Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber

  “All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble, be that here said and asserted once more. And in like manner too, all dignity is painful. A life of ease is not for any man . . . Our highest religion is named the Worship of Sorrow. For the son of man there is no noble crown, well worn or even ill worn, but there is a crown of thorns!”56

  Chapter 7

  What Are the Political Effects of Bullshit Jobs, and Is There Anything That Can Be Done About This Situation?

  I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.

  —George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

  If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorized stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value.

  —from “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”

  I would like to end this book with a few thoughts about the political implications of the current work situation, and one suggestion about a possible way out. What I have described over the last two chapters are the economic forces driving the proliferation of bullshit jobs—what I’ve called managerial feudalism—and the cosmology, the overall way of imagining the place of human beings in the universe, that allows us to put up with this arrangement. The more the economy becomes a matter of the mere distribution of loot, the more inefficiency and unnecessary chains of command actually make sense, since these are the forms of organization best suited to soaking up as much of that loot as possible. The less the value of work is seen to lie either in what it produces, or the benefits it provides to others, the more work comes to be seen as valuable primarily as a form of self-sacrifice, which means that anything that makes that work less onerous or more enjoyable, even the gratification of knowing that one’s work benefits others, is actually seen to lower its value—and as a result, to justify lower levels of pay.

  All this is genuinely perverse.

  In a sense, those critics who claim we are not working a fifteen-hour week because we have chosen consumerism over leisure are not entirely off the mark. They just got the mechanisms wrong. We’re not working harder because we’re spending all our time manufacturing PlayStations and serving one another sushi. Industry is being increasingly robotized, and the real service sector remains flat at roughly 20 percent of overall employment. Instead, it is because we have invented a bizarre sadomasochistic dialectic whereby we feel that pain in the workplace is the only possible justification for our furtive consumer pleasures, and, at the same time, the fact that our jobs thus come to eat up more and more of our waking existence means that we do not have the luxury of—as Kathi Weeks has so concisely put it—“a life,” and that, in turn, means that furtive consumer pleasures are the only ones we have time to afford. Sitting around in cafés all day arguing about politics or gossiping about our friends’ complex polyamorous love affairs takes time (all day, in fact); in contrast pumping iron or attending a yoga class at the local gym, ordering out for Deliveroo, watching an episode of Game of Thrones, or shopping for hand creams or consumer electronics can all be placed in the kind of self-contained predictable time-slots one is likely to have left over between spates of work, or else while recovering from it. All these are examples of what I like to call “compensatory consumerism.” They are the sorts of things you can do to make up for the fact that you don’t have a life, or not very much of one.

  on how the political culture under managerial feudalism comes to be maintained by a balance of resentments

  Now at the time of which I was speaking, as the voters were inscribing their ostraka [to determine which politician would be expelled from the city], it is said that an unlettered and utterly boorish fellow handed his ostrakon to Aristides, whom he took to be one of the ordinary crowd, and asked him to write Aristides on it. He, astonished, asked the man what possible wrong Aristides had done him. “None whatever,” was the answer, “I don’t even know the fellow, but I am tired of hearing him everywhere called ‘The Just.’ ” On hearing this, Aristides made no answer, but wrote his name on the ostrakon and handed it back.

  —Plutarch, Life of Aristides the Just

  No doubt I am overstating my case. People in consumer societies, even those in bullshit jobs, do eke out some kind of a life—though one might ask how viable such forms of life really are in the long term, considering that the stratum of the population most likely to be trapped in pointless employment would also appear to be the most likely to have lives marked by episodes of clinical depression or other forms of mental illness, not to mention, to fail to reproduce. At least, I suspect that this is the case. Such suspicions could only be affirmed by empirical research.

  Even if none of this turned out to be the case, though, one thing is inescapable: such work arrangements foster a political landscape rife with hatred and resentment. Those struggling and without work resent the employed. The employed are encouraged to resent the poor and unemployed, who they are constantly told are scroungers and freeloaders. Those trapped in bullshit jobs resent workers who get to do real productive or beneficial labor, and those who do real productive or beneficial labor, underpaid, degraded, and unappreciated, increasingly resent those who they see as monopolizing those few jobs where one can live well while doing something useful, high-minded, or glamorous—who they refer to as “the liberal elite.” All are united in their loathing for the political class, who they see (correctly) as corrupt, but the political class, in turn, finds these other forms of vacuous hatred extremely convenient, since they distract attention from themselves.

  Some of these forms of resentment are familiar enough, and will be instantly recognizable by the reader; others are less discussed, and might seem at first puzzling. It’s easy to imagine how someone working in a French tea factory might resent the flock of useless new middle managers imposed on them (even before those middle managers decided to fire them all). It’s not nearly so clear why those middle managers should resent the factory workers. But often middle managers, and even more, those managers’ administrative assistants, clearly do resent factory workers, for the simple reason that the latter have legitimate reason to take pride in their work. A key part of the justification of underpaying such workers is simple envy.

  Moral envy is an undertheorized phenomenon. I’m not sure that anyone has ever written a book about it. Still, it’s clearly an important factor in human affairs. By “moral envy,” I am referring here to feelings of envy and resentment directed at another person, not because that person is wealthy, or gifted, or lucky, but because his or her behavior is seen as upholding a higher moral standard than the envier’s own. The basic sentiment seems to be “How dare that person claim to be better than me (by acting in a way that I do indeed acknowledge is better than me)?” I remember first encountering this attitude in college, when a lefty friend once told me that he no longer had any respect for a certain famous activist since he had learned the activist in question kept an expensive apartment in New York for his ex-wife and child. “What a hypocrite!” he exclaimed. “He could have given that money to the poor!” When I pointed out the activist in question gave almost all his money to the poor, he was unmoved. When I pointed out the critic, while not exactly poor himself, appeared to give nothing to charity, he was offended. In fact I’m not sure he ever spoke to me again. I’ve run into this attitude repeatedly ever since. Within a community of do-gooders, anyone who exem
plifies shared values in too exemplary a way is seen as a threat; ostentatiously good behavior (“virtue signaling” is the new catchword) is often perceived as a moral challenge; it doesn’t matter if the person in question is entirely humble and unassuming—in fact, that can even make it worse, since humility can be seen as itself a moral challenge to those who secretly feel they aren’t humble enough.

  Moral envy of this sort is rife in activist or religious communities; what I would like to suggest here is that it is also, more subtly, present in the politics surrounding work. Just as anger at immigrants often involves the simultaneous accusation that newcomers work both too much and too little, so does resentment against the poor focus simultaneously on those who don’t work, since they are imagined to be lazy, and those who do work, since (unless they’ve been dragooned into some kind of work-fare) at least they don’t have bullshit jobs. Why, for instance, have conservatives in the United States been so successful at whipping up popular resentment against unionized hospital or autoworkers? During the 2008 bailout of the financial industry, while there was a public outcry against bankers’ million-dollar bonuses, no actual sanctions followed; however, the consequent bailout of the auto industry did involve sanctions: on assembly line workers. They were widely denounced as coddled for having union contracts that allowed them generous health and pension plans, vacations, and $28-per-hour wages, and forced into massive give-backs. Those working in the financial offices of the same companies who (insofar as they were not just sitting around doing nothing at all) were the ones who had actually caused the problems and were not expected to make similar sacrifices. As a local paper recalled:

  The bank bailout would be followed in February by a bailout of auto companies. Here, it was assumed that thousands of jobs must be shed for those companies to regain profitability. There had long been envy of auto-workers’ job protection and health benefits; now they became a scapegoat. As once-proud Michigan manufacturing cities all but shut down, right-wing radio commentators asserted that workers—instrumental, historically, through their labor struggles in obtaining seven-day work weeks and forty-hour days for everyone—were getting their just desserts.1

  One reason American autoworkers had such relatively generous plans, compared with other blue-collar workers, was first and foremost because they played such an essential role in creating something their fellow citizens actually needed, and what’s more, something recognized as culturally important (indeed, central to their sense of themselves as Americans).2 It’s hard to escape the impression that this was precisely what others resented about them. “They get to make cars! Shouldn’t that be enough for them? I have to sit around filling out stupid forms all day, and these bastards want to rub it in by threatening to go on strike to demand a dental plan, or two weeks off to take their kids to see the Grand Canyon or the Colosseum, on top of that?”

  It’s quite the same with the otherwise inexplicable drum-beat of animosity directed, in the United States, against primary and secondary school teachers. Schoolteachers, of course, are the very definition of those who chose a socially important and high-minded vocation in the full knowledge that it would involve low pay and stressful conditions. One becomes a teacher because one wants to have a positive impact on others’ lives. (As a New York subway recruiting ad used to say, “No one ever called someone up twenty years later to thank them for being such an aspiring insurance claims adjuster.”) Yet again, this seems to be what makes them fair game in the eyes of all those who denounce them as spoiled, entitled, overpaid spouters of secular humanist anti-Americanism. Granted, one can understand why Republican activists target teachers’ unions. Teachers’ unions are one of the mainstays of support for the Democratic Party. But teachers’ unions include both teachers and school administrators, the latter being those actually responsible for most of the policies most Republican activists object to. So why not focus on them? It would have been much easier for them to make a case that the school administrators are overpaid parasites than that teachers are coddled and spoiled. As Eli Horowitz noted:

  What’s remarkable about this is that Republicans and other conservatives actually did complain about school administrators—but then they stopped. For whatever reason, those voices (which were few and quiet to begin with) dwindled to nonexistence almost as soon as the conversation began. In the end, the teachers themselves turned out to be the more valid political targets, even though they do the more valuable work.3

  Again, I think this can only be put down to moral envy. Teachers are seen as people who have ostentatiously put themselves forward as self-sacrificing and public-spirited, as wanting to be the sort of person who gets a call twenty years later saying “Thank you, thank you for all you did for me.” For people like that to form unions, threaten strikes, and demand better working conditions is considered almost hypocritical.

  • • •

  There is one major exception to the rule that anyone pursuing a useful or high-minded line of work, but who also expects comfortable levels of pay and benefits, is a legitimate target of resentment. The rule does not apply to soldiers, or anyone else who works directly for the military. To the contrary, soldiers must never be resented. They are above critique.

  I’ve written about this curious exception before, but it might be helpful to recall the argument very briefly, because I think it’s impossible to really understand right-wing populism without it.4 Let me again take the case of America because it’s the one I’m most familiar with (though I’m assured the argument, in its broad outlines, does apply anywhere from Brazil to Japan). For right-wing populists, in particular, military personnel are the ultimate good guys. One must “support the troops”; this is an absolute injunction; anyone who would compromise on it in any way is a traitor pure and simple. The ultimate bad guys in contrast are the intelligentsia. Most working-class conservatives, for instance, don’t have much use for corporate executives, but they usually don’t feel especially passionate about their dislike for them. Their true hatred is directed at the “liberal elite” (this divides into various branches: the “Hollywood elite,” the “journalistic elite,” “university elite,” “fancy lawyers,” or “the medical establishment”)—that is, the sort of people who live in big coastal cities, watch public television or public radio, or even more, who might be involved in producing or appearing in same. It seems to me there are two perceptions that lie behind this resentment: (1) the perception that members of this elite see ordinary working people as a bunch of knuckle-dragging cavemen, and (2) the perception that these elites constitute an increasingly closed caste; one which the children of the working class would actually have far more difficulty breaking into than the class of actual capitalists.

  It also seems to me that both these perceptions are largely accurate. The first is pretty much self-evidently true if reactions to the 2016 election of Donald Trump are anything to go by. The white working class in particular is the one identity group in America toward which statements that might otherwise be immediately denounced as bigoted (for instance, that a certain class of people are ugly, violent, or stupid) are accepted without remark in polite society. The second is also true if you really think about it. We might again look to Hollywood for an illustration. Back in the thirties and forties, even the name “Hollywood” would tend to evoke images of magical social advance: Hollywood was a place where a simple farm girl could go to the big city, be discovered, find herself a star. For present purposes, it doesn’t really matter how often this actually happened (it clearly did now and then); the point is at the time, Americans did not see the fable as inherently implausible. Look at a list of the lead actors of a major motion picture nowadays and you are likely to find barely a single one that can’t boast at least two generations of Hollywood actors, writers, producers, and directors in their family tree. The film industry has come to be dominated by an in-marrying caste. Is it surprising, then, that Hollywood celebrities’ pretensions to egalitarian politics tend to ring a bit hollow in the e
ars of most working-class Americans? Neither is Hollywood in any way an exception in this regard. If anything it’s emblematic of what has happened to all the liberal professions (if, perhaps, a trifle more advanced).

  Conservative voters, I would suggest, tend to resent intellectuals more than they resent rich people, because they can imagine a scenario in which they or their children might become rich, but cannot possibly imagine one in which they could ever become a member of the cultural elite. If you think about it that’s not an unreasonable assessment. A truck driver’s daughter from Nebraska might not have very much chance of becoming a millionaire—America now has the lowest social mobility in the developed world—but it could happen. There’s virtually no way that same daughter will ever become an international human rights lawyer, or drama critic for the New York Times. Even if she could get into the right schools, there would certainly be no possible way for her to then go on to live in New York or San Francisco for the requisite years of unpaid internships.5 Even if the son of glazier got a toehold in a well-positioned bullshit job, he would likely, like Eric, be unable or unwilling to transform it into a platform for the obligatory networking. There are a thousand invisible barriers.

  If we return to the opposition of “value” versus “values” laid out in the last chapter, we might put it this way: if you just want to make a lot of money, there might be a way to do it; on the other hand, if your aim is to pursue any other sort of value—whether that be truth (journalism, academia), beauty (the art world, publishing), justice (activism, human rights), charity, and so forth—and you actually want to be paid a living wage for it, then if you do not possess a certain degree of family wealth, social networks, and cultural capital, there’s simply no way in. The “liberal elite,” then, are those who have placed an effective lock on any position where it’s possible to get paid to do anything that one might do for any reason other than the money. They are seen as trying, and largely succeeding, in constituting themselves as a new American nobility—in the same sense as the Hollywood aristocracy, monopolizing the hereditary right to all those jobs where one can live well, and still feel one is serving some higher purpose—which is to say, feel noble.