When you think of it not as individual capitalists trying to maximise profit at their own individual company, and as a class as a whole, it makes a little more sense.

Think about how Graeber starts out talking about subcontractor to a subcontractor to a subcontractor to the military, for example. Even though private contracting and outsourcing is done in the name of cutting costs, it actually costs more usually.

So in this chain of the military, the subcontractor, the subcontractor to the subcontractor, and the subsubsubcontractor, instead of just having the military doing whatever (e.g. their IT) in-house, there’s now a chain of companies, all presumably making profit. And each of those companies has people doing bullshit jobs, basically Kafkaesque bureaucracy shit, in order to function.

In this manner you can see how it may seem like capitalists are paying for people to do nothing, but in actuality it’s adding profit to the big ol pile of surplus value.