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Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
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Kevin's review
bookshelves: 2-brilliant-intros-101, econ-value-labour, 1-how-the-world-works, econ-finance, econ-corporations, econ-gender, econ-inequality, econ-market, econ-sci-techno, econ-violence, theory-gender, theory-philosophy, theory-psych, theory-sci-techno, theory-socialism-anarchism, theory-socialism-marxism, theory-culture-religion, critique-violence, econ-marxism, history-labour
Apr 07, 2018
bookshelves: 2-brilliant-intros-101, econ-value-labour, 1-how-the-world-works, econ-finance, econ-corporations, econ-gender, econ-inequality, econ-market, econ-sci-techno, econ-violence, theory-gender, theory-philosophy, theory-psych, theory-sci-techno, theory-socialism-anarchism, theory-socialism-marxism, theory-culture-religion, critique-violence, econ-marxism, history-labour
Read 3 times. Last read March 10, 2022 to January 28, 2025.
Capitalist Alienation 2.0…
Preamble:
1) Creativity:
--On the one hand, Graeber is my favourite writer.
…I’ve yet to read someone who has synthesized so much critical research and presented it in such a playful, engaging manner. As Colleen P. Eren reviewed, “[This book] makes the strange, familiar, and the familiar, strange.”
--Indeed, an essay in Graeber’s posthumous The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World...: Essays defends the method of “theoretical reduction”/“structural analysis” as “simplifying and schematizing complex material in such a way as to be able to say something unexpected.”
2) Rigour…?:
--On the other hand, it’s essential we constantly test our theories with an array of robust tools/lenses, perhaps even more so for theories that appeal to us (confirmation bias).
--Social sciences (yes, including “economics”) are a wonderland of biases; I experienced this the hard way from being lured early on into “free market” economics and New Atheism, with the subsequent growing pains of mounting contradictions and re-evaluations.
--Yes, there are innate difficulties in testing social theories (ex. difficult to perform social experiments to control for confounding variables/reproduce findings) compared to physical sciences, but many in social sciences seem rather negligent towards still-applicable tools in scientific research to control for our many fascinating biases (from “correlation fallacy” to “prosecutor’s fallacy”): see public science writer/medical doctor Goldacre’s: Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks
--James Suzman, an anthropologist like Graeber (although with differing views, i.e. prioritizing a materialist lens rather than idealist/cultural lens), cautions:
…If academia is messy, the reading public is even more vulnerable in our world full of Malcolm Gladwell salespeople disguised as social theorists. From an interview, Gladwell reveals:
…As I started to collect more challenges to Graeber’s cultural/idealist anthropology (esp. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity) and political strategy in Occupy Wall Street (The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement), it was time to re-evaluate this book…
Highlights:
1) Graeber’s Methodology:
--Graeber collected (from mostly English-speaking countries) 124 personal stories discussing his 2013 essay on bullshit jobs and 250+ more direct responses to his 2016 Twitter post:
i) Individual:
--i.e. “why do people agree to do and put up with their own bullshit jobs?”
--Graeber’s collection of anecdotes covers this.
ii) Societal/Economic:
--i.e. “what are the larger forces that have led to the proliferation of bullshit jobs?”
--This is the level I start with, i.e. (geo)political economy lens to analyze capitalism. Note Graeber’s response in an interview in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World...: Essays:
--i.e. “why is the bullshitization of the economy not seen as a social problem, and why has no one done anything about it?”
--As a (cultural) anthropologist, this is indeed the “other parts” that Graeber emphasizes:
…I find the above context on methodology useful to reassess, before we get swept away by the theories; see comments below (start at message #14) for rest of the review (theory!)…
Preamble:
1) Creativity:
--On the one hand, Graeber is my favourite writer.
…I’ve yet to read someone who has synthesized so much critical research and presented it in such a playful, engaging manner. As Colleen P. Eren reviewed, “[This book] makes the strange, familiar, and the familiar, strange.”
--Indeed, an essay in Graeber’s posthumous The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World...: Essays defends the method of “theoretical reduction”/“structural analysis” as “simplifying and schematizing complex material in such a way as to be able to say something unexpected.”
2) Rigour…?:
--On the other hand, it’s essential we constantly test our theories with an array of robust tools/lenses, perhaps even more so for theories that appeal to us (confirmation bias).
--Social sciences (yes, including “economics”) are a wonderland of biases; I experienced this the hard way from being lured early on into “free market” economics and New Atheism, with the subsequent growing pains of mounting contradictions and re-evaluations.
--Yes, there are innate difficulties in testing social theories (ex. difficult to perform social experiments to control for confounding variables/reproduce findings) compared to physical sciences, but many in social sciences seem rather negligent towards still-applicable tools in scientific research to control for our many fascinating biases (from “correlation fallacy” to “prosecutor’s fallacy”): see public science writer/medical doctor Goldacre’s: Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks
--James Suzman, an anthropologist like Graeber (although with differing views, i.e. prioritizing a materialist lens rather than idealist/cultural lens), cautions:
Novelty oils the engines of academia, a place in which there is more credibility to be gained by tearing down established ideas than by reaffirming them.…This pairs with Goldacre’s critique of systematic bias for publishing positive (i.e. novel, thus prestige) over negative findings. However, I would stress power in politically-contentious fields (ex. economics); theories useful to status quo power are popularized in well-funded departments (ex. business schools) whereas critical theories get relegated to basements (ex. geography, English department).
…If academia is messy, the reading public is even more vulnerable in our world full of Malcolm Gladwell salespeople disguised as social theorists. From an interview, Gladwell reveals:
I'm in the storytelling business, and so you're always drawn to the unusual. […] And if you come up through a newspaper as I did, your whole goal is to get a story on the front page, and you only get something on the front page if it's unusual, so you're quickly weaned off the notion that you should be interested in the mundane.…Goldacre dismisses Gladwell’s books as “silly and overstated”. How would Goldacre judge Graeber’s methodological rigour?
…As I started to collect more challenges to Graeber’s cultural/idealist anthropology (esp. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity) and political strategy in Occupy Wall Street (The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement), it was time to re-evaluate this book…
Highlights:
1) Graeber’s Methodology:
--Graeber collected (from mostly English-speaking countries) 124 personal stories discussing his 2013 essay on bullshit jobs and 250+ more direct responses to his 2016 Twitter post:
The results might not be adequate for most forms of statistical analysis, but I have found them an extraordinarily rich source for qualitative analysis, especially since in many cases I’ve been able to ask follow-up questions and, in some, to engage in long conversations with informants.…This could be sufficient for the topic (esp. by social science standards) if paired with broader data (ex. census), but the presentation is haphazard. In fact, I could not find a citation for a useful source (“a recent report”; luckily, this was easy to search for online: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “Occupational changes during the 20th century”) mentioned in the following core passage:
Why did Keynes’s promised utopia [prediction in 1930 that, by 2030, we would have a 15-hour work week]—still being eagerly awaited in the sixties—never materialize? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the twenties, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.--In terms of social science theory, Graeber writes:
So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” [not even citing direct quotes, tsk-tsk…] In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away. (Even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be.)
But 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. And these numbers do not even reflect all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or, for that matter, the whole host of ancillary industries (dog washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.
These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”
We are faced here with a classic problem in social theory: the problem of levels of causality. In the case of any given real-world event, there are any number of different reasons why one can say it happened. […]…Graeber considers 3 levels of casuality:
Much of the confusion that surrounds debate about social issues in general can be traced back to the fact that people will regularly take these different explanations as alternatives rather than seeing them as factors that all operate at the same time.
i) Individual:
--i.e. “why do people agree to do and put up with their own bullshit jobs?”
--Graeber’s collection of anecdotes covers this.
ii) Societal/Economic:
--i.e. “what are the larger forces that have led to the proliferation of bullshit jobs?”
--This is the level I start with, i.e. (geo)political economy lens to analyze capitalism. Note Graeber’s response in an interview in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World...: Essays:
Often Marxists take me to task for ignoring the basic tenets of Marxism. I don’t think I ignore them, but I actually take them rather for granted. I’m just emphasizing other parts of the equation.iii) Cultural/Political:
--i.e. “why is the bullshitization of the economy not seen as a social problem, and why has no one done anything about it?”
--As a (cultural) anthropologist, this is indeed the “other parts” that Graeber emphasizes:
It’s also the easiest to overlook, since it often deals specifically with things people are not doing.
[…] basic assumptions about what people are, what can be expected of them, and what they can justifiably demand of one another. Those assumptions, in turn, have an enormous influence in determining what is considered to be a political issue and what is not.”
…I find the above context on methodology useful to reassess, before we get swept away by the theories; see comments below (start at message #14) for rest of the review (theory!)…
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Quotes Kevin Liked
“It’s hard to imagine a surer sign that one is dealing with an irrational economic system than the fact that the prospect of eliminating drudgery is considered to be a problem.”
― Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
― Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
“We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself.”
― Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
― Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
“Since at least the Great Depression, we’ve been hearing warnings that automation was or was about to be throwing millions out of work—Keynes at the time coined the term “technological unemployment,” and many assumed the mass unemployment of the 1930s was just a sign of things to come—and while this might make it seem such claims have always been somewhat alarmist, what this book suggests is that the opposite was the case. They were entirely accurate. Automation did, in fact, lead to mass unemployment. We have simply stopped the gap by adding dummy jobs that are effectively made up. A combination of political pressure from both right and left, a deeply held popular feeling that paid employment alone can make one a full moral person, and finally, a fear on the part of the upper classes, already noted by George Orwell in 1933, of what the laboring masses might get up to if they had too much leisure on their hands, has ensured that whatever the underlying reality, when it comes to official unemployment figures in wealthy countries, the needle should never jump too far from the range of 3 to 8 percent. But if one eliminates bullshit jobs from the picture, and the real jobs that only exist to support them, one could say that the catastrophe predicted in the 1930s really did happen. Upward of 50 percent to 60 percent of the population has, in fact, been thrown out of work.”
― Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
― Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
“If we let everyone decide for themselves how they were best fit to benefit humanity, with no restrictions at all, how could they possibly end up with a distribution of labor more inefficient than the one we already have? 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 about arguing about what a genuine free society might actually be like.”
― Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
― Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
Reading Progress
April 7, 2018
– Shelved
September 14, 2018
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Started Reading
September 15, 2018
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35.0%
"On the history of make-work and the selling of one's time... thought-experiments + history/anthropology, this is where Graeber shines!"
September 17, 2018
–
80.0%
"Graeber going through the history of our conception of "work", from Christian theology roots of work ethic to feudal temporary "service" to capitalism changing this relationship to be permanent (wage labor) to labor theory of value, etc."
September 19, 2018
–
Finished Reading
February 3, 2019
–
Started Reading
February 8, 2019
–
Finished Reading
March 10, 2022
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Started Reading
January 28, 2025
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Finished Reading
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Oct 22, 2018 03:18AM
This is excellent, Kevin! Really, really thorough, and written in a supple and yet somehow dispassionately engaged (if that oxymoron is the way to put it) manner (i.e. I really like your prose). Arrighi's The Long 20th Century and Brenner's The Boom and The Bust explain that shift toward financialization very well, from somewhat conflicting perspectives, and Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism is v useful for the global south perspective, in this regard. Cheers!
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W.D. wrote: "This is excellent, Kevin! Really, really thorough, and written in a supple and yet somehow dispassionately engaged (if that oxymoron is the way to put it) manner (i.e. I really like your prose). Ar..."Cheers Bill, apart from contributing to the community of reviews I was surprised to find how fruitful it is to actually sit down and collect/refine one's thoughts, too often I would just move to the next read.
I'm curious if you can summarize the difference between Arrighi and Brenner's explanation, I'm just going through Wallerstein's summary so it's fresh on my mind.
Interesting, I actually started Harvey's book a while back and assumed it would not be heavy on global south, thus switching to Vijay Prashad, I'll have to revisit it then...
Arrighi follows Wallerstein in buying into the controversial K-Wave or Kondratieff wave 'theory' (hypothesis might be better!) of economic history, with financialization always coming at the end of a dominant economy's reign (The long 20C is thus the American century). Brenner is more in the mold of the classic political Marxist decline of rate of profitability (I don't remember his take on K-waves). Their real big disagreement comes over the originds of capitalism, though. Been a decade since I read any of them (except Harvey's Neoliberalism, which was last year)
Oh, and I always used to try to make detailed notes/summaries while reading. I will perhaps soon post my old notes to Brenner's Boom & Bust on my blog for anyone such as yourself wanting a quick (relatively-speaking) "digested read"
Ah, well I'll have to set aside the origins of capitalism and the associated Brenner debate, as I've not read into the sides here.As for financialization, Wallerstein in his WSA introduction seems to only mention the Kondratieff wave as an observation. This is similar to Luxemberg describing the 10-year cycle noticed by Marxists as an observation rather than a strict theory.
Wallerstein's ascribes to cycles because new technology creates new markets. I assume this is compatible with Marx's decline of rate of profitability, which I assume stresses the inevitable systemic (i.e. final) crisis, which Wallerstein supports as well. I haven't read Wallerstein saying financialization always follows the tail end of the cycle as profits are squeezed, although I'd be intrigued to see historical examples...
W.D. wrote: "Oh, and I always used to try to make detailed notes/summaries while reading. I will perhaps soon post my old notes to Brenner's Boom & Bust on my blog for anyone such as yourself wanting a quick (r..."Sounds good, thanks!
Perhaps I am conflating Arrighi and Wallerstein Kevin! Add in an aging memory and ...time to reread!
I still have many gaps as I work my way back in history. I specifically skipped Arrighi because his last book "Adam Smith in Beijing" seemed provocative, and I wasn't ready for it until I had more of the foundations (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)But your analysis of Arrighi sounds correct:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Your memory is on point here, just heard a lecture of Wallerstein's (https://youtu.be/uQV0w11vVO8) where he endorses financialization at end of cycles, I'm surprised I don't remember much of this from Graeber (Debt: The First 5,000 Years) and Hudson (Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy). I'm curious how Wallerstein describes the terminal capitalist crisis in Does Capitalism Have a Future? and how this relates to Brenner/Marx.
Another book everyone raves about is How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System...
excellent review. You have a really good grasp on how the world works.
Peter wrote: "excellent review. You have a really good grasp on how the world works."Cheers Peter, your reviews have been very helpful, what's inspiring you these days?
I have my hands in a lot of pots. I am nonfiction generalist. Science, Politics, Philosophy. I spend a lot of time on math and physics because its my background but in politics I am somewhere between liberalism and socialism. I use the moniker social democrat a lot.
Peter wrote: "I have my hands in a lot of pots. I am nonfiction generalist. Science, Politics, Philosophy. I spend a lot of time on math and physics because its my background but in politics I am somewhere betwe..."Ah yes, I enjoy the dive into a particular topic but share the need for diverse interests.
As for social dems and socialism, our world leaves us with messy terminologies so we'd have to spend a good amount of time unpacking and defining; skipping this would lead to misunderstandings.
But it's late here so I'll temporarily skip it and say that my prioritization is in the global division of labor, thus I'd have to push social dems (reformist liberal democracy + capitalist economy) further.
…review continued: 2) Alienation 2.0: Marxist Exploitation + Feminist Social Reproduction:
--Graeber traces the morality of “work” as follows:
i) Pre-Capitalist:
--Graeber only briefly summarizes:
[…] most people who have ever existed have assumed that normal human work patterns take the form of periodic intense bursts of energy, followed by relaxation, followed by slowly picking up again toward another intense bout.--Note: aforementioned (materialist) anthropologist James Suzman also tackles Keynes’ leisure prediction by analyzing hunting-gathering’s leisure society (Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen), which we can contrast with Graeber/Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
[…] The main reason why work could remain so irregular was because it was largely unsupervised. This is true not only of medieval feudalism but also of most labor arrangements anywhere until relatively recent times. It was true even if those labor arrangements were strikingly unequal. If those on the bottom produced what was required of them, those on top didn’t really feel they should have to be bothered knowing what that entailed.
ii) Feudalism:
--Focusing on Northern Europe, Graeber highlights not feudal services but life-cycle services in particular:
Essentially, almost everyone was expected to spend roughly the first seven to fifteen years of his or her working life as a servant in someone else’s household. Most of us are familiar with how this worked itself out within craft guilds, where teenagers would first be assigned to master craftsmen as apprentices, and then become journeymen, but only when they achieved the status of master craftsmen would they have the means to marry and set up their own households and shops, and take apprentices of their own. In fact, the system was in no sense limited to artisans. [Graeber then mentions peasants, both boys and girls (milkmaids), even elites (pages, etc.)]
[…] Service, in turn, was seen above all as the process whereby young people learned not only their trade, but the “manners,” the comportment appropriate to a responsible adult.
iii) Industrial Capitalism:
--Thus, capitalism’s shift to wage labour relations meant a permanent adolescence (Graeber’s focus on culture), where capitalism’s working-class by definition are stuck from becoming masters of their own means of production.
…This led to rebellions and moral panic, where the elite response was to moralize work as an end in itself to discipline the working-class: Victorian workhouses/Carlyle’s “Gospel of Work” (morality of self-sacrifice)/Protestant work ethic. Graeber highlights the “spiritual violence” of a social system rendering work as an end in itself. For synthesis with gender relations, see one of Graeber’s influences, Federici: Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
--Graeber includes the Marxist analysis of commodification, where industrial capitalist production commodified time to squeeze wage labour for profits, where idleness became theft of time. Crucially, the working class must remain dependent on wage labour (thus, dispossessed of means of production) via the threat of unemployment (Marx’s “reserve army of labour”).
…Graeber then uses the Marxist feminist lens to contrast:
a) Productivism:
--With capitalist industrialization, the Labour Theory of Value (LTOV) became mainstream, i.e. Classical liberal political economy (Adam Smith, Ricardo, etc.).
--Marx’s critique (Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1) included using Classical concepts, ex. “productive” vs. “unproductive” labour (ex. housework, education); Graeber emphasizes that Marx’s analysis here was deliberately considering the perspective of capitalists (i.e. “productive” for directly extracting profits, rather than for directly addressing social needs), which has predictably led to confusion.
--Graeber ties this intellectual context with the cultural shift where “productive” work was given a theological, patriarchal bias, where the “working-class” became represented by male factory workers despite this group never being the majority: “Consider a coffee cup. We “produce” it once. We wash it a thousand times.”
b) Social Reproduction:
--Marxist feminism (social reproduction theory) challenges productivism’s patriarchal bias by focusing on the majority of labour and their caring component: The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values
--After the US Civil War, corporate capitalism expanded. Robber barons countered the LTOV/“Gospel of Work” with the “Gospel of Wealth”/Marginalist Revolution in economics (creating today’s mainstream economics, i.e. “Neoclassical”, which Michael Hudson/Anwar Shaikh describe as “anti-Classical”), framing capital (not labour) as creating wealth.
--Thus, the combination of consumerism (low prices; consumer pleasure) with managerialism (low wages; work-place self-sacrifice). The patriarchal bias towards industrial (mechanical) labour was further disciplined by capitalists through the threat of automation (whereas care-work is more qualitative).
…continued…
iv) Managerial Feudalism: --More commonly called “Neoliberalism”/“Finance Capitalism”, we now arrive at the post-1970’s and can return to the introductory quote on bullshit jobs. Graeber’s point is that the decline in manufacturing/rise of “service economy” are exaggerated given the patriarchal productivism bias in conceptualizing the “working-class”:
Often it’s assumed that the decline of manufacturing—which, incidentally, hasn’t declined that much in terms of employment in the United States, by 2010 only returning to about what it was at the outbreak of the Civil War—simply meant that factories were relocated to poorer countries. This is obviously true to an extent, but it’s interesting to observe that the same overall trends in the composition of employment can be observed even in the countries to which the factory jobs were exported.--The actual rise of bullshit jobs (Graeber categorizes as: flunky/goon/duck taper/box ticker/taskmaster) is one component revealing Neoliberalism as a political project (rather than “economic efficiency” of market funamentalists) to re-instill wage-labour discipline and suppress working-class bargaining power (which would result from Keynes’ leisure society): The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism
--Graeber gives the example:
[quoting Obama:] “Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents one million, two million, three million jobs [filled by] people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?” [clearly, a leisure society where we lower overall working hours and redistribute the remaining work is intolerable for capitalist power]…Note: Graeber is also influenced by real-world economist Michael Hudson (The Bubble and Beyond), who provides a useful counter to market fundamentalist “efficiency” claims by actually considering the specific purpose of each particular market. Is this market:
[…] [Graeber writes:] He acknowledges that millions of jobs in medical insurance companies like Kaiser or Blue Cross are unnecessary. He even acknowledges that a socialized health system would be more efficient than the current market-based system, since it would reduce unnecessary paperwork and reduplication of effort by dozens of competing private firms. But he’s also saying it would be undesirable for that very reason.
a) directly providing goods/services and/or lowering the cost of production/operations?
b) Or, is it an extractive overhead (“unearned income”/“economic rent”), i.e. speculative (finance)/rent-seeking (land rents, natural resource monopolies, intellectual property patent monopolies, etc.)?
...This is why Hudson calls Finance Capitalism “Neofeudalism”; Graeber emphasizes the cultural aspect, thus “Managerial Feudalism”. This is also useful for judging what jobs qualify as “bullshit”; for those who argue the worker’s own self-testimony as insufficient (i.e. too micro, cannot see the whole system), then this is a macro view.
…In the Obama example, the actual healthcare service providers can operate on a cost-of-operations separate from the burden of the financial overhead (creating the most profitable and most costly healthcare system) of for-profit health insurance/Big Pharma (yes, private-sector bureaucracies).
--Graeber then considers the cultural divisions of our current situation:
a) Jobless:
--Reserve army of labour to discipline workers.
b) Socially-useful jobs:
--Under-paid; much of which are related to care-work; key institutions include hospitals and schools; COVID-19 popularized “essential workers”.
--Finance has infiltrated (ex. medical/student debts), thus Graeber describes Occupy Wall Street as a “revolt of the caring classes”; Liberal (i.e. cosmopolitan capitalism) parties and reformist unions control the power structure (“professional managerial class”).
c) Bullshit jobs:
--Graeber highlights the curious anger towards socially-useful jobs, i.e. given the managerial theology of work as self-discipline, how dare these other people find fulfilment in their jobs and expect compensation too!
--Graeber also unpacks the US conservative view towards:
a) Liberal elite:
--i.e. Intellectuals/Hollywood; rural conservatives are indeed correct in assuming that this path is unachievable.
b) Capitalists:
--Thus, rural conservatives can find this path of just making money (including luck/scams) more likely (thus, the relatability of a billionaire like Trump). I will add that educated immigrants similarly fall for the “fiscally-conservative” trap, because they prioritize economic mobility given their lack of political-cultural connections.
--Graeber adds that conservatives are also drawn to the military, which in the US is sadly a key jobs program/seen as public service (i.e. social need).
…Alternatives?
--Similar to Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which presents a fascinating big history synthesis only to conclude with a brief mention of debt jubilee, Graeber concludes Bullshit Jobs with a brief mention of UBI.
--However, we now have plenty of tools to move beyond social democrat UBI (ex. Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World) and into more transformative visions (ex. Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present)…
