Posted: Aug 10, 2014 4:55 am
David Graeber : “Spotlight on the financial sector did make apparent just how bizarrely skewed our economy is in terms of who gets rewarded” - Salon.com
noting
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs - STRIKE!
DG proposes that much of the growth has been in administrative sorts of jobs, and related ones like financial services, telemarketing, corporate law, human resources, and public relations. He proposes calling them "bullshit jobs", empty jobs that don't really produce much of value, something like digging a hole and then filling it up again.
As DG points out, in capitalism, that is not supposed to happen. If anything, it is like the Soviet Union, which got full employment by creating lots of makework jobs, like 3 people to handle a customer's order.
This seems to me like part of Peter Turchin's long-term cycle of history: elite overproduction. After a period of relatively egalitarian growth, a society's elites start to grow much faster, and they eventually make the society top-heavy. The elites then fight each other over the top spots.
He then mention someone who was an unsuccessful rock musician who became a corporate lawyer to pay the bills.
That seems plausible: corporate elites thinking that only corporate-elite sorts of jobs are worth paying for, and nobody else's jobs.
The ultimate in this position is Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, where the people who go on strike are mostly business leaders.
This leads to the position that one ought to dig holes and fill them up again, because it is so virtuous to do so.
Then this oddity:
What can be done? Mass defection? A spiritual awakening? DG notes that it was done in the Sixties and it provoked a backlash that made the problem even worse. He proposes that we need a labor movement that "manages to finally ditch all traces of the ideology that says that work is a value in itself, but rather redefines labor as caring for other people."
noting
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs - STRIKE!
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? David Graeber explored the phenomenon of bullshit jobs for our recent summer issue – everyone who’s employed should read carefully…
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 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.
DG proposes that much of the growth has been in administrative sorts of jobs, and related ones like financial services, telemarketing, corporate law, human resources, and public relations. He proposes calling them "bullshit jobs", empty jobs that don't really produce much of value, something like digging a hole and then filling it up again.
As DG points out, in capitalism, that is not supposed to happen. If anything, it is like the Soviet Union, which got full employment by creating lots of makework jobs, like 3 people to handle a customer's order.
This seems to me like part of Peter Turchin's long-term cycle of history: elite overproduction. After a period of relatively egalitarian growth, a society's elites start to grow much faster, and they eventually make the society top-heavy. The elites then fight each other over the top spots.
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.
He then mention someone who was an unsuccessful rock musician who became a corporate lawyer to pay the bills.
... 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.)
That seems plausible: corporate elites thinking that only corporate-elite sorts of jobs are worth paying for, and nobody else's jobs.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, there has been an enormous effort on the part of the people running this country to turn that around: to convince everyone that value really comes from the minds and visions of entrepreneurs, and that ordinary working people are just mindless robots who bring those visions to reality.
The ultimate in this position is Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, where the people who go on strike are mostly business leaders.
But at the same time, they’ve had to validate work on some level, so they’ve simultaneously been telling us: work is a value in itself. It creates discipline, maturity, or some such, and anyone who doesn’t work most of the time at something they don’t enjoy is a bad person, lazy, dangerous, parasitical. So work is valuable whether or not it produces anything of value.
This leads to the position that one ought to dig holes and fill them up again, because it is so virtuous to do so.
Then this oddity:
Actually I saw something telling written by a right-wing activist on some blog—he said, well the funny thing is, when we first started our school reform campaigns, we tried to focus on the administrators. But it didn’t take. Then we shifted to the teachers and suddenly the whole thing exploded.
What can be done? Mass defection? A spiritual awakening? DG notes that it was done in the Sixties and it provoked a backlash that made the problem even worse. He proposes that we need a labor movement that "manages to finally ditch all traces of the ideology that says that work is a value in itself, but rather redefines labor as caring for other people."