Something doesn't seem quite right.
Welcome to Not quite right.
My name's Ed and I'm Amanda, and we're here at Words on the Waves with
another interview with Hannah Forsyth.
And Hannah is the author of Virtue Capitalists,
the Rise and fall of the professional Class in the Anglophone World.
She's also the author of the very provocatively titled ******* Capitalism
Substack.
And so we spoke to her about her thoughts about capitalism.
So here's our interview with Hannah Forsyth.
We're here at Words on the Waves with Hannah Forsythe.
Nice to meet you, Hannah.
Great to be here.
And so tell us all about why you're here at Words on the Waves.
Thank you.
Yes, I so I was just on a panel with Sean
Skarma, who wrote a book called A Fair Day's Work
and talking about my book, which is called Virtue Capitalist,
the rise and fall of the professional class in the Anglophone world.
Oh, that's a little bit of a mouthful.
So would you like to just give us a bit of an overview on the themes of your book
and and what you hope to achieve with it?
Sure.
So I was really interested in class and so all of our ideas about class had been
formed when most people had working class jobs.
And so we had this kind of labour versus capital thing going.
But I was my first book was the History of Universities.
And so I was interested in what was going on with these people.
And as the number of them grew, so that now actually the majority of
people have professional jobs, what does that do to our class?
And how does that, how has that changed over the course of
the really the 20th century?
So I started in, I ended up starting in about 1870,
which was the beginning of a first kind of surge in professional occupations and
coming up to about 2008.
And did you have a thesis?
Were you sort of working towards some sort of idea or?
Well, I wasn't at the time, but as it turns out,
every single one of the professions that I looked at had a moral component to
their work.
And I didn't recognise it for the first couple of years of reading all of their,
their journals and archives.
But eventually I, I came to see that all of,
in order to do any of this work, you needed a combination of moral purpose
and kind of and excellent.
So you want to do a really good job, but you also want to do it for good
reasons.
So if you're an accountant, you need the audit to be correct.
If you're an engineer, you need the maths to make sure that the
buildings and the bridges don't fall down.
If you're a teacher, you need to care about the,
the ways that your students are are growing and developing.
If you're a nurse, obviously your care is part of,
of the thing.
So the moral dimension of each of these professions became really important part
of this.
And what I saw was that people were investing morality in a way that they
hoped would result in kind of profit, but a profit that was was moral as well
as economic satisfaction.
And this is maybe where we disconnect a little bit once we get into the corporate
world and we're all just sending emails back and forth.
And I know Ed and I share the opinion that, yeah, the corporate world,
it can be a little bit soul destroying at times.
Do you think that maybe there is something to be said for, I suppose,
having some sort of moral value in the work that you do?
Totally, totally.
I mean, the system had significant flaws, right?
So the the types of moral values that were being brought were often doing as
much harm as they were could.
So if we think about the reason why it's the Anglophone world was because when I
had a look at the patterns across Australia, New Zealand, Canada,
the United States, all exactly the same growth patterns,
totally different to the UK and we're.
Oh, so there's something going on about the
settler colonies that kind of encouraged the professions to grow in the 19th
century now.
So the kinds of moral values that they're bringing in were also deeply racist,
terribly sexist, built hierarchies through society that
were exploitative as often as they were good.
So if we think about who really was responsible for the Stolen Generations in
Australia, it's doctors, social workers, nurses,
those professions that come with lots of clergy, you know, lots of moral force.
But often those went wrong.
So I think they were onto something, but it brought with it kind of some
serious problems That began to change in the 60s and 70s where every one of those
professions had a moral crisis where they began to try to turn those hierarchies
upside down.
So the social workers had to absolutely disobey their bosses and start being on
Aboriginal people's side rather than taking their children way.
But that was a very difficult thing for those to do.
And legal aid began to come in so that the lawyers were not only serving rich
people and so on.
Every one of them went through this.
And we're kind of living now with the legacies of both of those systems of kind
of steep, in some ways unfair hierarchies that
connect moral values with your status in society,
but also kind of the people seeking to turn much of that upside down.
I'm just thinking about this idea of moral values in the workplace.
And I, I do agree that we don't really have that
individual moral values.
There's no morality associated with anyone's role.
Like the desire to make positive change.
I, I guess, is just not there for most people in
corporate life.
But there is a set of moral values from a organisational like corporate standpoint,
like things around climate change, sustainability, diversity,
all of that does exist.
There is that moral dimension, even if it is culture.
Yeah, even if it is often performative.
So I don't know if that's kind of taken the similar position.
I think there was a move from in the late 20th century away from thinking about
that virtue as being in hearing in yourself would and which came with some
problems to something where that you would manage at a more corporate level.
So because the virtue was part of the work, you couldn't not do it.
We ended up with kind of systems for risk and quality management and things like
that, that were there to ensure that
organisations were achieving what they morally said that they were going to do.
But we've got a different imperative coming through from management at that
time.
We're kind of finding efficiencies, building productivity becomes their
measure of success, and that success becomes often enough the
thing that matters most.
And so we end up then with a conflict between that and with the good that
you're trying to do.
And also lots and lots of forms like it across all of the professions.
Many, many will say they spend more time
filling out forms than doing their job.
Yeah, a lot of red tape.
And you have a sub stack called ******* capitalism.
I do.
And you know, I often that is that like a, a cheering kind of ******* or is it?
What's the tone there?
So I, I write about work, education and the history of capitalism.
But those are my three areas of interest.
And so I began my sub stack kind of thinking that we could describe the
history of ******* capitalism, but we could,
we'd also kind of look at strategies for ******* capitalism.
And so I have a little joke on it that I'm trying to **** capitalism.
1 homegrown vegetable at a time.
We live in the Blue Mountains and I my sub stack also includes of discussion
about my chickens.
Amazing.
I love it.
I mean, I'm often lamenting the fact that
capitalism and the arts don't mix.
And you're here at a writers festival.
What's your feeling on the place of the arts and how that works in society?
That's such a good question.
It's like the arts has been so important to everything,
to the growth of our sense of self as a culture, as nations, as humans and so on.
And we've had little spurts, haven't we, sometimes of really great support for the
arts.
And where we see that kind of wonderful flourishing.
We're not living in that moment, right at this moment.
And in some way, like that's terrible because we we lose
so much.
But at the same time, and I feel this as a as a former academic
who's left the university system where I can now do things.
I have the, you know, I have a lot less money, yeah,
but I have a lot more freedom.
And there's, there's kind of something quite wonderful
that happens in the arts when you're sitting on the edge,
you've not got very much, but gosh, you've got good ideas.
And I, I think that we're seeing a lot of that
coming out in the arts at the moment.
So it's almost like the starving artists or the good artists kind of things.
But you don't, you don't want to do it, do you?
Because like people should have good work and be well paid and, you know,
have enough time to do their art.
And, you know, so we, we want to support them,
but there's something special going on, I think at the moment,
despite the lack of support.
If only there was an option to be profitable and make money and not destroy
your soul.
Unfortunately, we're yet to find that one.
Yeah, yeah, me too.
But thank you so much, Hannah, for speaking with us.
We know you're limited in time, but it's been wonderful.
Great to meet you both.
This has been a special presentation of the Not Quite Right Podcast in
collaboration with Words on the Ways Writers Festival.
Check the show notes For more information about Words on the Waves and the books
mentioned in this episode.
If you're new to the podcast, please join us again for our regular
episodes where we talk about media, culture, and the art of writing.
Something doesn't seem quite right.