Art As It Stands Now?

La Biennale Arte di Veniza 2019

Venice, Italy is a world-heritage city under siege by water and tourists.  Huge cruise ships are towed along waterways, dwarfing the ancient buildings.  An ex-Russian billionaire’s massive metal super-yacht is docked near Piazza San Marco, towering over it too.  Elevated walkways for flooding are stacked in every piazza.  But it is a beautiful, unique place nevertheless.  It is now hosting the bi-annual ‘Biennale Arte 2019’ in several locations, the largest and oldest art show in the world. It show-cases what the curators consider the best of the world’s present art, along with artists chosen by various nations to represent them.   

Here are some takeaways from 2019 from a Left point of view:

 

Post-Modernist Nonsense

     1.   Painting is now a minor art form.

     2.   The Biennale could have been called the Venice Short-Film Festival for the many ‘art’ exhibits that consisted only of short films or documentaries. 

     3.   Post-modernism is still the main way artists look at the world.  Incoherence, pastiche and shock reign. Full of plastic rivers and actual rocks.  Motorcycles chopped in half or turned upside down. A wrecked airplane fuselage.  A floor of glass jars with a raptor and stereo equipment on it.  Large lumps of hollow plastic painted gold with floating legs inside.  Laughable, stupid junk. Styles definitely representing ‘the end of art.’

     4.   Nations choose their artists with political intent.  Some exhibits might be called ‘art washing.’  The brutal and theocratic regime in Saudi Arabia had a beautiful construction of paper or leather gourds attached to glowing golden tents.  Smart choice!  Russia's paper democracy had a dark and morbid exhibit based on the Hermitage.  It included mechanical wooden puppets that exhibit notes said was a ballet, which others saw as a mass hanging.  So that did not ‘wash.’  The billionaire-run U.S. had an exhibit of massive hats that you could not recognize as hats, centered around a vague theme of ‘liberty’ that was not apparent at all.

     5.   Many artists are in a dark, sad, creepy mood and evidently don’t know why.  For instance Belgium’s exhibit consisted of the butcher, baker and candlestick maker behind bars.  Hanging human-like forms drape from ceilings in the Arsenale building.  Abused Asian girls surrounded by chopped manikins populate large photos.  Poems are embedded on funereal spikes in a dark room.  Junk lies on floors.  Twisted faces are sculpted.  Grotesques abound. A reflection of capitalist life, 2019?

     6.   The standouts at Venice’s Giardini and Arsenale locations (the two main Biennale locations) were two Chinese artists from the People’s Republic of China, Su Yuan and Peng Yu.  One of their works I’ve christened ‘The Blood Machine’ – a huge metal arm that continually tries to sweep up a vast pool of blood-like liquid and fails.  Another I’ve christened ‘Lincoln’s Chair’ – a massive replica of the chair in the Lincoln Monument with Lincoln missing. What ‘sits’ on the chair instead is a whip-like hose that flails about like a snake.  Both have immediate political meanings, so you don’t need to read the wall notes to find out what the fuck is going on.

     7.   Technology is the basis of new digital art. To illustrate this, one art film consisted of just computer code streaming by in various colors.  At the Biennale large, complex, immersive 3D installations rule, many using electronics, lights, music and motion. Some of them took many, many hours of work to create and construct.

     8.   Many pictures of Africans or darker colored folks on the walls substitute for the real thing.

     9.   In the same light, some countries highlighted indigenous people like the Sami or Inuit (Finland and Canada) or refugees (France).

The Blood Machine - PRC

ISRAELI EXHIBIT

Of special strangeness was the Israeli exhibit, a form of immersive theater.  It consisted of ‘Field Hospital X.’ (Like we want to go to a hospital!) You had to take a number, sit in a waiting room until your number was called while watching a woman on a TV screen talk to you really slowly like you were stupid.  Then have a wristband attached, put on hospital booties, are taken upstairs, then stand in a booth and yell. Lame ‘Rolf’ therapy.  I did not. Then you are told to sit in a reclining medical chair and watch one of 4 videos on social injustices - Palestinian oppression and resistance, family abuse, abducted immigrant children, along with one other.  

I chose the Palestinian one.  It started with a man wearing a sheep’s head jacking off below the screen.  I got up and left at that point.  I was told by my partner who watched the whole video that that was part of a story about Palestinian cooks jerking off into baba ganoush as ‘acts of resistance.’ Given the exhibit was endorsed by the Israeli Culture Ministry and there is an ongoing actual Nakba resistance, this is pretty strange tea.  Why not have the Palestinian ‘artist’ wear an Abu Ghraib hood?  Why visually suggest jerking off as ‘the’ form of resistance? Obnoxious and trivializing, but then a Lacanian (neo-Freudian) psychologist was involved.  According to the exhibit notes the ‘viewers’ are sick and need to go to a hospital – but not the Israeli state.  Then there is the highly controlled ‘order’ and submission demanded by the exhibit.  Just a flavor of present Israeli society? A weird form of national ‘art washing.’

Buy Now!

POLITICAL ART

There were political exceptions to the general rules of the decorative, the incoherent or the creepy.  A Mexican artist moved a whole school wall full of bullet holes from Juarez and rebuilt it onsite.  The red Venezuela exhibit had a picture that changed from a woman to Trump as you looked at it - Trump, like Obama, is trying to overthrow the Venezuelan government.  The Finns, Swedes and Norwegians focused on nature and global climate change.  Photos of the Israeli wall in Palestine in Arsenale was a model for the lengthening U.S. wall. The India exhibit contained wooden peasant sandals with a symbol of each person’s labor sometimes attached.  The Chilean exhibit was dedicated to ‘opposing subaltern, colonial and imperial hegemony’ or something like that.  A final room at the Arsenale made fun of consumerism, which was labeled as done by Slavs and Tatars. 

THEORY?

This Biennale was called “May You Live In Interesting Times.”  The word ‘interesting’ has several meanings and one of them is that ‘interesting’ is a euphemism for challenging or menacing. The phrase was first used by British diplomats in 1898 and 1936 in just that way, though attributed without evidence by them to a Chinese ‘curse.’

This Biennale was sponsored by Swatch watches – evidently a commodity where commerce and art pretend to meet.  One of the curators, Ralph Rugoff, introduced the Biennale in the booklet so:  “It presents types of art that variously illuminate the notion, articulated by both Leonard da Vinci and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, that everything connects with everything else.” Dialectical materialism, a holistic method, says something of the sort, as does science, another holistic method.  Lenin might add that some things are actually more connected than others. 

P.S. - The predictable flooding that has inundated Venice over the past week reminds us once again the whole city is a work of art.  It seems the politics and planning for climate change is not commensurate.  

Other reviews about art below, use blog search box, upper left: 

Museum reviews - The Walker:  “Hippie Modernism,” “Frida Kahlo" and “Edward Hopper.  Museum of Russian Art: “Women in Soviet Art,” The Hermitage: “Travel Notes - The Hermitage,” The Minneapolis Institute of Art: “Discovering American Art Now.”  Uzbekistan Art Museum: “Desert of Forbidden Art.” The Tate Modern:  “Art is Dead.”

Book reviews:  “9.5 Thesis on Art and Class," “The Marxist Theory of Art” and Berger’s “Ways of Seeing.”

Commentary: On Banksy's street art: “Left in London.” Also: “The Minneapolis Spectacle” and “Slavs and Tatars.”

The Kulture Kommissar

Commune di Cortona, Toscana, Italia

September 27, 2019

A Little Dickens

“Purity” by Jonathan Franzen, 2015

Franzen is a middle-class novelist that explicitly says he writes about families and individual psychology, not politics.  Apoliticism is de rigeur for bourgeois wits as you might already know.  In that he is not far different than other mainstream U.S. fiction writers like John Updike and Saul Bellow.   He is one of the present darlings of the New York literary world.  That should make you queasy…

The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good

This work is almost comically bad.  We have a Cinderella story about a poor girl Purity, aka “Pip,” who discovers she is a billionaire.  We have another Dicken’s-like touch, where an unknown father and unknown daughter are reunited by unbelievable means. Even Purity’s nickname ‘Pip’ conjures up Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations.’  Then there is a ridiculous suicide.  We have constant digs at the left – squatters in Oakland, Occupy, internet leakers like Assange, class-knowledgeable writers like Steinbeck and Dos Passos, the East German workers’ state, vegetarianism – hell, everything a comfortable bore dislikes. 

Maybe he thinks he’s the new Dickens.  He’s not.  Dickens was not a revolutionary writer, but he criticized wealth in stories like "A Christmas Carol," and paid attention to the lives of the poor, child labor and class.  For instance "Little Dorrit" has scenes in a prison.  For his time, Dickens was a reformer and this is no surprise, as he himself came from below.  Franzen takes the most improbable parts of Dickens while ignoring his politics.

Over its 700-plus pages it limps along describing two really messed up women – Anabel and her daughter Purity/Pip, while adding a few more along the way.  Anabel is heir to billions yet attempts to become an art-house filmmaker and fails at it.  The key issue here is her ‘purist’ rejection of the billions.  I have to think that Franzen sees the craziness of both mother and daughter as rooted in this fact.  Rejecting money is the root of all evil!  The book also reflects a somewhat Updikian view of women.  Purity is sarcastic, a sexual tease, prone to uncontrolled emotional outbursts – someone you might want to avoid.  Her disturbed mother Anabel becomes a hermit in the San Francisco hills, living in a cabin and working at a grocery store as a clerk after being left by her husband Tom.  Tom had had enough of fighting - her emotional outbursts, constant discussions and blaming, while missing the fact that their last sexual encounter had included an intentionally-punctured condom.  Anabel never tells Pip about her father, and there is the story – the search for the father.  Another classic orphan story, like 'Oliver Twist.'  

Along the way is the development of an East German dissident from his Communist Party parents, Andreas, who becomes the new Assange running a ‘Sunlight Project.’  Andreas also becomes involved in a somewhat justified criminal enterprise and the guilt that follows him throughout the book is somewhat unexplainable.  Franzen has a conflicted relationship with technology and that incoherence is on display in the book, especially related to Andreas who he relentlessly dislikes. Franzen famously derided both Oprah and the internet in recent years.  The inclusion of his first book, “The Corrections,” in Oprah’s pop book club made him wince.  It shouldn’t have. It belonged there. 

Sexual obsession actually provides the emotional heart of the book.  The men in the book, especially Andreas, have terrible erotic jones’ for ‘beautiful’ younger women.  This might remind us of the tradition of English professors lusting after their coeds in U.S. fiction.  Franzen does not teach at a university but he might as well have.

I read it so you don’t have to.

Other reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Freedom” (by Franzen too); "Consider the Lobster" and "The Pale King" (both by DF Wallace); "American Pastorale" (Roth).

Commune di Cortona, Toscana, Italia

Red Frog

September 23, 2019

The National Razor

“The Permanent Guillotine – Writings of the Sans-Culottes,” edited by Mitchell Abidor, 2018

The image of the French Revolution in the U.S. and Britain has been colored by anti-revolutionary liberal novels like “Tale of Two Cities,” middle-class tales like Marat/Sade and execrable films like “Marie Antoinette” with Kirsten Dunst, which whitewashes Antoinette’s role in the repression and counter-revolution. Tourists and the French are still treated to a diorama of poor Antoinette imprisoned in the Concierge on the Ile de la Cite. The celebration of kings and queens doesn't stop there.  Netflix's "The Last Czar" ultimately paints a sympathetic portrait of the Romanovs, as does the "Marco Polo" series of Kublai Khan. The endless movies about queens starring Hollywood royalty like Helen Mirren and the idiotic coverage of the British royal family complete the picture.  Monarchs are cool!  No one talks about the sans-culottes (‘without shoes’) in a nice way.  So lets…

Slogan of the Sans-Culottes

The sans-culottes were the left-wing of the Jacobins of Marat, the Cordeliers Club and ‘The Mountain’ – a term for the whole French left.  They actually kept the Jacobins in line for a time.  The sans-culottes hated the monarchists, the clergy, the large businessmen and bankers, the judges and the ‘moderates’ – who were all in league together against the people and the French Revolution (1789-1795).  In other words, the sans-culottes were quite modern!  This is a collection of original writings by authors most will be unfamiliar with – Jacques Hébert, Jacques Roux, Jean Francois Varlet, Anacharsis Cloots, Sylvain Maréchel.  It includes revolutionary songs and hilarious dialogs, along with writings by organizations like the Brave Sans-Culottes, The Popular Society of Sans-Culottes of Nimes and The Enragés.  Writings of the Conspiracy of Equals, a group expressing the beginnings of communism, are not included.

The sans-culottes were more progressive than the American Revolution that came earlier.  Their role helped the French Revolution destroy the royal structure and inhibit the role of religion, while taking aim at large businessmen. Benjamin Franklin, a representative of the U.S. government, sided with the ‘moderate’ Girondin faction on the issue of executing royalty. The sans-culottes opposed this view, as the king and queen served as organizing forces and rallying points for counter-revolution. The sans-culottes also advocated terminal punishment of hoarders, capital strikers and price gougers, taking aim at the rich.  Instead they wanted to institute civil distribution and control of food and necessary goods.

Themes that run through their dialogs, speeches, articles and submissions to the revolutionary National Convention:  

1.          A hard-core anti-clericalism making fun of the priests, Jesus, the Catholic Church, a ‘virgin’ Mary and the ‘sacrament.’  This was because the clergy were one of the strongest legs of cruel support for the last monarch of France, King Louis XVI and his cohort.  Notre-Dame, the famous Parisian cathedral, was rededicated to the ‘Cult of Reason’ by the sans-culottes during the Revolution.  This was part of a de-Christianization program that sought to remove state funding for the Catholic Church and its priests. 

2.             A fierce hostility to large farmers and merchants, even bakers, who hoarded grain and goods, drove up prices, stopping production of food and tried to starve the people into submission.  They wanted price-controls and restrictions on how much the rich could own.

3.             An overwhelming anger against the so-called Girondin moderates – centrists who protected Antoinette, royalty, corrupt businessmen and the reactionary courts.  The Girondins engaged in civil war and encouraged a bloody military intervention by Austria to stop the French revolution.  As Lenin and Trotsky noted in their writings on France, ‘reasonable’ centrism blocks with right politics, not left. Watch the behavior of Democratic party ‘centrists’ like Biden, Harris, Buttigieg, O’Rourke, Booker or Klobuchar to see this in action in a modern U.S. context. 
      And of course, royalty.

  

The Queen Meets Her Deserved Fate

The editor, Mitchell Abador, says the sans-culottes were mostly artisans and small merchants – a radical petit-bourgeois. However the Enrages mention ‘workers’ repeatedly in their text and even Abador mentions ‘hired laborers.’  Abador seems to claim that the working-class as a class did not really exist or play a role in the revolution or the sans-culottes.  However any understanding of how artisans and merchants go about their business would show that cart drivers, hod-carriers, seamstresses, washer-women, clerks, stevedores, some peasants, soldiers, servants and simple laborers existed in 1789.  Perhaps not in the leadership, but certainly playing a large role as the real base of the sans-culottes themselves.  Comments about ‘hundreds of thousands’ of sans-culottes in the various rural departments and cities like Marseilles and Paris cannot just refer to artisans and merchants.  And I would imagine most small merchants and artisans actually could afford shoes!  For Abador to seem to disappear the working classes in the French Revolution is a political act.

Certain Jacobins like Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois crossed the aisle as Bukharin did, and supported the Thermidorian counter-revolution led by Napoleon in July 1794, which overthrew the Jacobins and Robespierre. Much as Stalin destroyed the Bolshevik Party that led the Russian Revolution, along with a good proportion of the leadership of the Red Army in the purges of the 1930s.  But no sans-culottes crossed the aisle.  They stayed true to their politics and were either executed or escaped.

Other reviews on French politics below, use blog search box, upper left:  “The Coming Insurrection,” “Citizen Tom Paine,” “In the Crossfire,” “The Left and Islamic Literalism,” “Thomas Piketty,” “The Beach Beneath the Street,” “Deephan,” “Something in the Air,” “The Age of Uprising,” “The Conspiracy.”  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog 
Commune di Cortona, Toscana, Italia

September 16, 2019      

System Change Not Climate Change

A Redder Shade of Green – Intersections of Science and Socialism,” by Ian Angus, 2017

This is a polemic against several mistaken ostensibly ‘leftist’ views on the issue of global warming and resulting climate change.  Angus edits an online journal, “Climate and Capitalism.”  His definition of eco-socialism is that the environmental issue is the key thing for socialists to tackle – a definition unlike others who call themselves eco-socialists and who don’t choose only one angle to pursue.
 

Angus takes on the argument around ‘catastrophism’ discussed in the book “Catastrophism – the Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse & Rebirth,” and especially the views of Eddie Yuen that counsel against telling the truth about global warming, basing itself on no evidence.  (Book reviewed below)  He also refutes the main argument in "Anthropocene or Capitalocene? – Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism,” arguing that this historic period did not start with capital, but with the ‘great acceleration’ after World War II.  (Book reviewed below.) He also takes some swipes at Jared Diamond’s “Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” (book reviewed below) which was refuted by a whole book, “Questioning Collapse.”

Like John Bellamy Foster, Angus supports the idea that Marx and Engels carefully studied developments in modern science, as their idea of dialectical materialism involved not just class struggle, but the whole realm of life. He highlights their close personal relationship with ‘the Red Chemist,” Carl Schorlemmer, a leading chemist and communist, who became their life-long friend and advisor on some things scientific.  He tracks their embrace of Darwin, who unknown to himself, extended dialectics and materialism into the realm of biological development.  Angus also pokes fun at those humanities academics who have no grasp of science, and those scientists who have no clue about politics.

Of most value here is Angus’ attack on neo-Malthusianism, which he identifies as one of the ways the bourgeoisie side-tracked the environmental movement in the 1970s after Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb.”  Populationist analyses which ignore everything but ‘poor people having too many babies’ leave the role of capitalism untouched – which is the point.  Of course women have the right not to be forced to have babies either, which Angus does support. The roles of environmental climate change, poverty, exported food production, war and imperialism are of far greater import.

The Book That Bombed

In his attack on the ‘capitalocene’ concept, he confronts Jason Moore, who argues that the term ‘anthropocene’ blames all humans, not capital, for global warming.  Angus contends that to build a bridge to present scientists, it makes more sense to stay with Anthropocene and that this concept has not ignored capital.  But the real issue is dating, as Moore claims global warming started with capital’s industrial revolution, while statistics (and most scientists) actually point to the huge increase of carbon in the atmosphere after 1945 during ‘the Great Acceleration.’  I have previously suggested the crucial importance of this date - the last before automobile and plastics technologies began to skyrocket, as well as the heating effect of imperialist World War II.

Angus endorses non-monocrop, biologically diverse organic agriculture (agro-ecology) though he does not discuss the issue of animal agriculture.  He points out that Cuba was the only country in the world to change their economy and agriculture after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, while every capitalist country talked and did less or nothing, relying on ‘the market’ or carbon credits to sort things out.  Many years later, nothing has changed though there have been developments in China, Latin America and a group of countries in Europe.

Angus is inspired by Barry Commoner, a socialist who wrote “The Closing Circle” in the 1970s.  Angus bases many of his arguments on the lack or weakness of the empirical proof used by his opponents – which only makes sense for a scientist and a Marxist.  This is part of his refutation of Alexander Coburn, who considered environmentalism to be a huge capitalist plot.  Or Yuen’s consumerist and green enclaves’ solutions to climate change: the ‘slow food’ movement, intentional communities, resisting consumerism, permaculture and urban farming… all falling far short of what is really necessary to shut down carbon completely, as soon as possible.  Or Leo Panitch, who also argued that ‘the truth’ would lead to passivity.  Actually ‘the truth’ – whether personally learned or through the constant facts coming across in the news - is leading more and more people to action on the climate, especially the young. 

Other reviews on this subject, below, use blog search box, upper left:  “Marx and the Earth:  An Anti-Critique,” “Ecological Revolution,” Marx’s Ecology,” (all by Foster); “Collapse” (Diamond); “Catastrophism,” “Anthropocene or Capitalocene?” “This Changes Everything,” (Klein); “The Sixth Extinction,” “Green is the New Red,” “The Vanishing Face of Gaia,” “Stop Tar Sands Oil,” “Tar Sands.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

September 13, 2019

Commune di Cortona, Italia

Do You Have One?

“Bullshit Jobs – A Theory,” by David Graeber, 2018

This book has an attractive title, as no one who has worked a day in their life hasn’t had a job that didn’t involve some or even plenty of bullshit.  However, as a theory it doesn’t really hold up.  In fact it is so amateurish that I gotta wonder.

Crucified

Graeber took a poll of his Twitter followers and got 250 Twitter responses on a 2013 essay about bullshit jobs he wrote, along with 124 blog comments about it.  This book is based on that self-selected sample size of 374. If you are rolling your eyes already, join me.

As an anthropologist Graeber wants to trace the personal and psychological sides of working a job that involves almost no work or secondarily, that involves anti-social work.  He classifies do-nothing bullshit jobs by 5 types: ‘flunkie,’ ‘goon,’ ‘duct taper,’ ‘box ticker’ and ‘taskmaster.’ He claims that upwards of 40% of all white-collar work consists of this, based on surveys that don't use a definition of bullshit.  The pie charts he includes are somewhat suspect, as e-mail and some admin work and meetings are classified by him as bullshit.  Yes, white-collars fuck around more than others, but that is the nature of the work, which is more solitary, and the position within the working-class, which is ostensibly higher.

He contends that, like the USSR, capitalism produces jobs just to produce jobs. (!)  As an anarchist, this fits his theory that the real problem is not political economy, but bureaucratism and the state.  In fact his last book, the “Utopia of Rules,” was about bureaucracy.  Hence capitalism is not the problem, which he hints at in several places:  “…it’s not the capitalist economic system but the modern international state system that … creates untold thousands of jobs across the planet…(some of which) rearrange furniture.”  Why we have an ‘international state system’ is left unsaid. He ultimately claims that capitalism no longer exists – we really live in a ‘rentier’ economy.  This ignores the falling rates of profit which lead to recessions and depressions. Marx himself developed the rentier idea when he described how monopolies in property of any kind are part of the usurious circulation of capital.  But Marx did not disappear capital in the process.

This quote is also along the same lines:  “…whole industries, such as corporate compliance, would not exist at all were it not for government regulations.  But the argument here is not that such regulations are one reason for the rise of bullshit jobs, it’s that they are the primary or, even, the only reason.” (my emphasis).  I had to read this quote several times to see this reads like a Republican/Libertarian argument. 

Graeber uses another quote from Obama opposing single-payer because single-payer would put many paper-pushers in the private health care industry out of a job.  What Graeber doesn’t mention is that Obama said this because he’s a friend of Big Pharma and the HMO industry, not those workers.  This is the same method used by Trump and coal miners.  Graeber does not mention that state-run jobs in workers' states like China and the former USSR actually allowed the pace of work to be slower and the power of supervisors to be far less – unlike jobs in a capitalist system.  Firing workers was difficult in the former workers' states, for instance. These details upset this whole hipster theory.

Graeber repeatedly contends that corporate lawyers are bullshit jobs.  In one sense they certainly are – but not in his sense of doing nothing, which is his key point.  As anyone aware of how capitalist corporations work, NO corporation could do business without them.  They defend the corporation from the government, from lawsuits by customers and sue to move money into the pockets of the company.  Under a workers state their jobs would go away, but that is not what he’s saying.  Graeber also contends that advertising jobs are bullshit – and indeed they are.  But without advertising, capital would not be able to sell commodities.  Sales is an essential part of commodification - stupid but essential.  So it might be bullshit to the personal lives of the person doing the work, but the system needs these various types of bullshit jobs to survive.  Just count all the poor, bored security guards in every large building – defending it from crime caused by poverty, an essential ingredient of a private profit system.  

Graeber also contends the whole finance industry is full of ‘bullshit’ jobs.  This is accompanied by humorous stories about pathetic HR internal websites, team-building seminars and useless middle managers – all true.  However, the dominant capitalist sector in the global ‘center’ IS the FIRE sector, playing an essential role when production no longer produces the profits it once did.  Many of these specific bullshit jobs are part of a strategy of internal control over those white collar drones in the cubes.  The increase in administrators in universities is the same. 

 

Bored and Dying

This highlights one thing that capital does that Graeber ignores – it will forgo profits or lower costs and use tax money in order to control or discipline the proletariat.  The massive investment in controlling labor within bourgeois organizations shows this.  On the streets, the terrorization of immigrants and police killings in the black community are part of this process of labor discipline.  In fact the whole military/intelligence structure of the U.S. might be considered part of this.

Most of Graeber’s focus on bullshit jobs is on people who are hired to do almost no work.  How many of you have THAT problem?  What is not mentioned is that a corporation that can hire people to do little or no work has too much money, obviously. They are inefficient and that happens.  But it is also a minority.  Most people work too much and the statistics prove it – even white collars.  The intensity of labor is usually high, along with productivity.  All of this is invisible to Graeber and his self-selected Twitter followers but I would imagine if he spread out his sample size, he’d find many people working intensely, at 2-3 jobs, on constant overtime, understaffed or always on-call.  He also admits his survey does not include the ‘peripheral’ global south or blue or pink-collar workers.  

The real problem is the definition of the term ‘bullshit’ which zigs and zags all over the place.  Like any swearword, it has different meanings in different contexts.  A hard, awful job may also be totally useful and necessary.  Is it ‘bullshit?’  In one sense, maybe yes, in another, no. 

On the whole, the book is an enjoyable read, as he and his Twitterati expose bad jobs in much the same way zines from the 1990s written by temps made fun of the dreadful workplaces they found themselves in.  He points out that the lower the pay, usually the more helpful and useful is your job – except for people like doctors and some skilled trades.  (He does not mention professors, his own occupation.) He also goes into a long discussion about how ‘work’ is not what it is cracked up to be.  What Graeber is really good at is unmasking the increasing complexity, stratification and bureaucracy within organizations under aging and declining capital – in universities, corporations, Wall Street, Hollywood or government.  He calls it ‘managerial feudalism.’  His one policy suggestion is Andrew Yang's - a Universal Basic Income.  As anthropology the book is good, but as a general theory it fails.  If Graeber had focused on how capital needs anti-social, bureaucratic and useless occupations to function, this book might have been better.

P.S. - Michael Roberts says recent research shows the self-concept of 'bullshit' jobs as 'useless' jobs is very low.  6/22/22 column:    https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2022/06/22/the-future-of-work-2-working-long-and-hard/ 

 

Other reviews on this subject below, use blog search box upper left:  “Debt – the First 5,000 Years,” “the Utopia of Rules,” (both by Graeber) “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” “The Hedonism Handbook,” “The Right to be Lazy,” “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” “Time Wars,” “Liquidated – An Ethnography of Wall Street,” “Marxism and the Oppression of Women.”

(Note:  The author worked in the legal side of the finance industry for a long time as well as many years in factories and there wasn't a day he had nothing to do.)

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

September 7, 2019