BULLSHIT JOBS – David Graeber

I want to ask something of everyone who has a full-time job. What would you be doing with your time if you didn’t have to work it for 40 or 50 hours each week? What if you could get away with 20 or 15? How would this change your life? It’s definitely fun to imagine. Some of us would start bands, volunteer, create art. Others would travel, spend time with family. A few, no doubt, would spend all that time sleeping, drinking, arguing about shit in a cafe, or binge-watching TV. Do any of those ideas count as “time well spent”? Do you think those activities have “value?” Do they matter? Business owners tell us that automation will soon make our lives easier and our work shorter. If that’s the case, shouldn’t we be free by now to enjoy all the extra time that technology has made available for us?

We don’t get to enjoy all that free time, of course. Instead, we work longer and harder. We pick up second and third jobs to get by. When our company’s profits go up (and by and large, they have, for decades) we no longer see our pay increase with them. Instead, there always seems to be more red-tape, bureaucracy and managers showing up. We’re answering to more bosses, spending our hours doing busywork that matters less and less. This is “bullshit,” anthropologist David Graeber says, and we have to understand it if we want to get out of it. About ten years ago, he wrote an article entitled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” in Strike! magazine, and that set off the storm that led to this book‘s publication. Graeber believed many of us engaged in “bullshit jobs” where we accomplished little. He thought that many of us knew it, too, and solicited testimony from people who believed they were stuck in one.

Graeber describes a bullshit job as one that is “pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious.” In fact, not even those who work a bullshit job can justify why it should exist. If they want to remain employed, though, they have to pretend they believe their job should in fact exist. I’d bet we can all name people who have these sorts of jobs. They include many managers, clerks and administrators. Marketing people, corporate lawyers, and public relations professionals likely belong on that list. The ranks of these workers exploded over the last century. Meanwhile, in the U.S. at least, farmers and industrial workers reduced their ranks.

A “bullshit” job isn’t the same thing as a “shit” job, to Graeber. Hauling trash, cleaning conference rooms and waiting tables may not sound pleasant. Still, those are real jobs that serve a purpose. It makes a difference that someone performs that work. If you didn’t know what “essential workers” meant, you learnt it during the COVID-19 pandemic. It doesn’t mean middle managers or software design consultants. It doesn’t mean bankers or copyright attorneys. It means those cooking meals, watching kids, ringing up groceries and driving trucks. It means people making the products and performing services that keep us going.

Graeber describes five basic types of bullshit jobs. One group are flunkies, folks hired to make the boss look and feel important. They’re the minions. Goons are the “aggressive manipulators” like corporate lawyers, telemarketers, lobbyists, and so on. They intimidate, trick, and delude us into doing what their bosses want. Still, they’re not serving a real social need when they work. To fix problems that wouldn’t exist, we have duct-tapers. They clean up the messes their bosses make through lazy or poor decisions, or make up for dumb faults in a system. Programmers and civil servants seem to get a lot of this work. Box tickers allow an organization to “claim it is doing something that it, in fact, is not doing”. They create the illusion of due dilligence and pretend to investigate. They may take about compliance and oversight, but their work often ends up buried in reports no one reads. Finally, we have the taskmasters. These middle managers sometimes spend their days assigning work to others. They check for completion, but it often makes no difference if they’re there or not. Other times, they create bullshit work out of whole cloth for others to do. They create useless paperwork and craft “strategic” mission plans no one needs.

The testimonies recounted in Bullshit Jobs cut deep because I recognize them. They speak to the pain felt when you know what you spend most of your day doing doesn’t matter. People don’t like feeling useless. We want to be creative, helpful, beneficial in some way. They don’t like having to spend hours at a job without an actual purpose for being there.

Most of us don’t like being “false”, either. But sticking with a bullshit job involves pretense – your boss seems to be lying to you, you seem to be lying back. Then you both lie to the rest of the world to justify your position. But in the end, the lies benefit the boss the most – and why wouldn’t it be for their benefit? They’re the ones ultimately in charge here. Graeber cites capitalists who argue over and over that “bullshit jobs” can’t exist. Why? Because a capitalist will never hire someone to do nothing, so those jobs must be useful to somebody. When they do acknowledge that bullshit jobs exist, government is somehow the culprit. Bureaucratic interference and bloat are the causes they cite. But Graeber convincingly shows that this can’t be half the real story.

Bullshit administrative and management jobs proliferate in the corporate world, too. In some ways they’re growing faster there than the government sector. Government jobs are, despite myths, often quite concerned about minimizing waste. That’s a byproduct of being accountable to voters and legislators scrutinizing their work. Meanwhile, what about the government-corporate cooperation that moderates and neoliberal politicians swear by? Graeber shows time and again how this relationship creates more bureaucracy and inefficiency. Problems drag on forever so that corporations hold onto a government contract. Per one senior manager: “we make money from dealing with a leaky pipe – do you fix the pipe, or do you let the pipe keep leaking?”

So what does the corporate, capitalist world get out of these bullshit jobs? Why keep them going if they’re not making a real difference, and are so inefficient? Graeber reasons that today’s capitalism is no longer what Adam Smith and Karl Marx studied. Another system exists, laid on top of capitalism, that perpetuates these jobs. Graeber believes it has more in common with the precapitalist system of feudalism. In that old economic system, lords bought off their flunkies and goons to keep control. They earned goodwill by throwing large festivals and feasts. The rich distributed their economic bounty for political purposes. A lord gained prestige, loyalty, and stability by paying people off and currying favor.

Now, corporate executives and high-ranking managers are the new feudal lords. They curry favor by hiring managers, administration, and clerical staff. These hierarchies give them near-feudal amounts of loyalty, prestige and political power. Remember: corporate and government intermixing is prevalent and penetrating in modern states. To a very real extent, economic power remains political power and vice versa. If you doubt it, ask yourself why lobbyists are so highly paid and influential. Tell me how too-big-to-fail banks get government protections. Joe Biden will ensure businesses get PPP loans (and get them forgiven), but not that millions of renters get money to prevent evictions. Ever hear that despite their differences, Republicans and Democrats serve the same masters? This is what folks mean by that. In the end, they make sure one class keeps the clout they need to stay on top. Odds are that class is not yours.

Bullshit Jobs engages with workers’ lives and struggles as well as big economic ideas. For instance, Graeber criticizes the Marxist labor theory of value from an anarchist perspective. In doing so, he highlights the differences between caring and productive work. It isn’t near convincing enough for me to discard Marxist economics , I gotta say. Still, it highlights a gap in economic thought based around what our work “produces”. Graeber is innovative and thoughtful from beginning to end here. His vision of where our working lives could have gone – and what we could still do with them – is inspiring. It’s also maddening to understand it and see it unfulfilled.

Graeber’s book is incredibly informative, well-sourced, and easy to read. His insight into our society, our motivations, and even our souls is profound. There’s so much in this that I didn’t cover here. In later chapters, he analyzes how this bullshit work culture breaks our social bonds and politics. Graeber even gives us food for thought on the “liberal elites” so many of my neighbors despise. This book invites us to think of them as monopolizing the kinds of well-paid jobs based in creativity, care, and social value. By contrast, most of us get stuck with the unpleasant scut work (or more bullshit jobs) if we want to make a decent living. I’m not sure what I make of that perspective, but it’s something that will stick with me, because I think there’s something very real there.

How many real jobs do we hire to support the people out performing these bullshit jobs? How many cleaning, food service and childcare workers does it take? How much spent on construction, infrastructure and IT for offices that shouldn’t exist? Graeber, per his sources and estimates, believes 50% workers perform “bullshit jobs”. It might be more. If that’s true, then shouldn’t we pushing for the 15-hour workweek that’s now possible? Shouldn’t we be fighting for the lives of creativity, leisure, care and community that we want? Isn’t any version of that better than a desk job that accomplishes nothing? Would the folks who spend their days writing poetry, traveling, or just watching TV and chatting in cafes be any more useless and undeserving than the 50% of us working “bullshit” jobs now? Would many of those liberated people find new ways to contribute real social value to our lives? Don’t we deserve to find out?

I will be reading more from David Graeber, and returning to this book often as I continue to explore more about the world of work. I can’t recommend strongly enough that you do the same.