- Tags:: 🗞️Articles
- Author:: David Graeber
- Link:: https://web.archive.org/web/20200926035023/https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
- Source date:: 2013-08-01
- Finished date:: 2020-09-29
The seed article of Bullshit Jobs.
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a fifteen-hour work week.
But this obviously didn’t materialized. Is it because we choose to work more but have iPhones? Not really according to Graeber: productive jobs (e.g., farm sector) have been automated. It is the administrative sector (financial services, telemarketing, corporate law…) that grew. These are what he considers bullshit jobs: pointless jobs for the sake of keeping us working.
And surprisingly, people with jobs with most obvious benefits (e.g., nurses) earn less and are resented, as if money compensates the feeling of pointlessness of jobs:
“But you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that, you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”
How can that happen under Capitalism?
The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ’60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.
The author is not really that “conspiranoid”:
Clearly, the system was never consciously designed.
But:
Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call ‘the market’ reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.