(GASPS)
In so far as it will be possible
to create a viable economy
that won't destroy the planet,
we're going to have to think very seriously
about what it is we consider
to be valuable in work to begin with.
I meet people at parties. I'd often say,
"I'm an anthropologist. What do you do?"
And people would not want to admit it.
After you get them a little drunk
they'll say, "Well, you know, actually,
"I'm the senior east coast vision manager
for this...
"I don't actually do anything!
I rewrite reports and then have meetings.
"Then give them to other people
who have meetings about the reports."
Or they would say, "Well, I don't really
do anything. I have this computer job.
"I could automate it and write software to
do the whole thing but don't tell my boss!"
There's all these people who personally
feel their jobs don't actually do anything.
That's fascinating for me because a huge
percent of the workforce, I thought,
20%-30%, were sitting there every day
thinking, "I'm not actually doing anything.
"I hope nobody figures it out."
What does that do to the collective soul?
I mean, how could you have
dignity in labour?
You can see how, under the Soviet system,
they're making up jobs to keep everybody
looking like they're working.
They have a full-employment ideology.
Capitalism is supposed to be the opposite.
A private firm should not be hiring people
who don't do anything,
but it's happening all over the place.
I tried to figure out how it happened and I
realised it has to do with ideology of work.
It's one of the real impediments
to us creating any kind of sane society.
In the 19th century, social movements
are actually quite successful
in inculcating a labour theory of value —
an industrial-based labour theory of value.
It took the factory work
as a primary idea of work.
People really believed it, but it was very
flawed because it was very egocentric.
It had to do with this ideal of productive
male factory labourers,
this kind of paradigm for all work.
As a result, it was kind of easy to attack.
So that, suddenly, you would have
this counter-offensive in the 20th century,
where this idea is replaced by the notion
that productivity comes
from the brains of entrepreneurs
and you're just a bunch of robots
carrying out their commands.
So then the question became
how to validate work.
They really pushed this originally puritan
idea that work is valuable in itself —
it doesn't have to produce anything.
If you're not working at something
you don't particularly like
you're just a bad person,
a workshy character.
In a perverse way, the uselessness
of the work actually became a virtue.
Anything that made the work fulfilling sort
of undercut that disciplinary role of work.
And this is the way people think nowadays,
that's how you have these corporations
that don't feel they have to pay people
to do art or translation
or anything you might do because you
actually have some interest in the subject,
but are willing to shell out
all this money on corporate lawyers
and strategic vision coordinators
and people like that.
So I think that the only way to shift this
is we really need to move toward a new idea
of what is valuable in labour.
I would suggest a labour theory of value
that starts with women's work,
caring labour, as the paradigm.
During Occupy Wall Street
we had this web page called We Are The 99%,
where people could talk about
their life situation
and why they supported the occupations.
80% of them were women, and even the men
were almost always in caring professions.
Or they were teachers
or they were doing social work of some kind
or they were in medicine,
but they all had the same complaint.
"I want to do a job where I care for other
people and benefit them in some way.
"If you want to do that they pay so little
you can't take care of your own family."
I almost thought of this movement
as the revolt of the caring classes.
So I think we're at the brink
of a reformulation of what work is
and what is valuable about it
that could really lead to a reformulation
of how we organise everything,
what we think production even is.
Production is ultimately
the production of people.
A collection of commodities
is a secondary moment which enables us
to produce people that we'd like to have
around — that's what life is really about.
