A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse – David Graeber on “The Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”

Guest Post by Michael Krieger

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Graeber’s argument is similar to one he made in a 2013 article called “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”, in which he argued that, in 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the end of the century technology would have advanced sufficiently that in countries such as the UK and the US we’d be on 15-hour weeks. “In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. 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.”

But what happened between the Apollo moon landing and now? Graeber’s theory is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was mounting fear about a society of hippie proles with too much time on their hands. “The ruling class had a freak out about robots replacing all the workers. There was a general feeling that ‘My God, if it’s bad now with the hippies, imagine what it’ll be like if the entire working class becomes unemployed.’ You never know how conscious it was but decisions were made about research priorities.” Consider, he suggests, medicine and the life sciences since the late 1960s. “Cancer? No, that’s still here.” Instead, the most dramatic breakthroughs have been with drugs such as Ritalin, Zoloft and Prozac – all of which, Graeber writes, are “tailor-made, one might say, so that these new professional demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally, crazy”

Graeber believes that since the 1970s there has been a shift from technologies based on realising alternative futures to investment technologies that favoured labour discipline and social control. Hence the internet. “The control is so ubiquitous that we don’t see it.” We don’t see, either, how the threat of violence underpins society, he claims. “The rarity with which the truncheons appear just helps to make violence harder to see,” he writes.

– From the Guardian article: David Graeber: ‘So Many People Spend Their Working Lives Doing Jobs They Think are Unnecessary’

Embarrassingly, it was only very recently that I became familiar with the writings of David Graeber, an author, anthropologist and professor at the London School of Economics. I read a decent amount, and very few writers connect with me in the way Mr. Graeber does. Of course, I don’t agree with everything he says (if you ever find yourself in total agreement with someone else there’s a problem), but I promise he will make you think. That’s worth a lot in the propagandized and dumbed down culture we inhabit.

About a month ago, I read an extremely thought provoking excerpt from his 2013 book, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement. The piece was titled, A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse, and I strongly suggest you read it.

Immediately after I read that, I  found him on Twitter and began following. Today, I came across a profile of him published by the Guardian, and I was once again reminded of how much I enjoy his thought process. So much so, that I decided to dedicate an entire post to him and encourage all of you to explore his work. Here are some excerpts from the Guardian article:

A few years ago David Graeber’s mother had a series of strokes. Social workers advised him that, in order to pay for the home care she needed, he should apply for Medicaid, the US government health insurance programme for people on low incomes. So he did, only to be sucked into a vortex of form filling and humiliation familiar to anyone who’s ever been embroiled in bureaucratic procedures.

At one point, the application was held up because someone at the Department of Motor Vehicles had put down his given name as “Daid”; at another, because someone at Verizon had spelled his surname “Grueber”. Graeber made matters worse by printing his name on the line clearly marked “signature” on one of the forms. Steeped in Kafka, Catch-22 and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Graeber was alive to all the hellish ironies of the situation but that didn’t make it any easier to bear. “We spend so much of our time filling in forms,” he says. “The average American waits six months of her life waiting for the lights to change. If so, how many years of our life do we spend doing paperwork?”

The matter became academic, because Graeber’s mother died before she got Medicaid. But the form-filling ordeal stayed with him. “Having spent much of my life leading a fairly bohemian existence, comparatively insulated from this sort of thing, I found myself asking: is this what ordinary life, for most people, is really like?

 Capitalism isn’t supposed to create meaningless positions. 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.”

This is a very important point. How does this happen? My answer is that our political and economic system is in fact a centrally planned oligarchy masquerading as a free market.

Graeber’s argument is similar to one he made in a 2013 article called “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”, in which he argued that, in 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the end of the century technology would have advanced sufficiently that in countries such as the UK and the US we’d be on 15-hour weeks. “In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. 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.”

But what happened between the Apollo moon landing and now? Graeber’s theory is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was mounting fear about a society of hippie proles with too much time on their hands. “The ruling class had a freak out about robots replacing all the workers. There was a general feeling that ‘My God, if it’s bad now with the hippies, imagine what it’ll be like if the entire working class becomes unemployed.’ You never know how conscious it was but decisions were made about research priorities.” Consider, he suggests, medicine and the life sciences since the late 1960s. “Cancer? No, that’s still here.” Instead, the most dramatic breakthroughs have been with drugs such as Ritalin, Zoloft and Prozac – all of which, Graeber writes, are “tailor-made, one might say, so that these new professional demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally, crazy”

Graeber believes that since the 1970s there has been a shift from technologies based on realising alternative futures to investment technologies that favoured labour discipline and social control. Hence the internet. “The control is so ubiquitous that we don’t see it.” We don’t see, either, how the threat of violence underpins society, he claims. “The rarity with which the truncheons appear just helps to make violence harder to see,” he writes.

He quotes with approval the anarchist collective Crimethinc: “Putting yourself in new situations constantly is the only way to ensure that you make your decisions unencumbered by the nature of habit, law, custom or prejudice – and it’s up to you to create the situations.” Academia was, he muses, once a haven for oddballs – it was one of the reasons he went into it. “It was a place of refuge. Not any more. Now, if you can’t act a little like a professional executive, you can kiss goodbye to the idea of an academic career.”

Why is that so terrible? “It means we’re taking a very large percentage of the greatest creative talent in our society and telling them to go to hell … The eccentrics have been drummed out of all institutions.” Well, perhaps not all of them. “I am an offbeat person. I am one of those guys who wouldn’t be allowed in the academy these days.” Indeed, he claims to have been blackballed by the American academy and found refuge in Britain. In 2005, he went on a year’s sabbatical from Yale, “and did a lot of direct action and was in the media”. When he returned he was, he says, snubbed by colleagues and did not have his contract renewed. Why? Partly, he believes, because his countercultural activities were an embarrassment to Yale.

His publications include Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004), in which he laid out his vision of how society might be organised on less alienating lines, and Direct Action: An Ethnography (2009), a study of the global justice movement. In 2013, he wrote his most popularly political book yet, The Democracy Project. “I wanted it to be called ‘As if We Were Already Free’,” he tells me. “And the publishers laughed at me – a subjunctive in the title!” But it was Debt: The First 5,000 Years, published in 2011, that made him famous and has drawn praise from the likes of Thomas Piketty and Russell Brand. Financial Times journalist and fellow anthropologist Gillian Tett argued that the book was “not just thought-provoking but exceedingly timely”, not least, no doubt, because in it Graeber called for a biblical-style “jubilee”, meaning a wiping out of sovereign and consumer debts.

At the end of The Utopia of Rules, Graeber distinguishes between play and games – the former involving free‑form creativity, the latter requiring participants to abide by rules. While there is pleasure in the latter (it is, to quote from the subtitle of the book, one of the secret joys of bureaucracy), it is the former that excites him as an antidote to our form‑filling red-taped society.

He is suggesting that, instead of being rule-following economic drones of capitalism, we are essentially playful. The most basic level of being is play rather than economics, fun rather than rules, goofing around rather than filling in forms. Graeber himself certainly seems to be having more fun than seems proper for a respected professor.

David Graeber’s latest book was recently published and is titled, The Utopia of Rules.

For related articles, see:

Ex-CIA Officer Claims that Open Source Revolution is About to Overthrow Global Oligarchy

Networks vs. Hierarchies: Which Will Win? Niall Furguson Weighs In.

The Comcast/Time Warner Merger and the War Between Centralization and Decentralization

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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Olga
Olga

Amen

flash
flash

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hardscrabble farmer

Bucky obviously never visited Camden, NJ.

Not everyone is you. This is not a nation of 325 million intellectuals thirsting for knowledge but thwarted by capitalist running dogs.

flash
flash

HSF, . Bucky as you call him is just stating the obvious…creating more useless jobs filling bureaucracies that administer bureaucracies which control the flow of mountains of free shit does nothign to tame the feral beast inside the idle …that’s another problem altogether .

Here’s another example of a useless job that feeds off the productive in order to support more useless jobs.

New Polls Show That 75% of Americans See Politicians as Corrupt; 2-to-1 Now Distrust the Police


Martin, First, I want to thank you for all that you do to educate and enlighten — you are living proof that excellence cannot be held down. I just finished speaking with my neighbor whose son was employed with the local police department and was someone for whom I provided a reference. I just learned he was recently fired for “ambiguity”. Essentially, and per comments from his peer-policeman at both City and County level, he failed to meet his ticket and confiscation quotas. I know my neighbor’s son well — prior to his tenure as a policeman, he helped me tame the 10 acres I live upon: he did his work with honor, intelligence and value. While its obvious we’re being hunted for money, its ver disturbing to see it happening at such a granular level — certainly nothing you haven’t warned us about. Thank you again for all you do to help humanity move forward. I look forward to seeing you in Princeton this November.

Best Regards,

NS

REPLY: The most recent polls show that 75% of Americans now distrust the police. They are becoming nasty, greedy, and view the public as the enemy. The days of helping people are just gone. Municipal governments are dead broke and they have converted the police to hunt down money everywhere. USA TODAY/Pew Research Center Poll finds Americans by 2-to-1 say police departments nationwide don’t do a good job in holding officers accountable for misconduct, Meanwhile, polls show that 75% of Americans believe politicians are just corrupt.
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Dutchman
Dutchman

From my observations as a software developer ( of 44 yrs ) is that most office people could work about 20 yrs a week, and get their work done.

IMO – except for people who have a quota, we could have a 32 hr work week, and get the same amount of work done. If we would reduce the work week by 8 hrs – 20% – that could reduce wear and tear on our highways, autos, our selves, plus save a lot of gasoline.

Stucky

Worst job I ever had was standing 8 hours a day at a plastic injection molding machine makin 5 gallon buckets. Eight hours of pushing a button, waiting 30 seconds, open the door, stack the bucket. Rinse and repeat. That’s it! It was a summer job. If that would have been my “life’s work”, I’m fairly certain I would have committed suicide.

I’m lucky to MOSTLY have had jobs I enjoyed. Few people — throughout history — have been so fortunate.

I wonder sometimes about agrarian economies of yesteryear … say, 1700 …. and you’re a farmer stuck looking at a horses’ ass all day long plowing your field. Useful? Yes. Also mind-numbingly boring and tedious, imho.

Anonymous
Anonymous

“From my observations as a software developer ( of 44 yrs ) is that most office people could work about 20 yrs a week, and get their work done. ”

Yeah, I once had an office job that required about 20 years a week worth of work to get it done.

Which is why I quit office work.

Anonymous
Anonymous

People need productive, useful, and purposeful work to have a sense of self worth and be peaceful members of society.

A human trait long recognized in the old phrase “Idle hands breed mischief”.

ASIG
ASIG

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that anthropologist are more likely to fuck things up then even those damn economists; Great with theories but short on practical common sense.

Billy
Billy

I wonder sometimes about agrarian economies of yesteryear … say, 1700 …. and you’re a farmer stuck looking at a horses’ ass all day long plowing your field. Useful? Yes. Also mind-numbingly boring and tedious, imho. – Stucky

I used to think that, too.

Till I understood the concept of ‘delayed gratification’ applied to that work as well.

Scratching in the dirt, fighting invasive weeds, wondering ‘What the fuck am I doing?’.

Then, after we had been here a few years and Daddy passed on, we had most of our surviving family here after the ceremony. Everyone remarked at how well-kept, organized and productive everything was. Most wished they lived someplace exactly like our little farm.

A farmer in 1700 would have also had the opportunity to provide much-needed food to his community. If he didn’t produce it, it would either have to be imported from somewhere else at greater cost or folks would have to go without.

Boring? At times, yes, certainly. But the reward comes later – the payoff being happy, grateful, well-fed people you know and care about. The farmer is the foundation of civilization. In that respect, the work is remarkably rewarding.

TE
TE

He quotes with approval the anarchist collective Crimethinc: “Putting yourself in new situations constantly is the only way to ensure that you make your decisions unencumbered by the nature of habit, law, custom or prejudice – and it’s up to you to create the situations.”

This totally explains my life and I do not believe I have ever read one of his books.

Plus, my eclectic life started long before he started publishing.

My hub has lived, pretty much, the same day for the past 30 years.

Living it for 10 is KILLING me inside.

And now I know why, once you are unfettered from doing what you are told, what you are led, to do and be, it is damned hard to go back.

I maybe turning 48 this year, but I’m not too old to switch things up again. And I must.

And one of the things has to be getting away from the mind-numbing, frightening now, governmental paperwork and regulations that rule my life. I need someone like @bb, a state-sucking rule believer, to do that for me. Because I’m nearly to the point I can’t even force myself to keep doing it.

Axel
Axel

“About fifty percent of the Human Race are middle men, and they don’t take kindly to being eliminated.” — Captain Malcolm Reynolds

The best science fiction is sprinkled with truisms. Although, in today’s society I would put that number somewhat higher.

credit
credit

i was partially grooving along with this guy and then i saw the quote about how he drew praise from Russell Brand – then an immediate credibility vacuum engulfed my brain.

TE
TE

@credit.

Russell Brand speaks one helluva amount of truth.

The problem is his message should resonant with Constitutionalists, but his appearance, personal life, and affect, turn them off.

I was amazed the first time I listened, not just watched, him.

Peace.

credit
credit

@TE
Brand is a dangerous narcissist sex and fame and drug addict who mirrors sincerity in order to sway his audience, of which you joined.

“I want to change the world, and do something valuable and beautiful. I want people to remember me before I’m dead, and then more afterwards.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

DRUD
DRUD

Wow, credit, you could not have driven home TE’s comment any more completely.

“Brand is a dangerous narcissist sex and fame and drug addict”

This is his “personal life” and has nothing to do with the truth of his message. You should do a quick Google search of “ad hominem.” Maybe your comment is already listed as a perfect example.

DC Sunsets

“Submitting oneself to labor discipline—supervision, control, even the self-control of the ambitious self-employed—does not make one a better person. In most really important ways, it probably makes one worse. ”

Just another of the pampered “intellectual class” who has no idea from where prosperity arises. NONE.

Damn it, it should be REQUIRED READING for anyone who is allowed time on a soapbox to re-read Leonard Reed’s “I, Pencil” and George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” at least every 12 months.

I so tire of people who confuse cause and effect.

DC Sunsets

Ironic, is it not?

Every “intellectual” who has “a plan” immediately disqualified himself because, by definition, he reveals a profound lack of wisdom, a planet-sized blind spot about his absolute ignorance in the grand scheme of things.

The wise listen and observe, and occasionally point out the ignorance of the self-assured.

For the record, I have no idea how “everything” should be run; I only know that the means ARE ALWAYS the ends, thus any “good notion” that must be implemented via coercion is by definition a “BAD NOTION.”

Bob
Bob

The Pareto principle permeates life. About 20% of the people, in 20% of the jobs, produce about 80% of the value that accrues to the enterprise. The pure bullshit jobs probably amount to 20% of 80% of low-value jobs…

Likewise, about 20% of the people do about 80% of the real thinking that affects human progress.

And finally, even the smartest and most focused among us spend only about 20% of the time actually thinking things through.

Thinking, by itself, is hard, difficult work. It will tire you out quickly until you build yourself up through constant practice. And by constant, please understand that most of us start from a very low baseline — about 20% of that 20% is high-quality, value-added thought, and the remaining 80% is of lesser value. And, of course, 20% of that 80% approaches being pure drivel…

Pirate Jo
Pirate Jo

Graeber is totally on-track when it comes to the proliferation of bullshit jobs.

But this?

“Graeber’s theory is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was mounting fear about a society of hippie proles with too much time on their hands. “The ruling class had a freak out about robots replacing all the workers. There was a general feeling that ‘My God, if it’s bad now with the hippies, imagine what it’ll be like if the entire working class becomes unemployed.’ You never know how conscious it was but decisions were made about research priorities.” Consider, he suggests, medicine and the life sciences since the late 1960s. “Cancer? No, that’s still here.” Instead, the most dramatic breakthroughs have been with drugs such as Ritalin, Zoloft and Prozac – all of which, Graeber writes, are “tailor-made, one might say, so that these new professional demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally, crazy”

What nonsense! The “Ruling Class” (TM) didn’t get together one day and decide to worry about the hippies. Most of them WERE hippies back in the day. They don’t give a shit whether you are working or not, as long as they keep making money. Cancer research took a backseat to crazydrugs because the crazydrugs make a faster buck for the shareholders. You could research cancer for thirty years and never make much headway. But giving people pills to pop is a guaranteed moneymaker. People like pills! The people who invented Prozac will never have to work another day in their lives. The people trying to cure cancer are still pulling all-nighters.

Sometimes this conspiracy stuff drives me crazy. People are simply greedy, self-serving, and view everything through a short-term lens, which explains most of the way things are. There’s no need to imagine elaborate plots.

Jim
Jim

A previous comment here from anonymous that people need useful productive work to be happy and feel like they have a purpose in life needs to be challenged. Our history simply shows that this is not true. Humans are the only species on the planet to create jobs. All the rest of the species on this planet seem to be very happy without jobs and humans at one time lived the same lifestyle. Simply breathing and eating and enjoying the weather. The lust for assets led to people trying to control other people and forcing them through slavery to do their bidding. Is it more obvious that people today with jobs they must do for a living are unhappy or that at one time people were unhappy doing nothing and sought out employment slash slavery? Please. A better way to put it would have been humans are happy when they have a purpose and that purpose helps other people. We were designed to be loving creatures. We are unhappy because all we do is kill instead of love. If the truth be known thats it. Humans were designed to love and we have turned to worshipping death. It all started with killing other animals and eating them.

Heywood Jablowme
Heywood Jablowme

@Stucky

RE; Your 9:08 am post- What exactly is your job now, I have never seen you post about your professional life and you have a great deal of spare time…….must be nice. Are you a writer?

Stucky

Heywood

Yes, I do enjoy writing. My writing career has earned me several million dollars so far. I’d have even more moolah if Admin paid me what he owes.

I do quite a bit of work with Ms Freud’s Psycho-business. ALL the computer work, including running and analyzing psych testing with WAIS software, marketing brochures, editing professional papers, etc.

I have lawyers and homeowners as clients for doing detailed Loan Modification paperwork for the banks.

All these things are done from the kitchen table with an internet connection.

Stucky

Well, that last sentence seems ridicules. My kitchen table does NOT have an internet connection. However, the laptop that sits on the table does. I hope that clarifies things.

Billah's wife
Billah's wife

Sticky

Yew need uh job, and I ain’t talkin one uh them cock slobbin truckstop deals that Billah makes 40 or 50 bucks off of on the weekends. Apply yerself and stop free loadin off yer old lady yew half wookie half neanderthal.

Shitballs uh mercy how did yew end up this weigh?

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