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