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Title: Is Your Job Bullshit? Author: Dayton Martindale Date: May 10, 2018 Language: en Topics: bullshit jobs, anti-work, David Graeber, interview Source: Retrieved on 28th November 2021 from https://inthesetimes.com/article/capitalism-job-bullshit-david-graeber-busywork-labor
David Graeber had a hypothesis. The anthropologist grew up working-class
in New York, and while his scholarship garnered accolades, he’s never
felt at home in the world of academia. From his time as a professor at
Yale (ended prematurely, he believes, due to his anarchist activism) to
his current gig at the London School of Economics, he kept running into
professional managers who didn’t seem to do much. Over drinks, some
confessed they actually didn’t do much; they spent a few hours a week
working and the rest browsing cat memes.
Graeber developed a suspicion that this was rather common and, in 2013,
wrote an essay for Strike! magazine, ​“On the Phenomenon of Bullshit
Jobs.” It was just a hypothesis — halfway a joke — but the piece was
translated into at least a dozen languages and reprinted all over the
internet, where it elicited floods of comments from people saying: ​“I
have a bullshit job.”
A subsequent YouGov survey found that 37 percent of British workers
believe their job makes no ​“meaningful contribution to the world” — more
than Graeber expected. So, he dug deeper, soliciting testimonials and
researching the political, cultural and economic structures that
encourage millions of people to effectively waste 40 hours a week. The
result is Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, a playful and provocative take on
what he calls ​“a scar across our collective soul.” In These Times spoke
to Graeber about the jobs problem, its causes and the future of
capitalism.
How did you determine what counts as a ​“bullshit job”?
DG: I’m not going to tell anyone who thinks their job is meaningful and
important that it isn’t. People weren’t saying, ​“I market selfie sticks,
selfie sticks are stupid, that’s a bullshit job.” They assumed that, if
someone actually wants something, then it’s not bullshit. They weren’t
judgmental about consumer taste.
A bullshit job is a job that the person doing it believes is pointless,
and if the job didn’t exist it would either make no difference
whatsoever or it would make the world a better place.
The existence of bullshit jobs seems to cut against the idea that
capitalism is efficient and squeezes labor.
DG: Capitalism treats blue-collar and white-collar wage earners
differently than salary earners. Since the 1980s, anybody who has a
non-bullshit job, who is doing actual work, has seen their work
downsized, sped up and Taylorized.
Simultaneously, capitalism has produced endless bullshit white-collar
jobs, which are designed to make you identify with the sensibilities of
managers. I call this managerial feudalism, whereby they keep adding
more and more and more levels of intermediary executives. If you’re an
executive you need to have an assistant or else you’re not important, so
they hire these flunkies. It has to do with power, really.
It screws up the creative industries. Movies have seven different levels
of executives, who all have these complicated titles. They all fuck with
the script and everything turns into mush. People point out this is why
movies are so bad now.
In universities, you have this managerial class that’s taken over from
the professors. They don’t know what the hell professors do. The more
distant the managers are from what they’re managing, the more numbers
they need because they don’t understand teaching themselves, and as a
result we professors have to spend a larger and larger percentage of our
time translating our activities into these quantitative terms that they
set out.
You would think that somebody would raise an objection to this. It’s
quite remarkable actually how you have something that’s such a glaring
contradiction in the basic ideology of capitalism and nobody talks about
it.
Why else have bullshit jobs been increasing?
DG: There is this rise-of-the-robots logic, this fear that gradually
technology is going to throw more and more people out of work. People
say, ​“Look, it hasn’t happened.”
I think it did happen, but they made up these imaginary jobs to keep us
working anyway, because we have an irrational economy that makes people
work eight hours whether or not there’s anything to do. Can you have a
surer sign of a stupid economic system than one in which the prospect of
getting rid of onerous labor is considered a problem? Any rational
economic system would redistribute the necessary work in a reasonable
way and everybody would work less.
It’s striking how much people report hating their bullshit job.
DG: They’re miserable! Two or three people said they kind of like their
bullshit jobs, but the overwhelming majority, they’re sick all the time.
They talk about depression, they talk about complex illnesses,
psychological and physical and immune problems that all clearly have to
do with tension and anxiety and depression.
And also they’re mean to each other. They scream at each other. The more
meaningless the work, the more people suffer doing it and the worse they
treat each other.
Does this unhappiness indicate something more fundamental?
DG: Psychologist Karl Groos used this phrase, and it always struck me,
​“the pleasure of being a cause.” When children first realize that when
they knock something over, they can do it again in the same way and it
will have the same result, there is a kind of pure joy and happiness.
This becomes the basis of your sense of agency and sense of self for the
rest of your life.
When you deprive children of that agency, they almost feel catatonic.
That shows we are creatures who need projects of transforming the world
around us. If we can’t do that, we hardly exist.
So this theory of human nature promulgated by economists and right-wing
politicians that people basically want something for nothing — that if
you just give them money they’re going to laze around and watch TV and
get drunk all day — it’s not true.
What are some of the ways out?
DG: I’ve been working with people who’ve become big advocates for a
universal basic income. It’s not the only solution, but it conforms with
my political instincts. People think that is odd because I’m an
anarchist. Why would I want a policy where the government would just
give people money? Isn’t that giving power to the government? I say, no.
A basic income would be the perfect leftist antibureaucratic policy. It
would not only reduce the number of bureaucrats, but it would get rid of
the worst of them, the annoying ones who decide whether you’re really
poor enough to deserve this, or whether you’re really married to that
person or whether you really live in that room.
Besides, they’re unhappy, those intrusive bureaucrats about whom you
wonder, ​“How can they live with themselves?” Well a lot of them can’t.
Those guys would be off the hook. They could go form a rock band or
restore antique furniture or do something nice.
What drew you to explore bullshit jobs?
DG: I have tended to focus on the ideological strong points of the other
side. That’s what my book Debt: The First 5,000 Years came out of— most
people think that people who owe money and don’t pay it back are bad.
With bullshit jobs, there is the idea that if you’re not working hard at
something you don’t enjoy, then you’re a bad person and don’t deserve
public relief. Those deeply rooted beliefs are the strongest weapons
capitalism has.
The anthropologist’s role is to take things that seem natural and point
out that they’re not, that they’re social constructs and that we could
easily do things another way. It’s inherently liberating.
Your explanation suggest capitalism is a less totalizing system than
some might think.
DG: It’s rapidly transforming into something that might not even be
capitalism, though it might be just as bad. When we think of something
as totalizing, we assume that to get from one totalizing thing to
another you need some kind of fundamental break. But historical change
tends to be somewhat gradual and complicated. At what point does the
other stuff mixed in with capitalism mean it’s not even capitalism
anymore?
I remember having this argument with conventional Marxists about the
transition from feudalism to capitalism. Okay, say that capitalism
started around 1500. And the Marxists insist that capitalism is
organized around wage labor. But wage labor was marginal until the
industrial revolution, around 1750. How can you say that wage labor is
central to capitalism if, for 250 years, it was a tiny element?
And of course the Marxist will say, ​“Well you’re not thinking
dialectically. From 1500 to 1750, people were in a process that was
going to lead to wage labor, they just didn’t realize it yet.” And I
realized, wait a minute, if that’s the case, how do we know that we are
even in capitalism now? Maybe we are already 100 years into a process
leading us to something and we don’t even know what it is. By that
logic, capitalism could have ended in like 1950, and we’ll only fully
know what replaced it in 2175.