WASHINGTON STATE POLICE TARGET BLACK MARCH ORGANIZERS WITH ARRESTS

By Nathalie Graham, The Stranger.

September 5, 2020

https://popularresistance.org/washington-state-police-target-black-march-organizers-with-arrests/

On Friday morning the Washington State Patrol (WSP) arrested nine people on suspicion of disorderly conduct during a protest that shut down the southbound lanes of I-5, congested Seattle streets, and backed up traffic to Bellevue.

Marchers say they block traffic to disrupt people living their day-to-day lives, and to bring the Black Lives Matter protest to where those people are.

Last week Morning Marchers shut down the Ballard Bridge. Yesterday, they shut down the southbound lanes on State Route Highway 99. In this latest demonstration, a team drove cars onto I-5, slowly merged across all lanes, and then came to a stop on the road.

Today wasn’t meant to be “spicy,” like the Ballard Bridge or the SR 99 shutdown, Elisha Ewing, 23, an organizer with the protest told me.

The group gathered around 8:00 a.m. this morning in the shadow of the Center for Wooden Boats at South Lake Union Park. Seattle Police Department officers showed up even earlier to keep tabs on the march. Protesters formed the plan throughout the morning. If the march’s car brigade (what Ewing calls the “car chrysalis,” since it’s meant to protect the protesters) could evade the SPD, the march would shut down I-5.

After ducking and weaving through South Lake Union and Eastlake, the cars made it onto I-5 from the University District entrance on 45th Avenue Northeast. Once they stopped traffic, protesters exited the cars, signs in tow.

In front of the protesters was a wide open Ship Canal Bridge. Behind them, traffic started stacking up. For just over 20 minutes, around 40 protesters stalled traffic and spoke to the people in their cars about the racist history of the Seattle Police Department. An SPD patrol car was in the mix.

The protest parted to allow a woman to get through so she could take her dad to his radiation treatment. Some frustrated teens caught up in the traffic on their way to a shop on Capitol Hill grumbled about the delay, a woman visiting from Idaho felt like she was getting a real taste of Seattle, and a man going to play soccer was pissed.

Phillip Aaron, 75, a civil rights lawyer stood outside of his car watching the protest, his gloved hands gripping his cane. He’s in the middle of representing a Chicago family whose 18-year-old son was shot in the back three times, Aaron told me. He’s tired of seeing Black people killed by police.

“I’m with them 1,000 percent,” Aaron said in the middle of the freeway. He had just come from a funeral. “[The protesters] need to make it uncomfortable for everybody. I respect them. That’s a lot of courage. These are beautiful people.”

Soon after, the protesters packed up and rolled out. The demonstration was over.

Freeman, 26, drove the car I was in. Katie Neuner, 25, sat in the passenger seat. Both are Black. A marcher named Erica in her late 20s sat next to me in the back. As we crested the slight incline of the Ship Canal Bridge, Neuner, dressed in effervescent green pants, euphorically climbed up through the sunroof to look at the traffic snaking behind the march. And then we saw the blockade of WSP vehicles. Neuner sat back down. Freeman slowed, driving toward the shoulder.

WSP troopers approached the car and told Freeman to step out of the vehicle. One said he was under arrest for obstructing traffic. Passengers were free to leave and exit the freeway, troopers said.

Freeman refused to exit the car. Four troopers, who were were not wearing masks, reached for him. Erica, a white woman, pushed her way between them, yelling. One trooper slammed his palm into Erica’s face, pushing her back. The troopers wrestled Freeman out of the car. Neuner jumped out of the car, screaming for them to stop. Erica grabbed one of the march’s walkie talkies before a trooper could confiscate it. The trooper arrested her.




WSP arrested every Morning Marcher they could identify, and they impounded all the arrested drivers’ vehicles. At least two white women who drove as part of the protest this morning avoided arrest. They told me they were not even stopped.

After the arrests, Marchers regrouped on the side of I-5 on Eastlake Boulevard. At least 12 WSP cars arrived on the scene with multiple tow trucks. Traffic remained stalled significantly longer than protesters planned due to the WSP response. One officer said the response was proportional because “people get killed when you block the freeway.” He may have been referencing Summer Taylor. Taylor was killed on July 4 when a driver plowed into a group of protesters on I-5.

Because police arrested these protesters on a Friday, other marchers fear they won’t be released from jail until after Labor Day. However, the arrests will not deter the march from happening every day, according to Ewing.

“They got some of our people, our cars, our property,” Ewing said, “But we’ll be back at it. I’m literally breathing right now, and that’s protesting.”

Bill Barr Knows That Voting Twice Is A Crime

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-lXcSiAIyU&ab_channel=act.tv

VENEZUELAN BUSINESSMAN ARRESTED AND TORTURED AT US DIRECTION

https://popularresistance.org/venexuelan-businessman-tortured/

By La IguanaTV.

September 5, 2020
| EDUCATE!




Note: Alex Saab is a businessman who was arrested by Interpol at the direction of the United States. Saab is accused of violating the illegal US sanctions against Venezuela for his work to keep the Venezuean CLAP program functioning. The Venezuelan CLAP program delivers food and other kitchen necessities at very low prices to more than 6 million Venezuelan households, more than 20 million people, every month. KZ
Alex Saab: “I Was Tortured To Testify Against President Maduro And Sign My Voluntary Extradition To The US.”

The businessman Álex Saab has said through a letter that he is being tortured daily by agents paid by the United States to make false statements against the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, and to sign his “voluntary” extradition to the North American country.

The Spanish newspaper El Mundo reported this Wednesday, September 2, that it had “exclusive” access to a letter written by Saab from the cell where he is being held irregularly on the African island of Cape Verde, a country that detained him at the request of the United States without respecting his diplomatic immunity and legal international procedures.

“The United States has four employees who enter my cell every night and beat me to make false statements against Maduro (…) I have been tortured to testify against Nicolás Maduro and sign my voluntary extradition to the United States,” says part of the extracts of the letter reviewed by the Spanish media.

In the letter, Saab recalls that he is a special envoy from Venezuela to Russia and Iran, which is why he has diplomatic immunity and demands his release.

The businessman highlights that despite the torture to which he is subjected daily, he will not accept under any circumstances that they force him to tell lies about President Maduro, much less that he be transferred to the United States.

“I was tortured for two days to make me sign a statement and I refused (…) The purpose of these criminals is for me to sign the voluntary extradition to the United States and make false statements against President Maduro and his family,” says Saab, who adds that “not even with blood” is he willing to “sign those lies and slander against a president who is fighting to save his people in the midst of an inhuman blockade.”

The government of Donald Trump accuses Saab, without having proof, of alleged laundering of 350 million dollars from “acts of corruption” that it attributes to the Venezuelan president through the American financial system.

In reality, Saab is a businessman that has helped the Venezuelan government to circumvent US sanctions and keep alive the international food supply for the CLAP program, a government program that delivers food almost for free to more than 6 million Venezuelan households every month.

Under these weak allegations, the businessman was arrested on June 12 when his plane stopped to refuel at the Amilcar Cabral international airport on the island of Sal, the most important in Cape Verde.

The arrest came at the request of the United States, despite the fact that the Interpol alert was issued a day later by Interpol.

In fact, Saab’s defense maintains that Interpol’s warrant is false because it is dated one day after his arrest and therefore considers it to be invalid.

“I have been a diplomat since April 2018 as a special envoy of Venezuela for Russia and Iran with diplomatic inviolability and immunity and I demand my immediate release,” Saab claims in the letter, where he reiterated that he was “arbitrarily detained in Cape Verde and taken off the plane.”

“I was going to Iran on an official visit in search of food, medicine, and gasoline to alleviate a crisis worsened by the empire (…) the gasoline already arrived in Venezuela, as all the media announced, arousing even more hatred from the United States,” emphasizes the businessman.

HALF Of Americans Live In Fear Of Medical Bankruptcy

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX6Tptpf_uw

THE OPPOSITE OF A CYNIC: DAVID GRAEBER, 1961-2020

By James Butler, Novara Media.

September 5, 2020

https://popularresistance.org/the-opposite-of-a-cynic-david-graeber-1961-2020/

What Is The Opposite Of A Cynic?

I have been wondering about this question since I heard the news of David Graeber’s death yesterday. I haven’t quite been able to come up with an answer: believer, idealist, optimist? All of those words capture something of his character, though all of them sound too much like happy accidents of temperament. Put it like this, then: a cynic is someone for whom the world is reducible to a set of base motivations – violence, acquisitiveness, self-advancement – and who is determined to see this ‘truth’ behind the most varied of phenomena, and who often acts to ensure that this is the case. In doing so, the cynic believes he will at least escape being disappointed by the world, although the misery and poison he carries around with him can make one wonder how effective an escape it really is.

David was the opposite of this: a kind of anti-cynic, at pains to point out how common acts of altruism, mutual support, sharing and solidarity were, and that their absence from accounts of the world – because they were invisible to, or undervalued by, the people who wrote those accounts – was intensely political. The motivation for that exclusion on the right might be thought obvious: those acts don’t fit comfortably with the contemporary capitalist conception of the human being, a perpetually value-maximising agent of economic exchange. David might also point out how fragile that conception is – why else must it so frequently be backed up and restated in advertising and mass media? – but also that it has gradually supplanted an older conservatism which recognised a place for non-market mutual support, especially if it could be subordinated, domesticated and kept in its proper place. That this secret history of solidarity should be frequently invisible to the left, as well, would often puzzle him: perhaps it was the result of unconscious acculturation in capitalist society, or perhaps the intellectual legacy of a tilt to economism on the British left. Perhaps it was simply a fear of looking trivial. Whatever its sources, David often pointed out that it diminished our accounts of politics, made them neater, more arid and less interesting than they actually were.

Like many of my political generation, I first met David in an occupied building: in my case a central London townhouse, squatted by activists to host the ‘Really Free School’, a kind of anarchic permanent festival of mutual education, ‘free’ in all of its senses. It was a hot time: the sudden eruption of the student movement in the UK, Tahrir Square and the Arab Spring. Few of us got much sleep that winter. One evening a few of us were speculating about what the future might look like: if we were successful – ‘we’ in the broadest of senses – if we weren’t, what the world might look like in ten years, in fifty. Hot political moments can be like that, the imagination takes wing, and can flit between utopia and dystopia. It’s not baseless speculation, either: what you think about the future helps stick a movement together, it tells you a lot about your comrades. I don’t remember when the funny-voiced American joined the conversation, but I do remember his interest in what everyone said, his ability to take someone else’s observation and find a richness in it, an unexpected direction from it, that they themselves hadn’t quite suspected was there. It was a generous form of teaching, all the more so for not advertising itself as teaching. It wasn’t until later in the evening as we were sitting on the pavement eating chips and he started talking about Madagascar that I realised who he was. Lots of people have that sort of story about David.

That explains why, when I think of David, I think of him sitting with unstinting attention at the back of an occupation, or catching sight of him anonymous in the throng of a demonstration, or relating some surely impossible activist scheme with a twinkling enthusiasm, just enough to convince you that he might be able to pull it off. I think he relished the success of his later work, and the audience it gave him – he wasn’t a fan of marginality for its own sake. Though he deplored the alternating spasms of adulation and denunciation any ‘public intellectual’ now receives on the internet, the prickliness with which he could argue back was rarely evident in person. The most uncomfortable I ever saw him look was on a panel expounding the virtues of the Occupy movement: after all, he said, he was the only one of those speaking about it who had actually bothered to turn up. His sources of hope were always a lot closer to the street than the seminar room. I can almost hear him over my shoulder as I type this, wondering if, well, the street couldn’t be a seminar room.

Much will be written about the intellectual legacy David leaves, especially the later books: Debt, The Utopia of Rules, Bullshit Jobs. He was a gifted popular communicator, who neither sought to impress his reader with obscurity, nor condescended to them because he judged them incapable of thought. He had a gift for explanation, such that reading him was often like grasping an obvious truth – though one that, until you read him, had eluded you. Has a political moment – spanning labour relations, systems of value and mass culture – ever been summed up more pithily than in the phrase ‘bullshit jobs’? His work often proceeded in great leaps, sparkling lines of inference and speculation between more careful scholarly sifting; it could earn him occasional academic reproach, sometimes from those convinced the era of ‘big’ books, attempts to really wrestle with fundamental questions, was over. From some of his critics you could get the sense that history was over, save the marginalia: David didn’t think that, and thought we needed big, daring books – thinking that dared to make leaps – to move forward.

But it is the brace of earlier books – Direct Action: An Ethnography and Possibilities – that I really love. Brought out via an anarchist publisher, between the two volumes there is material for probably five separate academic monographs, provided he muffled the political conclusions and cut the most interesting reflections. Both books were real boons when, in the miserable gully between the unwinding of the Iraq war, the financial crash, and the return of the Conservative Party to government, I was trying to find both a serious way of thinking about politics and some small crumb of hope. The direct action book, in particular, is an extraordinary exercise in theory in its best sense: that of looking at the world, and the way people act in it, and thinking about it very hard – in order to change it. It is simultaneously a loving record of a protest movement, a reflection on force and compulsion in all its forms, the meaning of democracy, and the many varied hues of the radical left – a force, as he put it disarmingly, ‘dedicated to the proposition that since human beings create and recreate the world every day, there is no inherent reason why they should not be able to create one we actually like’. The book has a fundamental, unshakeable optimism to it: that change really is possible, and in fact is inevitable. That means what we choose to do politically, right now, actually matters.

That conviction was what led David to picket lines for cleaners, unionisation drives for graduate students, Kurdish solidarity demonstrations and student occupations, as much as it ran like a red thread through all of his intellectual work. He paid the price for living his convictions in the US, where he lost jobs for it; I’m sure I’m not alone in the UK for being grateful it led to his migration here. Unlike many tenured radicals, his positions were not adopted for intellectual fashion or frisson: he did not retreat from them under pressure from the organs of respectability and professional decorum, but nor did he inflate them into perfectionism, piety or puritanism. It was surprising to some that an avowed anarchist should fight so hard for the Labour party under Corbyn, but it shouldn’t have been: he saw that that was where left politics was happening in the UK, even while retaining a healthy scepticism for the dead hand of parliamentarism. Why would he not go where the struggle is?

Novara Media would likely not exist without David Graeber: he helped give us the confidence to start out, and the conviction that left media – and especially left media that is able to think for itself – actually matters. It is no accident that Direct Action ends with a chapter on the imagination, a weapon he thought the left too often let rust through disuse; he reminded us that politics does not involve merely the calculation of seat numbers or a checklist of swing voters’ useful prejudices, but that it encompasses the whole span of human being, its yearning, loathing, contradictory, dreaming mess – and that it is usually from those messy corners that revolutions are sparked. Every interview with him involved the thrill of co-thinking, of keeping up as he hurtled along around speculative corners and digressions. We had our last recorded conversation after having not seen each other for some while: I wish I’d kept the tape running as we chatted for some hours afterwards. I confessed that I felt my innate pessimism rising again: he chided me by saying that he didn’t really understand why so many leftists seemed to think of themselves as pessimists. “After all, we all do incredibly, insanely optimistic things all the time”. Campaigning, arguing, protesting, even voting – trying to intervene wherever, however we can: “We just seem to have forgotten the optimism that’s underneath them.”

It will be harder to recover that optimism without him. We have his books, and one more to come, though the many he left yet to be written, that only exist as ideas shared between comrades and friends, jotted down hazily after some helter-skelter chat after a demonstration – those will have to be written now by other hands. Even more important, I think, than the books and essays is retaining sight of the horizon to which David was so closely trained, and his method for thinking, which combined seeing things as they really are along with the conviction that they can be otherwise. He believed, fundamentally, in human emancipation. At the end of Debt, he writes that the coming economic transformation, like previous epochal shifts, could be apprehended as catastrophe – certainly it will if we fail to recover our sense of ourselves as historical actors, something he saw as being increasingly and deliberately effaced. Debt, he says, is ‘just a promise corrupted by math and violence’. He wanted that book to throw open new perspectives, to push us to ‘think with a breadth and grandeur appropriate to the times’. What kind of promises might truly free human beings make to one another? I promise you David: we will try to find out.

Imagining a World With No Bullshit Jobs

Author David Graeber passed away several days ago. We are reprinting this interview with him about his book, "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

September 5, 2020 David Graeber, Chris Brooks ROAR




https://portside.org/2020-09-05/imagining-world-no-bullshit-jobs




Is your job pointless? Do you feel that your position could be eliminated and everything would continue on just fine? Maybe, you think, society would even be a little better off if your job never existed?

If your answer to these questions is “yes,” then take solace. You are not alone. As much as half the work that the working population engages in every day could be considered pointless, says David Graeber, Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and author of Bullshit Jobs: A Theory.

According to Graeber, the same free market policies that have made life and work more difficult for so many working people over the past few decades have simultaneously produced more highly paid managers, telemarketers, insurance company bureaucrats, lawyers and lobbyists who do nothing useful all day. Labor journalist Chris Brooks interviewed David Graeber to learn how so many pointless jobs came to exist and what it means for labor activists.
You make a distinction between bullshit jobs and shit jobs in your book. Can you talk a little bit about the distinction between the two?

Well it’s fairly straightforward: shit jobs are just bad jobs. Ones you’d never want to have. Back-breaking, underpaid, unappreciated, people who are treated without dignity and respect… The thing is for the most part, shit jobs aren’t bullshit, in the sense of pointless, nonsensical, because actually they usually involve doing something that genuinely needs to be done: driving people around, building things, taking care of people, cleaning up after them…

Bullshit jobs are most often paid quite well, involve nice benefit packages, you’re treated like you’re important and actually are doing something that needs to be done — but in fact, you know you’re not. So in that way they’re typically opposites.
How many of these bullshit jobs do you think could be eliminated and what kind of impact could that have on society?

Well pretty much all of them — that’s kind of the whole point. Bullshit jobs are ones where the person doing them secretly believes that if the job (or even sometimes the entire industry) were to disappear, it would make no difference — or perhaps, as in the case of say telemarketers, lobbyists, or many corporate law firms, the world would be a better place.

And that’s not all: think of all the people doing real work in support of bullshit jobs, cleaning their office buildings, doing security or pest control for them, looking after the psychological and social damage done to human beings by people all working too hard on nothing. I’m sure we could easily eliminate half the work we’re doing and that would have major positive effects on everything from art and culture to climate change.
I was fascinated by your connecting the rise of bullshit jobs with the divorce between worker productivity and pay. Can you explain this process and how it has developed over the past few decades?

To be honest I’m not sure how new a thing it really is. The point wasn’t so much about productivity, in the economic sense, as social benefit. If someone is cleaning, or nursing, or cooking or driving a bus, you know exactly what they’re doing and why it’s important. This is not at all so clear for a brand manager or financial consultant. There was always something of an inverse relation between the usefulness of a given form of labor, and compensation. There are a few well-known exceptions like doctors or pilots but generally it holds true.

What’s happened has been less a change in the pattern, as a vast inflation of the number of useless and relatively well-paid jobs. We deceptively refer to the rise of the service economy here, but most actual service jobs are useful and low paid — I’m talking about waitresses, uber drivers, barbers and the like — and their overall numbers haven’t changed at all. What’s really increased are the number of clerical, administrative and managerial jobs, which seem to have tripled as an overall proportion of workers over the last century or so. That’s where the pointless jobs come in.
Kim Moody argues that rising productivity and low pay has more to do with intensifying management techniques, like lean and just-in-time production and surveillance technology that polices workers, rather than with automation. If that is true, then it seems like we are stuck in a vicious loop of companies creating more bullshit jobs to manage and police workers, thereby making their jobs shittier. What are your thoughts on this?

Well that’s definitely true if you’re talking about Amazon or UPS or Wallmart. I guess you could argue that the supervisory jobs that cause the speedups aren’t really bullshit, because they are doing something, if something not very nice. In manufacturing robots really have caused mass gains in productivity in most sectors, meaning that workers are downsized — though the few that remain are paid better than workers in most sectors overall.

Nonetheless in all those areas there’s the same tendency to add useless levels of managers between the boss, or the money people, and the actual workers, and to a large extent their “supervision” doesn’t speed up anything but actually slows it down. This becomes the more true, the more one moves toward the caring sector — education, health, social services of one sort or another. There the creation of meaningless administrative jobs and the concomitant bullshitization of real work — forcing nurses, doctors, teachers, professors to fill out endless forms all day — (I say concomitant because a lot of that, while justified by digitization, is really just there to give the useless administrators something to do), has the effect of massively lowering productivity.

This is what statistics actually show — productivity in industry skyrocketing, and with it, profits, but productivity in say health and education declining, therefore, prices going up, and profits being maintained largely by squeezing wages. Which in turn explains why you have teachers, nurses, even doctors and professors on strike in so many parts of the world.
Another of the arguments you make is that the structure of the modern corporation resembles feudalism more closely than the ideal of hypothetical market capitalism. What do you mean by that?

Well when I was in college they taught me that capitalism means that there are capitalists, who own productive resources, like say factories, and they hire people to make stuff and then sell it. So they can’t pay their workers so much they don’t make a profit, but they have to pay them at least enough that they can afford to buy the stuff the factory produces. Feudalism in contrast is when you just take your profits directly, by charging rent, fees and dues, turning people in debt peons, or otherwise shaking them down.

Well, nowadays the vast majority of corporate profits don’t come from making or selling things but from “finance”, which is a euphemism for other peoples’ debts — charging rents and fees and interest and whatnot. It’s feudalism in the classic definition, “direct juro-political extraction” as they sometimes put it.

This also means the role of government is very different: in classic capitalism it just protects your property and maybe polices the labor force so they don’t get too difficult, but in financial capitalism, you’re extracting your profits through the legal system, so the rules and regulations are absolutely crucial, you basically need the government to back you up as you shake people down for their debts.
And this also helps to explain why market enthusiasts are wrong in their claims that it’s impossible or unlikely that capitalism will produce bullshit jobs.

Yes, exactly. Amusingly enough both libertarians and Marxists tend to attack me on these grounds, and the reason is that both are still basically operating with a conception of capitalism as it existed in maybe the 1860s — lots of little competing firms making and selling stuff. Sure, that’s still true if you’re talking about, say, owner-operated restaurants, and I’d agree that such restaurants tend not to hire people they don’t really need.

But if you’re talking about the large firms that dominate the economy nowadays, they operate by an entirely different logic. If profits are extracted through fees, rents and creating and enforcing debts, if the state is intimately involved in surplus extraction, well, the difference between the economic and political sphere tends to dissolve. Buying political loyalty for your extractive schemes is itself an economic good.
There are also political roots to the creation of bullshit jobs. In your book you return to a particularly striking quote by former President Barack Obama. Can you talk about that quote and what it implies about political support for bullshit jobs?

When I suggested that one reason bullshit jobs endure is that they are politically convenient for a lot of powerful people, of course, lots of people accused me of being a paranoid conspiracy theorist — even though what I was really writing, I thought, was more an anti-conspiracy theory, why is it that powerful people don’t get together and try to do something about the situation.

The Obama quote felt like a smoking gun in that regard — basically he said “well everyone says single payer health care would be so much more efficient, sure, maybe it would, but think about it, we have millions of people working in jobs in all these competing private health firms because of all that redundancy and inefficiency. What are we going to do with those people?” So he admitted the free market was less efficient, in health at least, and that’s precisely why he preferred it — it maintained bullshit jobs.

Now, it’s interesting you never hear politicians talk that way about blue collar jobs — there it’s always the law of the market to eliminate as many as possible, or cut their salaries, and if they suffer, well, there’s nothing you can really do. For example, Obama didn’t seem to have nearly such concern about the auto workers who got laid off or had to give huge pay sacrifices after the bailout of the industry. So some jobs matter more than others.

In the case of Obama, it’s pretty clear why: as Tom Frank recently noted, the Democratic Party made a strategic decision starting in the ‘80s to basically drop the working class as their core constituency and take up the professional managerial classes instead. That’s now their base. But of course that’s exactly the area the bullshit jobs are concentrated.
In your book you stress that it is not just the Democrats that are institutionally invested in bullshit jobs, but unions too. Can you explain how unions are invested in sustaining and proliferating bullshit jobs and what this means for union activists?

Well, they used to talk about featherbedding, insisting on hiring unnecessary workers, and then of course any bureaucracy will tend to accumulate a certain number of bullshit positions. But what I was mainly talking about was simply the constant demand for “more jobs” as the solution to all social problems.

It’s always the one thing you can demand that no one can object to your demanding, as you’re not asking for a freebie, you’re asking to be allowed to earn your keep. Even Martin Luther King’s famous March on Washington was billed as a march for “Jobs and Freedom” — because if you have union support, the demand for jobs has to be in there. And paradoxically if people are working independently, as freelancers, or even in coops, well, they’re not in unions are they?

Ever since the ’60s there has been one strain of radicalism that sees unions as part of the problem for this reason. But I think we need to think about the question in broader terms: how labor unions which once used to campaign for less work, less hours, have essentially come to accept the weird trade off between puritanism and hedonism on which consumer capitalism is based — that work should be “hard” (hence good people are “hard-working people”) and that the aim of work is material prosperity, that we need to suffer to earn our right to consumer toys.
You talk at length in your book about how wrong the traditional conception of working class work is. Specifically, you argue that working class jobs have more closely resembled the work typically associated with women than the work associated with men in factories. This means that transit workers have more in common with the care giving work of teachers than brick layers. Can you talk about this and how it relates to bullshit jobs?

We have this obsession with the idea of “production” and “productivity” (which in turn has to “grow”, hence, “growth”) — which I really think is theological in its origins. God created the universe. Humans are cursed to have to imitate God by creating their own food and clothing, etc., in pain and misery. So we think of work primarily as productive, making things — each sector is defined by its “productivity’, even real estate! — when in fact, even a moment’s reflection should show that most work isn’t making anything, it’s cleaning and polishing, and watching and tending to, helping and nurturing and fixing and otherwise taking care of things.

You make a cup once. You wash it a thousand times. This is what most working class work has always been too, there were always more nannies and bootblacks and gardeners and chimneysweeps and sex workers and dustmen and scullery maids and so on than factory workers.

And yes, even transit workers, who might seem to have nothing to do now that the ticket booths have been automated, are really there in case children get lost, or someone’s sick, or to talk down some drunk guy who’s bothering people… (Here the problem is the public has been so conditioned to think like petty bourgeois bosses they can’t accept that there’s no reason for people who are just there in case there’s a problem to be sitting around playing cards all day, so they’re expected to pretend to be working all the time anyway.) Yet we leave this out of our theories of value which are all about “productivity”.

I suggest the reverse, as feminist economists have suggested, we could think of even factory work as an extension of caring labor, because you only want to make cars or pave highways because you care that people can get to where they’re going. Certainly something like this underlies the sense people have that their work has “social value” — or even more, that it doesn’t have any social value if they have bullshit jobs.

But it’s very important I think to begin to reconsider how we think about the value of our work, and these things will become ever more important as automation makes caring labor more important — not just because, as I’ve already pointed out, it is having the paradoxical effect of causing those sectors to be less efficient, so there are more and more people have to work in those sectors to achieve the same effects, and not even because as a result these are the zones of real conflict, but especially because these are the areas we would not want to automate. We wouldn’t want a robot talking down drunks or comforting lost children. We need to see the value in the sort of labor we would only really want humans to do.
What are the implications of your theory of bullshit jobs for labor activists? You state that it’s hard to imagine what a campaign against bullshit jobs might look like, but can you sketch out some ideas of ways that unions and activists might start tackling this issue?

I like to talk about “the revolt of the caring classes.” The working classes have always been the caring classes — not just because they do almost all of the caring labor, but also because, perhaps partly as a result, they actually are more empathetic than the rich. Psychological studies show this, by the way. The richer you are, the less competent you are at even understanding other people’s feelings. So trying to reimagine work — not as a value or end in itself, but as the material extension of caring — is a good start.

Actually I’d even propose we replace “production” and “consumption” with “caring” and “freedom” — caring is any action ultimately directed towards maintaining or increasing another person, or other people’s freedom, just as mothers take care of children not just so they are healthy and grow and thrive, but most immediately, so they can play, which is the ultimate expression of freedom.

That’s all long-term stuff though. In the more immediate sense, I think we need to figure out how to oppose the dominance of the professional-managerial, not just in existing left organizations — though in many cases, like the US Democratic Party, I don’t even know if they should be called left — and thus, to effectively oppose bullshitization.

Right now nurses in New Zealand are on strike and one of their major issues is exactly that: on the one hand, their real wages have been declining, but on the other, they also find they are spending so much time filling out forms they can’t take care of their patients. It’s over 50 percent for many nurses.

The two problems are linked because of course all the money that would have otherwise been going to keep their wages up, are instead being diverted to hiring new and useless administrators who then burden them with even more bullshit to justify their own existence. But often, those administrators are represented by the same parties, even sometimes in the same unions.

How do we come up with a practical program to fight this sort of thing? I think that’s an extremely important strategic question.

Marianne Williamson On What The Neoliberal Establishment Doesn't Get About Trump

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBkouy2_O-8&ab_channel=KatieHalper