what I'm saying about bullshit jobs was
both attempts are jobs where he's been
the person doing it doesn't feel that
job ought to exist or needs to exist and
that's why I thought bullshitjobs are -
or I found - that bullshitjobs were
primarily of managerial, clerical,
administrative because those are the
people most likely to say you know 'this
job wasn't here either wouldn't make any
difference or the world might well be a
better place'. So I'm simply trusting
people to assess their own jobs. A lot of
people in banking do feel that way about
their own jobs and always have and still
do! Now those jobs don't have to be
automated if those people were right
because they don't need to exist in the
first place. On the other hand cleaners, delivery: a lot of these
jobs which are absolutely essential sort
of first order jobs that cannot be
gotten rid of even in a pandemic - that what I would call more classic shift jobs as
opposed to bullshit jobs: that are jobs which are absolutely necessary but
oddly enough for that very reason: they are
underpaid, undervalue, the people are
treated with disrespect
they're often much more dangerous than
other jobs even before you know before
the current situation - now those jobs
probably ought to be automated but one
of the reasons that they aren't is
because they have people desperate
enough to do them for very little money.
Kropotkin famously argued that if you
took all of the most unpleasant but
necessary jobs and divided them up so
that everyone had to do them those jobs
would disappear instantly, because it would be a
social priority to automate them as soon
as possible
 
Well I'm not saying that the banks were
relevant in 2008 - they're not
relevant now. I mean I think we need to
talk about power and the power to harm.
I mean the argument that, you know, the
more obviously your work benefits
others a lot the less they pay you, and
somebody once pointed it out, he said
well maybe it's the other way around: the
more easy it is for you to harm others
through your job, the more they'll pay
you. In that sense it makes sense that
hedge fund managers and people like that
are among the highest paid, because they
can do a lot of damage. It's a sheer
power. Well what we've learned about Wall
Street is that Wall Street can damage
people, but it can't really helps them,
and all the debates about whether to
shut down Wall Street because it kept
crashing a month ago, you know, it was
assumed that market crash would hurt
people. But no one said 'oh no, we can't
shut down Wall Street, because it
provides benefits the public of some
kind'. Of course it doesn't. It
surely exists for its own sake.
So the at the moment something showed up
which could hurt us even more than
finance, and therefore it has grabbed our
attention.
It's reminded us that what an economy is,
is really the means by which we take
care of each other and so as to keep
ourselves alive - so in that much more
immediate sense we've seen a more
immediate threat with rather that sort
of second-order threat that finance can
provide. But ultimately we're still
talking about what are essentially a
series of power relations.
 
The problems with the intellectual left
is the very idea that it would coalesce
around you to a sort of charismatic
theorists. We're talking very practical
questions, we're talking about questions
of what of vision and direction. What we
have at the moment is, we should be
arguing with each other about how we
feel about the role of state. That's a
certificate of our own irrelevance - what
we should be talking about is how to
take part in the arguments about the
fundamental changes that are going to
happen in our society in the wake of
this. I mean the last poll I saw so that
nine percent of people in the UK for
example want, I think, put things back to
normal. People are demanding a
fundamental change in our relationship
to each other and our relationship to
nature: we need to make ourselves
relevant to that debate, and as it
happens, most of the radical ideas of
social transformation have been coming
out of the left, but that's the important
thing: we should be dividing up, you know,
around our visions what is the best way
that we can transform society to make it
less incredibly violently, alienating and
oppressive, and still get to zero carbon
by 2025 or the most 2030 so that we
don't for not all on drew water in ten
years. These are the things that we're
supposed to be arguing about, but I mean
in a way it's a mercy that
this happened because it happened early
enough that there's still time to turn
things around. It's a kind of a warning
shot of things to come and the left are the
only people who've been thinking about
radically different business. So we need
to get over these kind of squabbles and
start thinking about what it is we're
actually proposed
