I just finished reading David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs. The premise is that anywhere from 25-50% of modern work serves no purpose. It’s not an economic problem but a cultural and mental health problem. Some of my favorite excerpts:
The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger. (Think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the sixties.) And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.
We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.
It’s not entirely surprising, then, that the first historical evidence we have for the notion that certain categories of people really ought to be working at all times, even if there’s nothing to do, and that work needs to be made up to fill their time, even if there’s nothing that really needs doing, refers to people who are not free: prisoners and slaves, two categories that historically have largely overlapped.
Time is not a grid against which work can be measured, because the work is the measure itself.
Before long, however, workers were arguing with employers about hourly rates, demanding fixed-hour contracts, overtime, time and a half, the twelve-hour day, and then the eight-hour day. But the very act of demanding “free time,” however understandable under the circumstances, had the effect of subtly reinforcing the idea that when a worker was “on the clock,” his time truly did belong to the person who had bought it—a concept that would have seemed perverse and outrageous to their great-grandparents, as, indeed, to most people who have ever lived.
Mitch’s story highlights the religious element: the idea that dutiful submission even to meaningless work under another’s authority is a form of moral self-discipline that makes you a better person. This, of course, is a modern variant of Puritanism.
Productive labor yields some kind of surplus value that capitalists can extract in profits; other labor is at best “reproductive”—that is, like housework or education (these are always put forward as the primary examples), such tasks perform the necessary second-order work of keeping workers alive and raising new generations of workers so that in the future they can, in turn, do the “real” work of being exploited.
The flip side of the left-wing protest marchers waving signs demanding “More Jobs” is the right-wing onlooker muttering “Get a job!” as they pass by. There seems a broad consensus not so much even that work is good but that not working is very bad; that anyone who is not slaving away harder than he’d like at something he doesn’t especially enjoy is a bad person, a scrounger, a skiver, a contemptible parasite unworthy of sympathy or public relief.
Work, Aristotle insisted, in no sense makes you a better person; in fact, it makes you a worse one, since it takes up so much time, thus making it difficult to fulfill one’s social and political obligations.
Work about work has become a kind of minor industry in its own right. The conclusions reached by this body of research—and what follows appears to hold true, with only minor variations, for both blue- and white-collar workers virtually anywhere in the world—might be summarized as follows:
1. Most people’s sense of dignity and self-worth is caught up in working for a living.
2. Most people hate their jobs.
Those trapped in bullshit jobs resent workers who get to do real productive or beneficial labor, and those who do real productive or beneficial labor, underpaid, degraded, and unappreciated, increasingly resent those who they see as monopolizing those few jobs where one can live well while doing something useful, high-minded, or glamorous—who they refer to as “the liberal elite.” All are united in their loathing for the political class, who they see (correctly) as corrupt, but the political class, in turn, finds these other forms of vacuous hatred extremely convenient, since they distract attention from themselves.
This is a powerful argument for human freedom. Most of us like to talk about freedom in the abstract, even claim that it’s the most important thing for anyone to fight or die for, but we don’t think a lot about what being free or practicing freedom might actually mean. The main point of this book was not to propose concrete policy prescriptions, but to start us thinking and arguing about what a genuine free society might actually be like.
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