[NJFAC] David Graeber on BS jobs; David Gordon on "guard labor"

Revisiting the Spiritual Violence of BS Jobs

"Anthropologist David Graeber's celebrated theory of "bullshit jobs" continues to provide a critical window into why modern work is often so useless, soul-sucking, and absurd. By Christopher Pollard 15 Oct 2024

....Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, first published in 2018. A "bullshit job," according to Graeber, is a job where even the person doing it secretly believes the job shouldn't exist. But part of their condition of employment is to pretend it's not as pointless as they know it to be.

Bullshit jobbers, he writes, can include "box tickers," "flunkies," "goons," and "taskmasters" (more on them later). Such roles are prevalent in areas such as finance, admin, law, marketing, and human resources. The book has been translated into many languages, and while it has been criticized for some rather broad generalizations, he clearly struck a chord.

In the 1930s, economist John Maynard Keynes suggested we were fast approaching a time when our new "labor-saving technology" meant we'd have to confront the issue of "technological unemployment." Due to the prodigious gains in productivity, wrote Keynes, we'd soon be working half as much—or less. By the postwar period, this had become a widely held belief.

Keynes, writes Graeber, was right. But rather than embrace more leisure time for workers, our response was "to make up a raft of new jobs," resulting in large swaths "of people, in Europe and North America in particular," spending "their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe[d]" did not really need to be performed.

The "proliferation" of these "bullshit jobs," Graeber suggests, is a significant part of the reason we don't have a 20- or even 15-hour work week....."

This is a good partial discussion of the problems with work. The late David Gordon wrote of "guard labor," a category including police, prison guards, military, many supervisors, et al. These are socially determined, and not productive. See, for example, these comments from his article in the LA Times:

"By increasing economic inequality and insecurity, conservative economic policies have exacerbated social tensions. As a consequence, an ever-increasing fraction of the nation's productive potential must be devoted simply to keeping the have-nots at bay.

Similarly, on the international scene, hawkish foreign and military policies aimed at reasserting U.S. global power have a comparably high price tag: A mounting fraction of the labor force is not producing goods for consumption or for investment but is either producing military goods or working for the Pentagon....."

jz

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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