Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber

  To get even the most minimal sense of what happens when you try, consider the following diagrams, which illustrate the difference between what’s required to print an exam, or upload a syllabus, in Queensland, a contemporary managerial university in Australia (where all course materials have to be in a uniform format), as compared with a traditional academic department (see figures 8.1–8.4).

  Figure 8.1 Creation of Course Profile/Syllabus (Managerial)

  Figure 8.2 Creation of Course Profile/Syllabus (Non-Managerial)

  Figure 8.3 Creation of Exam (Managerial)

  Figure 8.4 Creation of Exam (Non-Managerial)

  The critical thing about this diagram is that each of those additional lines represents an action that has to be performed, not by a computer, but by an actual human being.

  on the political ramifications of bullshitization and consequent decline of productivity in the caring sector as it relates to the possibility of a revolt of the caring classes

  Since at least the Great Depression, we’ve been hearing warnings that automation was or was about to be throwing millions out of work—Keynes at the time coined the term “technological unemployment,” and many assumed the mass unemployment of the 1930s was just a sign of things to come—and while this might make it seem such claims have always been somewhat alarmist, what this book suggests is that the opposite was the case. They were entirely accurate. Automation did, in fact, lead to mass unemployment. We have simply stopped the gap by adding dummy jobs that are effectively made up. A combination of political pressure from both right and left, a deeply held popular feeling that paid employment alone can make one a full moral person, and finally, a fear on the part of the upper classes, already noted by George Orwell in 1933, of what the laboring masses might get up to if they had too much leisure on their hands, has ensured that whatever the underlying reality, when it comes to official unemployment figures in wealthy countries, the needle should never jump too far from the range of 3 to 8 percent. But if one eliminates bullshit jobs from the picture, and the real jobs that only exist to support them, one could say that the catastrophe predicted in the 1930s really did happen. Upward of 50 percent to 60 percent of the population has, in fact, been thrown out of work.

  Except of course, there’s absolutely no reason it should have been a catastrophe. Over the course of the last several thousand years there have been untold thousands of human groups that might be referred to as “societies,” and the overwhelming majority of them managed to figure out ways to distribute those tasks that needed to be done to keep them alive in the style to which they were accustomed in such a fashion that most everyone had some way to contribute, and no one had to spend the majority of their waking hours performing tasks they would rather not be doing, in the way that people do today.11 What’s more, faced with the “problem” of abundant leisure time, people in those societies seem to have had little trouble figuring out ways to entertain themselves or otherwise pass the time.12 From the perspective of anyone born in one of those past societies, we’d probably look just as irrational as the Phools to Ijon Tichy.

  The reason the current allocation of labor looks the way it does, then, has nothing to do with economics or even human nature. It’s ultimately political. There was no reason we had to try to quantify the value of caring labor. There is no real reason we have to continue to do so. We could stop. But before we launch a campaign to reconstitute work and how we value it, I think we would do well to once again consider carefully the political forces at play.

  • • •

  One way to think about what’s happened is to return to the opposition between “value” and “values,” through which perspective, of course, what we are seeing is an attempt to force one to submit to the logic of the other.

  Before the industrial revolution, most people worked at home. It’s only since perhaps 1750 or even 1800 that it’s made any sense to talk about society as we typically do today, as if it were made up of a collection of factories and offices (“workplaces”) on the one hand, and a collection of homes, schools, churches, waterparks, and the like on the other—presumably, with a giant shopping mall placed somewhere in between. If work is the domain of “production” then home is the domain of “consumption,” which is also, of course, the domain of “values” (which means that what work people do engage in, in this domain, they largely do for free). But you could also flip the whole thing around and look at society from the opposite point of view. From the perspective of business, yes, homes and schools are just the places we produce and raise and train a capable workforce, but from a human perspective, that’s about as crazy as building a million robots to consume the food that people can no longer afford to eat, or warning African countries (as the World Bank has occasionally been known to do) that they need to do more to control HIV because if everyone is dead it will have adverse effects on the economy. As Karl Marx once pointed out: prior to the industrial revolution, it never seems to have occurred to anyone to write a book asking what conditions would create the most overall wealth. Many, however, wrote books about what conditions would create the best people—that is, how should society be best arranged to produce the sort of human beings one would like to have around, as friends, lovers, neighbors, relatives, or fellow citizens? This is the kind of question that concerned Aristotle, Confucius, and Ibn Khaldun, and in the final analysis it’s still the only really important one. Human life is a process by which we, as humans, create one another; even the most extreme individualists only become individuals through the care and support of their fellows; and “the economy” is ultimately just the way we provide ourselves with the necessary material provisions with which to do so.

  If so, talking about “values”—which are valuable because they can’t be reduced to numbers—is the way that we have traditionally talked about the process of mutual creation and caring.13

  Now, clearly, if we assume this to be true, then the domain of value has been systematically invading the domain of values for at least the last fifty years, and it’s hardly surprising that political arguments have come to take the form they do. For instance, in many major American cities, the largest employers are now universities and hospitals. The economy of such cities, then, centers on a vast apparatus of production and maintenance of human beings—divided, in good Cartesian fashion, between educational institutions designed to shape the mind, and medical institutions designed to maintain the body. (In other cities such as New York, universities and hospitals come in second and third as employers, the biggest employers being banks. I’ll get back to banks in a moment.) Where once left-wing political parties at least claimed to represent factory workers, nowadays, all such pretense has been discarded, and they have come to be dominated by the professional-managerial classes that run institutions like schools and hospitals. Right-wing populism has taken systematic aim at the authority of those institutions in the name of a different set of religious or patriarchal “values”—for instance, challenging the authority of universities by rejecting climate science or evolution, or challenging the authority of the medical system by campaigns against contraception or abortion. Or it has dabbled in impossible fantasies about returning to the Industrial Age (Trump). But really this is something of a bitter-ender game. Realistically, the likelihood of right populists in America wresting control of the apparatus of human production from the corporate Left is about as great as the likelihood of a Socialist party taking power in America and collectivizing heavy industry. For the moment, it would appear to be a stand-off. The mainstream Left largely controls the production of humans. The mainstream Right largely controls the production of things.

  It’s in this context that the financialization and bullshitization of both the corporate sector, and particularly the caring sector, are taking place—leading to ever-higher social costs, even at the same time as those who are doing the actual frontline caring are finding themselves increasingly squeezed. Everything seems to be in place for a revolt of the carin
g classes. Why has none yet taken place?

  Well, one obvious reason is the way that right-wing populism and divide-and-conquer racism have placed many of the caring classes in opposite camps. But on top of that, there’s the even stickier problem that in many areas of dispute, both sides are supposed to be in the “same” political camp. This is where banks come in. The entanglement of banks, universities, and hospitals has become truly insidious. Finance works its way into everything, from car loans to credit cards, but it’s significant that the principal cause of bankruptcy in America is medical debt, and the principal force drawing young people into bullshit jobs is the need to pay student loans. Yet since Clinton in the United States and Blair in the United Kingdom, it’s been the ostensibly left parties that have most embraced the rule of finance, received the largest contributions from the financial sector, and worked the most closely with financial lobbyists to “reform” the laws to make all this possible.14 It was exactly at the same time that these same parties self-consciously rejected any remaining elements of their old working-class constituencies, and instead became, as Tom Frank has so effectively demonstrated, the parties of the professional-managerial class: that is, not just doctors and lawyers, but the administrators and managers actually responsible for the bullshitization of the caring sectors of the economy.15 If nurses were to rebel against the fact that they have to spend the bulk of their shifts doing paperwork, they would have to rebel against their own union leaders, who are firmly allied with the Clintonite Democratic Party, whose core support comes from the hospital administrators responsible for imposing the paperwork on them to begin with. If teachers were to rebel they’d have to rebel against school administrators who are actually represented, in many cases, by the exact same union. If they protest too loudly, they will simply be told they have no choice but to accept bullshitization, because the only alternative is to surrender to the racist barbarians of the populist Right.

  I have myself smashed my head against this dilemma repeatedly. Back in 2006, when I was being kicked out of Yale for my support of grad students engaged in a teacher unionization drive (the Anthropology Department had to get special permission to change the reappointment rules for my case, and my case only, in order to get rid of me), union strategists considered a campaign on my behalf on MoveOn.org and similar left liberal mailing lists—until reminded that the Yale administrators behind my dismissal were probably active on those lists themselves. Years later, with Occupy Wall Street, which might be considered the first great rising of the caring classes, I watched those same “progressive” professional-managerials first attempt to co-opt the movement for the Democratic Party, then, when that proved impossible, sit idly by or even collude while a peaceful movement was suppressed by military force.

  on universal basic income as an example of a program that might begin to detach work from compensation and put an end to the dilemmas described in this book

  I don’t usually like putting policy recommendations in my books. One reason for this is that it has been my experience that if an author is critical of existing social arrangements, reviewers will often respond by effectively asking “so what are you proposing to do about it, then?” search the text until they find something that looks like a policy suggestion, and then act as if that is what the book is basically about. So if I were to suggest that a mass reduction of working hours or a policy of universal basic income might go far in solving the problems described here, the likely response will be to see this as a book about reducing working hours or about universal basic income, and to treat it as if it stands and falls on the workability of that policy—or even, the ease by which it could be implemented.

  That would be deceptive. This is not a book about a particular solution. It’s a book about a problem—one that most people don’t even acknowledge exists.

  Another reason I hesitate to make policy suggestions is that I am suspicious of the very idea of policy. Policy implies the existence of an elite group—government officials, typically—that gets to decide on something (“a policy”) that they then arrange to be imposed on everybody else. There’s a little mental trick we often play on ourselves when discussing such matters. We say, for instance, “What are we going to do about the problem of X?” as if “we” were society as a whole, somehow acting on ourselves, but, in fact, unless we happen to be part of that roughly 3 percent to 5 percent of the population whose views actually do affect policy makers, this is all a game of make-believe; we are identifying with our rulers when, in fact, we’re the ones being ruled. This is what happens when we watch a politician on television say “What shall we do about the less fortunate?” even though at least half of us would almost certainly fit that category ourselves. Myself, I find such games particularly pernicious because I’d prefer not to have policy elites around at all. I’m personally an anarchist, which means that, not only do I look forward to a day sometime in the future when governments, corporations, and the rest will be looked at as historical curiosities in the same way as we now look at the Spanish Inquisition or nomadic invasions, but I prefer solutions to immediate problems that do not give more power to governments or corporations, but rather, give people the means to manage their own affairs.

  It follows that when faced with a social problem my impulse is not to imagine myself in charge, and ponder what sort of solutions I would then impose, but to look for a movement already out there, already trying to address the problem and create its own solutions. The problem of bullshit jobs, though presents unusual challenges in this regard. There are no anti–bullshit job movements. This is partly because most people don’t acknowledge the proliferation of bullshit jobs to be a problem, but also because even if they did, it would be difficult to organize a movement around such a problem. What local initiatives might such a movement propose? One could imagine unions or other worker organizations launching anti-bullshit initiatives in their own workplaces, or even across specific industries—but they would presumably call for the de-bullshitization of real work rather than firing people in unnecessary positions. It’s not at all clear what a broader campaign against bullshit jobs would even look like. One might try to shorten the working week and hope things would sort themselves out in response. But it seems unlikely that they would. Even a successful campaign for a fifteen-hour week would be unlikely to cause the unnecessary jobs and industries to be spontaneously abandoned; at the same time, calling for a new government bureaucracy to assess the usefulness of jobs would inevitably itself turn into a vast generator of bullshit.

  So would a guaranteed jobs program.

  I’ve only been able to identify one solution currently being promoted by social movements, that would reduce rather than increase the size and intrusiveness of government. That’s Universal Basic Income.

  Let me end with a final testimony, from an activist friend whose political purpose in life is to render her own bullshit job unnecessary, and one of her fellow activists. Leslie is a Benefits Advisor in the United Kingdom, that is, she works for an NGO whose purpose is to guide citizens through the elaborate obstacle course successive governments have set up to make it as difficult as possible for those out of work, or otherwise in material need, to get access to the money the government claims it has set apart for them. Here is the testimony she sent in:

  Leslie: My job shouldn’t be necessary, but it is, because of the whole long train of bullshit jobs invented to keep people who need money from having it. As if claiming any kind of benefit were not Kafkaesque, intrusive and humiliating enough, they also make it incredibly complicated. Even when someone is entitled to something, the process of applying is so complex most need help to understand the questions and their own rights.

  Leslie has had to deal for years with the insanity that ensues when one tries to reduce human caring to a format that can be recognized by computers—let alone computers designed to keep caring precisely limited. As a result she ends up in much the same position as Tania in chapter 2, who had to spend hours rewriti
ng job applicants’ CVs and coaching them on which keywords to use to “make it past the computer”:

  Leslie: There are now certain words which have to be used on the forms, I call it the catechism, which if not used can result in a failed claim—but these are only known by those like myself who have had training and access to the handbooks. And even then, especially for disability claims, the claimant often ends up having to fight through to a tribunal to get their entitlement recognized. I do get a little thrill every time we win through for someone. But this doesn’t make up for the anger I feel about the colossal waste of everyone’s time this is. For the claimant, for me, for the various bods at the DWP [Department of Works and Pensions] who deal with the claim, for the judges at the tribunals, the experts called in to support either side. Isn’t there something more constructive we could all be doing, like, I don’t know, installing solar panels or gardening? I also often wonder about whoever made up these rules. How much did they get paid for it? How long did it take them? How many people were involved? To their minds I guess they were ensuring that the noneligible don’t get money . . . And then I think of visiting aliens laughing at us, humans inventing rules to prevent other humans from getting access to tokens of a human concept, money—which is by its nature not scarce.