![[Book Club | Part 1 Discussion] Bullshit Jobs](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/VeEzTLxq4X.jpg){kind=link}
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
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.
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.
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'.