ON THE PHENOMENON OF BULLSHIT JOBS (STRIKE! is a bi-monthly newspaper – we deal in politics, philosophy, art, subversion and sedition.)
Ever had the feeling that your job might be made up? That the world would keep on turning if you weren’t doing that thing you do 9-5? Anthropology professor and best selling author David Graeber explored the phenomenon of bullshit jobs for our recent summer issue – everyone who’s employed should read carefully…
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would have advanced sufficiently by century’s end that countries like Great Britain or the United States would achieve a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.
So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.
These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”
It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is exactly what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the very sort of problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.
While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organising or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.
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.
Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.
I think this is actually a pretty accurate description of the moral dynamics of our own economy.
*
Now, I realise any such argument is going to run into immediate objections: “who are you to say what jobs are really ‘necessary’? What’s necessary anyway? You’re an anthropology professor, what’s the ‘need’ for that?” (And indeed a lot of tabloid readers would take the existence of my job as the very definition of wasteful social expenditure.) And on one level, this is obviously true. There can be no objective measure of social value.
I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless? Not long ago I got back in touch with a school friend who I hadn’t seen since I was 12. I was amazed to discover that in the interim, he had become first a poet, then the front man in an indie rock band. I’d heard some of his songs on the radio having no idea the singer was someone I actually knew. He was obviously brilliant, innovative, and his work had unquestionably brightened and improved the lives of people all over the world. Yet, after a couple of unsuccessful albums, he’d lost his contract, and plagued with debts and a newborn daughter, ended up, as he put it, “taking the default choice of so many directionless folk: law school.” Now he’s a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm. He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist.
There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (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.) But even more, it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely. Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.
This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.
Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people. It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told “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?”
If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the – universally reviled – unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days.
David Graeber is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. His most recent book, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, is published by Spiegel & Grau.
Could brinkmanship on Greece’s left deliver the country from austerity? BY WILLIAM RAILTONON JANUARY 4, 2015
“Greece is not run through democracy now, it is run through a Troika. Three foreign officials that fly into Athens airport and tell the Greeks what they can and cannot do.”
Almost two years after this criticism of European hegemony was voiced by an MEP in the European Parliament, Greece finds itself heading into an election which could result in renouncing its austerity measures and leaving the Euro.
On 25th January, Greeks will go to the polls once again, following the Greek parliament’s rejection of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’ presidential nomination.
Opinion polls predict victory for the young, leftist party Syriza. Formed of a coalition of National Socialists, greens and Maoists and others, Syriza’s popularity owes to its pledges to raise the minimum wage, end privatisation and reverse the austerity measures which Greece consented to as part of its $240bn bailout by the EU and IMF.
Campaigning on television this week, three of Syriza’s MPs, including economic adviser Yiannis Milios, indicated that unless the conditions of the Europe’s bailout can be eased, a government headed by Syriza would stop making repayments to foreign creditors on its debt. Fears of a default on these repayments have scared markets.
In an interview with the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation in March 2014, Milios said that in Greece “public debt is used as a vehicle to increase the power of the ruling classes and the very big corporations and to deprive labour rights and income from the masses” by dismantling the welfare state and cutting wages and pensions.
For the last 4 years, social conditions have been difficult in Greece. Disenchantment with Europe is a view shared by the squeezed middle and unemployed youth alike. So long as Greece’s fiscal policy is dictated by the so-called Troika (the IMF, the ECB and the European Commission), real growth is a pipe-dream.
The Greek political establishment is very worried about what might happen in three weeks’ time. Rather than strengthening the Greek negotiating position, members of the current government believe that stopping repayments will lead to Greece’s exit from the Euro. Greek newspaper Ekathimerini reported that on Wednesday, Prime Minister Samaras, head of the ruling conservative party New Democracy, described Syriza’s agenda as “the most official program guaranteeing poverty that the Greek people have ever heard in an election campaign”.
If Greece’s political shift to the left could be expected, it is surprising that Syriza is leading the charge. A victory for Syriza is a prediction few would have made before the bailouts.
Since the 1980’s, the Greek centre-left has been represented by Pasok, a popular social-democratic party which was the main partner in the Greek coalition government until 2012. However, Pasok was ousted during the election for the poor role it played in negotiating the austerity imposed by Europe. Pasok currently languishes with 5% of the vote but Syriza was doing even worse in the polls back in 2009 (4%), before the young radical Alexis Tsipras led the party to victory in last year’s European elections, winning a 27% share of the vote – 4% more than its rival in government, New Democracy.
The real question is: Can Syriza’s threat of a ‘Grexit’ force Germany to lessen austerity measures?
There was a time when a Grexit was unthinkable. When the second bailout was issued in 2012, Greece’s default threatened to bring down Spain, Ireland, Italy and others with it; a total Eurozone collapse. Some commentators are still arguing that Greece’s exit in 2015 would trigger a selloff of peripheral bonds, undermine the ECB and threaten the Euro much to the same extent.
However, in an interview with Rheinische Post newspaper, a senior member of Angela Merkel’s party, Michael Fuchs, has unequivocally denied that Greece’s “blackmail” would work this time. “The times where we had to rescue Greece are over. There is no potential for political blackmail anymore. Greece is no longer of systemic importance for the euro.”
Syriza’s victory is by no means certain. Polling data suggests that no party will emerge with an outright majority. A poll cited in the Financial Times has suggested that 5% of the total vote might even be stolen by ex-PM and former Pasok leader George Papandreou, who has established a new centre-left coalition. The left’s vote would be split and the government would cling to power.
But Syriza is not alone. The rise of Podemos (which translates as “We can”), a Spanish leftist party, is symptomatic of political parties on the left breaking into the mainstream. The wave of populist parties gathering support since the economic crisis has come predominantly from the right, but not exclusively.
Economic protectionism and a tough stance on crime and chiefly immigration (albeit to very different extents) have characterised the policies of right-wing parties appealing to the politically disillusioned. With the rise of Syriza and Podemos, it would seem that nationalism and euroscepticism are attitudes which the left and right could hold increasingly in common in the future.
After all, the MEP who stood up in 2012 to attack the Troika’s dictatorship of Greek policy was UKIP’s Nigel Farage.
As these parties become established as more than just a protest vote, they will find themselves under increasing pressure to show that their ideals can be transformed into workable alternatives.
We will have to wait until after 25th January to see if Syriza can deliver.
Why Syriza is good news for Greece and Europe (V. Fouskas)
Why Syriza is good news for Greece and Europe
The Cold War is over. Scaremongering campaigns on the part of German and European officials make no sense, as Syriza is not a threat to Europe, but a breakthrough.
On 29 December, 2014, the Greek parliament failed to elect a President of the Republic and the country is heading toward elections, scheduled for 25 January 2015. Syriza will win the election, albeit in a climate of scaremongering that, mutatis mutandis, resembles Greece in the 1940s and after. Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany's Finance Minister has already warned that, "the new government [implying Syriza] must fulfil all the obligations signed by the previous one". This new type of White Terror must stop for the benefit of both Greece and Europe.
In December 1944, Athens was in flames. Clashes took place between Greek nationalist forces and the British Army on the one hand, and Greek left democratic forces of the National Liberation Front (EAM-ELAS), on the other. The clashes were confined to Athens, but all over Greece the situation remained very tense. The defeat of EAM-ELAS in Athens by superior forces, led to its disarmament in the Varkiza Agreement (February 1945), followed by a campaign of fear and intimidation, a campaign of White Terror that finally led to a bloody Civil War (1946-49) and the final defeat of EAM by the nationalist forces aided by the USA in Cold War conditions.
From 2011 onwards, and especially before and during the electoral campaigns of May and June 2011, a new form of White Terror and propaganda of fear and intimidation was levelled against Syriza, Greece's rising party of the left, on the grounds of "taking Greece back to Middle Ages by moving the country outside the EU and the EMU". Before the crucial parliamentary vote of 29 December 2014, Greek right-wing PM, Antonis Samaras, the key person responsible for Greece's nationalist stance over the issue of Macedonia in 1990-1993, exercised, together with his right-wing and "socialist" entourage, the same form of obscene propaganda, trying to scare the MPs and, by extension, the electorate away from Syriza positions.
No doubt, the same scaremongering tactics will be pursued by all pro-establishment parties in the run-up to the election contest of 25 January, which Syriza is poised to win. So is it, mutatis mutandis, the 1940s all over again? Not at all, and to the extent that it is, this time by contrast, it is going to be good for both Greece and Europe. Here is why.
The post-Civil War regime established in Greece had all the features of a semi-authoritarian, peripheral and dependent regime under Cold War conditions: its ideology was purely anti-Communist and anti-left/democratic; its political powers were drawn from its ability to treat its citizens to a good dose of fear and compulsion under the auspices of its foreign Cold War master, the USA; and its economic abilities were restricted due to a structural, pre-existent, developmental gap with the economies of the core. In other words, Greece in the 1950s and 1960s remained a relatively under-developed, semi-authoritarian state and a dependent, peripheral national formation, despite its high growth rates.
Soon, in 1967, came dictatorship, after the failure of the right-wing establishment to control the rise of the left and the refusal of Archbishop Makarios in Cyprus to surrender his independent island to three pro-NATO forces: Greece, Turkey and the UK. Thus, the post-1974 breakthrough that came with the legalisation of Communism and the formation of political forces voting for a new constitution, heralded a period that soon began to give way to new forms of economic and political dependency. The European Community began to be Greece's new financial sponsor, with the USA in the background controlling, via NATO, Greece's security apparatus.
This emergent complexity was marred by a new, two-party regime alternating in power, or ruling together in a Große Koalition, until recent times. This created an unprecedented regime of political clientelism, nepotism, corruption and wheeling and dealing, the most recent big scandal being that involving German multinational, Siemens. The collusion between big comprador interests (large import consortia) and the governing parties of New Democracy and PASOK has been colossal. The more the fusion between comprador interests and ruling parties deepened, the more new forms of authoritarianism emerged, especially with the rise to prominence of a monetarist set of policies that began prevailing in the executives of Europe and the EEC/EU itself in the 1980s (Greece became a member in 1981, five years ahead of Portugal and Spain and for geo-strategic/geo-political, rather than economic, reasons).
In a purely Cold War manner, the systemic parties managed to contain the fragmented Greek left, which briefly rose to some prominence in 1989-90, when PASOK lost power amidst a series of scandals. The fall of Communism took its toll on the Greek radical left, but it soon re-grouped and created a stable political force winning 4% of the vote, aside from the traditional Greek Communist Party (KKE), one of the last vestiges of Stalinism not just in Europe but in the world.
Syriza
Some argue that the rise of Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left) is the result of the extreme austerity policies implemented in Greece by the two ruling parties as a consequence of the debt crisis. This is only partially correct. The debt crisis and the austerity that followed destroyed the middle classes and pushed people to the extreme left and the extreme right, but the recruiting process of the extreme right of Golden Dawn has been contained, whereas Syriza's influence has increased with the passage of time. Today, opinion polls give it top ranking. Moreover, no splinter group or leadership coming from the matrices of the two ruling parties has managed so far to amass any considerable political force.
One explanation remains outstanding in explaining the rise of Syriza to prominence, namely, the deep ideological roots of the spirit of the Greek democratic resistance against Nazism and nationalism in the 1940s, roots passed on from one generation to another, of which not just the Greeks but the whole of European civilization must be proud. What is happening today should not be seen by EU leaders as a call for the recapitulation of the 1940s project to defeat the left that provided the backbone of resistance against Nazism in Greece; rather, it should be seen as a blessing, opening the way for profound changes both in Greece and Europe against the dominance of neoliberal financialization and the anti-inflation bias presided over by Germany.
The Cold War is over. Scaremongering campaigns on the part of German and European officials make no sense, as Syriza is not a threat to Europe but a breakthrough. Syriza's programme advocates a substantial write-off and renegotiation of the bail-out agreements, accompanied with what is called a "development clause". Leaning towards a Keynesian, rather than a monetarist, approach, Syriza opts for balanced rather than surplus budgets, and advocates a return to the minimum wage and a relief programme for all affected by the crisis in order to stem the humanitarian fall-out. It also advocates a fair taxation system and a breaking of the nexus between corruption and comprador interests, although we have not yet seen a concrete reform programme concerning institutional renewal and re-organisation of Greece's dilapidated state machine.
Elements of this programme should include a generous de-centralisation of the state strengthening the weak periphery, bringing into the heart of it the taxpayer and not the corrupt comprador element with its political networking, complexities and clientelist networks.
In all, this is a modest and reasonable programme from which moderate left and democratic socialist forces across Europe would benefit by letting themselves being steered clear of the monetarist consensus of the centre in which German anti-inflation interests and policies have the upper hand. Before the bail-out austerity agreements were implemented, Greece's debt to GDP ratio was at 125%; today it is at 174%. Unemployment was at 9%; today it is at 27%, whereas youth unemployment is at 65%. Why then should demand-led policies be an anathema for Europe's rulers?
To this end, socialist forces throughout Europe, especially in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and the Labour Party in the UK, should support Syriza in its titanic effort to win the election of 25 January against the obscurantism of the falling, failed and corrupt regime that has been governing Greece not just since 1974 but since December 1944. "Two Karamanlises" of the Right-Wing New Democracy party and "three Papandreous" of various Centre-Left parties have ruled Greece from the 1940s to the present day. It is now time for those dynasties to go home. But there is also something else that should not go unnoticed.
In the past, as Lenin famously wrote in his State and Revolution, socialists used to say that Nazism and fascism were embedded in, and emanated from the state's conservative machine, which should be smashed in the transition to socialism. Today, the phenomena of extremism and neo-Nazism have their roots directly in the market fundamentalism of ruling elites and neoliberal financialization. Rampant market forces feed xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism across Europe, and the wilder the supply-side policies are the more the likelihood that we will see the emergence of strong neo-Nazi parties.
The Aegean, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans is a remarkable geo-strategic frontier for Europe, especially as regards population movements on the ground. Europe needs Syriza and Greece to produce a balanced policy on migration and illegal migration, cultivating solidarity with Asians and Africans, instead of hostility and civic conflict. That is an additional reason why Syriza must be supported by all democrats across Europe. This would be the real victory of the left against neo-Nazi forces, opening the road for more substantive social democratic changes across the continent and beyond.
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