Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber

  On top of all that, since she is a do-gooder, Leslie can expect to make only a minimal living herself and the money to run her office itself involves satisfying an endless chain of self-satisfied paper pushers.

  Leslie: To add insult to injury, my work is funded by charity trusts, a whole other long chain of BS jobs, from me applying for money up to the CEOs who claim their organizations fight poverty, or “make the world a better place.” At my end this starts with hours searching for relevant funds, reading their guidelines, spending time learning how to best approach them, filling out forms, making phone calls. If successful, I’ll next have to spend hours every month compiling statistics and filling out monitoring forms. Each trust has its own catechism and its own sets of indicators, each wants their own set of evidence that we are “empowering” people, or “creating change” or innovation, when, in fact, we’re juggling rules and language on behalf of people who just need help to fill out the paperwork, so they can get on with their lives.

  Leslie told me of studies that demonstrate that any system of means testing, no matter how it’s framed, will necessarily mean at least 20 percent of those who legitimately qualify for benefits give up and don’t apply. That’s almost certainly more than the number of “cheats” who might be detected by the rules—in fact, even counting those who are honestly mistaken the number still only comes to 1.6 percent. The 20 percent figure would apply even if no one actually was formally denied benefits at all. But of course the rules are designed to deny as many claimants as can plausibly be denied: between sanctions and capricious applications of the rules, we’ve gotten to the point now where 60 percent of those eligible for unemployment benefits in the United Kingdom don’t get them. In other words, everyone she describes, the entire archipelago that starts with the bureaucrats who write the rules, and includes the DWP, enforcement tribunals, advocates, and employees who work for the funding bodies that process applications for the NGOs that employ those advocates, all of them, are part of a single vast apparatus that exists to maintain the illusion that people are naturally lazy and don’t really want to work—and therefore, that even if society does have a responsibility to ensure they don’t literally starve to death, it is necessary to make the process of providing them with the means of continued existence as confusing, time-consuming, and humiliating as possible.

  The job, then, is essentially a kind of horrific combination of box ticking and duct taping, making up for the inefficiencies of a system of caregiving intentionally designed not to work. Thousands of people are maintained on comfortable salaries in air-conditioned offices simply in order to ensure that poor people continue to feel bad about themselves.

  Leslie knew this better than anyone because she’d spent time on both sides of the desk. She had been on benefits herself for years as a single mother; she knew exactly what things looked like on the receiving end. Her solution? Eliminate the apparatus entirely. She is involved in the movement for Universal Basic Income, which calls for replacing all means-tested social welfare benefits with a flat fee to be paid to everyone, equally, residing in the country.

  Candi, a fellow Basic Income activist—who also held a useless job in the system whose details she preferred not to disclose—told me she originally became interested in such issues when she first moved to London in the 1980s and became part of the International Wages for Housework Movement:

  Candi: I got involved in Wages for Housework because I felt that my mother needed it. She was trapped in a bad marriage, and she would have left my dad a lot earlier if she’d had her own money. That’s something really important for anyone in an abusive or even just boring relationship: to be able to get out of it without being financially impacted.

  I’d just been in London for a year. I’d been trying to get involved in some form of feminism back in the States. One of my formative memories was my mother taking me to a consciousness raising group in Ohio when I was nine. We ripped out pages from St. Paul’s Gospel where he was talking about how terrible women are and made a pile of them. And because I was the youngest member of the group they told me to light the pile. I remember I wouldn’t do it at first because I’d been taught not to play with matches.

  David: But you did eventually light it?

  Candi: I did. My mother gave me permission. Not long after that she got a job that paid enough to live on, and immediately, she left my dad. That was kind of proof in the pudding for me.

  In London, Candi found herself drawn to Wages for Housework—then widely seen by most other feminists as an annoying if not dangerous fringe group—because she saw it as providing an alternative to sterile debates between liberals and separatists. Here at least was an economic analysis of the real-life problems women faced. Some at the time were beginning to speak of a “global work machine,” a planetwide wage-labor system designed to pump more and more effort out of more and more people, but what feminist critics had begun pointing out was that same system also defined what was to be considered “real” labor—the kind that could be reduced to “time” and could thus be bought and sold—and what wasn’t. Most women’s labor was placed in the latter category, despite the fact that without it, the very machine that stamped it as “not really work” would grind to a halt immediately.

  Wages for Housework was essentially an attempt to call capitalism’s bluff, to say, “Most work, even factory work, is done for a variety of motives; but if you want to insist that work is only valuable as a marketable commodity, then at least you can be consistent about the matter!” If women were to be compensated in the same way as men then a huge proportion of the world’s wealth would instantly have to be handed over to them; and wealth, of course, is power. What follows is from a conversation with both of them:

  David: So inside Wages for Housework, were there many debates about the policy implications—you know, the mechanisms through which the wages would actually be paid?

  Candi: Oh, no, it was much more a perspective—a way to expose the unpaid work that was being done that nobody was supposed to talk about. And for that it did a really good job. Few were talking about the work women were already doing for free in the 1960s, but it became an issue when Wages for Housework was established in the 1970s—and now it’s standard to take it into account when working out divorce settlements, for example.

  David: So the demand itself was basically a provocation?

  Candi: It was much more a provocation than it was ever a plan, “this is how we could actually do it”—anything like that. We did talk about where the money would come from. At first, it was all about getting money out of capital. Then in the later eighties, Wilmette Brown’s book Black Women and the Peace Movement came out,16 all about how war and the war economy affects women and particularly Black women more than anyone else, so we started using the slogan “pay women not soldiers.” Actually you still hear that, “wage caring not killing.”

  So we certainly targeted where the money was. But we never much got into the mechanics.

  David: Wait, “wage caring not killing”—whose slogan is that?

  Leslie: Global Women’s Strike. That’s the contemporary successor to Wages for Housework. When we came out with the first European UBI [Universal Basic Income] petition back in 2013, that was Global Women’s Strike’s response: two months later, they put out a petition to wage carers instead. Which myself, I wouldn’t have a problem with, if they were willing to admit that everyone is a carer in one form or another. If you’re not looking after someone else then at the very least you’re looking after yourself, and this takes time and energy the system is less and less willing to afford people. But then recognizing that would just lead back to UBI again: if everyone’s a carer, then you might as well just fund everybody, and let them decide for themselves who they want to care for at any given time.

  Candi had come around from Wages for Housework to UBI for similar reasons. She and some of her fellow activists started asking themselves: Say we did want to promote a real, practical program, w
hat would that be?

  Candi: The reaction we used to get on the street when we leafleted for Wages for Housework was, either women would say, “Great! Where can I sign up?” or they’d say, “How dare you demand money for something I do for love?” That second reaction wasn’t entirely crazy, these women were understandably resistant to commodifying all human activity in the way that getting a wage for housework might imply.

  Candi was particularly moved by the arguments of the French Socialist thinker André Gorz. When I offered my own analysis on the inherently unquantifiable nature of caring, she told me Gorz had anticipated it forty years ago:

  Candi: Gorz’s critique of Wages for Housework was that if you kept emphasizing the importance of care to the global economy in strictly financial terms, then there was the danger that you’d end up putting a dollar value on different forms of caring, and saying, that’s its real “value.” But in that case, you are running the risk of more and more of that caring becoming monetized, quantified, and therefore, kind of fucked up, because monetizing those activities often decreases the qualitative value of the care, especially if it’s done, as it is usually, as a list of specific tasks with set time limits. He was already saying that in the seventies, and now, of course, that’s exactly what’s transpired. Even in teaching, nursing.17

  Leslie: Let alone what I do.

  David: Yeah, I know. “Bullshitization” is my phrase.

  Candi: Yes, it’s been bullshitized, absolutely.

  Leslie: Whereas UBI . . . Didn’t Silvia [Federici] write or talk in an interview recently about how the UN and then all sorts of world bodies kind of glommed onto feminism as a way to resolve the capitalist crisis of the seventies? They said, sure, let’s bring women and carers into the paid workforce (most working-class women were already doing a “double day”), not to empower women but as a way of disciplining men. Because insofar as you see an equalization of wages since then, it’s mainly because in real terms, working-class men’s wages have gone down, not because women are necessarily getting that much more. They’re always trying to set us against each other. And that’s what all these mechanisms for assessing the relative value of different kinds of work are necessarily going to be about.

  That’s why for me, the pilot study of Basic Income carried out in India is so exciting. Well a lot of things are exciting about it—for instance, domestic violence goes way down. (This makes sense because I think some 80 percent of domestic disputes that lead to violence turn out to be about money.) But the main thing is, it starts to make social inequalities dissolve. You start by giving everyone an equal amount of money. That in itself is important, because money has a certain symbolic power: it’s something that’s the same for everyone, and when you give everyone, men, women, old, young, high caste, low caste, exactly the same amount, those differences start to dissolve. This happened in the Indian pilot where they observed that the girls were given the same amount of food as boys unlike before, disabled people were more accepted in village activities, and young women dropped the social convention that said they were supposed to be shy and modest and started hanging around in public like boys . . . Girls started participating in public life.18

  And any UBI payment would have to be enough to live on, all by itself, and it would have to be completely unqualified. Everyone has to get it. Even people who don’t need it. It’s worth it, just to establish the principle that when it comes to what’s required to live, everyone deserves that, equally, without qualification. This makes it a human right, not just charity or duct tape for lack of other forms of income. Then if there are further needs on top of that, say someone is disabled, well, then you address that, too. But only after you establish the right of material existence for all people.

  This is one of the elements that startles and confuses a lot of people when they first hear about the concept of Basic Income. Surely you aren’t going to give $25,000 a year (or whatever it is) to Rockefellers, too? The answer is yes. Everyone is everyone. It’s not like there are so many billionaires this will come to a particularly large amount of money; rich people could be taxed more anyway; if one wanted to start means-testing, even for billionaires, then one would have to set up a bureaucracy to start means-testing again, and if history tells us anything, it’s that such bureaucracies tend to expand.

  What Basic Income ultimately proposes is to detach livelihood from work. Its immediate effect would be to massively reduce the amount of bureaucracy in any country that implemented it. As Leslie’s case shows, an enormous amount of the machinery of government, and that half-government corporate NGO penumbra that surrounds it in most wealthy societies, is just there to make poor people feel bad about themselves. It’s an extraordinarily expensive moral game played to prop up a largely useless global work machine.

  Candi: Let me give an example. Recently I was thinking maybe I’d foster a kid. So I looked into the package. It’s quite generous. You get a council flat, and on top of that you get £250 a week to look after the child. But then I realized: wait a minute. They’re talking about £13,000 a year and an apartment, for one child. Which the child’s parents in probably most cases didn’t have. If we’d just given the same thing to the parents so they didn’t get into so many problems they’d never have had to foster the child to begin with.

  And, of course, that’s not even counting the cost of the salaries of the civil servants who arrange and monitor fosterage, the building and upkeep of the offices in which they work, the various bodies that monitor and control those civil servants, the building and upkeep of the offices in which they work, and so forth.

  This is not the place to enter into arguments about how a Basic Income program might actually work.19 If it seems implausible to most (“But where would the money come from?”), it’s largely because we’ve all grown up with largely false assumptions about what money is, how it’s produced, what taxes are really for, and a host of other issues that lie far beyond the scope of this volume. Waters are further muddied by the fact that there are radically different visions of what a universal income is and why it would be good to have one: ranging from a conservative version that aims to provide a modest stipend as a pretext to completely eliminate existing welfare state provisions like free education or health care, and just submit everything to the market, to a radical version such as Leslie and Candi support, which assumes existing unconditional guarantees like the British National Health Service will be left in place.20 One sees Basic Income as a way of contracting, the other sees it as a way of expanding the zone of unconditionality. This latter is the kind that I would myself be able to get behind. I do this despite my own politics, which is quite explicitly antistatist: as an anarchist, I look forward to seeing states dismantled entirely, and in the meantime, have no interest in policies that will give states more power than they have already.

  But oddly, this is why I can get behind Basic Income. Basic Income might seem like it is a vast expansion of state power, since presumably it’s the government (or some quasi-state institution like a central bank) that would be creating and distributing the money, but, in fact, it’s the exactly the reverse. Huge sections of government—and precisely, the most intrusive and obnoxious ones, since they are most deeply involved in the moral surveillance of ordinary citizens—would be instantly made unnecessary and could be simply closed down.21 Yes, millions of minor government officials and benefit advisors like Leslie would be thrown out of their current jobs, but they’d all receive basic income too. Maybe some of them will come up with something genuinely important to do, like installing solar panels, as Leslie suggests, or discovering the cure for cancer. But it wouldn’t matter if they instead formed jug bands, devoted themselves to restoring antique furniture, spelunking, translating Mayan hieroglyphics, or trying to set the world record for having sex at an advanced age. Let them do what they like! Whatever they end up doing, they will almost certainly be happier than they are now, imposing sanctions on the unemployed for arriving late at CV-building semina
rs or checking to see if the homeless are in possession of three forms of ID; and everybody else will be better off for their newfound happiness.

  Even a modest Basic Income program could become a stepping-stone toward the most profound transformation of all: to unlatch work from livelihood entirely. As we saw in the last chapter, a strong moral case can be made for paying everyone the same regardless of their work. Yet the argument cited in that chapter did assume people were being paid for their work, and this would at the very least require some kind of monitoring bureaucracy to ensure that people were, in fact, working, even if it did not have to measure how hard or how much they produced. A full Basic Income would eliminate the compulsion to work, by offering a reasonable standard of living to all, and then either leaving it up to each individual to decide whether they wished to pursue further wealth, by doing a paying job, or selling something, or whether they wished to do something else with their time. Alternately, it might open the way to developing better ways of distributing goods entirely. (Money is after all a rationing ticket, and in an ideal world, one would presumably wish to do as little rationing as possible.) Obviously, all this depends on the assumption that human beings don’t have to be compelled to work, or at least, to do something that they feel is useful or beneficial to others. As we’ve seen, this is a reasonable assumption. Most people would prefer not to spend their days sitting around watching TV and the handful who really are inclined to be total parasites are not going to be a significant burden on society, since the total amount of work required to maintain people in comfort and security is not that formidable. The compulsive workaholics who insist on doing far more than they really have to would more than compensate for the occasional slackers.22