Dear Friends,
For my pieces on Inner Life, I’d like to explore a few ‘classic,’ ‘famous’ essays - pieces that get referenced a lot, but which are easy enough to have missed. If nothing else, these are an opportunity to revisit the original essay - in this case David Graeber’s ‘Bullshit Jobs’ piece from 2013 - and to get a flavor for what the author was originally saying, which, often, can be pretty different from how the ideas of the essay have been disseminated in the culture at large.
Best wishes,
Sam Kahn
ON ‘BULLSHIT JOBS’
I can actually remember where I was when I first read the ‘Bullshit Jobs’ essay. I was at work, surfing the web on a slow afternoon, not at all sure that the job I was doing made, in Graeber’s language, “a meaningful contribution to the world,” and read the essay and looked around and had the feeling of having caught the whole office out, of realizing that everybody else was exposed by the same embarrassing secret.
Graeber’s essay, as he describes it in its book-length elaboration, was “based on a hunch.” He had grown up - like all of us - surrounded by the dogma that capitalism might be cruel but it was also lean and mean and efficient. The profit principle was supposed to be so strong that, if nothing else, then everybody earned their keep.
But that didn’t quite seem to be what was happening if one did a quick once-over of their office, as I was doing, or if one allowed dinner party guests to get a few in them and then asked them if they thought there was any intrinsic value to their work - which seemed to be how Graeber conducted his research for the original ‘Bullshit Jobs’ article. It turned out that very few people were able to articulate what their job was or why it mattered. And, by the time of the book, when Graeber was able to draw upon some more sophisticated methods of polling, it turned out that about 37% of respondents in a British survey claimed that their job “made no meaningful contribution to the world” while 40% in a similar Dutch study said that “their jobs had no good reason to exist.”
Graeber is an anarchist, writing from a leftist perspective, and his conclusion, not so surprisingly, has to do with the dissolution of capitalism. “I would like this book to be an arrow aimed at the heart of our civilization,” he writes in the Bullshit Jobs introduction. “There is something very wrong with what we have made ourselves. We have become a civilization based on work - not even ‘productive work’ but work as an end and meaning in itself….It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.”
Particularly in the original essay, Graeber’s focus is on a swathe of white-collar work, which he calls the ‘administrative sector’ and includes industries like financial services, corporate law, human resources, public relations. His analysis, which gets somewhat psychologically-oriented, is that there is such a thing as real work, which involves performing necessary tasks, being a nurse, garbage collector, subway train driver, etc; and then there is all the work that is basically extraneous. What’s particularly perverse, in Graeber’s view, is that the society is engaged in a sort of mass resentment of those whose work is actually significant. “Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited,” Graeber writes. “The larger stratum is basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class - but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value.”
This is of course the language of class warfare - the belief that those who are doing real, productive work should come to consciousness and should, at the very least, get paid better than the wide swathe of white-collar bullshit jobs. That’s a valid-enough point, but Graeber goes off in two other directions that I am more interested in following at the moment.
One is the comparison that he keeps making between the United States, at its ostensibly capitalist apex, and the Soviet Union. Graeber writes:
In capitalism, this [the proliferation of bullshit jobs] is precisely 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 sort of very 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.
Something about this really struck me and aligned with a hunch I’ve had - that there was always more in common between the Soviet system and the American imperium than might have been supposed. The ‘bullshit jobs’ observation catches something important - that American capitalism isn’t exactly the sort of cowboyish, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may free market that we’ve been raised to believe it is. That it is a managed system. That there are society-wide goals, much as there were in, say, the USSR, that those goals include objectives like ‘full employment’ and often point in very different directions than what the ‘profit principle’ would seem to suggest. In my own office experience, the profusion of ‘bullshit jobs’ often seems to emerge from a sort of generous exuberance - companies early on deciding that they’re committed to ‘growing’ and then hiring freely, past their ability to guarantee any actual work. In some sense, this spirit of spread-the-work-around, if less than optimally efficient, is actually benevolent. I’ve noticed that above all in companies’ willingness to hire young people who know nothing and drain a salary and who may not stay around long enough to actually benefit the company - but the companies are willing to make the investment out of some commitment to the ‘long-term health’ of the industry. And, on a more macro level, that’s maybe a reasonable way to understand and to justify that 40% of the economy (if not more) that by its own assessment contributes nothing of discernible value but which does keep itself employed, keeps the wheels of commerce turning, etc.
But that’s a rosy way to spin the phenomenon Graeber is describing. And if the enforced employment of the Soviet Union was ultimately suffocating, injurious to the system as a whole, our variant of it may be as well. Graeber gets a bit apocalyptic in the language he uses to describe the system we have, but, at the same time, it’s hard to argue that he’s completely off in what he’s describing. He writes, for instance:
Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul.
I had that sort of experience at the peak of the pandemic. I was working on a high-end production with high stakes - we all really wanted it to be good. But somehow the creative team was shrunken down to four people, and somehow, within a few months of working on the project, the production company was no longer willing to pay for hotel rooms on shoots and was encouraging the creatives to stay with relatives. This was not, however, because there was no money. There was money for lawyers and insurance risk assessment and liaisons from within the production company to deal with the lawyers and with the risk assessors. And then of course there were whole new Covid testing protocols - which had very, very little to do with reducing transmission but were really adept at limiting liability. The Graeber ‘bullshit jobs’ essay was a welcome guide to that experience, a terrific way of understanding what was happening - and it didn’t feel benevolent at all or a method to generate employment; it was all fear-based, a way of passing the risk around.
This is the other arresting direction that Graeber takes his argument in - contending that the bullshit jobs phenomenon isn’t really about jobs at all, or even the economy, it’s about what we do with our souls. In his essay he tells the paradigmatic story of a school friend, who had been a poet, an indie rocker, who was “brilliant, innovative,” and who had then, as he put it to Graeber, “taken the default choice of so many directionless folk: law school.” That story - so common, apparently so trivial - would usually be treated as a kind of parable of maturation, but for Graeber it’s symptomatic of everything that’s wrong with the culture. “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?” he writes.
Like so many critics, Graeber leaves things off before proposing any sort of solution. I don’t think he has any suggestions for how to generate demand for poet-musicians - and neither do I. But at least the terms of the problem are being clearly set out. What we’re interested in, Graeber would suggest (and I would agree), isn’t the society of full-employment or the society of benevolent corporate largesse. What we want is a society in which as many people as possible can do what they love to do. A society with dignity in work and recognition for work well done. The social project is about enabling that, however it can.
Sam Kahn writes Castalia.
Interesting piece and great idea for a series.
Graeber’s essay is still quite readable and captures what many people intuitively suspect about their own jobs, but it does so without much evidence and employs an alarming number of abstractions (whenever somebody writes “the ruling class” or “our society” without expanding on what they mean, watch out).
The Economist interviewed Graeber in 2018:
https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/06/29/bullshit-jobs-and-the-yoke-of-managerial-feudalism
Yet they also concluded a few years later that his thesis was ultimately not supported by data:
https://www.economist.com/business/2021/06/05/why-the-bullshit-jobs-thesis-may-be-well-bullshit
But I think what Graeber does usefully touch on is the vital psychological role that work has for many of us. I’m generally in agreement with Freud on that:
“No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work.”
I sometimes define real work as something where you shower afterwards, not beforehand like most of the rest of us do. I suspect there’s something about that kind of work that’s more inherently satisfying than, say, pushing paper. Perhaps it’s just the physical activity involved.
But at the same time, some of these jobs really do need to be automated. Think of agricultural stoop labor. One reason why there’s always a chronic labor shortage in California agriculture is because the work is so physically demanding. The recent immigrants who do most of this work sensibly go on to other jobs as soon as possible.
Freud also thought the examination dream so many of us have had was a recent development in human history. That seems reasonable. Our forebears were probably too busy surviving, gleaning a potato field in Poland, for example, to have that kind of anxiety dream; likely they dreamed about food, not exams or jobs.
As for superfluous jobs, when Musk eliminated half of Twitter’s workforce, many hated him for that. But isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work?
And look at some of the WPA work of the 30s: many of those national park lookouts and rock walls are still there, in good shape, now part of the park system’s aesthetic. Yet those were so-called “make work” jobs.
Boots Riley’s 2018 movie, Sorry to Bother You, deals with telemarketers in a slightly alternative universe and efforts to unionize them. One of my favorite lines is when Steven Yeun’s union organizer mentions that they organized the LA sign twirlers the year before. That’s so funny: is sign twirling, a goofy kind of advertising, a necessary job, or a superfluous one?
The movie is currently on the Amazon Prime streaming service:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XthLQZWIshQ
As for the number of poet-musicians, I think most people are indifferent to poetry and many of the rest actively dislike it, so maybe we have about the right number, if not a surplus.
In the Chinese short story Folding Beijing, someone from the working class discovers that all the work they do could be performed by machines, but the rulers allow people to do it so that they have work. Some people like bullshit jobs. For example, we know of someone with a PhD who became a road sweeper because it gave him time to think. I'm not saying that I would like such a job, but it strikes me that this is a matter of degree and nuance. Because, looked at from one perspective, ALL jobs are bullshit jobs, or most of them.
I'm more concerned with bullshit tasks. For example, in one place I worked the powers-that-be decided we all had to submit time sheets to show what we'd been doing all week. That took an hour last thing on a Friday. I was convinced that nobody ever read them, or would be able to query them even if they did. I designed the time sheet in an Excel spreadsheet, and set the spreadsheet up to complete the timesheet randomly. It didn't look much different from the real thing, and took only a few seconds to do. I never quite had the courage to use it though. I wish I had now.
In England, despite the government telling schools they no longer needed to assign 'levels' to students' work, some headteachers still ask for that to be done. So I created a random Levels generator, which I describe in a forthcoming (11th Feb 23) post called 6 ways to respond to requests for pointless data.
What Sam says about the high and mighty looking down their noses at the people doing the jobs nobody really wants. They had a bit of a come-uppance in the 1970s when the garbage collectors went on strike. There's nothing like mounds of uncollected rubbish to make people re-evaluate their attitudes.