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I read this on the clock
Jul. 11th, 2023 04:53 pmUpon returning from my organizing hiatus I decided to start off slow and attend a nice little book club with my starting working group, political education. To that end, some comrades I hadn’t seen in a while and I got together every two weeks to discuss the late great David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, the book-length expansion of his viral essay of the same title.
I wouldn’t say this was the most tightly argued piece of theory I’ve ever read but I don’t think it was supposed to be. It instead meanders around a fairly wide range of work-related complaints and attempts to create a usable taxonomy of bullshit, and does some exploration of what that bullshit does to us, why it happens, and what might be able to push back on it. Graeber’s writing is cheeky and readable, occasionally to the point of breeziness, but I think that’s more than balanced out by the way he’s able to talk about actual-leftist-not-just-left-liberal concepts–like his anarchist reservations about “policy”--in a clear, simple way that relies lightly enough on leftist theory terms that he’s able to explain each one that he does use. I don’t think every book of left theory needs to do this (not everything is an intro course, sometimes you need to have a 200-level discussion) but it’s nice when books whose audience is not just Marxists gets in a little Marxist political education without butchering the subject. (Graeber is an anarchist but apparently his dad was a Marxist, so he tends to take a sort of fond poking-fun approach at a lot of longstanding Marxist concepts that I suspect will make them seem a bit less threatening to non-Marxist readers, without misrepresenting them as just fancier terms for liberal ideas.)
The book obviously deals with some fairly infuriating subject matter (although cathartically so, if you have a bullshit job, or a fundamentally non-bullshit job that is undergoing bullshitization), but it’s quite fun to read. When Graeber comes up with new terms he tends to go for punchy and memorable, rather than laboriously constructed from Greek and Latin roots or older lefty terms: his main categories of bullshit jobs are “flunkies,” “goons,” “duct tapers,” “box tickers,” and “taskmasters.” (There is also a “second-order” or combination category of “flak catchers.”) There is also a great amount of qualitative survey data; the various comments and testimonials are definitely great reading and, while putting a number on how much of our economy is bullshit is pretty tough, they are very convincing indicators that something in our economy seems to have gone wrong.
After some really interesting dives into the psychology of being bored at work and the flows of resentment in modern political life, Graeber puts forth some thoughts on why this state of affairs has been allowed to happen in defiance of all theoretical assumptions about capitalist efficiency, and rather reluctantly offers a policy suggestion: a quick-and-dirty but thought-provoking discussion on UBI.
Overall I think this book raises more questions than it answers, but also I think that was kind of the idea. I think it’s very good for shaking up one’s thinking about work, efficiency, and value (and values), and also it’s fairly entertaining. It was definitely fun to read and discuss in a small group, and I recall the original essay being quite a conversation starter as well. Also it has the benefit if being considerably shorter than either Debt or The Dawn of Everything, so it’ll probably be easier to get other people to read!
I wouldn’t say this was the most tightly argued piece of theory I’ve ever read but I don’t think it was supposed to be. It instead meanders around a fairly wide range of work-related complaints and attempts to create a usable taxonomy of bullshit, and does some exploration of what that bullshit does to us, why it happens, and what might be able to push back on it. Graeber’s writing is cheeky and readable, occasionally to the point of breeziness, but I think that’s more than balanced out by the way he’s able to talk about actual-leftist-not-just-left-liberal concepts–like his anarchist reservations about “policy”--in a clear, simple way that relies lightly enough on leftist theory terms that he’s able to explain each one that he does use. I don’t think every book of left theory needs to do this (not everything is an intro course, sometimes you need to have a 200-level discussion) but it’s nice when books whose audience is not just Marxists gets in a little Marxist political education without butchering the subject. (Graeber is an anarchist but apparently his dad was a Marxist, so he tends to take a sort of fond poking-fun approach at a lot of longstanding Marxist concepts that I suspect will make them seem a bit less threatening to non-Marxist readers, without misrepresenting them as just fancier terms for liberal ideas.)
The book obviously deals with some fairly infuriating subject matter (although cathartically so, if you have a bullshit job, or a fundamentally non-bullshit job that is undergoing bullshitization), but it’s quite fun to read. When Graeber comes up with new terms he tends to go for punchy and memorable, rather than laboriously constructed from Greek and Latin roots or older lefty terms: his main categories of bullshit jobs are “flunkies,” “goons,” “duct tapers,” “box tickers,” and “taskmasters.” (There is also a “second-order” or combination category of “flak catchers.”) There is also a great amount of qualitative survey data; the various comments and testimonials are definitely great reading and, while putting a number on how much of our economy is bullshit is pretty tough, they are very convincing indicators that something in our economy seems to have gone wrong.
After some really interesting dives into the psychology of being bored at work and the flows of resentment in modern political life, Graeber puts forth some thoughts on why this state of affairs has been allowed to happen in defiance of all theoretical assumptions about capitalist efficiency, and rather reluctantly offers a policy suggestion: a quick-and-dirty but thought-provoking discussion on UBI.
Overall I think this book raises more questions than it answers, but also I think that was kind of the idea. I think it’s very good for shaking up one’s thinking about work, efficiency, and value (and values), and also it’s fairly entertaining. It was definitely fun to read and discuss in a small group, and I recall the original essay being quite a conversation starter as well. Also it has the benefit if being considerably shorter than either Debt or The Dawn of Everything, so it’ll probably be easier to get other people to read!