David Graeber – ‘Bullshit Jobs’. In this book, David Graeber argues that there are millions of people across the world — clerical workers, administrators, consultants, telemarketers, corporate lawyers, service personnel, and many others — who are toiling away in meaningless, unnecessary jobs, and they know it. Capitalism is supposed to bring efficiency, but instead of freeing ourselves from the suffocating 40-hour workweek, we’ve invented a whole universe of futile occupations that are professionally unsatisfying and spiritually empty. Graeber argues that unions and a universal basic income can provide a potential solution to the phenomenon of bullshit jobs.
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
Shout out to the preface for calling out the importance of ska musicianship.
It was a university professor, and generally when stuff breaks in a university office they send the maintenance crew to fix it instead of having a professor do it (there's likely rules against it, especially if it's one of those big shelves that takes up a whole wall).
The maddening part was that it took weeks to fix due to lack of carpenters, but the uni paid somebody to make him feel "heard and seen" as a politician might say, and apologize about the delay rather than hire an extra person to actually fix the shelf.
The apology person is there to stave off lawsuits! They have a role to play but it is pretty bullshit.
Its a very good book, I feel like it really fleshes out a topic that has been touched on by others in recent years (Mark Fisher and Ivor Southwood to name a couple). I think that the idea that many people are occupied doing things that are of no or very little social value is something that most people would agree with, either because they have experienced it themselves or because they've had dealings with capitalist bureaucracy. I also think this has become more obvious over the past 18 months with many of the people working from home being able to see more clearly how much of their work is actually bullshit.
However, what is obviously needed is for the left to make this issue explicitly politicised and to present a political solution to the problem (This could be the kind of de-growth that Max Ajl talked about, a UBI, co-ops, etc). Instead of people seeing the way out of these jobs being to just find another or to get promoted, we need to be showing the ways in which these can be done away with altogether in such a way that will benefit the working class as a whole. Doing this might well be necessary if the left is to appeal to and bring the people trapped in these soul-crushing jobs into a movement with the potential to make positive changes - a not insignificant number of people if we go by Graeber's numbers. I know that solutions are something Graeber talks about towards the end of the book though, so we'll have to see what he came up with.
As for quotes, I think this one in particular stood out to me:
“I would like this book to be an arrow aimed at the heart of our civilization. There is something very wrong with what we have made ourselves. We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement. The main political reaction to our awareness that half the time we are engaged in utterly meaningless or even counter-productive activities—usually under the orders of a person we dislike—is to rankle with resentment over the fact there might be others out there who are not in the same trap. As a result, hatred, resentment, and suspicion have become the glue that holds society together. This is a disastrous state of affairs. I wish it to end.”
The quote hits fucking hard, yeah. Traditional Marxist thought's never exactly resonated with me, since I spent so long outside the concept of a "worker" due to autism and the inherent inability to get a job that often implies. There was sometimes pity for the lumpenproles, but not much in terms of, like, here's shit you can do besides just "support the workers and hope they like you enough to support people like you in the distant future." The absolute fucking mental violence that comes from society towards those that don't work is brutal, to where even if you have a job and there's a pretense of you doing "work" you're so conditioned by society that you start unravelling yourself anyways.
Disabled people are fucking pets. Any amount of aid we get has to come out of our autonomy and dignity in exchange for us being so "useless." It's hard not to develop an antipathy for the moralization of work after going through that for so long, and only being treated as an actual person once I fucking lied my way into a "real" job just made me even more infuriated. It's as Graeber describes the flunkies of the old aristocracy, you might be provided for but that dickhead owns you.
"The absolute fucking mental violence that comes from society towards those that don’t work is brutal"
Definitely. It used to be that they'd lock the unemployed "undeserving poor" up in workhouses and forced labour concentration camps, these days there's less direct physical violence but they'll still starve vulnerable people to death or drive them to suicide in the name of punishing the "scroungers". In the UK, disabled folks have been forced to go through disability reassessments to prove that they are disabled and in need of financial support from the state. If the private company that conducts the assessment says you're fit to work, your benefits are cut or stopped altogether and you're forced to try and find employment. These such assessments have been linked to 6 suicides, 2,700 new mental health problems, and 7,000 new anti-depressant prescriptions per 10,000 reassessments, and there have been millions of reassessments done. And this is only a single aspect of the whole thing.
Any amount of aid we get has to come out of our autonomy and dignity in exchange for us being so “useless.”
The idea that disabled people should be grateful for the "benevolence" of being able to live a comfortable life (and most don't even get that much) without needing to work or while working less is just disgusting.
"As though you rendered the proletarians a service in first sucking out their very life-blood and then practising your self-complacent, Pharisaic philanthropy upon them, placing yourselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when you give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them! Charity which degrades him who gives more than him who takes; charity which treads the downtrodden still deeper in the dust, which demands that the degraded, the pariah cast out by society, shall first surrender the last that remains to him, his very claim to manhood, shall first beg for mercy before your mercy deigns to press, in the shape of an alms, the brand of degradation upon his brow." - Engels, 'Condition of the Working Class in England'.
The gas thing I think is an interesting example in particular, since most jobs don't actually pay you for travel time and expenses. But they want you to come into work physically anyways, even when there's not really a point to it, not even survellience to make sure you're doing the job (because they were too lazy to do that anyways). It's a degree of control over your time that they're not even actually paying for, but they still feel entitled to.
"Work from home has been such a blessing. For gas, and for everything… I almost get survivor’s guilt because I came out of Covid in so much better of a situation than most people. I actually still get done what my bosses expect, but I have so much more time to simply fuck off. Mostly reading theory, exercising, making food for when my room mates come home, and posting here."
Reading theory AND posting on company time? There goes my hero...
Seriously though, the thing that concerns me about more jobs looking to move more permanently to distanced working is the increasing interest in surveillance stuff used by business to basically spy on their employees and see when they're working, what they doing, how long they're doing it for, etc. It wouldn't surprise me if some company has already started making employees work with their web cam on to watch them while they work. I feel like if the market became big enough, products like Alexa or Ring cameras might start branching into employee home surveillance and leave us all in a never ending panopticon nightmare.
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/11/portugal-remote-working-laws-bosses-right-to-disconnect-covid
I'm almost done with chapter 2 and two weeks behind, but Graeber (as well as in Debt) has such a talent for linking the concept of trade and economics to power. Each of these little stories that he's rattling off seem insane when put into a vacuum.
I was listening to the audiobook and was so wrapped up in it that I totally missed the chapter and accidentally read through like chapter 7 haha. Really good book, like @Fuckface69 said I love Graeber's writing style. I think mostly this book puts in to words and defines a lot of things I kinda knew instinctively but didn't know how to express the ideas. The different categories of bullshit jobs are interesting, I also liked how he makes sure to always call out when a job isn't in and of itself bullshit, but it's just a shit job to have.
Yeah, it's a very keen insight. "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean" is such a clear and obvious example where a company may well lose money because an employee is using up supplies and perhaps bothering customers and can't even quickly respond to whatever might need done because they gotta go put up their cleaning supplies first, all just so that the employer can feel more secure that they're not "wasting" the time they paid for. The example with digging the rocks out of the field is particularly infuriating in its pointless cruelty.
One of my favorite parts was where he called out Douglas Adams for hating on hairdressers.
lol yeah. It's such an important point, because he makes it very clear early on that when he says bullshit he doesn't mean it how others have meant it in the past, as this hierarchal judgement of the worthiness of something people like to do and want done. A bullshit job isn't making video games that you personally don't enjoy, nor is it sex work, nor is it even criminal behavior. It's work that even the worker themselves acknowledges shouldn't exist, and wouldn't exist if not for the absurd machinations of a deeply hierarchal system that treats rich people as somehow spiritually in tune with what's most efficient.
We are going to have Dawn of Everything for next
yearmonth. My bad lolIf you're interested in Economics, Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value is a fun read, if a bit all over the place. In a lot of ways it's sort of a roadmap to his later projects.
Enjoying this book. Framing this book by going through what is and what is not a bullshit job I’m learning that most of our jobs have some bs to them and Graeber also mentions this is a spectrum.
I find it interesting how most bs jobs are earned through employment time and the only way for them to legitimize their job is to create a whole apparatus of bs. This is how the problem has gotten so pervasive in our society.
Didn’t necessarily enjoy the part where the author is making false equivalencies through bs jobs under capitalism and the USSR. I think the example was having three butchers do the same job because everyone had the right to work.
I hope Graeber discusses the attractiveness of these jobs in a society where we are not paid for our labor and so finding jobs where you have to labor very little is a form of our power over one’s body.
The example with the USSR's relevant, because the book is decidedly about antiwork, as in not moralizing work at all and not predicating aid on doing (unnecessary) work, which is absolutely a failing of older leftist movements that tended to overvalorize work as being of almost spiritual importance,
It's also very useful when speaking to a liberal audience (like this website), because it makes a direct comparison between the US's imagination of Soviet beuracracy and the US's own hypocritical labor practices, due to an even more ingrained assumption that if you don't work you literally deserve to die.
I just finished chapter 2, so I feel this. I'm supposed to help facilitate this shit too lol.
Well shit, I wanted to discuss the book more. On chapter 10 of The Dawn of Everything so I'll be prepared for that discussion as well, thanks audiobookbay.
![[Book Club | Part 1 Discussion] Bullshit Jobs](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/VeEzTLxq4X.jpg){kind=link}
