Tag: capitalism

social-darwin-awards:

berniesrevolution:

IN THESE TIMES

---

David Graeber had a hypothesis. The anthropologist grew up working-class in New York, and while his scholarship garnered accolades, he’s never felt at home in the world of academia. From his time as a professor at Yale (ended prematurely, he believes, due to his anarchist activism) to his current gig at the London School of Economics, he kept running into professional managers who didn’t seem to do much. Over drinks, some confessed they actually didn’t do much; they spent a few hours a week working and the rest browsing cat memes.

Graeber developed a suspicion that this was rather common and, in 2013, wrote an essay for Strike! magazine, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” It was just a hypothesis—halfway a joke—but the piece was translated into at least a dozen languages and reprinted all over the internet, where it elicited floods of comments from people saying: “I have a bullshit job.”

A subsequent YouGov survey found that 37 percent of British workers believe their job makes no “meaningful contribution to the world”—more than Graeber expected. So, he dug deeper, soliciting testimonials and researching the political, cultural and economic structures that encourage millions of people to effectively waste 40 hours a week. The result is Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, a playful and provocative take on what he calls “a scar across our collective soul.” In These Times spoke to Graeber about the jobs problem, its causes and the future of capitalism.

How did you determine what counts as a “bullshit job”?

I’m not going to tell anyone who thinks their job is meaningful and important that it isn’t. People weren’t saying, “I market selfie sticks, selfie sticks are stupid, that’s a bullshit job.” They assumed that, if someone actually wants something, then it’s not bullshit. They weren’t judgmental about consumer taste.

A bullshit job is a job that the person doing it believes is pointless, and if the job didn’t exist it would either make no difference whatsoever or it would make the world a better place.

The existence of bullshit jobs seems to cut against the idea that capitalism is efficient and squeezes labor.

Capitalism treats blue-collar and white-collar wage earners differently than salary earners. Since the 1980s, anybody who has a non-bullshit job, who is doing actual work, has seen their work downsized, sped up and Taylorized.

Simultaneously, capitalism has produced endless bullshit white-collar jobs, which are designed to make you identify with the sensibilities of managers. I call this managerial feudalism, whereby they keep adding more and more and more levels of intermediary executives. If you’re an executive you need to have an assistant or else you’re not important, so they hire these flunkies. It has to do with power, really.

It screws up the creative industries. Movies have seven different levels of executives, who all have these complicated titles. They all fuck with the script and everything turns into mush. People point out this is why movies are so bad now.

In universities, you have this managerial class that’s taken over from the professors. They don’t know what the hell professors do. The more distant the managers are from what they’re managing, the more numbers they need because they don’t understand teaching themselves, and as a result we professors have to spend a larger and larger percentage of our time translating our activities into these quantitative terms that they set out.

You would think that somebody would raise an objection to this. It’s quite remarkable actually how you have something that’s such a glaring contradiction in the basic ideology of capitalism and nobody talks about it.

Why else have bullshit jobs been increasing?

There is this rise-of-the-robots logic, this fear that gradually technology is going to throw more and more people out of work. People say, “Look, it hasn’t happened.”

I think it did happen, but they made up these imaginary jobs to keep us working anyway, because we have an irrational economy that makes people work eight hours whether or not there’s anything to do. Can you have a surer sign of a stupid economic system than one in which the prospect of getting rid of onerous labor is considered a problem? Any rational economic system would redistribute the necessary work in a reasonable way and everybody would work less.

It’s striking how much people report hating their bullshit job.

They’re miserable! Two or three people said they kind of like their bullshit jobs, but the overwhelming majority, they’re sick all the time. They talk about depression, they talk about complex illnesses, psychological and physical and immune problems that all clearly have to do with tension and anxiety and depression.

And also they’re mean to each other. They scream at each other. The more meaningless the work, the more people suffer doing it and the worse they treat each other.

(Continue Reading)

I’d just like to add a parallel to the bullshit jobs thing from literal feudalism:

Rather
than rewarding an underling with land, a noble would give them titles and a
meaningless but prestigious job for a wage, e.g. Keeper of the King’s Keys,
Castilian of the Castle, Constable of the Tower, Martial of this or that. The
wages were often quite low, but it came with protection from prosecution, so it
was a license to extort people. Being made a wool factor (a wool merchant’s
agent) or a tax inspector was basically a license to steal with immunity so long
as you remained loyal to whoever got you the job.