Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber

  In the United States, of course, all this is very much complicated by the country’s legacy of slavery and inveterate racism. It’s largely the white working class that expresses class resentment by focusing on intellectuals; African Americans, migrants, and the children of migrants tend to reject anti-intellectual politics, and still see the educational system as the most likely means of social advancement for their children. This makes it easier for poor whites to see them as unfairly in alliance with rich white liberals.

  But what does all this have to do with supporting the troops? Well if that truck driver’s daughter was absolutely determined to find a job that would allow her to pursue something unselfish and high-minded, but still paid the rent and guaranteed access to adequate dental care, what options does she really have? If she’s of a religious temperament there might be some possibility in her local church. But such jobs are hard to come by. Mainly, she can join the army.

  The reality of the situation first came home to me over a decade ago when attending a lecture by Catherine Lutz, an anthropologist who has been carrying out a project studying the archipelago of US overseas military bases. She made the fascinating observation that almost all of these bases organize outreach programs, in which soldiers venture out to repair schoolrooms or to perform free dental checkups in nearby towns and villages. The ostensible reason for the programs was to improve relations with local communities, but they rarely have much impact in that regard; still, even after the military discovered this, they kept the programs up because they had such an enormous psychological impact on the soldiers, many of whom would wax euphoric when describing them: for example, “This is why I joined the army,” “This is what military service is really all about—not just defending your country, it’s about helping people!” Soldiers allowed to perform public service duties, they found, were two or three times more likely to reenlist. I remember thinking, “Wait, so most of these people really want to be in the Peace Corps?” And I duly looked it up and discovered: sure enough, to be accepted into the Peace Corps, you need to already have a college degree. The US military is a haven for frustrated altruists.

  • • •

  A case could be made that the great historical difference between what we call the Left and the Right largely turns on the relation between “value” and “values.” The Left has always been about trying to collapse the gulf between the domain dominated by pure self-interest and the domain traditionally dominated by high-minded principles; the Right has always been about prising them even farther apart, and then claiming ownership of both. They stand for both greed and charity. Hence, the otherwise inexplicable alliance in the Republican Party between the free market libertarians and the “values voters” of the Christian Right. What this comes down to in practice has usually been the political equivalent of a strategy of good-cop-bad-cop: first unleash the chaos of the market to destabilize lives and all existing verities alike; then, offer yourself up as the last bastion of the authority of church and fatherhood against the barbarians they have themselves unleashed.

  By juxtaposing the call to “support the troops” with condemnations of the “liberal elite” the Right is effectively calling out the Left as hypocrites. They’re saying, “Sixties campus radicals claimed they were trying to create a new society in which everyone could be happy idealists living in material prosperity, where under Communism the distinction between value and values would be annihilated and all would work for the common good—but all they really ended up doing was to guarantee any jobs which allow one to feel like one is doing that are set aside exclusively for their own spoiled children.”

  This has some very important implications for the nature of the societies we live in. One thing it suggests about capitalism more generally, is that societies based on greed, even that say that human beings are inherently selfish and greedy and that attempt to valorize this sort of behavior, don’t really believe it, and secretly dangle out the right to behave altruistically as a reward for playing along. Only those who can prove their mettle at selfishness are to be afforded the right to be selfless. Or, that’s how the game is supposed to work. If you suffer and scheme and by doing so manage to accumulate enough economic value, then you are allowed to cash in and turn your millions into something unique, higher, intangible, or beautiful—that is, turn value into values. You assemble a collection of Rembrandts, or classic racing cars. Or you set up a foundation and devote the rest of your life to charity. To skip straight to the end is obviously cheating.

  We are back to Abraham Lincoln’s version of medieval life-cycle service, with the proviso that now, the overwhelming majority of us can only expect to experience anything like full adulthood on retirement, if at all.

  Soldiers are the one legitimate exception because they “serve” their country; and—I suspect—because usually, they don’t get much out of it in the long run. This would explain why right-wing populists, so unconditional in their support for the troops during their term of service, seem so strangely indifferent to the fact that a large percentage of them end up spending the rest of their lives homeless, jobless, impoverished, addicted, or begging with no legs. A poor kid might tell himself he’s joining the Marines for the educational and career opportunities; but everyone knows that’s at best a crapshoot. Such is the nature of his sacrifice; hence, of his true nobility.

  All the other objects of resentment I’ve mentioned so far can be seen as ostentatious violations of the principle of inverse relation of compensation and social benefit. Unionized autoworkers and teachers perform a vitally necessary function, yet have the temerity to demand middle-class lifestyles. They are objects of a special ire, I suspect, by those trapped in soul-destroying low- and middle-level bullshit jobs. Members of the “liberal elite” of the Bill Maher or Angelina Jolie variety are seen as having skipped to the front of every line they’ve ever been asked to stand on, so as to be able to monopolize the few jobs that do exist that are simultaneously fun, well paid, and make a difference in the world—while at the same time, presuming to represent themselves as the voice of social justice. They are the particular objects of resentment of the working class, whose painful, difficult, body-destroying, but equally socially useful labor never seems to strike such paragons of liberalism as of much interest or importance. At the same time, that indifference would seem to overlap with the outright envious hostility of those members of the “liberal classes” trapped in higher-order bullshit jobs, toward those same working classes for their ability to make an honest living.

  how the current crisis over robotization relates to the larger problem of bullshit jobs

  Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

  —H. L. Mencken

  A crisscrossing of resentments increasingly defines the politics of wealthy countries. This is a disastrous state of affairs.

  It seems to me all this makes the old leftist question—“every day we wake up and collectively make a world together; but which one of us, left to our own devices, would ever decide they wanted to make a world like this one?”—more relevant than ever. In many respects, the science-fiction fantasies of the early twentieth century have become possible. We can’t teleport or place colonies on Mars, it’s true, but we could easily rearrange matters in such a way that pretty much everyone on earth lived lives of relative ease and comfort. In material terms this would not be very difficult. While the pace at which scientific revolutions and technological breakthroughs occur has slowed considerably since the heady pace the world came to be familiar with from roughly 1750 to 1950, improvements in robotics continue, largely because they are a matter of improved application of existing technological knowledge. Combined with advances in materials science, they are ushering in an age where a very large proportion of the most dreary and tiresome mechanical tasks can indeed be eliminated. What this means is that work, as we know it, will less and less resemble what we think of as “productive” labor, and more and more resemble “caring” labor�
�since, after all, caring consists mainly of the sorts of things most of us would least like to see done by a machine.6

  There has been a lot of scare literature of late about the perils of mechanization. Most of it follows along the lines that Kurt Vonnegut had already developed in his very first novel, Player Piano, in 1952: with most forms of manual labor eliminated, society, these critics warn, will necessarily divide into two classes, a wealthy elite who own and design the robots, and a haggard and disconsolate former working class who spend their days shooting pool and drinking because they have nothing else to do. (The middle class would split between them.) This obviously not only completely ignored the caring aspects of real labor, it also assumed property relations were unalterable, and that human beings—at least, those who were not, say, science-fiction writers—were so completely unimaginative that even with unlimited free time, they would be unable to come up with anything particularly interesting to do.7 The 1960s counterculture challenged the second and third assumptions (though not so much the first one), with many sixties revolutionaries embracing the slogan “Let the machines do all the work!” This in turn led to a renewed backlash of moralizing about work as a value in itself of the sort we’ve already encountered in chapter 6—at the same time as an export of many factory jobs to poor countries where labor was cheap enough it could still be performed by human beings. It was in the wake of this reaction to the sixties counterculture, in the seventies and eighties, that the first wave of managerial feudalism, and the extreme bullshitization of employment, began to make itself felt.

  The latest wave of robotization has caused the same moral crises and moral panics as the sixties. The only real difference is that, since any significant change in economic models, let alone property regimes, is now treated as definitively off of the table, it’s simply assumed the only possible result will be to convey even more wealth and power to the 1 percent. Martin Ford’s recent The Rise of the Robots, for example, documents how, after making most blue-collar workers redundant, Silicon Valley is in the process of taking aim at health care, education, and the liberal professions as well. The likely outcome, he predicts, is “techno-feudalism.” Throwing workers out of work, or impoverishing them by forcing them to compete with machines, will be deeply problematic, he argues: particularly since, without paychecks, how exactly is anyone going to afford all the shiny toys and efficient services the robots will provide? This may be a cruelly simplified summary, but it helps to underline what I think to be missing from such accounts—that predictions of robots replacing humans always go just so far, and then stop. It’s possible for futurologists to imagine robots replacing sports editors, sociologists, or real estate agents, for example, yet I have yet to see one suggest that the basic functions that capitalists are supposed to perform, which mainly consist of figuring out the optimal way to invest resources in order to answer current or potential future consumer demand, could possibly be performed by a machine. Why not? One could easily make a case that the main reason the Soviet economy worked so badly was because they never were able to develop computer technology efficient enough to coordinate such large amounts of data automatically. But the Soviet Union only made it to the 1980s. Now it would be easy. Yet no one dares suggest this. The famous Oxford study by engineer Michael Osborne and economist Carl Frey, which sizes up 702 different professions in terms of their susceptibility for being replaced by robots,8 for instance, considers hydrologists, makeup artists, and travel guides, but makes no mention whatsoever of the possibility of automated entrepreneurs, investors, or financiers.

  At this point, my own instinct is to turn for inspiration from Vonnegut to a different science-fiction writer, Stanislaw Lem, whose space voyager Ijon Tichy describes a visit to a planet inhabited by a species to which the author gives the rather unsubtle name of Phools. At the time of his arrival the Phools were experiencing a classic Marxian overproduction crisis. Traditionally, they had been divided into Spiritors (Priests), Eminents (Aristocrats), and Drudgelings (Workers). As one helpful native explained:

  “Through the ages inventors built machines that simplified work, and where in ancient times a hundred Drudgelings had bent their sweating backs, centuries later a few stood by a machine. Our scientists improved the machines, and the people rejoiced at this, but subsequent events show how cruelly premature was that rejoicing.”

  The factories, ultimately, became a little too efficient, and one day an engineer created machines that could operate with no supervision at all:

  “When the New Machines appeared in the factories, hordes of Drudgelings lost their jobs; and, receiving no salary, they faced starvation.”

  “Excuse me, Phool,” I asked, “but what became of the profits the factories made?”

  “The profits,” he replied, “went to the rightful owners, of course. Now, then, as I was saying, the threat of annihilation hung—”

  “But what are you saying, worthy Phool!” I cried. “All that had to be done was to make the factories common property, and the New Machines would have become a blessing to you!”

  The minute I say this the Phool trembled, blinked his ten eyes nervously, and cupped his ears to ascertain whether any of his companions milling about the stairs had overheard my remark.

  “By the Ten Noses of the Phoo, I implore you, O stranger, do not utter such vile heresy, which attacks the very foundations of our freedom! Our supreme law, the principle of Civic Initiative, states that no one can be compelled, constrained, or even coaxed to do what he does not wish. Who, then, would dare expropriate the Eminents’ factories, it being their will to enjoy possession of same? That would be the most horrible violation of liberty imaginable. Now, then, to continue, the New Machines produced an abundance of extremely cheap goods and excellent food, but the Drudgelings bought nothing, for they had not the wherewithal—”9

  Before long, the Drudgelings, though—as Tichy’s interlocutor insisted, entirely free to do what they wanted provided they did not interfere in anyone else’s property rights—were dropping like flies. Much heated debate ensued, and a succession of failed half measures. The Phools’ high council, the Plenum Moronicum, attempted to replace the Drudgelings as consumers as well, by creating robots that would eat, use, and enjoy all the products the New Machines produced far more intensely than any living being could possibly do, while also materializing money to pay for it. But this was unsatisfying. Finally, realizing a system where both production and consumption were being done by machines was rather pointless, they concluded the best solution would be for the entire population to render itself—entirely voluntarily—to the factories to be converted into beautiful shiny disks and arranged in pleasant patterns across the landscape.

  This might seem heavy-handed,10 but sometimes, I think, a dose of heavy-handed Marxism is exactly what we need. Lem is right. It’s hard to imagine a surer sign that one is dealing with an irrational economic system than the fact that the prospect of eliminating drudgery is considered to be a problem.

  Star Trek solved the problem with replicators, and young radicals here in the United Kingdom sometimes talk about a future of “fully automated luxury communism,” which is basically the same thing. A case could easily be made that any future robots and replicators should be the common property of humanity as a whole, since they would be the fruit of a collective mechanical intelligence that goes back centuries, in much the same way as a national culture is the creation of, and thus belongs to, everyone. Automated public factories would make life easier. Still, they wouldn’t actually eliminate the need for Drudgelings. Lem’s story, and others like it, still assume that “work” means factory work, or, anyway, “productive” work, and ignore what most working-class jobs actually consist of—for instance, the fact noted in the last chapter, that workers in “ticket offices” in the London Underground aren’t there to take tickets but to find lost children and talk down drunks. Not only are robots that could perform such functions very far away, but even if they did exist, most of us would
not want such tasks performed in the way a robot would perform them anyway.

  So the more automation proceeds, the more it should be obvious that actual value emerges from the caring element of work. Yet this leads to another problem. The caring value of work would appear to be precisely that element in labor that cannot be quantified.

  Much of the bullshitization of real jobs, I would say, and much of the reason for the expansion of the bullshit sector more generally, is a direct result of the desire to quantify the unquantifiable. To put it bluntly, automation makes certain tasks more efficient, but at the same time, it makes other tasks less efficient. This is because it requires enormous amounts of human labor to render the processes, tasks, and outcomes that surround anything of caring value into a form that computers can even recognize. It is now possible to build a robot that can, all by itself, sort a pile of fresh fruits or vegetables into ripe, raw, and rotten. This is a good thing because sorting fruit, especially for more than an hour or two, is boring. It is not possible to build a robot that can, all by itself, scan over a dozen history course reading lists and decide which is the best course. This isn’t such a bad thing, either, because such work is interesting (or at least, it’s not hard to locate people who would find it so). One reason to have robots sorting fruit is so that real human beings can have more time to think about what history course they’d prefer to take, or some equally unquantifiable thing like who’s their favorite funk guitarist or what color they’d like to dye their hair. However—and here’s the catch—if we did for some reason wish to pretend that a computer could decide which is the best history course, say, because we decided we need to have uniform, quantifiable, “quality” standards to apply across the university for funding purposes, there’s no way that computer could do the task by itself. The fruit you can just roll into a bin. In the case of the history course, it requires enormous human effort to render the material into units that a computer would even begin to know what to do with.