Yet creating this situation became such a point of pride for the party in power that parliamentarians were known to give out collective cheers on voting down bills proposing to give nurses or police a raise. The same party took a notoriously indulgent view of the sharply rising compensation of those City bankers who had almost crashed the world economy a few years before. Yet that government remained highly popular. There is a sense, it would seem, that an ethos of collective sacrifice for the common good should fall disproportionately on those who are already, by their choice of line of work, engaged in sacrifice for the common good.

One result is that national politics, in most countries, have come to be organized around—indeed, national life in a certain sense, to be held together by—a complex play of (often unstated) resentments. Those stuck in bullshit jobs resent those sectors of the working class who have traditionally productive labor, or whose work clearly helps others: hence, for instance, the strange ire directed, in the United States, against unionized auto workers or teachers when they have the temerity to demand decent wages and benefit packages, a rancor that never seems to be directed toward auto executives or school administrators. But at the same time, members of the working class have come to resent members of the intellectual and cultural elites far more than they do members of the economic elite. I’d long been puzzled by this fact—so regularly and skillfully exploited by right-wing populists. I think I cracked the riddle, at least to my own satisfaction, only by juxtaposing the hatred of the liberal elite with that other most effective right-wing populist refrain
“support the troops,” the unconditional adulation of—especially lowranking—members of the military. There seemed a sense that these were connected but on the surface, at least, there seems no obvious reason. Then it occurred to me: this was really a conflict over different conceptions of nobility. What we are seeing is a resentment of a class of people who are seen as having monopolized all those jobs where one could be handsomely paid to pursue some form of value other than purely material.

A repairman in Nebraska or parking attendant in Detroit, after all, could imagine a scenario in which their child might become rich—
unlikely though that might be. They found it impossible to imagine a scenario where their child might become drama critic of The New York Times, or an international human rights lawyer. And in this they were perfectly correct: the barriers are indeed higher. Those fields which are seen as cut off from the ordinary citizen are, in turn, precisely those
where it is possible to pursue “values” rather than mere economic
“value”: truth (journalism, higher education), beauty (literature, the
arts), justice (activism, human rights), charity, and so forth. Curiously,
what are called “value voters” hate that class which purports to have monopolized the pursuit of value, just as they celebrate the armed forces.
But this, too, makes sense: since, after all, if that repairman or parking attendant’s son was determined to pursue a career where he was, indeed, paid a living wage and benefits to pursue something noble, something other than money, what options are really open to him? Perhaps to work in the church. More likely, to join the army. This is, for instance, why the
particular animus directed toward Hollywood as the very epitome of this “liberal elite” also makes perfect sense: where once Hollywood was imagined as a magical place of potential social elevation, where poor farm girls go off to be discovered (it doesn’t matter how often this really happened, though it did occasionally, so much so that people imagined
it could happen), nowadays it appears to be dominated by an endogamous caste most of whose members can trace back generations of previous actors, writers, directors, and producers—which makes their pretenses toward a politics in favor of the little man seem all the more hypocritical to those who know they are permanently locked out of the worlds such figures inhabit.

I should add here that this also helps explain how and why racial politics takes the particular form that it does in the United States—and here the U.S. is, as it was in the earlier part of the twentieth century, the experimental ground, as it were, for certain forms of fascism that were later adopted in Europe and elsewhere around the world. Generally speaking, working-class immigrants and African Americans are the exception, and are not anti-intellectual in the same sense; most still see education as an honorable and legitimate means of advance rather than a mechanism of violent exclusion. This profound difference in orientation is one reason “working class” and “white working class” can become near-synonyms not only in the United States but so many other rich countries as well.