AN ORANGE REVIEW OF BULLSHIT JOBS BY DAVID GRAEBER (2018)

AN ORANGE REVIEW OF BULLSHIT JOBS BY DAVID GRAEBER (2018)

Recommended to me by artist and fellow social activist, Zarahn Southon, this book makes for interesting reading. The central theme of people who work in bullshit jobs – and know this being the case – seems to be somewhat facile in the first instance since the much larger problem are people working in bullshit jobs they themselves value very much. Such as soldiers, policemen and all the true believers in what David calls ‘the sadomasochistic dynamic of hierarchical work arrangements’. The managerial feudalism (I have advocated for the term ‘neo-feudalism’ for many years) so rightly decried by David does exist because it affords sadistic pleasure for the managers. David’s allusions to sexual politics in this context are poignant, delving into what might be called Freudian or Reichian domains. His description of Foucault’s supposedly positive transformation after embracing BDSM is hilarious even though the message is supposed to be serious: BDSM as a work place scenario is Ok because we can call ‘orange’ to terminate the game at any time. In the real work place scenario, the worker detecting ‘bullshit’ cannot call ‘orange’ and is instead forced to submit to utter humiliation if not worse. David as the consummate academic/teacher provides the slogan of ‘mutual manipulation of teacher and student (power-good), versus the tyranny of the authoritarian pedant (domination-bad)’. As a teacher/academic myself I certainly agree with the latter but I am not so sure about the former.  Given David’s support for Universal Basic Income as a possible solution to the perverse problem of bullshit jobs, one wonders if David would call ‘orange’ on his current employer (LSE, where bullying seems less pronounced than in his previous position at Yale) as much as I would do so on mine. As we know, much of the teaching/academic profession is populated by sadistic characters so well portrayed in Pink Floyd’s music video for ‘teacher leave us kids alone’ (a more literary example I would recommend is Alfred Andersch’ Der Vater eines Mörders(1980), The father of a murderer, translated by Leila Vennewitz (1994), which fictionalizes the real story of Himmler’s father as a sadistic high school headmaster). 

On a more anthropological (David is after all an anthropologist) and sociological playing field, David provides many a valuable insight on the nature of work itself (he does subtitle his book with ‘a theory’). I like his assertion that real work is service based – caring for others or even for oneself – rather than production based as conceived in many a theoretical treatise on the value or values of labour. The perverse biblical definition of labour as a punishment from god is traced through to the English Puritan and Protestant obsessions with work as a character-building exercise, down to the diminishing factory worker and the subsequent rise of bullshit jobs (especially in the so-called service industries, like banking and insurance). His critique that the both the Left and the Right of the political spectrum are beholden to work as a right (by the Left) and as a commodity (by the Right) may be a bit misleading, especially as he seems to equate the Left with politicians like Clinton, Obama and Blair. We know that these characters are anything but from the Left (it would be interesting to find out what David now thinks of Jeremy Corbyn). Citing Karl Marx on a few occasions, in mainly positive terms, one cannot deny the premise that labour adds value to products. Nurses as a ‘caring’ profession rely on ‘useful’ health products as much as any other caring profession relies on their version of useful products. On the other hand, a much sharper critique might have focused on the mad proliferation of ‘useless’ bullshit consumer products, a sort of double-whammy of having a bullshit job making bullshit products (like the armaments industry – notwithstanding that quite a few workers in this industry might feel they are doing a sterling job). Instead David focuses on bullshit jobs that often involve doing nothing at all, or not very much, so that the worker feels guilty about it, affecting his/her mental health in the process. Some of the many anecdotes (call them case studies if you must) come from the software programming industry where low level programmers have to fix (with ‘duct tape’) the many bugs left behind by higher-ups, a sort of mindless drudgery played out in the Silicon Valleys of our modern times. Embedded in this theme is David’s thesis that AI, robotics and automation have indeed taken over many of the jobs formerly performed by human workers but the real consequence should have been to free the workforce from the 40-hour working week, reducing it to a 15-hour working week. Instead workers now have to work 70 hours a week to make ends meet, working in bullshit jobs that substituted the ones made redundant by automation. An even more schizophrenic situation is built into another type of bullshit job that involves social welfare workers whose job it is to deny the poor their rightful assistance by making it as difficult as possible to get through the red tape associated with it. It is sad but true that in our Western society anybody who does not work and is therefore poor, must be punished, at least as a character-building exercise. In this context David does make a very good point: the liberal Left (such as the Labour party in NZ, my ed.) attacks this ‘unemployment’ problem by promising full employment and a minimum wage (but not even a ‘living wage’ as demanded by some of the more progressive unions) when the solution is in fact a radical reduction of work (and throwing the ‘work ethic’ into the rubbish bin of history) if not total abolition of it. On the political Right, ‘unemployment’ (between 3% - 8%) is of course most desirable as it allows for sadistic competition in the workplace. Human freedom, as David bravely notes, is not at all predicated on regular work (as forever abused by the Nazis' Arbeit macht frei) but on getting a sustainable livelihood. In historical terms, as he reminds us, this meant working for food and shelter during the growing seasons and taking it easy during the fallow seasons. Quoting Orwell, he also reminds us, the ruling classes cannot conceive of the working classes as having time off lest they get up to all sorts of mischief, like hatching plans to usurp the power of the few, or else engage in fun and games for the sake of a bit of enjoyment if not sexual pleasure. Endless work, meaningful or not (as bullshit jobs), keeps us workers imprisoned in a system that David correctly identifies as ‘perverse’. A terrible indictment, really, but also a call in the wilderness to break free (but see where it got Freddie Mercury if we continue with the 1960’s anti-establishment theme which David considers as evidence that young people then could envisage a life outside working nine to five). To break free from neo-feudalism will require a kind of anarchic revolution never seen before.