TRASHFUTURE - *Unlocked* Riley's Commie Book Club: The Death of Homo Economicus

Episode Date: November 2, 2018

You asked! We listened! We procrastinated actually doing it for a while! We've unlocked Riley's Commie Book Club from September, The Death of Homo Economicus by Peter Fleming, for your listening pleasure. Check it out on Pluto Press here: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745399409/the-death-of-homo-economicus/ In the mean time, sign up to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture Commodify your dissent with a shirt from Lil Comrade: https://www.lilcomrade.com/category/merch xoxo Riley

Hello, it's me once again Riley and you can tell that it is just me because there's no one trying to talk over me. There's no one talking about super Yu-Gi-Oh or whatever it is they're doing now. Idiots. I have no need to call for Nate to do anything because it's a Riley solo episode today. Yes, that's right. Once again, I have opened a book, looked at all the words, turned the pages, made some notes, and I'm ready to share my thoughts with you for Riley's Kami book club episode, whichever one it is now. I have been reading The Death of Homo economicus by Peter Fleming, who is a professor of business and society at the City University of London. Don't let the title fool you. Peter Fleming is not a business school

professor who's going to try to talk to you about six ways to jumpstart your marketing department or a growth hacking strategy for accountancy fraud. No, he's talking about the relationship of business and society. I think his book, The Death of Homo economicus out now on Pluto Press, or the out actually for quite a while. It's just one I was sort of interested in reading is about kind of the ways in which I think at once sort of the actual businesses have sort of colonized a lot of the way that we live by sort of taking over more and more aspects of, you know, just society like talking privatization and shit, but also how the ways of business thinking have taken over more and more elements of our personal lives.

And the book itself is interesting. I think what's interesting to me about it is that it brings a lot of other lines of thinking together. So as I sort of go through kind of what it says and what I think anyone who's listened to previous Kami book clubs will sort of recognize a lot of shit in there that I've discussed in, you know, previous episodes, like we'll sort of see we'll see. We'll see a lot of like the sort of monetization of feeling that we talked about in psychopolitics or like the kind of irrational consistency and bureaucratization for its own sake and the deadening effect of that that we talked about in the amateur or even like the sort of hyper exploitation of the poor because they're least

able to resist that exploitation, you know, like the socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor that we saw in like turn of the century London and people of the abyss. And, you know, even, you know, talking about, you know, states running themselves as businesses and so on for regulatory arbitrage that we might have seen in violent borders, it really does kind of bring it all together. And we also talk a lot about, you know, the also we stuff we haven't talked about yet, like David Graber's book bullshit jobs because Fleming is really interested in work sort of he draws heavily from the the bullshit jobs thesis. So what are the things that sort of drew me to this book and I guess that draws me to books of

this nature as I think like in some ways the core central premise of this podcast, it'll have not this particular episode, but the show overall is the ways in which like systematization of things and the sort of the turning the turning of things into sort of formalized bureaucratized systems, while at the same time the kind of creeping influence of sort of instrumentalized life. So when I say instrumentalized life, I mean like have fun at your office, so you'll be more productive, you know, like things that are done in the service of other things and where that thing is ultimately always in the service of, you know, whatever capital wants. These things are basically the the main malefactors of our lives that are just making things worse. It's not to

say that systemization is always bad, but rather that sort of systematization and instrumentalization tend to be well systematization for what? Well we're systematizing everything so we can control it more so we can extract more for the sake of capital, more or less. And whether that's technology or bureaucracy or sort of a toady and culture of access-based liberal news journalism, I mean it's all kind of the same thing, at least the way I see it. Anyways, enough prevaricating, let's get into the book itself. So this is from Fleming's blog and it's a nice sort of, it nicely encompasses sort of the relationship between the figure of the Homo economicus and Fleming's book. He says, Homo economicus is the self-centered utility maximizing individual

that is at the heart of neoclassical and mainstream economics. Of course, Homo economicus is an imaginary figure, an idealization that economists more assume we more or less approximate. And as if proposition, that is to say let's assume people act as if they are self-interested individuals that then feeds abstract econometric formulas and theorems. So obviously like Fleming didn't come up with the idea of the Homo economicus, but nor did people like your standard neoclassical economist like Friedman. It's actually an idea that sort of gets most, I'm going to say it's most commonly thought of as introduced in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, 18th century, but if you want to really reach it goes as far back as the ancient Greeks, but we won't bother with

that for now, we'll stick with Smith. So Smith wrote, it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity, but to their self-love. We never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages. So you know it's the usual, and I can't remember who said this, it was another person writing a little, a little after, said you know that essentially we realized that private vice, so avarice and greed, creates public virtue, which is a functioning market economy. It's more or less an argument for the price signal. I want to make the most money, so I'm going to do the thing that people

are willing to pay for the most, and therefore satisfy the most needs. People keep doing that until the price gets pushed down, and then all of a sudden, hey, presto, everyone's utility is more or less maximized, which is an idea that sort of works in a frictionless vacuum, but as soon as you start, as soon as you start sort of adding power relationships into that mix, it very quickly becomes a system not of sort of equal exchange and utility maximization, but a system of extraction where some of, where most people are sort of very tightly controlled by others, and sort of just, and sort of forced to labor until the, and where their sort of excess value of their labor can then be extracted. And even like Smith realized this, like he sort of he understood that the world

wasn't a frictionless vacuum, but you know dipshits like Milton Friedman love to just cherry pick the little bits of sort of the early economic thinkers like Smith that they like, so that they can sort of imagine that their ridiculous propaganda has some kind of respectable lineage. So yeah, we have this idea. It's fundamentally the human who always acts rationally, but rationality is defined as the tendency to think and behave entirely self-centeredly, where self-centeredness is construed profit maximizing and wealth accumulation. And it's that imagination, that sort of that idea that people will will and ought to only act in this way, or all society is fundamentally not working, that has sort of driven a lot of the sort of, you might say,

bad public policy, and indeed a lot of the bad sort of corporate policy of the last. Well, that's an interesting question last for how long. I mean, you could say you could never say that sort of capitalism sort of worked, you know, I mean, you can say that it always worked under its own premises as a system of extraction, or as a system of sort of dominance and control. But you can maybe say that it's been particularly bad at matching up to its sort of public, private, vice, public virtue rhetoric since like maybe 1960, or like maybe 1970, when we sort of begin to contend with sort of stagflation and flatness in the global economy. And again, in sort of the late 90s, we have the dot-com bubble burst, the birth and growth of the sort of

national security state, and then yet again in 2008, where we have the great recession we never properly got out of. I mean, I saw Bloomberg opinion actually post today, a very startling graph that sort of unemployment has gone up and up and up and up and up, but wages have stayed roughly flat, which if we go back to that assumption of supply and demand, if everyone's sort of equally contracting parties, then we should assume that, you know, as unemployment goes down, right, as more people are employed, the demand for workers will be higher, so workers will be able to demand higher wages. But because of the unequal power relations, that simply hasn't happened. Instead, you know, unemployment is going down, and yet companies, because they just,

capital, because it's so controlling, is able to just say, okay, perfect, well, we're still not paying you. That's slightly beside the point, but not that beside the point, and that's something we'll explore as we get into the book. So I think the key premise of this book is not, is about, is not really an analysis of whether the Homo economicus model sort of works or doesn't work under capitalism's own, under capitalism's own assumptions, but rather sort of exploring who the Homo economicus is and what purpose it serves as an ideological sticking point, right? And so the key premise of the book is that the Homo economicus is fundamentally unhuman, because humans have more things than constant optimization on our mind. We're capable of

enjoying something intrinsically. And I think the more vampiric capitalism becomes, like the later stage we get to capitalism, the more the rate of profit has fallen, the more it looks for more resources to exploit. So the more it demands from its subjects, and the more it must discipline them to act in this way, because acting like this strips the intrinsic enjoyment out of anything. And it more and more becomes fuel, if you like, for the global economy. It's like, we're on a ship that is slowly sort of sinking, and we're firing the engines by sort of pulling more wood off the hull until everyone's drowned, and there's just a captain left on the engine, and the engine is a Tesla being blown into space for some reason by a guy who calls people pedophiles

and then doubles down on it later, not talking about anyone specific, of course. And one of the things I kind of think of here is higher education. And this is sort of, I guess to me, this kind of combines a little bit some of the insights in psychopolitics and the amateur. Because one of the things that Byung-chul Han talks about in psychopolitics is the monetization of the sort of emotional realm, the experiential realm, and the sort of slaving of these things to, yes, you'd say the capitalist impulse, right, where you're no longer, you no longer consume, I don't know, Nike shirt. But you sort of consume what you feel the Nike shirt makes you, and it also becomes shared, and it becomes this almost snakey thing where simply by existing, there are

just a number of different sort of pools of capital existing through you. And this is not just, of course, the Nike shirt, but it's your existence on Instagram and so on and so forth. So it's like little bits of your life that weren't, didn't used to be part of the economy, or used to not be part of the economy in such a way. So like sharing pictures with your friends have kind of become part of the economy while we weren't looking. And more than, and then, and so, you know, like that's when we think of like higher education, and this is sort of gets into more of the amateur argument. We think what higher education sort of used to be, well, again, it should go back far enough, it used to be just a way for sort of noble and wealthy families in the sort of early

modern England to sort of, you know, do something with their sort of useless third and fourth sons, send them off to go, you know, debate the finer points of the Ecclesiastes and, you know, D'Oxford. But it lets like fast forwarded a little bit when we get sort of the modern liberal arts education, it's even the fantasy people have of Oxford when they sort of read something like Brice had revisited, right? It's it is a it is sort of a place to become sort of engage in contemplation and sort of you like sort of self might say self improvement even. I don't mean making yourself more marketable. I mean changing yourself via education into the kind of person you might have reason to value and now the the sort of impotences of business have colonized the world

of higher education so intensely that they're that now it's really just seen as a kind of job training and and it's it's run on the sense of seeing the students as customers and must be in needing to maximize customer satisfaction, but where customer satisfaction is seen as helping those students enter their prestigious positions in the labor market. And so you get something that was intrinsically useful. If you like intrinsically useful is kind of a weird contradiction in terms. You get something that sort of is intrinsically good or facilitates an intrinsic good that's sort of personal, which is the improvement and what and broadening of, you know, your your mind in a way that you see fit. Now, obviously, there's no way to talk about sort of Oxford in the fucking,

I don't know, in the 20s and the pre thatcherite blairite years without remembering that it was like a sordid institution that was, you know, there to, you know, train colonial administrators of the worst type and that the canon that they were reading was, you know, extraordinarily, let's say it hadn't been decolonized, but I'm sort of using it more as an example rather than sort of trying to think of it as some pure and wonderful thing that used to be great before the fuckers came along. Anyway, but you get how that so that there was something there that has when it changed it didn't change from a sort of it didn't it didn't become more democratized. It wasn't that we opened this kind of, you know, opportunity to sort of

become the kind of person you might have reason to want to be to more people. Instead, we were like, okay, well, we can open this to more people because it's important job training. And so that's, but that's a very homo economicist way to sort of think about education, which is okay, the students are customers. So we have to make sure we maximize satisfaction. And we as so we get more students, and we're going to end the students are going to pick the kinds of courses or the kinds of universities they want, and are going to help them get a job afterward. And so everyone really is as the process of higher education is sort of transformed through the sort of homo economicist mindset into a purely transactional

extended training program, where you're far more likely to k-hole and get chlamydia than your usual corporate retreat. But if you're a human under late capitalism, and we say late capitalism, we're sort of referring to the stage where the production is no longer really expanding. It's just sort of turned on itself now, where where sort of hyper exploitation is is is sort of almost going is going up in between people, there's sort of nowhere left to grow. We're just, I think this Matt, Matt Christmas said this, I thought it really stuck with me, it's the cannibal stage of capitalism when it eats itself. When all there is left to do is sort of engage in marketing or financial trickery, we're not even building anything anymore. And even

then it wasn't even it wasn't good then like we fetishize manufacturing. It's like it literally just is this system is no longer the system is built on just sort of ritualized trickery. And we get into that actually. Fleming calls this wreckage economics, but we'll get into that in a sec. But if you're a human living in this state, you must make sure that every decision you make is super rational. And we already have defined rational, not in a way that you're doing and being the kind of person or living kind of life, you'd have reason to value, but rather that you are maximizing your usefulness to capital so that maybe you'll end up holding some someday. So rational in that way. So in that case, every spare thought you have is going to be spent

training yourself for the skills you needed, you need for tomorrow, every relationship, strip mine for business potential, and every spare second is spent on Fiverr or driving Uber. And this kind of this reminds me actually a little bit of a couple years ago when I was working as a freelance writer. I always I had a I had a one one big client. And there was always a fortunately there was always a lot of work with this one big client. I could be putting together a manuscript or I could be summarizing something or I could be writing a treatment for a short film or whatever. Like, there was always something. And so I always caught myself thinking on weekends. How much am I paying to be on my weekend right now? Because I could just

be doing more writing. How much am I paying to sleep an extra hour? How much am I paying to go on lunch? And it's a really weird way to sort of organize your life because you're being that you begin thinking of the world in this like, just really very strange, strange way. You begin you begin thinking in terms of well, how much can I get as opposed to who am I and what am I doing? And in that sense, I think I think I've talked about this before one of the things that really kind of troubles me. One thing I think of a lot. And that gives me a lot of unease is the idea that my life could be being lived by anybody, not not me that sort of that I'm you almost sort of wonder well, what's the point of being sentient if we're if all of the rational choices that you can make

are kind of set out for you and you just and everyone just makes the same ones, you know, I mean, okay, well, I might go. I might sort of work a different three jobs, but they're fundamentally similar to one another and the reason my reason and they're only incidentally different in the activities that we're doing, you know, they're they're not there. It's still just towards the end of accumulation. It's like, well, how'd you get here? Well, I took Highway three, how'd you get here? Well, I took the a road actually, it's like, oh, well, but we're all still here. And that's I think something that really I find almost an animating anxiety. Anyway, so Homo economicus has been around since the days of Adam Smith. But it was with the rise

of sort of Reagan and Thatcher that governments really sort of began to completely rebuild society after its image. So a couple another term that gets bandied around a lot is neoliberalism. So we get you get a late capitalism or what's that that's cannibal capitalism. What's neoliberalism? That's government intervention and sort of that's that's where that's where rather than sort of the government or the state being the house and the house always winning is that business is the state in the house and business always wins because now now the power sits in in sort of hyper mobile capital that can more or less go anywhere and is always seeking to optimize around the margins. So this is kind of the violent borders thesis right that sort of hyper capital mobility has

sort of made governments submit to capital and that governments then must sort of feel that they must that they are now the constituents. They are the servile constituents of capital rather than the servants of their people. And so what the society rebuilt in the image of Homo economicus look like Fleming quotes here quote from Fleming here be ready to submit 24 seven to work debt has transformed your life into a vast economic contract and capitalist force no longer cloaks itself in niceties but rather is ready to reject you into destitution when you were no longer needed. So the tale of Homo economicus that Fleming tells is not one only of the rationalist maximizing tendency of individual humans but of the rationalist maximizing tendency that has invaded all of our

other institutions as everything puts more of itself in a sacrificial altar in service of defending capitalism from its own contradictions. So one of the really so okay he gives examples of three different people you know a woman who can't walk down to the end of her garden who's got her personal independence payment which for American listeners is like disability cover taken away by the Department of Work and pensions a young man who went who went into debt to go to university and then couldn't find a job and when it came time to pay back his student loans simply killed himself and then a man who was made redundant by his company in Texas and sort of rather than face the kind of degradation of the what he

called what Fleming calls the unemployment industry decided to go on a rampage and it is the sort of sheer impossibility and indignity of life for these people that Fleming is sort of pointing out here right so the the contradiction is that is the the woman who's completely disabled being told well you have to go find work anyway even though you can't walk down to the end of your garden and saying well I know that but just reasonably I couldn't possibly do that I literally can't and and the reason that contradiction is forced on to her is because other more powerful people have faced the contradiction of well we are a pool of capital we whatever company whatever we just think it's easier to think of them as pools of capital we were based in this much the United

Kingdom however we've realized that we can pay out more to our shareholders if we are well let's say not basing a kingdom or have a double irish which is a tax arrangement or a dutch sandwich is another tax arrangement which is not a strup vafo although strup vafos are very good we can do that we can sort of pay less into the society from which we extract the surplus value of workers labor and sort of keep more of it for ourselves so the to the pipe goes one way and sort of the taxation and redistributive mechanisms that are that designed to pipe that's that wealth back down are it's sort of it's it's are gone and so the contradiction that sort of that of of capitalism that sort of well how does a society that sort of extracts how does a society where one group

extracts more value out of the other but requires those others to then engage in transactions to keep their concerns going well how does that carry on over the long term or it doesn't so rather than accept a sort of rather than accept a situation in which maybe they are forced to be sort of responsible social stewards which is obviously suboptimal because we'd rather they didn't exist in the first place sort of society and capital have sort of met society in terms like the government and so on have made a pact that that contradiction is then to be put down onto someone like this woman who are like this woman in scotland who basically is just told what i'm sorry there's just not enough there's not enough for us to sort of understand your impossible situation

and i'm afraid you must continue working which for her is basically a death sentence and it was she did end up dying so that's why we say in reality we have socialism for the rich and capitalism for the workers so just a couple days ago jeremy clarkson's terrible daughter was the subject of a fawning op-ed about not going to the university from the daily mail so this is a quote from that article emily 24 who lives in london explained how she didn't get the three a's she needed to study politics and sociology at the university of leeds however she decided not to reset her exams and reapply describing how the cost of university didn't seem worth it emily whose father jeremy has an estimated worth of around 30 million pounds added that she believes

she has the he she has had an advantage of jumping straight into work so of course you know she got into a successful career as a writer because she had no need to go into massive private debt to prove her worth to an employer who would then go on to have power over her because she was a she was basically had the kind of resources in space to not be a homo economicist she had the resources in space to not make what we what is for people who are sort of having to optimize those decisions and sort of weigh the risks of sort of taking on taking different paths she had the luxury to not do that she had the luxury that anyone would have if we lived in a sort of society where something like universal basic income was implemented properly where you

wouldn't have to say do i want to go to university so i can get a stamp of approval for an employer or do i want to try my hand at writing there because there are some people who are like you know what i like numbers they just make sense to me i kind of like balancing books i think i might like to be an accountant i mean i don't know many of these people but i'm sure they exist um but it's sort of it is from it sort of takes from the realm of necessity if you like and sort of tries to decommodify us and decommodify elements of our lives we don't have to do that emily clarkson's life has been decommodified already the choices she makes are basically just now more or less about personal fulfillment and the thing is the thing that really gets me is that

emily clarkson is basically right she's correct about university but like without realizing she's correct and sort of by accident because people with without insanely wealthy parents must quote take individual responsibility as consumers of education privately taking on the responsibility for preening themselves to be selected by employers who will then go on to exploit them fifty thousand pounds for university when it's a job training program if you're not if you don't need to do it to sort of get yourself like ready to for the labor market is a terrible investment unless of course you're already wealthy but the problem is that it's seen as an investment and not as a a right or a um a decision that i'm just making because i want to right now it's this sort

of hyper evaluation of these um i guess you could say of every choice so the logic of homo economicus i've sort of hinted at this before um how it sort of invaded all of society i am how it invaded sort of the public institutional so think about the research excellence framework we've discussed in the previous kami book clubs where sort of all professors at certain universities are just now measured on how many citations they get and then you know create works that are sort of appropriated by academic publishers who then just sit on them for you know to engage in rent seeking behavior or we think about private institutional frameworks so think about the quote more human workplaces that ask us to submit more

of our emotional and social energy into our to our boss to prove our loyalty and that's as we become the company people to the souls we talk for that in psychopolitics or even individually as we just submit more and more deepens its grasp on us is kind of what part of what fleming calls wreckage economics i sort of hinted at this so the principles of wreckage economics and this is something that really came to the fore in 2008 and this is something also like i kind of want to i kind of want to say this is not new um fleming sort of talks about how it's sort of much more prominent after 2008 maybe he's right but this strikes me a little bit like people who are like oh well there's capitalism and crony capitalism and it's like no fuck you all

capitalism is crony capitalism what you call crony capitalism is just you know capitalism that hasn't got a nice little mask over the cronyism um so i think really it's always been wreckage economics as we'll go into but it's just it's harder and harder to cover up with a sort of mask of a mutual benefit so the principles are the the principles of wreckage economics are an emphasis on the capture or enclosure of community based resources so think of like i said those academic publishers that have stepped in between the publicly funded universities that pay university academics who've privately trained themselves up um and then the general public right so rents are to be sought from control like this where the academic publishers do nothing all they do is they

own the brand names of the prestigious journals that you need to publish in in order to sort of continue taking over in the research excellence framework right that whole way of organizing universities dumping lots of public money into them dumping lots of private money into them via debt and then and then sort of making sure people are constantly publishing at a record pace stuff that nobody will ever read and actually quite often people have to pay to submit is exactly kind of how this model works so rents are being sought from control of things rather than the production of new things that's rent seeking behavior i think we talked about that in an episode with grace Blakely a few months ago that you should go revisit

um capture is policed and defended by big business in the state protests hacking and so on are a terrifying force so if we think of um there was a a actually there was an information freedom protester that Fleming talks about who downloaded a huge archive of all journal articles just made them available to the public and then when the sort of lawsuit was brought against him that was basically just going to ruin his entire life to make an example of him to others who might think of being an information freedom advocate um they uh uh they just they were that he just killed himself um and it was it was the it was it was this overwhelming sort of it was the overwhelming force to protect a copyright that was doing

nothing but sort of helping the big big key principles of springer um but also it's not just that that capture is policed it's that sort of chasing after that which has been withdrawn is policed as well so if you remember the um and again this is it's why it's interesting they feel this this book club is really drawing together a lot of things um if if you remember sort of the episode we did with dan handcocks where we talked about like um sort of policing rioting music and um the this sort of the student protests in 2010 um they invented sort of new they sort of took new ways of almost like militarizing the police response to students who were protesting the withdrawal of the educational maintenance allowance

and the imposition of universe of fees on on universities right like it was people were kettled and injured and it was it was a response that was designed not just to you know preserve order which again is arguably not a good thing um but in fact to like meet out with sort of violence um protection of the of if you like the shrinking state that facilitates upward transfer is legitimate and any attempt to reclaim by those at the bottom as you know at best unwise and at worst sort of criminal i mean unwise in the sense that any time we say what if we property funded the nhs everyone's like venezuela um anyway let's continue so strong disdain for economic democracy that's kind of tied to sort of what i was saying with the ema

you know public discontent for privatization led to a reform in new zealand which the government promised it would ignore the result of and then they went ahead and issued another referendum about the flags something you don't really mind changing and finally that social disequilibrium is to be exploited for gain quantitative easing easy credit benefit slashing um sort of insane foreclosures like we really saw like you know a computer error led wells fargo to enclose on the foreclose on tens of thousands of homes it didn't own because it was just in such a foreclosure mania and then it's like well that's done you know that's that's over those homes have been foreclosed upon i'm afraid you know you lose and yet they're always very good at finding you know

pennies the o them and finding ways to charge interest on them so if you think about it this is just the ways in which sort of pools of capital are just exerting force on people and i think there is i feel like there's another tenet here and this something fleming talks about later but i think the casualization of work doesn't fit neatly in to any of these principles um and so one of the examples he uses is that like look when you're uh dpd or hermes delivery driver right you're only paid when you're on shift you're you're like notionally an independent contractor but really you're actually a dpd worker who just is paid less than the minimum wage because they've decided that they're only

going to pay you for the parts the job that are value added to them so you know yeah your your main job is delivering packages well your main job isn't really driving to your next package pickup that's between your job and your job so you clock in not at the beginning of the day but you clock in when you pick up your first package and then you clock out as soon as you drop that package off and you know flaming is a really good example here of a bartender what part of a bartender's job is really adding value what part should the capitalist really pay them for well um when the bar is empty should they still be paid when they're going to the bathroom should they still be paid in fact in the action of grabbing a beer opening it putting it

into the glass and then handing it to the customer you could say throwing out the bottles not value added because the customer has already given you the money you know making change that's actually losing you money maybe every time you make change you know you should pay a little fee for accessing the till drawer you know like all of this is all of this is is is not that far fetched and so we i remember i saw there was one there's one company that's saying well look we know that big newspapers whatever don't pay freelancers on time so as a company that said if you that we will pay you now it's like faster pay or something i can't remember what it's called um but we'll deduct $50 from your overall commission price and we'll pay you now

and so that's just a transaction fee pay $50 it's like because company because the big papers have realized they can just not pay freelancers or pay them at their leisure months after they promise they would there is a company that's just yeah you can pay to be paid just accept a lower a lower um a lower payment and yeah you know our capital our pool of capital we'll just we'll just siphon some of it off and there you go more of your labor is being appropriated by capital more effectively and i think that's sort of a i think that's that's so prevalent and so pernicious that i think it ought to be made a principle of wreckage economics um so i think one of the all of this the way that this relates to the home economics because we kind of know

this has all been happening right like if you listen to this podcast like none of this should come as a surprise to you um but that uh the way that this relates to wreckage of an economics for fleming is that the home economics serves to she that to shield capitalism from its internal contradictions or rather exist to shield those made powerful by capitalism from the internal contradictions that created them and then going ahead and imploded in 2008 um yeah because the global ruling class was wiped out in the 1930s depression right like not all of them but there was massive sort of loss of capital and more over there was sort of massive um then then the destruction reeked by world war two destroyed even more of it and if you know your thomas pickety

you'll know that in history sort of social and economic equality like the creation of the welfare estate for example occurs when stocks of capital are destroyed and capital's power um versus labor is roughly diminished obviously that's a massive oversimplification of pickety's argument and i'm sure there are some economics nerds who are sort of yelling at their phones right now that's fine at alex kealy with any of your complaints um but the solution to sort of that massive destruction of capital stock and the implosion of the capitalist system was basically a sort of new deal with all of its faults and sort of including massive infrastructure spending the marshal plan the creation of the of the social welfare state etc um and that was a solution that kind of

if you like re it was it was a solution to it was a society level solution whereas in 2008 the bankers who worked at layman brothers they're fine you know they're they're still fine now just recently they held a celebration of their own venality and an undisclosed location in london probably quite reasonably fearing for their safety should the location of the event be uncovered and that's because the bailout this time the bailout that sort of created wreckage economics basically said okay well we're going to sort of bail out we're just going to do a massive credit infusion into the banks and assume that just because people are rational and we have the price signal and all of this that's going to create a wave of lending it's going to stimulate a lot

of economic activity and then capitalism will kind of just write itself of course that's not how it happened because that kind of assumes a little bit that you know people are free and equal actors engaging in exchanges and you know employees can you know contract whatever which gave a lot of money to people on the basis that as employment started to go up they would start to pay people more or remember what we said in the beginning about that graph saying capitalism's broken employment's gone up but no one's getting paid anymore and so the and so really what happens is we have capitalism ended in 2008 or so and and the solution to keep it going was basically just to keep the powerful powerful by sort of just giving them a whole lot of cash and then

quite reasonably they kept it and so you know the great recession ultimately wasn't paid for through the destruction of capital stocks but rather treating ordinary people as economic cannon fodder to preserve capital stocks and plumbing's contention which i see is pretty much true is that a deal was struck between industry and government like i said earlier neoliberal regimes provide support financial incentives and tax breaks to industry to quote unquote create jobs which is seen as good at itself and you can just think of the towns prostrating themselves for amazon to come in and create jobs but then we also remember that in every single rigorous economic analysis of amazon coming into your town your town is basically worse

off that you're sort of you're you you're paying for a large influx of of citizens sometimes by saying that you're even going to help pay their high salaries because then you're going to be in amazon town you're going to have lots of these things these lots of these jobs but really what it's going to do is it's going to make your towns existing constituents lives worse because none of this money that you're paying to sort of have amazon come in is going back into the towns coffers and amazon's and with all the tax sweetheart deals amazon's probably not going to pay much in tax either you're saying well it's okay it's okay you know the the cons they there's basically a form of trickle down economics or say okay that's fine because the new you know

manager of you know fucking third world's third or first world slavery is going to spend more money at your artisan coffee shops and ultimately if you think that is going to be the thing that saves your like structurally indebted and and like overly stretched your towns overly stretched finances from destruction i have a fucking bridge to sell you because it's absolute hogwash the problem is not that is not unemployment but over employment as the state bribes corporations to create jobs that don't matter the jobs create the numbers unemployment goes down but production stays the same and that's partly because it doesn't need to go anywhere you know it's that it's um i can't remember who i think this was richard wolf uh set wrote this

was that we yet we can't think of corporations come basically coming in and creating jobs you think of sort of especially billionaires you think of them rather seizing control of potential productive activity it's not amazon created 5 000 jobs when it moved to fucking topeka but rather amazon seized control of a great deal of topeka's economic activity and now that is more that's going to make sure that jeff bezos can still get like a hundred and twelve million dollars richer every day i think the real i think the real sort of the real killer point here is just that employment and wages have become delinked right because the jobs just aren't connected to anything you know unemployment production and wages is just not

linked anymore like most workers in our economy are kind of like maggie simpson with her toy steering wheel in the opening credits where she's steering she's beeping the horn but you know really it's marge driving and then ultimately at some point in the in the in in the opening credit sequence workers switch from being maggie being homer with their then run over so how does this relate to the practice of work itself which flaming focuses on a lot there's a whole sort of chapter in his book about sort of the slow death of work and that's in two senses the slow death of work as productive activity and the slow death that is entailed by doing work in general and the sort of ritual and religious nature of it now so from early industrialism fortism post fortism

and today under wreckage economics perhaps the most critical discussion about the capitalist underutilization of labor and its concurrent maximization is somehow internal to the dominant ideological system itself total employment and excessive hours put in at the office on one hand and utter uselessness on the other a kind of employed redundancy the two trends look opposed but actually belong to the same method of economic misalignment demanding labor's fullness and absence often at the same time so if this sounds like a little bit like epo echoes of mark fisher's capitalist realism that's probably no surprise as fisher's name check directly capitalist realism is not some unadulterated business logic but rather the imposition of the insanely

unreal universe that everyone except the ultra rich must confront and navigate and that's why homo economicus is dying because capitalism has externalizes contradictions all the way to the bottom but it's just that that bottom is now growing so if you were to ask someone in the 1990s is capitalism doing okay for you you know maybe you might have to use different words because you know not everyone not every potential sort of feel like leftist voter quite and sort of identify their malefactors yet because a lot of it takes quite a bit of reading that a lot of people don't have time to do but regardless capitalism was working well for you know your standard white factory worker in columbus in the 1980s and then it wasn't but it was still working

pretty well for the you know recently graduated university educated magazine writer but then in the 2000s all of a sudden it wasn't and in 2008 was working for fewer and fewer people so the people who are at the bottom who are forced to live as the homo economicus is growing because you're either forced to live as the homo economicus or you're not there's really not a lot of in between and now the people who aren't forced to live and this this sort of weird unreal hyper exploited hyper rational scared animal way are emily clarkson you know so where we think of the of the contradiction of work and non-work i mean flaming has a lot on this and again it should you should be expecting a little bit of kind of the david graver bullshit

jobs thing which i think going to be a preface to an episode we're going to do in the future but where it's a yeah we see the underutilization demanding labor's presence and its absence its fullness in its emptiness which is that we sort of sit at at jobs so many of us sort of manipulating excel spreadsheets that we know are irrelevant or just maybe checking email for a little while but then looking busy sort of putting in work as ritual rather than work as productive activity as a kind of religion and it's again just like everything else it's a system of control and domination so we speak of like the death of moritz airheart who is a bank of america intern who put in a 72 hour shift and then promptly died and how really for him employment was a total ritual a

self-flagellating ritual and this is and then because it was because the more you especially in a job like this it's less about what you put in and more about how often you show up it's like oh well you are and so moritz airheart should not be seen as a dynamic business genius even though he may have been a dab hand at maths but rather like saint simian stylities who sort of is a an ancient i'm like syrian monk an ancient syrian christian monk who sort of just elects to live at the top of a pillar forever so that he can suffer and be exposed and demonstrate his fealty to god what is work literally working yourself to death for an activity that is unconnected to any kind of production like being a teacher or a surgeon or whatever

that's a social usefulness rather but not production production is just one way of being socially useful but what better way to demonstrate you're just fealty to a higher power than just killing yourself for no reason but this is why any workplace initiative to tackle mental health quote unquote always fails before it starts because it fails to recognize that caring for an employee is like caring for livestock and the whole point of your enterprise is to exploit them as much as possible so i'm mental out that's why mental health programs offered by companies often are just like hey we're going to give you cbt so you can sort of cope with all of the mad shit we make you do in fact for that if you want to hear more about that you

can listen to our episode mindfulness meltdown with author maggie van ike which is i'm i think eight months ago or so it's also pretty good yeah like i said this is really pulling a lot of stuff together and so like just and just so just going back to that for a second right like remember the the theory our theoretical bartender from earlier who's actually just going to be paid for the time when she's physically pouring the beer into the glass because that's the only part of her job that's really her job she shows up to work when she grabs the beer she leaves work when she's when she throws it away and then she's not at work and therefore not paid and she picks it up again that sort of reorganization of work basically sees the social contract of work

as going one way that there is no social that that capital it has no responsibility to anybody else that work is not a social process it's merely a series of exchanges where we get what we want where we all get what we want where i want money you want me to do a job and so we're going to negotiate terms or i do a job and that but that but that imagining production that way is between sort of two equal um counter parties to a contract same thing with more its air heart it was not really a counterparty to a contract so much as a religious devotee um sort of praying at the altar of excel um where that depends on us believing the kind of homo economic as myth that oh we are maximized we're doing being rational we're all just rational counterparties and not

that this myth is a thin smoke screen over what is ultimately a brutally exploitative system but a brutally exploitative system where there is no social production it is merely just sort of the incidents an incident that arises from if you like a private vice becoming public virtue when really in fact it is just public vice that becomes public vice and may maybe is private virtue for the stockholders of bank of america who are able to benefit from the devotion onto death of the world's more its air hearts and one of the things i think is really interesting is that a lot of this stuff is pushed as i'm sort of moving away from more its air heart for a bit because even though because most people aren't employed in that kind of situation they're more

employed in say gig economy contracts zero hours contracts they work for amazon they work for uber they're sort of disposable and tracked and measured and everything and when we imagine that everyone is an equal counterparty to a contract and sort of power doesn't come into it then we can kind of you know hand wave our way out of this contradiction you're rising self employment means more and more people should be benefiting from the fruits of their labor right but fleming points out how this obviously isn't true simply because tons of autonomously quote unquote or flexibly employed people still require the patronage of a company it's less self-interested economic units bouncing off one another and more a patronage relationship where you must

always prove your worth to your master at any given time because ultimately what we have to remember is that if these people were actually autonomous they would probably work less and all of this economic rationalism is really just secular secularized calvinist salvation anxiety communicated ritually as a devotion to the lords and priests of capitalism which in turn leads us to the idea of human capital where every person is a mini corporation they must act like a corporation but how do corporations act think of mike ashley and sports direct they are they are terminally sell their terminally self-regarding incredibly short termist and ultimately fucking sociopathic the person acted like sports direct sort of compunctionlessly sort of just hoovering

up sort of the wealth of others and sort of ruining lives without a second thought then they'd be fucking put in jail but we are forever optimizing we're meeting the right partner for our career picking hobbies to ingratiate ourselves our boss and also lowering our expectations because life has lived in the margins just remember doug evans the famous dunce in charge of juicero and raw water said specifically that he sees his employees this way they invest their time in the company but again this is an absurd contradiction because time and money are not simply interchangeable when power is in play that is to say doug evans if the company goes well the employees have invested their time in the company in return for a wage or more or less kept alive doug evans has invested

some capital in the company has made fabulously wealthy and in fact gets to stay fabulously wealthy because he was always fabulously wealthy right like the idea that sort of human talent in time is equivalent to capital is just demonstrably fucking false so wages are depreciated by the sporadic and unpredictable nature of such employment compared to standard jobs fluctuations in labor demand coupled with the one side of power dynamic that sees employers alone deciding whether you work and will be paid today lowers incomes expectations and governments of course do little to help this exempting self-employed and gig economy workers and blah blah blah from labor protections and minimum wages so i'm sort of slightly running low on time here

so i'll just remind you like also like right now in terms of lowered expectations it's not even just in wages it's in what you do too so um oan jones is being how to go at um because he said that the british media is basically elitist is overly privately educated it's overly people from wealthy backgrounds and so on and so forth um and people in journalism sort of have read this and said hey i'm not a journalist just have a wealthy background then they'll go on to say even though i have a wealthy background i've done all this great work and i'm very talented or they'll say i actually overcame my non-wealthy background and you're discounting that which is so fucking insanely blinkered um because we've constrained the size of the market for jobs that people actually want to

do um and so talent is necessary but hardly sufficient or often not sufficient for success that is to say there are tons of potentially talented journalists who are walking around right now doing maybe driving uber or working for fiverr who aren't currently being journalists because they don't they don't have the capacity or never did to work the five unpaid internships or didn't get the stroke of luck it's like part of being a home economicus is being and all as all of these people are is being unable to see the world for its structures of being unable to see that there are biases and then overcoming them it doesn't mean that you are especially wonderful or at least if you think that's what it means then you're psychotically self-regarding rather

it means that yes there are biases and the fact that you overcame them is incidental to the fact that there are fucking biases which is completely completely completely fucking wild anyway i'm running very short on time i actually have more to say but i'm going to cut it soon which is that fleming's prescription here and now he goes on to talk about how the home economicus is constantly in retreat from sort of these powers that aim to sort of exploit and kill and so on you sort of hide from the unemployment industry and university or internships you sort of you you sort of hide from the state that sort of aims to criminalize more and more elements of your life and that it's that of an that they bought the act the home economicus is sort of similar to an animal in

retreat well what's the solution is he sees a homo politicus uh as the as the answer which is someone who is not sort of maximizing every decision sort of again with sort of blinders on for the sake of being whatever capital wants him or her to be and do but sort of understands that there can be more to life and that there can be more that you can sort of do that there you can be more than a homo economicus you can be you know you you can be the person you have you can lead the kind of life you'd have reason to value but that takes looking at these structures and understanding that they're not simply sort of exogenous they're not just there but that they are temporary and time bound and political that all of these are political choices and we sort of made

a choice to live this way and by our own bizarre and inexplicable apathy we continue to do so so you know once again i mean just like and just like in in the last episode where we talked about where we talked about the solutions that reese jones offers to the sort of violent borders problem it's well a borderless communist world the solution that fleming offers to the homo economicus problem is well a sort of a you could say a politically conscious and could say a solidarity and characterized by solidarity working class with a clear political vision again i feel like we've fallen into the trap a little bit not to sort of diminish the analysis itself we've fallen into a little bit of the trap of sort of saying the solution saying the end state as the solution because i hate to

always end these on a fucking downer but i i don't know how we get there i mean like i said the best i mean right now the best hope is you know organized democratic socialism that sort of seems to be on the rise in at least canada in the uk i think one of last thing i think i think one of the reasons that we sort of defend corbin so much is that we see him as the main method by which we can create socialism in our time i guess that you think the important thing and because i see is like i see always we're talked of as a cult and saying a fuck off but i think the important thing to remember it's we are to become homo politicus is to remember that figures like corbin or bernie sanders are basic as politicians are basically only useful in as much as they stand for us

as the biggest chance of electorally achieving socialism in our time i think that's one of the important things to remember as we sort of try to hold on to this transformation to homo politicus as fleming would say because if it's around a single person then that movement will be as temporary as that person and to our credit as a sort of general tendency or movement or whatever i don't think we're as cultish as everyone thinks we are i think we are actually not corbin fanboys or bernie rose or whatever but actually i think we're just socialists and i don't think the sort of weird middle aged fucking tea junkies and orwell fans and you know oh well i i went to the first to second summer of love in 89 outside manchester probably in different

accent whatever i don't think those people understand it i think they can only see us as having been hoodwinked by some old grifter but i i don't know i don't think we are so i guess maybe i'm ending this one a little bit more optimistically than previous episodes anyway i also just have to go myself so i'll say thank you everyone who's been listening to us for your patience i know our release schedule has been a bit erratic recently that's because hussain's traveling myla's been in edinburgh i've been away nate our producer who we're always yelling at has just moved to britain he's now here but we're all going to be in the same place again making the same high volume of content that you crave from next week we've got a lot of really really really

exciting episodes coming up and i'm very excited for them to come out anyway thank you to jinsang for our theme song here we go you can find it on spotify as ever you can commodify your descent with a t-shirt from a little comrad and of course you should always remember that if you want if you want to cook up actually existing socialism there's no better way than the fine stoneware of remmy good night everybody