Bullshit Jobs

[alanjjohnstone]

A David Graeber interview

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/21134/capitalism-job-bullshit-david-graeber-busywork-labor

Quote:

A bullshit job is a job that the person doing it believes is pointless, and if the job didn’t exist it would either make no difference whatsoever or it would make the world a better place.

I think he mixes up mercantile capitalism and what can be called guild capitalism here and fails to understand how a system evolves into a system…he appears to dismiss class struggle…peasants resisting the encroachments of wage labour and dispossession in primitive accumulation and the stealing of the commons.

Quote:

Okay, say that capitalism started around 1500. And the Marxists insist that capitalism is organized around wage labor. But wage labor was marginal until the industrial revolution, around 1750. How can you say that wage labor is central to capitalism if, for 250 years, it was a tiny element? And of course, the Marxist will say, “Well you’re not thinking dialectically. From 1500 to 1750, people were in a process that was going to lead to wage labor, they just didn’t realize it yet.” And I realized, wait a minute, if that’s the case, how do we know that we are even in capitalism now? Maybe we are already 100 years into a process leading us to something and we don’t even know what it is. By that logic, capitalism could have ended in like 1950, and we’ll only fully know what replaced it in 2175.

[ALB]

I don't understand the point he is trying to make in his argument with "conventional Marxists". He seems to be suggesting that, with the introduction of a basic income, we could be in the beginning of a long gradual transformation of capitalism into something else similar to the transition from feudalism to capitalism.It is also not that clear from the interview what he means by "bullshit jobs". Since he rules out jobs that are producing something useful this rules out all the low-paid shitty jobs involved in producing, processing and distributing food. And leaves mainly various paper-shuffling middle management jobs which in comparison are comparatively well-paid.

[robbo203]

Perhaps a ""bullshit job" could be defined minimally as a  job that wouldnt exist if capitalism didnt exist – that is to say, if production for use was the sole criterion of production – although Graeber seems to mean by BS jobs something more than this.  Also, it has to be born in mind that much useful non BS work goes into supporting and underpinning BS work.    What proporrtion of the electricity generated by power stations goes into supporting the acitvities of the armamanets industry.  How many constructon workers are involved in building banks  and so on,  Are these jobs which apprear to be socially useful, by extension, BS jobs as well? Perhaps Graeber needs to be sent  a copy of this Party pamphlet in which a whole lot of socially useless prpducts and activities are listed   http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/capitalism-socialism-how-we-live-and-how-we-could-live Once again,  this is yet another example of where having a specific well-researched pamphlet on a particular topic – in this case, on the extent pf capitalism's structural waste – could be invaluable and serve as a reference which people like Graeber could draw upon 

[ALB]

Just remembered, when we reviewed his book on Debt in the August 2012 Socialist Standard Graeber sent in a reply that was published in the October issue. It makes the same point as in his answer to the final question in the interview (scroll down, it's the second letter):http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2012/no-1298-october-2012/letters

Quote:

What I was mainly trying to address in the section on capitalism is a question that to my knowledge no Marxist analysis has really been able to resolve: why, if capitalism is a system based on factories and free wage labor, did most of the financial institutions that we associate with it – stocks, bonds, futures trading, semi-private central banking systems, and so on – actually arise in the 17th century, long before either factories or (any significant amount of) free wage labor made an appearance. The whole idea of "merchant capitalism" which is supposed to characterize the period from roughly 1500 to 1750 (or even 1800 in most of Europe) has always been a puzzle. If capitalism is a system based on wage labor, then it wasn't capitalism at all. But if so most bourgeois revolutions happened before capitalism had even appeared! If merchant capitalism is capitalism, then capitalism does not have to be based on wage labor, and certainly not free wage labor, at all. Claiming that merchant capitalism was capitalism because European elites were somehow trying to create a system that didn't exist and there is no evidence they were even capable of imagining, seems absurd. The obvious answer is that capitalism is not in fact necessarily based on free wage labor contracts.

To which we replied:

Quote:

We can’t see how anyone can deny that central to Marx’s analysis of capitalism (“the capitalist mode of production”) is the capital/wage-labour relationship, whether or not they agree with this. But this is not the only feature of capitalism; it is also a market economy where goods are produced to be sold. In fact, capitalism can be defined as a system where all the elements of production, including in particular the human ability to work (labour power), are bought and sold, which only becomes general once the direct producers have been separated from the means of production, whether land or machines. This didn’t come about suddenly in one go; it developed over time. Historically, the world market – as an inter-national market – first came into being in the 16th century and then market relations spread internally within countries producing for it as there were put change the more they got involved in it. Those in control of political power in these countries faced a choice: either to try to resist the changes or to encourage them. The “European elites” were divided over the issue. Those in favour of change wanted to remove all the barriers to property ownership and production for the market inherited from feudalism. They were, or represented, the up-and-coming bourgeoisie. In the end, they got their way, especially after they won control of political power in the English Revolution in the 17th century and the American and French Revolutions in the 18th century. Whether or not they envisaged a system of production based on wage-labour eventually emerging, they were consciously aiming at the spread of market relations and of the concept of the individual free to enter into market relations with other individuals.

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