David Graeber is an American anthropologist who teaches at the London School of Economics. .... Last year, he wrote a much-discussed essay asking what happened to society’s old promise of more leisure time for workers; for the tasks that have come to occupy the hours that were once promised to be ours, Graeber invented the delicate and slightly obscure label, “bullshit jobs.”Graeber seems to be the current American left's contribution to radical thought, but I have my doubts. In this commentary I am going to argue that he is functioning more as a gatekeeper for the capitalist ruling class than undermining their rule and their system. See if you agree.
I charge him with "gatekeeping" because the thrust of his thesis about the many jobs which he alleges serves no purpose diverts attention away from the capitalist system onto unspecified others. Thus, no one is to blame or everyone is to blame. It seems that everyone is stupid or irrational by working in "bullshit jobs". Graeber's use of this expletive reminds me of many people who use such words when they don't have a solid argument: an expletive serves to drive a point through its shock value.
Initially in the interview he seems to be blaming socialists for the emphasis on work as a value in and of itself. Later he makes a tentative reference to a system, but immediately directs your attention elsewhere: mostly onto a universal "we". Examine two key passages:
We see in the first passage that he mentions an "economic system", but then immediately directs our attention to a labor movement. Instead of explaining why the system produces "bullshit jobs", most of his arguments in this interview seem to imply that the unnamed system is simply stupid. (In his original essay of last year, he mentioned the capitalist system, but only once!) He totally overlooks the radical fact that the controllers of the capitalist system, from which they derive so much wealth and power, have provided many "bullshit" jobs in their economy in order to make the system function. I'll give one example from my own experience.
- I think we need to attack the core of the problem, which is that we have an economic system that, by its very nature, will always reward people who make other people’s lives worse and punish those who make them better. I’m thinking of a labor movement, but one very different than the kind we’ve already seen. A labor movement that manages to finally ditch all traces of the ideology that says that work is a value in itself, but rather redefines labor as caring for other people.
- I think we need to start by redefining labor itself, maybe, start with classic “women’s work,” nurturing children, looking after things, as the paradigm for labor itself and then it will be much harder to be confused about what’s really valuable and what isn’t. As I say, we’re already seeing the first stirrings of this sort of thing. It’s both a political and a moral transformation and think it’s the only way we can overcome the system that puts so many of us in bullshit jobs.
For about six years I worked as a Rehabilitation Counselor serving adults with a wide range of disabilities: from drug/alcohol addiction to physical disabilities. Theoretically, we provided job counseling, training, and medical services in order to make them employable. However, under a capitalist bureaucracy our jobs inevitably evolved into "bullshit jobs" in order to crank out numbers of successful "rehabilitation closures" to justify bigger budgets and bigger bureaucratic empires.
To accomplish the latter, we were pressured to accept for services everyone who entered our building, workup an extensive file on them, and then close them as successful. At one time I estimated the amount of time I was doing the actual work of making real disabled people employable versus the others. I realized that I was spending 50% of my time doing "bullshit" work. The ruling class directorate didn't really care about putting people with disabilities to work. What they really wanted and got was providing jobs for educated, angry young people during the period when so many were protesting against the Vietnam War.
During these years I was sufficiently aware of why these jobs were created by the system and why they functioned the way they did. They were set up under the Lyndon Johnson administration in order to pacify the anti-war movement and generally stifle dissent among the college student population by providing them with jobs. In those days young people were questioning everything, particularly the Vietnam War, the oppression of minorities and women, the assassinations of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Black Nationalists, and other activists. Thus, "bullshit" jobs were needed to pacify the population. There are many other reasons for such jobs, but there are always reasons as to why they exist in terms of serving the system and its ruling class. Hence, they rarely are "bullshit" to the masters of the system.
However, this sort of analysis is completely missing from Graeber comments. He seems to suggest that we are all responsible and need to re-orient our thinking. He refers to an ideology, but fails to elaborate on how the ideology serves the system and how a labor movement could overcome this powerful weapon of the ruling class. I wonder if this sort of political analysis is the reason that Graeber was hired by a major ruling class university in their economics department.