Decoding Rafael Behr

Rafael Behr will shortly be away. I have no idea where spends his holidays, but there is a distinct whiff of a retreat to the country about the introductory paragraph to his latest column in the Guardian: "August is the month when those of us who spend most of the year fixated on Westminster let politics drift into our peripheral vision, which is how most people see it the rest of the time. It is the benefit I have come to appreciate most from a summer holiday – the shift in perspective that accompanies a more abstemious news diet.Constant grazing on the minutiae of ministerial statements is not normal." Assuming that politics, or at least politics of the sort analysed by Behr and his ilk, is about the minutiae of ministerial statements is obviously a deliberately limiting frame. It's also worth noting his choice of word there, "minutiae", when something like "chaff" would better suit the grazing analogy. The term is not merely archaic, it points to a particular political tradition that becomes more evident as he explains what he means by normal.

"Normal is politics as it appears to people who are busy doing something else." The implication is that there is a divide between authentic democratic politics, which is mild and unobtrusive, and the sort practised at the "ideological extremes", which is passionate and lacking reason. The idea that political participation varies in not a product of modern sociology but a longstanding premise rooted in the Classical Greek idea of an anti-democratic social hierarchy. The most famous example of this was Plato's myth of the metals, in brief: the citizens of a polis owe loyalty to their city because they were born of its earth, but each has an admixture of metal in their soul. Those with gold are born to rule, those with silver are born to support the rulers (soldiers, police), and those with bronze or iron are born to serve (peasants, artisans). Behr accepts this fundamental division: politics is a matter for an educated minority and the tedious necessity of democratic legitimacy requires minimal engagement. What it doesn't require is for the people to be stirred up by demagogues insisting they take a closer interest in it.

The scene has been set in this way not to argue for a restriction of the franchise, so that cultured types like Behr can devote their full attention to chastising errant politicians without hoi polloi troubling their vision, but to convince you that your interests are best served by a political class that eschews anything beyond the most bland politics: "The winner in British elections tends to be the side that most appeals to that vast, amorphous constituency whose preferences are, by definition, ill-defined. There is an art in coming across as less intrusively political than the other side. The unspoken pitch is not to use up all the mental bandwidth that voters would rather spare for things other than politics." This isn't moderation in all things but quietism: leave the politics to others and hope that they rarely bother you. Despite the evidence that voters' preferences are often well-defined, Behr insists that a lack of interest is the norm, even going so far as to claim that the 2019 general election result was in part attributable to "remainers who hadn’t felt all that strongly about Europe in 2016 and wished the whole damned business would just go away", which is some climbdown after his own vociferous campaigning on the subject.

The suggestion is that politics should be restrained in manner, but there is a clear subtext: that society should cordon it off lest it infects "normality". Politics is destabilising, even bad for your health. Inevitably with Behr, Corbyn must make an appearance: "He was seen as a fanatic, the ringleader of lapel-grabbing, finger-jabbing cranks who think politics should be more in-your-face." The purpose on this occasion is to draw a parallel across the gulf of normality with the political right: "That stance, culturally rebarbative to many British voters, has now been adopted by the Conservative party. It stands out more grotesquely when you let politics drift past in the background. It is the face that leers from the crowd, eyes bulging, veins throbbing, fizzing with idiosyncratic fury: the Lee Anderson look." Corbyn and Anderson are clearly not remotely alike in manner, but the link is rhetorically established (note the repetition of "face"), allowing the aims of mild social democracy to be dismissed as fanaticism and bracketed with a reactionary bigotry that is only too culturally congenial to many British voters. Anderson may be a clown, but he is not unrepresentative, any more than Corbyn is.

Being a Guardian writer with little in the way of original insight, Behr also shoehorns in the concerns of the moment. Thus: "The internet has obviously had a radicalising effect on politics around the world. The mechanism is well documented: people dwell in information silos, have their prejudices amplified and insulate themselves from discomfiting truths." There is nothing obvious about this and it isn't "well-documented". Indeed, pretty much all the serious academic studies on the subject (the ones that don't get any press coverage, naturally) suggest either that the effect is neutral or that it is mildly positive - i.e. people are exposed to more diverse views and the ones that opt to exist in "information silos" are the same ones who actively chose to do so with older media, such as newspapers and TV. It also takes only a little historical awareness to realise that we are living in an age of weak radicalism. Contrast the political polarisation of today with the 1920s and 30s, or even the 1970s and early-80s. The prominence of the "culture wars" isn't evidence of greater radicalisation but of a willing distraction from substantive politics such as economic justice and climate change.

Inevitably, the purpose of Behr's condescending and illiterate column is to write-off the current Conservative government (characterised by Sunak's "pleading sterility", whatever that means, as much as Lee Anderson's boorishness) while managing expectations for the inevitable disappointments of its successor: "the opposition frontbench, under Starmer’s guidance, has successfully cornered the market in unthreatening banality. That might not sound like much of an achievement, but it counts for a lot when the Tory tone is hysterical menace." Who does it count for a lot with? That such banality elicits Behr's faint praise does not mean that it is widely admired. And exactly who considers a future Labour goverment to be less threatening? Is it families on benefits with more than two children, or graduates facing crippling tuition fee loans? Or is it perhaps the shareholders of water companies and private healthcare firms? What's odd in this is that Behr appears not to realise that Labour's "banality" is aimed squarely at the sort of voters who think the "plain-spoken" Anderson has a point.

The conclusion is predictably daft. "People who don’t follow politics closely might not be able to put their finger on why Labour should be given a go at government, but the idea that Britain needs another term under the Tories feels palpably weirder." Does it feel any weirder than it did in 2019 when Behr and his colleagues at the Guardian did their best to undermine the opposition and so guarantee an election victory for the Conservatives? A clue to the true weirdness of the times was provided in an earlier swipe at the previous Labour leader: "Theresa May’s net approval rating was higher going into the 2017 election – in which she was humiliated – than Johnson’s was on the eve of his triumph. The differentiating factor was the increase in determination to keep Jeremy Corbyn out of Downing Street." And how exactly did that change of opinion between 2017 and 2019 come about among "people who don't follow politics closely"? What led an electorate that Behr assures us would rather not think about politics, and whose preferences are ill-defined, to such determination?

Behr's schtick is that politics is something that must be endured. His only book is Politics: A Survivor's Guide, which employs his heart-attack as the launchpad for an assault on "extremism", despite not offering any independent evidence that the "stress" of his job (lunch with politicians, 1,000 words a week) was a factor and while admitting a history of heart disease on both sides of his family. But the reason why politics must be endured is not in the nature of politics itself. Between the lines he is conventional enough in believing it to be a potentially noble profession. The problem is the frankly awful people it attracts at the edges and the deviation from centrist moderation that he and his peers casually label "populism". What Behr found offensive about Corbyn once he gave him his attention after 2015 was not his politics, which he would simply dismiss as naive, but that he should be popular. In other words, his is a judgement on the people not the politician. Likewise, what seems to offend him about Anderson is not the clownishness but the fear that his working class style (however artificial) might be popular. It is the threat of an intrusion by the dull bronze and iron souls into politics that worries him.

Sixty Glorious Years

A paradox of British politics is that the nominally conservative party pays little heed to its history while the progressive party seems incapable of not constantly looking over its shoulder at the past. The Tories lack of respect for their own political ancestors and long-cherished principles ("Fuck business" being a recent example) simply points to the callous nature of their opportunism. What remains constant is their defence of privilege and property, the rewards of that opportunism. In contrast, the Labour Party seems constitutionally incapable of not raking over past ideological struggles. This is partly because the media, taking their lead from the opportunist Tories, sees value is digging up the dead, but it also reflects the personalisation of the party's history, particularly in the office of the Leader. The tendency towards ancestor-worship is as strong as that towards damnatio memoriae. This can currently be seen in both the continuing anathema of Jeremy Corbyn (and his hagiography by supporters) and in the attempts to rehabilitate Tony Blair (and his critics' refusal to forget about the Iraq War dead). Contrast this with the way that ex-Tory leaders are promptly consigned to the oubliette of history (Churchill and Thatcher being the exceptions that prove the rule).

The consequence of these competing tendencies is that every era is defined through the party leader, and they in turn are judged in comparison to previous incumbents. This, as much as the sentimentality and anti-intellectual bias of Labourism, explains the conservatism of the party. As Keir Starmer steadily pushed Labour's policy to the right after 2019, to the point where it became barely distinguishable in many areas from that of the Tories, there was a flurry of commentary to the effect that he was the true heir to Blair. Roy Jenkins' phrase about carrying a Ming vase was widely recirculated to explain the party's caution, the implication being that once in power Labour would spread its wings and do some good. But it soon became clear that the benign economic circumstances that Labour inherited in 1997, which allowed it to first maintain Tory spending plans and then steadily increase investment in public services on the back of an expanding economy and City tax receipts, are not going to be repeated. For all the mantras about higher growth and productivity, Labour clearly has no idea how to deliver either beyond trusting business and tinkering with planning reform.

With Blair offering a poor parallel, despite his very public anointing of Starmer, there has been a recent increase in the stock of Harold Wilson, who won a general election in 1964 after thirteen years of Conservative government (snap!) and then won two more elections before losing in 1970 and staging a comeback in 1974. That the last of these periods in power would result in Margaret Thatcher's victory in 1979 and a further eighteen years of Conservative government isn't generally mentioned. The parallels have tended to focus exclusively on the 1964-1970 period instead. In an amusing coincidence, the New Left Review has just published a number of articles from 1963 by leading lights on the left - Raymond Williams, Peter Wollen, Ralph Miliband and Eric Hobsbawm - that were originally published in Italian in the journal Il Contemporaneo. Miliband's contribution, titled "If Labour Wins ...", is helpful in understanding the suggested parallel between 1964 and 2024. It opens: "There are countries where the looming defeat of the government gives rise to complex judgements concerning the identity of its successor. Britain is not one of them. The decline of the present Conservative government, which has recently assumed spectacular proportions, and its ever-more-likely defeat at the approaching general election, can have only one beneficiary: the Labour Party."

The contemporary parallels between next year's general election and the one sixty years ago stretch beyond the coincidence of what Wilson described as "thirteen wasted years" to the hope recently expressed by the New Statesman that  "Labour’s caution could turn to radicalism in office". No evidence if offered for this claim beyond fan-fiction: "You can already picture Reeves standing at the despatch box, brow furrowed, proclaiming that action is required because the situation is worse than she understood." For this to be plausible, you'd have to assume either that the Shadow Chancellor hasn't been reading her briefs or that she's slow on the uptake, neither of which inspires confidence. There is nothing in Labour's history to suggest that faced with a financial crisis it will favour "radicalism" or that it will reject Treasury orthodoxy (Reeves is a former Bank of England economist). 1931 is the paradigmatic case but much the same can be said for Wilson's handling of the sterling crisis in 1966 when he chose to cut public expenditure rather than devalue the pound. Likewise, Gordon Brown's "saving the world" in 2008 was a triumph of coordination within the limits of fiscal orthodoxy, not a radical departure.

As Phil Burton-Cartledge noted, "Radicalism has to do more than upset: it has to fundamentally threaten the power relationships that structure and are upheld by a political settlement, and does so in a way that opens up opportunities for more democracy". Viewed in this light, the Wilson administration of 1964-70 was certainly radical in intent in some areas, even if many of its departures from orthodoxy proved short-lived or would eventually be stymied, such as the Department of Economic Affairs and the Open University. There was also the government's support for social reform, notably the Race Relations Act 1965, the abolition of capital punishment, the legalisation of homosexuality and the liberalisation of abortion and divorce, none of which could be said to be congruent with Labourism, albeit not necesarily in conflict either. It's worth noting that Wilson allowed legislative time for many of these reforms (i.e. via backbench bills) but refused to publicly commit his support. He was himself a social conservative, not the liberal other centrists have subsequently claimed. What that record hightlighted was the extent to which Labour in the 1960s was a mass movement that combined both organised labour and the liberal middle classes (personified in Roy Jenkins), not simply an anti-Tory coalition of convenience.

Starmer's Labour has shown no comparable intent and has gone out of its way to reassure the media and reactionary voters that it is conservative in all but name: that it will preserve most of the Tory dispensation of the last 13 years but simply manage it better. If Wilson was a half-hearted reformer, Starmer shows no inclination to pursue any sort of reform outside of the further marketisation and privatisation of public services, an abuse of the word. Far from framing Labour as a mass political movement, Starmer has decided to reduce it to a supportive claque for a Westminster-centric cartel. The anti-democratic moves against the left are not just factionalism, they represent a wholesale rejection of political activism. This has arguably been the lasting legacy of the People's Vote campaign, with its romantic parliamentarianism and rejection of provocative demands (e.g. soft Brexit) in favour of condescending maximalism. Today's equivalent of Herbert Morrison's "Socialism is what a Labour government does" is "Politics is what the PLP does". The one elevated government over extra-parliamentary activism, but the other simply rejects the idea that there is any political legitimacy beyond Parliament.

As you would expect from the author of Parliamentary Socialism, Miliband emphasises the continutiy of Labourism, which underpins the pessimism of his thoughts in 1963, something that we lose sight of with the focus on leaders and their supposed ability to "change the party" by force of will (that Clause IV moment etc). As he says of the revisionist turn against nationalisation in the 1950s, "These views did not represent a major departure from Labour’s traditional economic philosophy. The ‘revisionists’ merely wanted to give programmatic status to what has been the objective of Labour’s leadership (as distinct from its activists) from the moment the Party was founded. Other ‘revisionist’ demands were scarcely newer: the insistence on Labour’s ‘classless’ character and aims, the active discouragement of trade-union militancy, flattery of middle-class voters, the general weakening of Labour’s political message—this had always been part of the party’s approach. But such demands acquired a new significance in the late 1950s, when the ‘affluence’ in which workers were supposedly wallowing was used to reinforce the need for a new image, appropriate to a ‘post-capitalist’ society of an increasingly petty-bourgeois character."

One point Miliband made about Wilson as a political personality was his ambiguity: "Wilson’s whole career since 1951 has been built on ambiguity and a careful avoidance of too specific a commitment in the various disputes that have agitated Labour since that time." The charge against Starmer isn't one of ambiguity but straightforward inconsistency (Brexit) and even bald deceit (pretty much everything else). Ultimately, these styles are an expression less of an individual psychology than of the material and institutional conditions of the time. Or, to put it another way, the environment selects for these personality types. Wilson's ambiguity was a necessary talent in the service of maintaining unity both within a large and fractious party and across a wider labour movement that represented half the workforce, not to mention ensuring that Labour remained in pole position to lead the progressive coalition that emerged in the 1960s. In contrast, Starmer is the product of a countermovement: the attempt to re-establish the auctoritas and dignitas of the state after the twin shocks of Brexit and Corbynism. This calls forth a pious conservatism (the religious dimension is substituted by its secular equivalent: patriotism) and a performative authoritarianism. The idea that we can expect "radicalism" from this quarter is laughable.

A Decade of Bullshit Jobs

In a recent Jacobin essay, the sociologist Matteo Tiratelli took issue with David Graeber's celebrated idea of bullshit jobs. His purpose was not to say that they didn't exist, though he convincingly shows that the definition of the term is misleading, but that the heart of the matter is not a subjective sense of meaninglessness but a disconnect between work and the common good: "David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs asked a vital question about contemporary capitalism. But its theoretical starting point led it down a blind alley. The central problem with work today is not that a growing proportion of people feel their own job to be pointless. It is that the economy as a whole is not oriented around satisfying true human needs. Instead, we find our working lives consumed by dysfunctional bureaucracies that constrain our capacity for play and creativity. We waste time trapped in processes that exist only to give our bosses more control over us. And we’re directed to jobs that wouldn’t exist if people had the power to choose where to invest our increasingly scarce resources. That is where the real bullshit lies."

Where Graeber and Tiratelli overlap is in the assumption that bullshit jobs play a disciplinary role, both by occupying us and so preventing dissent at the level of society and by keeping us under the thumb of  bureaucratic management within the confines of the firm. But for me this misses out a crucial question. If we accept that many jobs are pointless, in the sense that their disappearance would not be a negative and might even be a net positive for society, why do they exist? Put another way, why do capitalists spend money on tasks that don't need doing and which they appear not to value? In his How to be an Anti-capitalist in the Twentieth Century, Erik Olin Wright notes one of capitalism's self-destructive tendencies: "Each employer wants to pay employees as little as possible in order to maximize profits, but this then depresses the buying power of consumers in the market, which in turn makes it harder to sell the things capitalists produce". It doesn't make much sense to heighten the exploitation of labour and then fritter away the gains on unnecessary roles that produce no surplus value.

A key sociological point to make about bullshit jobs, at least in the examples favoured by Graeber, is that they are predominantly "white collar", as we used to say. We can all think of pointless jobs that are coded working class, such as security guards, but the dominant image that comes to mind is someone in an office laboriously updating a spreadsheet that no one else will look at. In other words, regardless of the physical and cognitive demands of the work, these jobs are typically occupied by people who would be considered middle class, whether under-employed professionals or harried clerks. Paying supernumerary workers to ensure a large enough middle class to both preserve political dominance and maintain a buying public for goods and services is rational in aggregate, but self-interest would rule it out at the level of the specific firm. Capitalists are themselves subject to capitalist ideology, hence they are capable of irrational actions, even actions contrary to their own immediate interests, if they serve to preserve the capitalist order. But even so, there is a clearly a gap in the theory when it comes to coordination. And as ever when we are faced with a collective action problem, it makes sense to look at the role of government.

Tiratelli sees an avenue of coordination in the welfare state. "The growth of education and health care as an employer of last resort is intimately bound up with the decline of manufacturing ... the social power that industrial workers once had allowed them to win substantial concessions from the state and from capital, concessions that often took the form of expanded welfare provision. While those manufacturing jobs have been automated and offshored, the welfare states they created have lingered on, often under attack but generally accounting for a growing share of GDP and of working-class employment." There is something to be said for this, not least that the conservative political desire to "shrink the state" never actually manages to reduce it in any meaningful way, even as it shifts resources from the needy to favoured groups (consider the cross-party consensus to preserve the two-child benefit cap versus the acceptance that public money should be spent on the private school fees of diplomats' children).

But Tiratelli's theory is also unsatisfactory because of his focus on the working class. What we actually see in the welfare state is increasing labour exploitation and proletarianisation. As he notes himself, "They are increasingly underfunded when compared with the demands placed on them. They are poorly paid, insecure, and casualized. Professional autonomy has been decimated. And the prestige attached to these vital roles has been systematically eroded". This description shares many of the characteristics of the "precariat", but that concept obviously extends beyond the working class to the middle class. Indeed, the emergence of the idea reflected the extension of traditional practices from working class jobs to middle class ones, such as casualisation and piece-work. What were once accepted as necessary features of the market became a social "problem" only after this shift. But precarity extends well beyond the public sector to encompass the private, and arguably is more rife in the latter because the former has retained greater labour rights. The problem of coordination in the private sector remains.

When I first addressed this issue a decade ago, in response to Graeber's original essay, I suggested that the solution to the conundrum lay in the work of Ronald Coase, specifically his theory of transaction costs for firms. In a nutshell, firms will keep certain skills inhouse to meet intermittent need because this is ultimately cheaper than outsourcing, however this leads to the creation of unnecessary administration tasks to fill the downtime. As the firm grows, this work is gradually consolidated into distinct roles: bullshit jobs. However, there remains the countervailing tendency for technology to reduce transaction costs, so making intermittent outsourcing more attractive (this is the essence of the "gig economy"). Combined with the suspicion that recovery from recession would see a higher turnover in firms and an end to what appeared to be job-hoarding, my conclusion was that "In the face of this pincer movement, the decline in bullshit jobs seems likely and thus Graeber's essay takes on the air of a lament for a soon-to-disappear world, not unlike the typing-pools and reprographic offices of yore."

That prediction (though only semi-serious) has proved wrong. Recovery has been weak and the long-tail of low productivity firms stubbornly persistent: the great shakeout hasn't happened. The statistical decline in bullshit jobs that Tiratelli finds depends on his assumption that such jobs are predominantly working class, but that in turn rests on a subjectivity about how society values work (e.g. cleaners, labourers, sales staff) and the consequent lack of self-worth this gives rise to. The subject is bedevilled by the methodological issue that worth is reported by the worker, not established by any external, objective means. Thus the bullshit jobs that infest the corporate world can be defended by their occupants simply adopting a belief that they "add value" to a business. The key insight implicit in Graeber's essay is that, however they are defined, there was a noticeable increase in bullshit jobs during the 1990s and 2000s, yet this occured at precisely the time that many firms were outsourcing peripheral functions and even offshoring core operations.

If this is not simple coincidence, it suggests that bullshit jobs are a characteristic of globalisation, but this would lead us to expect them to decline as globalisation has itself cooled after 2008 and even gone into reverse with onshoring and inhousing. This does not appear to have happened, at least not in the corporate sector. The pandemic and ensuing lockdown led many people to question the value of their work. This was both in the sense of putting their careers in perspective as people around them died and in discovering that they could accomplish a week's tasks in a couple of days if they worked from home and thus avoided the "frictions" inherent in an office job, though the greatest friction, poorly-managed meetings, got worse for many with the shift online. That some companies have now insisted that workers return to the office, ironically including Zoom, suggests that the disciplinary role posited by both Graeber and Tiratelli is real, though that clearly covers both useful and useless roles. What we still don't have is any greater clarity on why firms continue to indulge the latter. 

The simplest explanation is probably that firms do not know how to properly evaluate cognitive roles (consider the story of Elon Musk assessing programmers by the quantity of code they produced). They know there is waste and inefficiency, but it cannot be isolated as easily as on a production line. As no one firm has an advantage over any other in this respect, the overhead can be accepted simply as the cost of doing business, much as the inefficiency inherent in any bureacratic system has long been tolerated. The great promise of information technology was that it would improve bureaucracy by eliminating the human factor. The great promise of the Internet was that it would transfer the burden of administration onto customers. Both have only been partial successes. The next great hope is that AI will somehow do away with the need for many cognitive roles, though it should be obvious that, as with previous technologies, this is likely to simply generate novel bullshit jobs in its train. It appears that bullshit is simply a feature of any cognitive work, and as that type of work expands as a share of the labour force under the pressure of continuing automation, we can expect such jobs to proliferate.