Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber

  20. Many, of course, then quit in horror and disgust. But we don’t know the real numbers. Rachel suggested to me that many young people, unless in expensive metropolises like London, were less inclined to stick it out than their parents had been simply because the cost of housing and life in general is so ridiculously inflated that nowadays even an entry-level corporate job is not going to guarantee stability and security anymore.

  Chapter 5: Why Are Bullshit Jobs Proliferating?

  1. Louis D. Johnston, “History Lessons: Understanding the Declines in Manufacturing,” MinnPost, last modified February 22, 2012, www.minnpost.com/macro-micro-minnesota/2012/02/history-lessons-understanding-decline-manufacturing.

  2. It would be vain to try to list them all but Reich’s book was The Work of Nations (1992), and the classic statement on immaterial labor is Maurizio Lazzarato (1996), though it became famous largely through Hardt and Negr’s Empire (1994, 2000), which predicted the revolt of the computer geeks.

  3. There are many such studies. For one example, see Western and Olin Wright 1994.

  4. I had a friend who was addicted to heroin and went on a methadone program. Bored of waiting for doctors to decide he was “ready” to begin reducing his dosage, he started pouring off a little of the drug each day until, some months later, he was able to announce triumphantly that he was clean. His doctor was furious, and told him only professionals have the competence to decide when he should have done this. It turns out the program was funded on the basis of the number of patients they served and had no incentive to actually get anyone off drugs.

  One should never underestimate the power of institutions to try to preserve themselves. One explanation for the thirty-year impasse of the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process”—if at this point one can even call it that—is that on both sides, there are now powerful institutional structures which would lose their entire raison d’être if the conflict ended, but also, a vast “peace apparatus” of NGOs and UN bureaucrats whose careers have become entirely dependent on maintaining the fiction that a “peace process” is, in fact, going on.

  5. UKIP doesn’t count.

  6. To head off any possible accusations of essentialism: I am proposing these three levels as modes of analysis, and not suggesting the existence of autonomous levels of social reality that in any sense exist in their own right.

  7. I sometimes ask my students, when discussing Marx, “What was the unemployment level in ancient Greece? Or medieval China?” The answer, of course, is zero. Having a large proportion of the population who wish to work, but cannot, appears to be peculiar to what Marx liked to call “the capitalist mode of production.” But it appears to be, like public debt, a structural feature of the system which must nonetheless be treated as if it were a problem to be solved.

  8. To take a random example, the famous March on Washington in 1963, at which Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, was officially called the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom: demands included not just antidiscrimination measures but also a full-employment economy, jobs programs, and a minimum-wage increase” (Touré F. Reed, “Why Liberals Separate Race from Class,” Jacobin 8.22.2015, www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/bernie-sanders-black-lives-matter-civil-rights-movement/), accessed June 10, 2017.

  9. David Sirota, “Mr. Obama Goes to Washington,” Nation, June, 26, 2006.

  10. Of course, some might argue that Obama was being disingenuous here, and downplaying the political power of the private health industry, in the same way that politicians justified bank bailouts by claiming it was in the interest of millions of minor bank employees who might otherwise have been laid off—a concern they most certainly do not evince when, say, transit or textile workers are faced with unemployment. But the very fact that he was willing to make the argument is revealing.

  11. To those who accuse me of being a paranoid conspiracy theorist for suggesting that government plays any conscious role in creating and maintaining bullshit jobs, I hereby rest my case. Unless you think Obama was lying about his true motives (in which case, who exactly is the conspiracy theorist?), we must allow that those governing us are, in fact, aware that “market solutions” create inefficiencies, and unnecessary jobs in particular, and at least in certain contexts look with favor on them for that very reason.

  12. I might note in passing that the same is true of many orthodox Marxists, who argue that since by Marx’s definition all labor within the capitalist mode of production must either produce surplus value, or aid in the reproduction of the apparatus of value-creation, the appearance that a job is useless must be an illusion based on a false folk theory of social value on the part of the jobholder. This is really just as much a statement of faith as the libertarian insistence that the market can never be responsible for social problems. One might argue whether this position was really held by Marx but even this is basically a theological debate. It ultimately depends on whether one accepts the premise that capitalism is a totalizing system: that is, that within a capitalist system social value is determined only by the market system. I will discuss this further in the next chapter.

  13. This is then preemptive. I acknowledge that historically, for an author to head off obvious objections almost never succeeds in stopping future critics from raising those objections anyway; generally, they just pretend their objections were never anticipated and ignore any counterarguments to them that might have been made. But I figured it was worth a try.

  14. www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labourlabor-markets-0. Accessed April 1, 2017.

  15. For instance, it contained glaring flaws in basic logic: the author attempted to refute my argument that giving workers security and leisure time will often result in social unrest by noting unrest by workers who did not have security and leisure time. Even those who have received no training in formal logic, and therefore have never heard of the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent, but still have basic common sense, are generally aware that the statement “if A then B” is not the same as “if B then A.” As Lewis Carroll adroitly put it ,“You might as well say ‘I see what I eat’ is the same as ‘I eat what I see’ ”.

  16. The piece has no byline.

  17. If you ask: “Are you really saying the market is always right?” they will often reply, “Yes, I am saying the market is always right.”

  18. Instead, it’s always assumed the burden of proof is on those who question such assertions.

  19. I note in passing—and this will be important later—that while the number of administrators has gone up, the real explosion has been in administrative staff. This figure does not, I should emphasize, refer to caterers or cleaners, who were, in fact, being largely outsourced during this period, but to administrative underlings.

  20. Most of the changes that did directly affect teaching, such as, say, class chat rooms, were managed by the (proportionally declining numbers of) teachers themselves.

  21. Some phrases generated by the random Financial Bullshit Generator, accessed July 4, 2017, www.makebullshit.com/financial-bullshit-generator.php.

  22. There are other enterprises, of course, that are basically fraudulent in nature—or, in some cases, are dedicated to providing the means for others to commit fraud. A number of testimonials I received were from college paper writers. There have always been smart students or graduates willing to pick up a little cash writing term papers for lazy classmates, but in America in recent decades, this has coalesced into an entire industry, coordinated on a national level, employing thousands of full-time paper writers. One of them suggested to me that the industry was the predictable result of the convergence of credentialism—the fact that one now needed a degree of some kind to gain access to almost all desirable jobs in America—and business logic.

  Barry: When I first started this work, I imagined I would be constantly learning fascinating, new information about a broad array of subjects. While I have had the opportunity to write the rare, interesting essay on queer theory or
the history of Roman blood sport, I’ve found that I’m largely writing countless papers about business and marketing.

  After some consideration, this makes a lot of sense to me. Higher education is constantly justified on the basis that it is an investment in your future. The crippling load of student debt is worth it because it is going to allow for a stable six-figure income someday. It’s hard for me to imagine that many folks are studying to get a Bachelor of Business Administration because it’s their passion—I’m pretty sure they’re just jumping through the hoops to get the degree that they see as their path to a high-paying job. As for my clients, I think they see themselves as willing to increase their level of investment in return for a lower workload and guaranteed good marks. The amount I charge for writing a few key term papers is only a tiny fraction of the average tuition cost.

  This makes sense to me, too. If you’re actually paying attention in business courses when the professor tells you that it’s normal and even admirable to attempt to get the greatest benefit for the least amount of investment, and that same professor then assigns you a paper, there’s really no reason not to hire someone else to write it if that’s the most efficient thing to do.

  23. For the record, I don’t know which of the four it was.

  24. Another reason sometimes cited for the multiplication of unnecessary levels of executive or administrative staff is protection from the threat of lawsuits. Here’s the account of one bank employee, Aaron: “It’s common to now see ‘Chief of Staff’ roles in large financial institutions . . . they are simply an ineffectual buffer between senior managers and any potential litigation from regulators or disgruntled employees. This buffer never works because in litigation, the plaintiff will always name the senior manager in the court papers as this maximizes the likelihood the case gets settled to avoid embarrassment. So what do the Chiefs of Staff end up doing? Well, they tend to organize meetings with senior managers and their leadership teams and commission lots of pointless management consultant surveys to try and work out why morale is so low (a question that could be answered much more easily by simply asking employees what they think. You often see them organizing charity days and puff pieces in newspapers or journals.” According to Aaron, HR staff are now less likely to fulfill such roles, as they, too, fear legal liability. Clearly, the situation varies in different banks.

  25. It’s probably relevant, admittedly, that the economics department in my college was entirely dominated by Marxists; the phrase goes back at least to Perry Anderson (1974).

  26. Much of this argument and several of the examples are taken from the first chapter of Graeber, Utopia of Rules, 3–44.

  27. Of course, this is not the way things are represented, and, naturally, in any branch of industry defined as “creative,” whether software development or graphic design, production is typically outsourced to small groups (the celebrated Silicon Valley start-ups) or individuals (casualized independent contractors) who do work autonomously. But such people are often largely uncompensated. For a good recent critical history of managerialism, see Hanlon, 2016.

  28. Definitions of feudalism vary, from any economic system based on tribute-taking, to the specific system prevalent in Northern Europe during the High Middle Ages, in which land was granted in exchange for military service in ostensibly voluntary relations of vassalage—a system which outside Europe is documented mainly in Japan. From this perspective most other Asian empires and kingdoms operated with, as Weber called them “patrimonial prebendal” systems where lords or important officials collected the income from a certain territory but did not necessarily occupy or directly administer it, an approach European kings also later attempted to impose when they had the power. All this could be endlessly dissected but here I really only want to make the point that in such systems, where there are people who are primary producers, and others whose basic job it is to move those things around, the latter almost invariably end up organized into very elaborate chains of command. The nineteenth-century Ganda kingdom in East Africa might seem a particularly telling example in this regard: all farming and most productive work was done by women; most men, as a result, ended up part of an elaborate hierarchy of titled officials running from the village to the king, or as flunkies or retainers to such officials. When too many idle men accumulated, rulers would start wars or sometimes simply round thousands up and massacre them. (For the best recent synthesis on feudalism from a Marxist perspective, Wood, 2002; on the Ganda, Ray, 1991.)

  29. Cited as an anonymous source in Alex Preston, “The War Against Humanities in Britain’s Universities,” Guardian, Education Section, 1, March 29, 2015.

  30. One might argue that Marcel Duchamp, by placing a urinal in a gallery and declaring it a work of art, opened the door to the entry of managerialism into the arts. At any rate he eventually became horrified by the door he’d opened up, and spent the last decades of his life playing chess, which, he argued, was also one of the few things he could do that could not possibly be commodified.

  31. Many suggest to me one reason for the dishwater mediocrity or even plain incoherence of so many contemporary movie scripts is that each of these supernumeraries will typically insist on changing at least a line or two, just to be able to say they had some influence on the final product. I first heard about this when after seeing the endlessly terrible 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. The entire plot seemed to be designed to lead up to a moment of realization, where the alien comes to understand the true nature of humanity (that they are not basically evil, just very bad at handling grief). Yet when the moment came, the alien never actually said this. I asked a friend in the industry how this could have happened and he assured me that the line I was expecting was almost certainly in the original script; some useless executives must have intervened to change it. “You see there are usually dozens of these guys hovering around any production and every one of them will feel they have to jump in and change around at least one line—or else what’s the excuse for their even being there?”

  32. Joseph Campbell was an historian of religion whose book The Hero with a Thousand Faces argued that all hero myths have the same basic plot. The book was an enormous influence on George Lucas in developing the plots for the original Star Wars trilogy. While Campbell’s argument for a universal archetypal hero narrative is now considered at best something of an entertaining curio by scholars of epic or heroic myth, the analysis he offers probably would be valid now for Hollywood movies, since almost all screenwriters and producers are familiar with the book and attempt to use it in designing plots.

  33. Holly Else, “Billions Lost in Bids to Secure EU Research Funding,” Times Higher Education Supplement, October 6, 2016, accessed June 23, 2017. www.timeshighereducation.com/news/billions-lost-in-bids-to-secure-european-union-research-funding#survey-answer.

  34. “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” Baffler, no. 19 (Spring 2012): 66–84, with an expanded version in Graeber, Utopia of Rules, 105–148.

  35. These titles were, in fact, produced by using the random bullshit job title generator at the website BullShit Job, www.bullshitjob.com/title.

  36. The argument of this paragraph is a very abbreviated version of the argument of the introductory essay in Graeber, Utopia of Rules, 33–44.

  Chapter 6: Why Do We as a Society Not Object to the Growth of Pointless Employment?

  1. For instance, at the height of the Greek debt crisis, public opinion in Germany was almost unanimous that Greek debt should not be forgiven because Greek workers were entitled and lazy. This was countered by statistics showing Greek workers actually put in longer hours than German ones; which, in turn, was countered by the argument that this might be true on paper but Greek workers slacked off on the job. At no point did anyone suggest that German workers were working too hard, creating an overproduction problem that could only be solved by lending foreign countries money to be able to import their goods, let alone that the Greek ability to enjoy life was in any w
ay admirable or a model for others. To take another example, when, in the 1990s, the French Socialist Party ran on the platform of a thirty-five-hour workweek, I remember being struck by the fact that no American news source I was able to find that deigned to mention this fact suggested that reducing working hours might be seen as, let alone be, good in itself, but only presented it as a tactic for reducing unemployment. In other words, allowing people to work less could only be treated as a social good if it allowed more people to be working.

  2. Technically the measure is “marginal utility,” the degree to which the consumer finds an additional unit of the good useful in this way; hence, if one already has three bars of soap stockpiled in one’s house, or for that matter three houses, how much additional utility is added by a fourth. For the best critique of marginal utility as a theory of consumer preference, see Steve Keen, Debunking Economics, 44–47.

  3. And I should note just for the sake of clarity that most of those who embrace the labor theory of value do not make this argument; some value comes from nature, as Marx himself, the most famous advocate of the labor theory of value, did occasionally point out.

  4. Of course, this is exactly the position also taken by the most radical free market libertarians.

  5. Since reproduction is technically “the production of production,” then maintaining the physical infrastructure or other elements exploited by capitalism would also count.

  6. Similarly, in the domain of values, when market comparisons can be made, they are assumed to be somehow incidental, not a reflection of the object’s true worth. No one would actually insist that a Damien Hirst shark is worth, say, two hundred thousand Vipassana meditation retreats, or a Vipassana retreat, one hundred fudge sundaes. It just happens to come out that way.