On the other hand, Eric pointed out he does now have two advanced degrees, a research fellowship, and a successful career—he attributes much of this to the knowledge of social theory he gained while living in the squat.
3. Rufus more or less confirmed this when I asked about his father’s motivations: he said his father couldn’t stand the company, either, felt he was basically in a bullshit job himself, and just wanted his son to have something to put on his CV. The question remains why, as VP, he couldn’t just have lied.
4. It is interesting to note that the British welfare state, like most post–World War II welfare states, was consciously constructed against the principle that the poor need to be compelled to labor. This started to change almost everywhere starting in the 1970s.
5. Since the seventies, surveys have regularly revealed that 74 percent to 80 percent of workers claim that, if they won the lottery or came into some similar fortune, they would continue working. The first study was by Morse and Weiss (1966), but it has been replicated frequently since.
6. Classic source on this: Robert D. Atkinson. 2002. “Prison Labor: It’s More than Breaking Rocks.” Policy Report, Washington, DC, Progressive Policy Institute—though by citing I am in no sense supporting his policy conclusions that prison labor should be made generally available to industry!
7. And also, crucially, that they might just as easily not have done it. Hence, Groos defined the attendant joy as being the feeling of freedom.
8. So, for instance, another psychoanalyst, G. A. Klein, writes, “[W]hen the baby starts to grasp articles, sits up, tries to walk, he begins a process that eventually yields the sense that the locus and origins of these achievements is in himself. When the child thus feels the change as originating within himself, he begins to have a sense of being himself, a psychologically, not simply physically, autonomous unit” (1976: 275).
Francis Broucek, “The Sense of Self,” Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 41 (1977): 86, feels this doesn’t go far enough: “The sense of efficacy is at the core of the primitive sense of self and not a property of some already defined self. This primitive feeling of efficacy is what the psychoanalytic literature refers to as infantile omnipotence—a sense of efficacy, the limits of which are not yet apprehended . . . The primary sense of self emerges from effectance pleasure associated with the successful correspondence of intention and effect.” There is thus a fundamental joy in the knowledge of one’s own existence that is tied to one’s freedom to have effects on the world around you, including others, at first regardless of what those may be.
9. Francis Broucek, “Efficacy in Infancy: A Review of Some Experimental Studies and Their Possible Implications to Clinical Theory,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 60 (January 1, 1979): 314. “The total inner separation from the environment in response to such traumata may foreshadow later schizophrenic, depressive, narcissistic or phobic behaviour, depending on the frequency, severity and duration of the experiences of failed influence or invalidated expectancy, the age at which such traumata occur, and how much of a sense of self based on efficacy experiences has been established prior to the traumata.”
10. I am, of course, offering an extremely simplified version of Schiller’s philosophy.
11. In legal terms, most slaveholding societies justify the institution by the legal fiction that slaves are prisoners of war—and, in fact, many slaves in human history were captured as the result of military operations. The first chain gangs were employed in Roman plantations. They were made up of slaves who had been placed in the plantation’s ergastulum, or prison, for disobedience or attempted escape.
12. There is certainly work on moralists in China, India, the classical world, and their concepts of work and idleness—for instance, the Roman distinction of otium and negotium—but I am speaking here more of the practical questions, such as when and where even useless work came to be seen as preferable to no work at all.
13. Writing of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century weavers, E. P. Thompson informs us: “The work pattern was one of alternate bouts of intense labor and of idleness, wherever men were in control of their own working lives. (The pattern persists among some self-employed—artists, writers, small farmers, and perhaps also with students—today, and provokes the question whether it is not a “natural” human work rhythm.) On Monday or Tuesday, according to tradition, the hand-loom went to the slow chant of Plen-ty of Time, Plen-ty of Time: on Thursday and Friday, A day t’lat, A day” (1967:73).
14. When I was in high school there was a kind of macho game among the coolest students, before exams, where they would boast how many hours they’d gone without sleep-cramming beforehand: thirty-six, forty-eight, even sixty hours. It was macho because it implied such students had not done any study at all before, since they had been thinking about more important things. I rapidly figured out that if one reduced oneself to a mindless zombie, the extra hours of study weren’t actually going to help. I suspect this is one reason I am now a professor.
15. Hunting versus gathering again being the paradigmatic example. Child-care is probably the most dramatic exception: it’s largely a woman’s domain, but it is always generating stories.
16. I am ignoring here the managerial functions of running their estates, but it’s not clear this was considered labor at the time. I suspect it wasn’t.
17. Historically speaking, the institution of wage labor is a sophisticated latecomer. The very idea of wage labor involves two difficult conceptual steps. First, it requires the abstraction of man’s labor from both his person and his work. When one purchases an object from an ancient craftsman, one has not bought his labor but the object, which he has produced under his own time and his own conditions of work. But when one purchases an abstraction, labor power, which the purchaser then uses it at a time and under conditions which he, the purchaser, not the “owner” of the labor power, determines (and for which he normally pays after he has consumed it). Second, the wage-labor system requires the establishment of a method of measuring the labor one has purchased, for purposes of payment, commonly by introducing a second abstraction, labor time.) M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 65–66: “We should not underestimate the magnitude, speaking socially rather than intellectually, of these two conceptual steps; even the Roman jurists found them difficult.”
18. An early Christian would have been outright offended, since time, properly speaking, belonged only to God.
19. Though, in fact, Homer represents the fate of the thes, or occasional agricultural hireling, who rented himself out in this manner, as actually worse than a slave, since a slave at least is a member of a respectable household (Odyssey 11.489–91).
20. The only notable exception to this rule is that free citizens in democracies were often willing to hire themselves out to the government for public works: but this is because the government being seen as a collective of which the citizen was a member, it was essentially seen as working for oneself.
21. See David Graeber, “Turning Modes of Production Inside Out: Or, Why Capitalism Is a Transformation of Slavery (Short Version),” Critique of Anthropology 26, no. 1 (March 2006): 61–81.
22. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutes of a Nilotic People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), 103. Maurice Bloch, in Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 80–94, argues that Evans-Pritchard overstates things, and is no doubt correct if Evans-Pritchard really is making arguments as radical as is sometimes attributed to him, but I don’t think he truly is. Anyway, the counterarguments have to do mainly with a sense of historical time rather than day-to-day activity.
23. E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38 (1967): 56–97.
24. See Jacques LeGoff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), for classic essays extending E. P. Tho
mpson’s insights back to the High Middle Ages.
25. Those who designed modern universal education systems were quite explicit about all this: Thompson himself cites a number of them. I remember reading that someone once surveyed American employers about what it was they actually expected when they specified in a job ad that a worker must have a high school degree: a certain level of literacy? Or numeracy? The vast majority said no, a high school education, they found, did not guarantee such things—they mainly expected the worker would be able to show up on time. Interestingly, the more advanced the level of education, however, the more autonomous the students and the more the old episodic pattern of work tends to reemerge.
26. The West Indian Marxist Eric Williams (1966) first emphasized the history of plantations in shaping the techniques of worker control later employed in factories; Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (London: Penguin, 2004), adds ships, focusing on merchant vessels active in the slave trade, as the main other experiment-zone for rationalized work discipline during the period of merchant capital. Naval vessels are relevant, too, especially as they often employed unfree labor as well, since many of the sailors were “pressed” into service against their will. All of them involved contexts where in the absence of long traditions of what one could or could not demand of an employee—which were still felt to apply in areas that had emerged more directly from feudal relations—closely supervised work could itself be reorganized around new ideals of clocklike efficiency.
27. One reason all this is not obvious is that we have been conditioned to think, when we think of “wage labor,” first of all of factory work, and factory work, in turn, as production-line work where the pace of labor is set by the machines. In fact, only a very small percentage of wage labor has ever been factory work and a relatively small percentage of that based on conveyer-belt-style production lines. I’ll be writing more about the effect of such misconceptions in chapter 6.
28. Don’t believe me? You can hire them here: www.smashpartyentertainment.com/living-statues-art.
29. I was slightly surprised that someone born around 1900 or 1910 had already internalized such an attitude and asked Wendy if her grandmother had ever been a supervisor or employer. She didn’t think so, but later discovered that her grandmother had briefly helped run a chain of groceries many years before.
Chapter 4: What Is It Like to Have a Bullshit Job? (On Spiritual Violence, Part 2)
1. As noted in the last chapter, it’s true that the entire class-period structure is really just a way to teach students time discipline for later factory work, and might now be considered redundant on that basis. But that’s the system that exists.
2. My translation from the French: Je suis conseiller technique en insolvabilité dans un ministère qui serait l’équivalent de l’Inland Revenue. Environ 5 percent de ma tâche est de donner des conseil techniques. Le reste de la journée j’explique à mes collègues des procédures incompréhensibles, je les aide à trouver des directives qui ne servent à rien, I cheer up the troops, je réattribue des dossiers que “le système” a mal dirigé.
Curieusement j’aime aller au travail. J’ai l’impression que je suis payé 60 000$/an pour faire l’équivalent d’un Sudoku ou mots croisés.
3. Obviously, such environments are not always nearly as carefree for members of the public who have to interact with such officials.
4. Obviously, the 4 percent figure would only be the case if no workers surveyed felt their work was both useful and unfulfilling, which is unlikely.
5. While it is quite rare for supervisors to tell workers directly they are supposed to pretend to work, it does happen occasionally. One car salesman wrote: “According to my superiors, if I’m being paid a salary, I have to be doing ‘something’ and ‘pretend’ to be productive even though there’s no real value to the work. So, I spend several hours a day making phone calls to nobody. Does that make any sense?” Too much honesty in such matters appears to be a profound taboo almost anywhere. I remember once in graduate school, I had a gig doing research for a Marxist professor who among many other things specialized in the politics of workplace resistance. I figured if I could be honest with anyone, it would be him, so after he had explained to me how the timesheet worked I asked, “So how much can I lie? How many hours is it okay to just make up?” He looked at me as if I’d just said I was a starseed from another galaxy so I quickly changed the subject and assumed the answer was “a discrete amount.”
6. Many workplaces are keenly aware of the dangers of easygoing supervisors and take active measures to head them off. Those who work counters in fast-food chains, which, of course, are in my terms generally shit jobs and not bullshit jobs, often tell me that each branch is carefully wired by closed-circuit TV to ensure that workers with nothing to do are not allowed to just sit around relaxing; if they are observed to do so by those monitoring in some central locations, their supervisor is called up and chewed out.
7. Roy Baumeister, Sara Wotman, and Arlene Stillwell, “Unrequited Love: On Heartbreak, Anger, Guilt, Scriptlessness, and Humiliation,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64, no. 3 (March 1993): 377–94. One friend of mine who once had a prolonged affair with a married man noted a similar difficulty—unlike the betrayed wife, there’s very little in the way of cultural models telling the “other woman” how she’s supposed to feel. She’s thinking of writing a book to begin to make up the gap. I hope she does so.
8. Nouri, the software developer, provides an interesting insight, suggesting that the hostility and mutual hatreds in a bullshit office might actually be functional in inspiring workers to act at all. He reports that while working in an obviously doomed banner ad company, an enterprise that made him depressed and sick, “I was so bored that a couple programmers snitched to management (excuse me, Scrum Master) about my productivity. So he hostilely gave me a month to prove myself, trying to accumulate evidence that I was missing doctor’s notices. In two weeks, I outperformed the rest of the team combined, and the company’s lead architect declared my code ‘perfect.’ Scrum Master was suddenly all smiles and rainbows again, telling me the doctor’s notes were of no concern.
“I advised him to continue insulting me and threatening my job, if he wanted me to remain a high-performer. It was my twisted version of fun. Like an idiot, he refused.
“Lesson: hate is a great motivator, at least when there’s no passion and fun. Maybe explains a lot of workplace aggression. Picking fights with someone at least gives you reason to carry on.”
9. Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973). Fromm’s prime example of a nonsexual sadist is Joseph Stalin, and of a nonsexual necrophiliac, Adolf Hitler.
10. Lynn Chancer, Sadomasochism in Everyday Life: The Dynamics of Power and Powerlessness (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
11. Romance novels, for instance, tend to feature attractive men who appear cruel and heartless but are ultimately revealed to be kindhearted and decent instead. One might argue that BDSM practice, from a submissive woman’s perspective, encodes the possibility of this transformation as part of the structure of the event and under her own ultimate control.
12. Article 23 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, states: “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.” It also guarantees equal pay for equal work, compensation adequate to support a family, and the right to form labor unions. It says nothing about the purpose of the work itself.
13. The office was also “rife with bullying and deeply, deeply strange office politics”—the usual sadomasochistic dynamics one can expect to ensue in hierarchical environments, as usual, too, exacerbated by the shared guilty knowledge that there’s nothing really at stake.
14. There is a happy ending to this one, at least temporarily: Rachel reports she was soon after able to find work for a program teach
ing remedial math to poor children. It is everything her insurance job is not and pays well enough that she should be able to afford grad school.
15. Patrick Butler, “Thousands Have Died After Being Found Fit for Work, DWP Figures Show,” Guardian (US), last modified August 27, 2015, www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/27/thousands-died-after-fit-for-work-assessment-dwp-figures.
16. Mark: “Personally I often used to wish I wasn’t aware that my job was bullshit. Kind of like how Neo in the Matrix movies may sometimes have wished he hadn’t taken the red pill. I’d despair (and still do) that I’m working in the public sector to help people, but I rarely if ever help anyone. I also feel a sense of guilt that I’m paid by taxpayers to do this.”
17. He adds: “Herbert Read’s ‘To hell with culture’ best describes this situation.” I checked. It isn’t bad.
18. It is important to emphasize that in professional environments, the ability to play the role is generally far more important than the ability to actually do the work. Mathematician Jeff Schmidt in his excellent Disciplined Minds (2001) carefully documents how the bourgeois obsession with prioritizing form over content has played havoc with the professions. Why is it, he asks, that Catch Me If You Can–style imposters can often successfully pretend to be airline pilots or surgeons without anyone noticing they have no qualifications for the job? The answer he suggests is that it’s almost impossible to get fired from a professional job—even pilot or surgeon—for mere incompetence, but very easy to get fired for defiance of accepted standards of external behavior, that is, for not properly playing the part. The imposters have zero competence, but play the part perfectly; hence, they are much less likely to be dismissed from their positions than, say, an accomplished pilot or surgeon who openly defies the unspoken codes of external comportment attendant on the role.
19. Psychological studies have shown that taking part in protests and street actions, at least, tend to have overall health benefits, reducing overall stress and with it rates of heart disease and other ailments: John Drury, “Social Identity as a Source of Strength in Mass Emergencies and Other Crowd Events,” International Journal of Mental Health 32, no. 4 (December 1, 2003): 77–93; also M. Klar and T. Kasser, “Some Benefits of Being an Activist,” Political Psychology 30, no. 5 (2009): 755–77. The study, however, focuses on street actions; it would be interesting to see if this also extends to less embodied forms of protest.
Bullshit Jobs Page 35