by David Graeber, 17/08/13.
Extracts:
“In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that
technology would have advanced sufficiently by century’s end that countries like
Great Britain or the United States would achieve a 15-hour work week. There’s
every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite
capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been
marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order
to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and
North America in particular, spend their
entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need
to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this
situation is profound. It is a scar
across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
(…) Rather than allowing a massive reduction of working
hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures,
visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service”
sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of
whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the
unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health
administration, human resources, and public relations. (…) These are what I
propose to call “bullshit jobs.”
It’s as if someone
were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all
working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is exactly what is not supposed to happen.
Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where
employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as
many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three
clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the very sort of problem market competition is supposed to fix.
According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is
going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ.
Still, somehow, it happens. (…)
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 ‘60s). 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.
(…) There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting
with, what does it say about our society
that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented
poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate
law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable
wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or
important, not anybody else.) But even more, it shows that most people in
these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a
corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. (…)
This is a profound
psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in
labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not
create a sense of deep rage and resentment? Yet it is the peculiar genius of
our society that its rulers have figured out a way (…) to ensure that rage is
directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work.
For instance: in our society, there
seems to be a general rule that the more obviously one’s work benefits other
people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find,
but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire
class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage
collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of
smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without
teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science
fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not
entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs,
lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal
consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted
exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.
Even more perverse,
there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of
right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment
against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very
fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually
necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people. It’s even clearer
in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment
against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the
school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems)
for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told
“but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on
top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health
care?”
If someone had
designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance
capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real,
productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder
are divided between a terrorised stratum of the – universally reviled –
unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in
positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and
sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and
particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a
simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social
value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from
almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why,
despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days.”
David Graeber is a Professor of Anthropology at the London
School of Economics.
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