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Bullshit Jobs
A Conversation with David Graeber
Loretta LOU
Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (Simon & Schuster 2019). Graeber’s photo by Frantzesco Kangaris/ Guardian News & Media Ltd.
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s your job a pointless job? Does it make a meaningful contribution to the world? If your job was eliminated, would it matter to anyone? These are some of the questions that David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, examines in his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Simon & Schuster 2019). It has been estimated that across the developed world up to 40 percent of workers—especially those in administration, finance, and the legal professions—saw their jobs as a form of meaningless toil analogous to the Greek myth of Sisyphus. These white-collar workers covertly think that their jobs are not only useless, but sometimes harmful to society. With increased automation, a fifteen-hour workweek is not unachievable, but on average working hours have increased rather than decreased over the past few decades. In this book, Graeber examines this epidemic of futility, and offers a theory for human freedom and social liberation.
Loretta Lou: Can you give us a summary of how the book builds on your essay ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant’, which went viral when it was first published in STRIKE! Magazine in the summer of 2013?
David Graeber: Well, to some degree, all I was trying to do was to give voice to all the hundreds of people who wrote to me with stories and reflections on their own experience of bullshit jobs. It was so clear that a substantial portion of the population, in most rich countries at least, had experienced things that to them constituted a profound form of spiritual violence, but completely lacked a language to talk about it—or, even more perhaps, did not feel that they had a right to. But also I wanted to think a little harder about why this had happened. A lot of people thought the original essay ended in some kind of conspiracy theory, since I pointed out that the rich and powerful find it very convenient that everyone else should be spending all their time working, even without a purpose of any kind, and this must have something to do with why this is allowed to happen and why no one steps in to do anything about the situation. So it is really, if anything, an anti-conspiracy theory. I wanted to explore the larger socioeconomic and cultural mechanisms that not just allowed pointless work to emerge, but which make it so difficult to talk about it openly, let alone see it as a social problem.
LL: Your definition of ‘bullshit jobs’ is mainly subjective. You define a bullshit job as one that the workers consider to be pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious. Yet, for many Chinese people, sacrificing and being able to support for their family is as important if not more important than contributing to the wider social good. It is a way of becoming a moral being. What do you make of that?
DG: What you speak of in China is not all that different from some of the attitudes I encountered in Europe or America. Paid employment, especially wage labour, has long been considered part of a life-cycle phenomenon; it is the way you learn how to be an adult, but also how you gain the means to actually become an adult capable of taking care of a family. When you talk to people who say their jobs are pointless, they too will almost always say that they are doing it for their family—or even for the family they would like to have in the future. Yet, at the same time, I do not think there is anyone in the world who, on discovering that the only way to ensure comfort and opportunity for their children was to dig a hole and fill it in a hundred times a day, would not be driven a little crazy by it.
that if productivity goes up, workers get a share of the increased profits—or perhaps hiring more workers, but since it was the 1990s, the boss just hired more and more white-collar workers. At first, there had been only two: the boss and a human resources manager. Suddenly the catwalks were full of guys in suits, three, four, five, ultimately maybe a dozen of them, wandering around with clipboards watching people work, basically trying to figure out some kind of excuse for their existence. They tried to concoct schemes for greater efficiency but the place was already about as efficient as it could be. They held meetings and seminars and conferences and read each other’s reports. Finally, they decided: well, we can just fire everyone and move the plant to Poland! The place has been in occupation ever since.
LL: You argue that Universal Basic Income (UBI) will liberate people from their bullshit jobs. In China, UBI has resonances with the socialist state’s ‘iron rice bowl’ policy— something that the Chinese people have mixed feelings about. What do you think are the major obstacles to implementing UBI in former socialist states?
DG: Some people have talked instead about ‘universal basic services’ which is much more similar to what used to exist under state socialism. I think the experience of such regimes is in many ways paradoxical. In the early twentieth century, people used to remark that the socialist unions tended to demand higher wages, the anarchist unions tended to demand fewer hours: one appealed to workers who wanted a larger stake in the system, the ‘advanced proletariat’ as Marx termed them, the other, to recently proletarianised peasants and craftsmen, who could still imagine a life outside the system entirely. Marx and Bakunin had a famous argument over who were the real revolutionary classes: the ‘advanced proletariat’ in places like England and Germany, or the recently proletarianised or ‘in-threat-of-being proletarianised’ in places like Russia or Spain, or for that matter China. I think the great irony of twentieth-century socialism is that Bakunin was right, it was the anarchist recently proletarianised constituencies who made the revolution, but what they got was socialist rulers who subscribed to the idea that they should ultimately create a land of industrial and consumer abundance. However, it is doubly ironic that this was never going to happen under a command economy, and that the one benefit they did provide was precisely the anarchist one: with universal employment and a system where it was pretty much impossible to get fired from your job, people did, in fact, get less hours. Paradoxically, owing to their productivist ideology, the socialists could not take credit for this, even though it was perhaps the most significant social benefit they did provide.
Rather, they had to refer to it as ‘the problem of absenteeism’. When workers in, say, Poland became enthusiastic about reintroducing capitalism, it simply never occurred to them it would mean they would have to actually work 8–10 hour days and ask for permission to go to the bathroom. By the time they figured this out it was too late to do anything about it. But it strikes me that we need to start by rewriting the history of what really happened in the twentieth century, to liberate it from the propaganda from both sides, before we can assess what we can do about it now. As for China, well, I do not really know, but I am aware the 996 movement is starting to challenge exactly these sorts of issues. But it is just a start. I think we need to ask how much did the two rival systems of socialism and capitalism share some of the same basic mistakes about work and production. And we should more carefully assess the extent to which the apparent flaws of the socialist system might have actually been its biggest advantages? Is there a way to make a social guarantee a way of unleashing popular inventiveness and creativity rather than stifling it?
LL: Some of your conservative readers might actually endorse your espousal of Universal Basic Income as not only an argument in favour of increased automation, but also an excuse to eliminate all social welfare programs, which would be detrimental to the most disadvantaged and vulnerable groups in our society, such as disabled people. How do you feel about the political implications and perhaps misappropriation of your work?
DG: Well, it seems to me that there are three broad approaches to UBI: there is a liberal version which just wants to give everyone a modest amount of money in addition to their income, as a kind of cushion; there is a right-wing version, which explicitly wants to undermine the welfare state; and there is a left-wing version, which is about detaching livelihood from work entirely—to say everyone is guaranteed a modest but comfortable lifestyle, if you want more, that is up to you. I am a proponent of the latter, which is about expanding the zone of unconditionality, not shrinking it. We need free health care, free higher education, and a basic income. Things like disability support would not be affected: we would not expect people to pay for their own wheelchairs any more than we would expect them to pay for their own medical care. But reducing conditionality also shrinks the role of the state and what might be called the demi-state—say the private healthcare industry in the United States, which is entirely state enabled and regulated, or the financial sector, which has become inexorably intertwined with the modern state. Above all it reduces the most obnoxious and intrusive elements of that state, the endless
