Thanks to @RedCloud for the schedule
Reading/Discussion Schedule:
Preface, Chapters 1 & 2 - Sunday 21st November
Chapters 3 & 4 - Sunday 28th November
Chapters 5 & 6 - Sunday 5th December
Chapter 7 - Sunday 12th December
PDF of the original essay that led to the book
A few years ago I went to a Barnes & Noble to buy this book, but when I got there I had trouble finding it on their shelves, even though I had checked their website ahead of time to make sure it was in stock at that location. Eventually I had to ask one of their employees for help.
Turns out they had it in the business section.
Gonna try to do this one since I started it a couple months ago. Personal challenge: read the whole thing on the clock
this is the way. i daydream of bringing in a bunch of my lefty books and just having them on my desk. never have to mention them, but just there to make a statement.
Overview of the chapters of the book, click to expand
Overview:
Preface: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
Chapter 1: What Is a Bullshit Job?
Chapter 2: What Sorts of Bullshit Jobs Are There?
Chapter 3: Why Do Those in Bullshit Jobs Regularly Report Themselves Unhappy?
Chapter 4: What Is It Like to Have a Bullshit Job?
Chapter 5: Why Are Bullshit Jobs Proliferating?
Chapter 6: Why Do We as a Society Not Object to the Growth of Pointless Employment?
Chapter 7: What Are the Political Effects of Bullshit Jobs, and Is There Anything That Can Be Done About This Situation?Chapter 1: What Is a Bullshit Job?
- Why a Mafia Hit Man is Not a Good Example of a Bullshit Job
- On the Importance of the Subjective Element, and Also, Why It Can Be Assumed That Those Who Believe They Have Bullshit Jobs Are Generally Correct
- On the Common Misconception That Bullshit Jobs are Confined Largely to the Public Sector
- Why Hairdressers Are a Poor Example of a Bullshit Job
- On the Difference Between Partly Bullshit Jobs, Mostly Bullshit Jobs and Purely and Entirely Bullshit Jobs
Chapter 2: What Sorts of Bullshit Jobs Are There?
- The Five Major Varieties of Bullshit Jobs
- What Flunkies Do
- What Goons Do
- What Duct Tapers Do
- What Box Tickers Do
- What Taskmasters Do
- On Complex Multiform Bullshit Jobs
- A Word on Second-Order Bullshit Jobs
- A Final Note, with a Brief Return to the Question: Is It Possible to Have a Bullshit Job and Not Know It?
Chapter 3: Why Do Those in Bullshit Jobs Regularly Report Themselves Unhappy?
- About One Young Man Apparently Handed a Sinecure Who Nonetheless Found Himself Unable to Handle the Situation
- Concerning the Experience of Falseness and Purposelessness at the Core of Bullshit Jobs, and the Importance Now Felt of Conveying the Experience of Falseness and Purposelessness to Youth
- Why Many of Our Fundamental Assumptions on Human Motivation Appear to Be Incorrect
- A Brief Excursus on the History of Make-Work, and Particularly of the Concept of Buying Other People’s Time
- Concerning the Clash Between the Morality of Time and Natural Work Rhythms, and the Resentment It Creates
Chapter 4: What Is It Like to Have a Bullshit Job?
- Why Having a Bullshit Job Is Not Always Necessarily That Bad
- On the Misery of Ambiguity and Forced Pretense
- On the Misery of Not Being a Cause
- On the Misery of Not Feeling Entitled to One’s Misery
- On the Misery of Knowing That One Is Doing Harm
- Coda: On the Effects of Bullshit Jobs on Human Creativity, and On Why Attempts to Assert Oneself Creatively or Politically Against Pointless Employment Might Be Considered a Form of Spiritual Warfare
Chapter 5: Why Are Bullshit Jobs Proliferating?
- A Brief Excursus on Causality and the Nature of Sociological Explanation
- Sundry Notes on the Role of Government in Creating and Maintaining Bullshit Jobs
- Concerning Some False Explanations for the Rise of Bullshit Jobs
- Why the Financial Industry Might Be Considered a Paradigm for Bullshit Job Creation
- On Some Ways in Which the Current Form of Managerial Feudalism Resembles Classical Feudalism, and Other Ways in Which It Does Not
- How Managerial Feudalism Manifests Itself in the Creative Industries through an Endless Multiplication of Intermediary Executive Ranks Conclusion, with a Brief Return to the Question of Three Levels of Causation
Chapter 6: Why Do We as a Society Not Object to the Growth of Pointless Employment?
- On the Impossibility of Developing an Absolute Measure of Value
- How Most People in Contemporary Society Do Accept the Notion of a Social Value That Can Be Distinguished from Economic Value, Even If It Is Very Difficult to Pin Down What It Is
- Concerning the Inverse Relationship Between the Social Value of Work and the Amount of Money One Is Likely to Be Paid for It
- On the Theological Roots of Our Attitudes Toward Labor
- On the Origins of the Northern European Notion of Paid Labor as Necessary to the Full Formation of an Adult Human Being
- How, with the Advent of Capitalism, Work Came to Be Seen in Many Quarters Either as a Means of Social Reform or Ultimately as a Virtue in Its Own Right, and How Laborers Countered by Embracing the Labor Theory of Value
- Concerning the Key Flaw in the Labor Theory of Value as It Became Popular in the Nineteenth Century, and How the Owners of Capital Exploited That Flaw
- How, over the Course of the Twentieth Century, Work Came to Be Increasingly Valued Primarily as a Form of Discipline and Self-Sacrifice
Chapter 7: What Are the Political Effects of Bullshit Jobs, and Is There Anything That Can Be Done About This Situation?
- On How the Political Culture under Managerial Feudalism Comes to Be Maintained by a Balance of Resentments
- How the Current Crisis over Robotization Relates to the Larger Problem of Bullshit Jobs
- On the Political Ramifications of Bullshitization and Consequent Decline of Productivity in the Caring Sector as It Relates to the Possibility of a Revolt of the Caring Classes
- On Universal Basic Income as an Example of a Program That Might Begin to Detach Work from Compensation and Put an End to the Dilemmas Described in This Book
The first paragraph as teaser:
Let us begin with what might be considered a paradigmatic example of a bullshit job.
Kurt works for a subcontractor for the German military. Or . . . actually, he is employed by a subcontractor of a subcontractor of a subcontractor for the German military. Here is how he describes his work:
The German military has a subcontractor that does their IT work.
The IT firm has a subcontractor that does their logistics.
The logistics firm has a subcontractor that does their personnel management, and I work for that company.
Let’s say soldier A moves to an office two rooms farther down the hall. Instead of just carrying his computer over there, he has to fill out a form.
The IT subcontractor will get the form, people will read it and approve it, and forward it to the logistics firm.
The logistics firm will then have to approve the moving down the hall and will request personnel from us.
The office people in my company will then do whatever they do, and now I come in.
I get an email: “Be at barracks B at time C.” Usually these barracks are one hundred to five hundred kilometers [62–310 miles] away from my home, so I will get a rental car. I take the rental car, drive to the barracks, let dispatch know that I arrived, fill out a form, unhook the computer, load the computer into a box, seal the box, have a guy from the logistics firm carry the box to the next room, where I unseal the box, fill out another form, hook up the computer, call dispatch to tell them how long I took, get a couple of signatures, take my rental car back home, send dispatch a letter with all of the paperwork and then get paid.
So instead of the soldier carrying his computer for five meters, two people drive for a combined six to ten hours, fill out around fifteen pages of paperwork, and waste a good four hundred euros of taxpayers’ money.
Reading bullshit jobs was a radicalizing experience for me. I think it was the nail in the coffin for any hopes I had of being happy with a lifetime of pointless office work
Just read the original essay. Pretty cool. I guess he expanded on it in the book by giving concrete examples?
I particularly liked this point -
if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call ‘the market’ reflects what they think is useful or im- portant, not anybody else.
Also, how true is this claim about the SU -
in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat
Like, I’m wholly illiterate about the functioning of the Soviet economic and politics system post-Stalin. Any recs would be appreciated.
I also don’t understand how such a system would have arisen if at every point each private capitalist was seeking to maximise their profit (and thus looking to remove the excess workers rather than hiring people who added no value).
Clearly all that administration is necessary else businesses without them would have succeeded and grown much larger. So it seems this “meaningless work” is in the sense the same as unproductive labor that’s necessary for capitalism to function. And what we’re seeing is a growth of that labor compared to productive labor (in the Marxist sense). Both turning people into mindless machines endlessly repeating the same tasks.
Is the claim just that these jobs are “bullshit” from a societal point of view? Which, I mean, I don’t know anyone who’d disagree with that. And yeah, under a centrally planned socialist economy with today’s level of technology and productivity, people would definitely be much more free.
That makes me question why China also seems to be facing this problem rather than transitioning away from it. What is it exactly that they’re seeking to develop? And why did the SU fail to achieve that level of production? In fact, could Maoist China have done so? Plus, these are all humongous countries - what about the smaller ones?
in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat
This feels like a weird joke... but in all seriousness: One to take the order, one to cut/package the meat, and a cashier. Seems reasonable to me.
Like, if I go to Walmart and get some sliced lunch meat/cheese from the deli there's at least two clerks that I need to deal with. The person taking the order/cutting/packaging the product and the cashier to ring me out. Doesn't sound like that big of a deal.
it seemed like an apocryphal detail and made me a little worried as i've heard Debt has been criticized for some of its historical claims, but when you describe like that it really does sound completely ordinary
I also don’t understand how such a system would have arisen if at every point each private capitalist was seeking to maximise their profit (and thus looking to remove the excess workers rather than hiring people who added no value).
It's been a while since I read the book, but he does spend some time talking about this. He doesn't have an exact answer but he points out how curious it is that this phenomenon is occurring under a system that prides itself on maximizing profit.
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.
He mentions that sometimes Marxists struggle with the idea that capital isn't well-allocated or that workers are being paid for something that has no use-value to the firm.
I think flunkies are a particularly telling example - people you only need in order to legitimize your business, organization, or team's social position. It's inefficient to hire a secretary to pick up the phone for you if you have more than enough time, but picking up your own phone makes you look like a tiny one-human operation. Perhaps the secretary does provide a use-value, but in this case it's a complicated one that weaves its way through psyches.
In all, I think the catcher is that there are emergent social phenomena that go above and beyond the brute material conditions and tie back in and around them.
Reminds me of a part in 'Stolen' by Grace Blakeley (highly recommend) where she discusses why CEO salaries have increased so much and why they often get paid in stock these days instead of a salary. One of the reasons is that they would often make decisions not based on what was necessarily good for shareholders but what would increase their own power or status. For example, arranging a merger between two companies might not always be a very profitable idea, but it does mean that the CEO gets further ahead in the dick-measuring contest as they're now in charge of a larger business with more employees. Making the CEO themselves a shareholder helps to prevent this kind of thing happening, but for lower ranked managers or heads of departments (who are still salaried and will obviously be more involved in both the recruitment and day-to-day running of their departments in large businesses) the same incentive for inefficient, unprofitable, dick-measuring bullshit is still there. Like you said, if all the other managers have their own secretary, you're going to want one (or several), too.
It’s a good book. But absolutely terrified me when my companies CEO mentioned it as a very interesting read.
Graeber was fairly popular (and polarizing) with the techbro and CEO crowd. Most of them didn't understand his point or motivations, but the idea that many issues are a problem of economic efficiency is highly appealing to that crowd.
I first heard of him through a google employee who saw him at one of the company's speaker series'.
aren't bullshit jobs the lube in the capitalist machine in this metaphor? 🤔 they need the PMC both to do the managerial work they are too lazy for, and to bribe some would-be workers to dampen class conflict? and tech bros want to abolish this inefficiency?
This one is particularly good to read because typical libs are fairly likely to have read it and at least partially misunderstood it. Gives you an opportunity to discuss it and some of its radical implications with them.
Holy crap I can't believe I've actually read this one already. I uh... have a lot of theory I need to catch up on.
That being said, this is a short entertaining read. If you have a bullshit job yourself it'll be an even quicker read. My job would qualify as a box ticker job lol.
Just added this to my check out list at the library. Graeber is such a good writer that I might be able to keep up this time.
I haven't done one of these but I've been meaning to read this book. Is there anything I need to do?Nvm, someone answered that below!
![[Book Club Announcement] Winner: Bullshit Jobs!](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/qHxbm5aXgB.jpg){kind=link}