Reading: Is Your Job Bullshit? David Graeber on Capitalism’s Endless Busywork By: Dayton Martindale / 10 May 2018
From his time as a professor at Yale (ended prematurely, he believes, due to his anarchist activism) to his current gig at the London School of Economics, he kept running into professional managers who didn’t seem to do much.
I mean, we all have. But I will say that one of the few things that I kind of (but not entirely) agree with both Peter Shamshiri and Michael Hobbes about (regarding the If Books Could Kill episode on Bullshit Jobs) is that Graeber really didn't have a full understanding of work outside of academia. Despite growing up working class, he had very little (if any) personal experience in realms outside of academia.
And it's also interesting because a lot of his own personal exploration of academia is very... cis white man. This makes sense (that's who he was), but he very rarely explored the ways in which academia treated everyone else (unless someone reminded him to do so).
A subsequent YouGov survey found that 37 percent of British workers believe their job makes no “meaningful contribution to the world” — more than Graeber expected. So, he dug deeper, soliciting testimonials and researching the political, cultural and economic structures that encourage millions of people to effectively waste 40 hours a week. The result is Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, a playful and provocative take on what he calls “a scar across our collective soul.”
This feels like they're trying to make Bullshit Jobs more than it was. It was a sell-out book, and he knew it. (Even the Peter and Michael figured it out... sort of. They didn't explicitly state it, but they said that the essay felt too short and that the book was too long... and neither really incorporated a lot of evidence and often veered into vague territory. This is also something I agree with them on to an extent.)
David Graeber: A bullshit job is a job that the person doing it believes is pointless, and if the job didn’t exist it would either make no difference whatsoever or it would make the world a better place.
I think I actually have come to hate David's definition of a bullshit job because it doesn't actually engage with trying to understand the world and the context of those jobs.
In fact, I think a lot of jobs that people think “make a difference” or “should exist” are bullshit jobs. Working with children and guiding them to participating in the world in healthy ways isn't bullshit, yet teachers really do embody a lot of bullshit elements of the world, including things that they “must teach” according to the curriculum and how a lot of their curriculum ties directly to a poor organisation of society, continued colonialism and imperialism, anti-immigrant policies and coerced assimilation, training people to engage in 'civility' rather than contextualising different kinds of confrontation (along with a shit-ton of both-sidesing behaviours when a problem occurs, and forcing people to participate in a hierarchical structure that actually creates more issues than it ever solves (including the expectation that all adults inherently deserve children's respect because they “have authority”).
Would all teachers say they have a 'bullshit job'? I suspect most would not. But I think it largely is because it's not actually doing anything to change the world for the better and it's not about supporting both children's autonomy or communal care; even in the best of cases, it's about sustaining the status quo. (When even my anarchist friends who are teachers still frame it as “civilising children” and mean it positively, I think we should start asking a lot of questions about what it is that school does. And a lot of people do not.)
In fact, Graeber also wouldn't have recognised the bullshit of professorship because.... that was his bread and butter. He could just recognise the elements of bullshit in academia, and none of them were outside of the managerial and administrative aspects of academia.
Graeber: I’ve been working with people who’ve become big advocates for a universal basic income. It’s not the only solution, but it conforms with my political instincts. People think that is odd because I’m an anarchist. Why would I want a policy where the government would just give people money? Isn’t that giving power to the government? I say, no.
A basic income would be the perfect leftist antibureaucratic policy. It would not only reduce the number of bureaucrats, but it would get rid of the worst of them, the annoying ones who decide whether you’re really poor enough to deserve this, or whether you’re really married to that person or whether you really live in that room.
Besides, they’re unhappy, those intrusive bureaucrats about whom you wonder, “How can they live with themselves?” Well a lot of them can’t. Those guys would be off the hook. They could go form a rock band or restore antique furniture or do something nice.
I'm quoting this part in whole because it highlights perfectly the failures of Graeber's understanding of policies and connections. While I would not mind getting UBI so I can stop pretending to give a shit about some of the lessons I do (and could also stop having to play games of price negotiation, which I hate), I think it's mistaken to believe that it's inherently good or even something that should be desirable.
UBI wouldn't “decrease” the number of bureaucrats because UBI would also become a safeguarded policy in the way that all other welfare policies have been. It might not become a means-tested item, but it certainly would not support a whole range of people because that is not how governments work (and any anarchist should know this). As a good example, just check how many governments would gladly give any kind of welfare to immigrants.
If we look at social security or social insurance (unemployment, retirement, sick leave, etc), these policies are entirely unequal despite the fact that they are provided to people to access them. Each designation of social insurance has their own bureaucrats (first) who then tease out who gets what and how much. Accessing these services as an immigrant is near impossible, despite the fact that we most certainly pay into them. Despite paying into unemployment, I am entirely unable to access it both due to my status as an immigrant and because I'm a freelancer; if I lose work, it is put squarely on my shoulders. Despite paying into sick leave, I don't even get paid a percentage of an average month of income because I am a freelancer. I do not get to access this.
Who is to say that UBI wouldn't become like this? (And honestly, who is going to pay immigrants UBI anyway? We're exploitable because we're coerced into participating in capitalism just so we don't get deported from places we've lived for years, all because a visa or a policy shift requires it.)
Not only that, but if you're working on projects like UBI and knowing the government will get good press from it? Trying to get people to fight that government when they work on shittier things later is going to be even more difficult because they might fear losing the one thing keeping them afloat. It's a useful short-term solution, but it's not a good long-term one; it's also one that requires significant amounts of planning to deal with. (I also don't like the idea that a government can change and UBI can either diminish or just disappear because of that.)
Graeber: The anthropologist’s role is to take things that seem natural and point out that they’re not, that they’re social constructs and that we could easily do things another way. It’s inherently liberating.
If only more would do that instead of lean in on the status quo.