Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber

  50. The book was eventually renamed Crack Capitalism (2010), which I’ve always felt was a far inferior title.

  51. One oft-quoted passage from Studs Terkel’s Working: “Unless a guy’s a nut, he never thinks about work or talks about it. Maybe about baseball or about getting drunk the other night or he got laid or he didn’t get laid. I’d say one out of a hundred really get excited about work” (1972:xxxiv); but at the same time, from the same testimony, “somebody has to do this work. If my kid ever goes to college, I just want him to have a little respect” (1972:xxxv).

  52. Gini and Sullivan 1987:649, 651, 654.

  53. Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White (1995) is the classic study of this phenomenon.

  54. The formula was later reduced to “the greatest good for the greatest number,” but Bentham’s original theory was based on hedonistic calculation and that’s what Carlyle was responding to.

  55. Carlyle 1843:134.

  56. Ibid.

  Chapter 7: What Are the Political Effects of Bullshit Jobs, and Is There Anything That Can Be Done About This Situation?

  1. Matthew Kopka, “Bailing Out Wall Street While the Ship of State is Sinking? (Part 2),” The Gleaner, January 25, 2010, http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20100125/news/news5.html, accessed July 22, 2017. At the time, one frequently circulated claim was that autoworkers were making as much as $75 an hour, but this was based on an industry PR statement that took the total costs of all wages, benefits, and pensions for all workers, and divided them by the total number of hours worked. Obviously, if one calculated by these means, almost any worker in any industry could be represented as getting two or three times his or her actual hourly wage.

  2. The second reason was that as factory workers they were all concentrated in the same place, which made it easy to organize together. This meant that they could threaten strikes that would have a serious effect on the economy.

  3. Eli Horowitz, “No Offense Meant to Individuals Who Work With Bovine Feces,” http://rustbeltphilosophy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/no-offense-meant-to-individuals-who.html, accessed August 31, 2013.

  4. What follows is drawn largely from an essay that appeared in long format as “Introduction: The Political Metaphysics of Stupidity.” In The Commoner (www.thecommoner.org.uk), Spring 2005, and shorter format in Harper’s as “Army of Altruists: On the Alienated Right to Do Good,” Harper’s, January 2007, 31–38.

  5. Insofar as there are not quite enough children of privilege to go around—since elites almost never give birth to enough offspring to reproduce themselves demographically—the jobs are likely to go to the most remarkable children of immigrants. Executives with Bank of America, or Enron, when facing a similar demographic problem, are much more likely to recruit from poorer white folk like themselves. This is partly because of racism; partly, too, because corporations tend to encourage a broadly anti-intellectual climate themselves. It is well known at Yale, where I once worked, that executive recruiters tend to prefer to hire Yale’s “B” students, since they are more likely to be people “they’ll feel comfortable with.”

  6. There has been a great deal of effort to normalize the idea that caring tasks can or should be carried out by machines, but I don’t think it has been or really could be successful in the long run.

  7. It is interesting to note in this context that Vonnegut had, in fact, been enrolled for a master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago immediately after the war, though he never completed his dissertation. This no doubt explains why one of the main characters in the book is an anthropologist. Perhaps if he’d studied harder, he’d have realized that his premise—that workers would not be able to handle too much leisure—was profoundly flawed. (Ray Fogelson, who was there at the time, told me he returned many years later with a thesis so obviously dashed together it left the department in a quandary, so they decided to grant him a degree, instead, for Cat’s Cradle.)

  8. The most likely at #702 is Telemarketer; the least, at #1, Recreational Therapist; Anthropologists such as myself are fairly safe at #32. See Frey and Osborne (2017)—the original, online version of the paper appeared in 2013, and received a good deal of news coverage at the time.

  9. Stanislaw Lem, Memoirs of a Space Traveler: The Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), 1981 [1971] 19–20.

  10. Lem was writing in still-Socialist Poland in the 1970s; but for what it’s worth, his satire of Stalinism is just as merciless. On another journey, Ijon Tichy finds himself in a planet governed by a vast irrigation bureaucracy that has become so caught up in their mission that they have developed the ideology that humans are naturally evolving into fish. The inhabitants are forced to practice “breathing water” for increasing numbers of hours every day.

  11. Bear in mind that, averaged over a year, even medieval serfs did not work even close to a forty-hour week.

  12. I’m not going to dignify here arguments put forward in some quarters that reducing hours of employment will lead to an increase in crime, unhealthy practices, or other negative social effects. I’m sure identical arguments could have been made against freeing slaves, and likely were. I see them as having an equivalent moral standing. How is arguing that people should be forced to work forty hours a week they would not otherwise have to work because they might otherwise drink, smoke, or commit crimes any different from arguing that the entire population should be placed in prison for an equivalent amount of time as a form of preventative detention?

  13. One might call it “human production,” and I have done so elsewhere; but in this context, even that seems to hit the wrong note.

  14. No doubt one could quibble over who received the most money from whom in what circumstances, but it was Bill Clinton who presided over the repeal of Glass-Steagall, thus “liberalizing” finance and opening the way to the 2008–09 crisis, and Tony Blair in the UK who first introduced tuition in the British universities.

  15. Frank 2016.

  16. Brown 1983.

  17. Gorz’s actual words: “The search for higher productivity would lead to the standardization and industrialization of such activities, particularly those involving the feeding, minding, raising and education of children. The last enclave of individual or communal autonomy would disappear; socialization, ‘commodification’ and preprogramming would be extended to the last vestiges of self-determined and self-regulated life. The industrialization, through home computers, of physical and psychical care and hygiene, children’s education, cooking or sexual technique is precisely designed to generate capitalist profits from activities still left to individual fantasy” (Gorz 1997:84, originally published in French in 1980, which makes it really quite prophetic). The more specific engagement with the Wages for Housework movement is in Critique of Economic Reason 2010:126, 161–64, 222).

  18. The details can be found in Sarath Davala, etc. Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2015).

  19. For the most thorough recent exploration of the current arguments for basic income, see Standing (2017).

  20. In fact, in some ways, they might have to be expanded. One could make the argument UBI wouldn’t work with a rent-based economy because, say, if most homes were rented, landlords would just double rents to grab the additional income. At the very least controls would have to be imposed.

  21. This is also why conditional versions of the same program, or guaranteed jobs programs, are in no sense variations on—let alone “improved versions of”—the same thing. The key to UBI is the unconditional element, which allows for a massive reduction of the role of government intrusion in citizens’ lives. These supposedly “modified” or “improved” versions either will not do this, or will have the opposite effect.

  22. Obviously, moral philosophy tends to assume that the “free rider” problem is a fundamental question of social justice, outweighing considerations of human freedom, and therefore usually concludes that it would be justifia
ble to set up a system of surveillance and coercion so as to ensure that not even a small number of people live off of others’ work (unless they’re rich, in which case that’s usually somehow totally okay). My own position, which is the typical Libertarian Socialist position, is, “So what if they do?”

  23. I never met Foucault, but I base my descriptions on some of those who did.

  24. It is sometimes said that Foucault never defines “power” and it’s true that he was often slightly coy about the matter, but when he did, he defined power as “a set of actions on other actions,” and its exercise as “acting on another’s actions” (1982:789). This is, surprisingly, closer to the Parsonian tradition than anything else.

  25. Foucault 1988:18–19.

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