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.
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