More to the point of the article, I’d argue most PhD work meets the definition of “bullshit jobs” much better than Graeber’s unrigorous and widely contested book.
It’s clear to me that we’re moving towards a two-tier economy, with one tier best described as varying levels of “broke” (which includes everyone from homeless people like her, to people who buy second hand BMWs and Mercedes who don’t have even $50,000 in savings), and asset owners. Earning money outside a salary is essential, whether online, or by starting a business, or OnlyFans-style stuff. More resourceful people with multiple, diversified income source will thrive, and people who believe “the system” has their back, and that a salaried life is the “prestigious”, “default” path, will crumble.
I guarantee you, there are people making money online, working 10h a week like you say, living in third-world countries that give you more day-to-day freedom (as long as you’re not a political opponent) than Western democracies. It’s not a dream, it’s reality! If you’re an anarchist, don’t expect the government to bail you out. The “dream life” according to you, is very real, today, and you can get to it with maybe a year of hard work, with the added benefit of being geopolitically independent, and able to bail if things get bad.
Sorry if i gave this impression. I precisely put "essential" in quotation marks to indicate that the interpretation is very subjective and variable. What i meant was that in order to have housing and food and what i personally consider basic human needs, most jobs are not needed: many people who previously felt like their job was a form of contribution to society took a step back with the first lockdowns and realized that overall and on average, society did just fine without them working at all. That's what i meant, and i certainly did not intend to imply that a virus can be beaten with cops and batons as most of our governments have tried (and failed), or that breathing fresh air and physical exercise should be illegal. Overall, there were pretty good anarchist analysis of the current Covid 1984 (wink) epidemic [0] [1], and you'll probably be glad to know i defied the lockdown and curfew on several occasions due to militant and/or mutual aid activities.
> More to the point of the article, I’d argue most PhD work meets the definition of “bullshit jobs”
Depends on what you call a job. If you do that to earn money and fame, sure that's bullshit. But in other cases, can we even call it a job? All PhD candidates (not a lot) i ever met here in France were in rather precarious situations and were studying questions that explicitly fascinated them, as part of related militant and creative activities. That kind of active curiosity often reminds me of the hacker spirit, but of course that's not the kind of mindset taught in most academic circles (the original "Watchdogs" for Nizan).
I often see people in various fields engaging in serious study of an issue that affects them. In computing, in cooking, in mechanics. We don't call these PhD because there's gatekeeping in academia, but most people are doing actual research work at some point in their life and i think that's something worth acknowledging/incentivizing. It strikes me that there are often similarities between certain blogposts detailing a problem space, and an actual research paper... but one is certainly less esteemed in our society.
> If you’re an anarchist, don’t expect the government to bail you out.
Even if you aren't an anarchist, please don't expect anything from powers that be. Read some historical propaganda and history of social struggles, or social sciences research papers.
> The “dream life” according to you, is very real, today, and you can get to it
I definitely agree with this part of the sentence, but we don't give it the same meaning. For me autonomy is something that is built collectively: there is no freedom or equality if only i enjoy them (or in other words, and as the saying goes, "none are free until all are free"). Earning a high-enough wage to afford to pay a landlord and supermarkets and dozens of evil corporations for very basic services is not a dream life in my view: i view it as earning a greater share of the pie baked off the back of exploited people. Personally, i'm more interested in free communes and how to build radical alternatives to the dystopian nightmare we're in.
[0] https://crimethinc.com/2020/04/10/and-after-the-virus-the-pe...
[1] https://fr.tild3.org/en/blog/2021/may-first/ (disclaimer: i co-wrote this one)
But we still needed “office” workers who support other areas of enterprises. Legal, contracts, compliance, HR, financial, development, management, etc. All still very essential to the viability of an enterprise but who could perform those duties remotely.
Sure there is necessary fluff like all the idiotic “trainings” in different things that are self- perpetuating industries that are in reality box checking exercises, they are a drag but a minority of things.
I precisely meant that society would be better off without all these "jobs". They are useless constructs required by capitalism and competition, but do not build anything useful for society, except maybe for compliance (if by that you meant quality assurance).
Moreover, i would argue that productive jobs don't have to be so many. When you have ten supermarkets selling the same shit, you need storage and logistics for all of them run by different people. If we lived in a society of cooperation not competition, each supermarket could probably be run on half the jobs currently required (if not much less).
Likewise for food production. If canteens were serviced by people who enjoy that and consider it a useful service to their peers, and not to ensure their basic survival through wage slavery, then we'd have overall less venues to feed everyone and much less food waste.
I'm not arguing against free initiative to start some project, i'm just arguing capitalism and its competition places very wrong incentives that wastes tons of human labor and actual resources that a mutualized/cooperative economy would save.
But...
The above probably described much of the "essential" workers. Capitalism is not the problem. Consumerism and advertising and the media are the creators of this artificial demand.
Communism or socialism would not fix things either. There you have no choice of what you will be in society. That is determined for you by your school and your connections. And because the economic demands are different, there is usually less automation, meaning more boring work. Now, sure, doctors and bricklayers may get more even compensation, though one may get a better apartment, but you're not in the driver's seat and you don't get to figure out your place in life (ala UBI dream), you get to do what the state (or if cooperative based, the cooperative) thinks they need you. You may ultimately become a parasite, but t will be where they want you as a parasite.
Communism/Socialism can usually do just as well as capitalism in terms of basic research (medicines, energy, etc), but tend to have a blind spot for other life-style centered improvements.
Consumerism is a direct consequence of capitalism. Capitalism rests on private property and competition, so you need either structural monopoly or mind-control techniques (advertisement) in order to grow against your competitor.
In an economy based on cooperation where you life is not dictated by pieces of paper (property titles) and imaginary numbers (money) these things simply do not exist.
> Communism or socialism would not fix things either. There you have no choice of what you will be in society.
I don't think we have the same understanding of communism, though the confusion is easy because most people who advocate for "communism" actually promote "dictatorship of the proletariat" (as theorized by Marx and Lenin) which they view as a necessary step to build communism which is the exact opposite of that (classless society).
I'm guessing all countries you think of as communist (USSR, China?) have never been communist in fact, at least not according to marxist/anarchist definition of communism which means there is no class or privileges and everyone is free and equal. You may be interested to read "There is no communism in Russia" or "Trotsky protests too much" by Emma Goldman about how communism in USSR is a lie.
As an anarchist, my understanding of communism is that everyone gets a choice, which we don't get in this society. If we remove chiefs and profiteers, then suddenly we are all free to enjoy life and decide for everything.
And i should point out that this is not merely a theory. Anarchist ideas have rarely been applied on a grand scale (though they have historically, and continue to live to this day in the hearts of revolutionaries of Chiapas and Rojava), but i've been living most of my life in free communes where money is not a thing (except for interactions with "the outside world") and property is ruled by needs not paper (the house is yours because you live in it).
Similarly, John Maynard Keynes, who probably had access to better data, predicted that increased productivity would allow us to work 15 hours / week by now. And his projections for productivity growth were accurate—however the benefits never materialized.
You see something similar with women entering the work force. It used to be that married men worked 8 hours a day, and that provided for their wives, who stayed home and took care of children, etc. Then it became more common for married women to work as well. You would expect that this would mean that husbands and wives would split the work and do 4 hours/day each and likewise share domestic responsibilities. But that's not what happened. Instead men still work 8 hours a day, and women work nearly as long and also bear most of the responsibility for childcare and the home.
They definitely materialized. Where you think the Bezos' and Musk's billions come from?
They never materialized for workers.
Why? To be honest, my "10 hour" estimate was not a direct quote, i don't remember if the authors i read said 4 or 15, but i do remember it was on this scale.
> You see something similar with women entering the work force.
So true.
Many people in the US could easily have 10h work week, if they could just reign in their creeping lifestyle inflation and live like people did at the end of 19th century.
Instead, most people opt to work more in exchange for significantly more comfort and pleasure. It's an unconscious choice for most - they can't even fathom living beyond a certain standard, so they in essence HAVE TO work fulltime. But the option to work less is there, they just don't realize it is.
This is a dangerous lie that makes it sound like most people's money are going to luxuries. They don't.
Over 30 % of average household spending in the US goes to rent or other housing, with insurance and healthcare being next 20 % and transportation next 15 %. See https://www.elitepersonalfinance.com/average-household-budge...
You might think people are spending money on TVs and iPhones and cars but most people buy a TV or iPhone every month - to their landlord, and once in a while buy a new car to their hospital.
Well housing is a great example of creeping lifestyle inflation. At the end of the 19th century, the average new house size was around 1,000 square feet and the average household size was close to 5 people. So 200 square feet per person. Today the average new house size is around 2,500 square feet and the average household size is 2.5 people. So 1,000 square feet per person. That's lifestyle inflation. If you're OK with 1,000 square feet shared with 4 other people, you can live more cheaply.
Health insurance wasn't common then and health care was close to non-existent. Penicillin hadn't even been invented yet. If you cut yourself and it got infected, you might die. If you're OK with living the way your great grandparents lived, you can live more cheaply. If you get sick, pray.
The average new car price is $40,000. That's another great example of creeping lifestyle inflation. I think I might have spent $40,000 in total on the 7 cars I have owned in my life. If you're OK with people at work making fun of the car you drive, you can live more cheaply.
What's the median of the actually-inhabited dwelling? You're talking about new houses. Most people can't afford new or a house, and live in crappy old apartment buildings. Also, most constructions are due to speculation: there's already plenty of empty dwellings. There is no housing crisis, the crisis is created by the rich to profit off the poor;
> The average new car price is $40,000. That's another great example of creeping lifestyle inflation.
Yes and no. People don't really have a choice because the incentives are skewed. It's hard to find old parts because there is no regulation forcing the industry to provide them and/or make inteoperable parts. Once again, capitalism is ruining everything, otherwise we could very well drive old cars and they would be well-maintained, and it would be illegal for a manufacturer to make a product that's incompatible with others (except for very compelling technical reasons).
That's definitely not how it works.
First, because people in the global north spend most of their resources on basic survival (unless you're from the upper classes) imposed on them by capitalist system based on private property where imaginary pieces of paper (property titles) means you need to pay ransom to reside somewhere.
Second, because the material comfort in the global north is not ensured by the workforce from the global north (i mean, partially yes, but mostly not) but by the quasi-slave labor from the global south, be it in mines or factories or sweatshops.
Third, because we have a global abundance of resources and so much of it is wasted. Estimates vary but i believe ~30% of food is wasted globally, yet people go hungry in most countries. There's millions of empty apartments in US/France, yet hundreds of thousands of people living in the streets. We live in a monstrous system where we have the means to make every one well-off but consciously decide some people must suffer.
Fourth, because even not accounting for obvious waste, planned obsolescence means stuff that is produced goes to replace shit-broken stuff instead of going to people who could get access to it for the first time. I believe planned obsolescence is a crime against humanity (and other species pollution and climate change are threatening).
If you take these points into consideration, i believe sharing work and resources more fairly could lead to everyone having decent material comfort for very little weekly work.
Watch a documentary about rural parts of third world countries, they're much closer to "basic survival" than pampered middle-class members in the West. For reference, in China, not that long ago people were subsiding primarily on rice - that the majority they ate every day throught all of their lives. Not to mention, they went hungry quite often (but not often enough to starve to death). That's "basic survival".
Here in the West, we can cut out so much fat out of our lives without really losing out anything truly substantial. For example, check out this guy: https://earlyretirementextreme.com/. He's living in Chicago on $700 a month, around half of which goes to health insurance and real estate taxes. But, people think it's "hard" or "miserable", and they prefer to chain themselves to their full-time jobs for decades so that they can fly on vacations, get new shiny cars and go to McDonalds every other day. That's the choice I wrote in my OP.
On the other hand, do you consider an end-of-the-19th-century lifestyle an acceptable target to aim at? I've found people tend to aim a lot higher when given the option.
In some regards, yes. In others, not. I'm not saying we should throw away all medical progress from the last century if that's what you're wondering. Or that we should have factories in city centers spilling toxic byproducts directly into the street as was common back then.
I'm arguing our modern comfort standards are not correlated with how much work takes place, because most of what we consider work today does not produce anything meaningful/useful.
I believe a 10h work week is a high estimate for how much we need to work to maintain our lifestyle [0], accounting for the dismantling of slave labor in poorer countries which produce everything we consume.
The amount of work necessary to produce food over a century has been cut by at least two orders of magnitude, and although there's a lot to learn from some mistakes (monoculture destroys soil and exposes plants to sickness, and fertilizers make the land sterile) we can benefit from scientific discoveries applied to traditional techniques, such as permaculture in the field of growing stuff.
Also, you can take into account how much infrastructure has been individualized, which also accounts for resource/energy waste. Do we really need one oven/fridge per person? Mutualizing infrastructure saves resources.
Overall, i'm convinced a decent modern life is possible [1] if we as a society decide to investigate the topic, instead of planning the next great scheme to steal money from the public for the already-insanely-rich known as "Green New Deal" which will certainly not do anything to save the environment.
Only a global revolution can save us from doom. The people in power and the people who own the industry are precisely the classes of people who put us in this situation. They are both incapable and unwilling to address issues. I'm not exactly saying we need to chop their heads (though that is tempting) but we as humans must do our best without expecting anything from these psychopaths running the show.
[0] Though it requires other measures such as fighting planned obsolescence and resource waste.
[1] Not exactly as we know it. We would probably use different materials, build less tall buildings and live in overall less-urban cities (etc). But we could still enjoy what we consider modern comfort (abundant medicine/food/heat).
The tragedy is in this assumption that extending opportunities to the middle and bottom layers will detract from the privilege of the top. While it is true to some extent that innovation and change does result exactly in that, in reality we’re all just missing out on the tide of prosperity.
But we’re hell bent on differential wealth and competitive advantage, all slaves to the egotistical gene
That is ridiculous. Many, many businesses closed, and many, many more were impacted in ways that will take years to recover from. Many employees took short term cuts in pay or benefits just so the companies they work for could survive.
Then add to that many of the jobs that couldn't be done during covid aren't useless, but the impact of not doing them scales over time. A good example of this is a sales person for a company that makes a product. Sure, if they can't bring in new clients for a few months, the company will hurt but may be ok. But if you take away their sale people forever, you might as well just close down the company.
Just because we _did_ survive without certain employees for a period of time doesn't make them all useless. The long term impacts are substantial.
> But if you take away their sale people forever, you might as well just close down the company.
When you say sales people, are you talking about a merchant behind a booth? Or a PR person? The latter should not exist at all in my opinion and is definitely a useless job which does not produce anything useful for society. The social function of marketing is to direct part of the revenue stream in one direction and not another, which is only "useful" (huge quotation marks) in an economy based on private property and competition. In a cooperative economy where as long as there is food people are fed, what matters is how to produce food and maintain infrastructure and heal people, and of course culture/science/education.
> Just because we _did_ survive without certain employees for a period of time doesn't make them all useless. The long term impacts are substantial.
I agree we cannot study these problems in isolation. However, you are the one not looking at the bigger picture. Another world is possible if we stop following the laws of Capital and State which are not laws of nature. Also, to be fair, many useless jobs kept going: i would have gladly done without cops and bankers and politicians for the lockdowns (and forever) but unfortunately these bloodsucking vampires grew even more virulent. Well I guess that's how species feeding on our misery operate.
No, I'm arguing based on the assumption that a LOT of countries ARE capitalistic. And recognizing that fact and designing things to work within that framework is a reasonable approach.
> if we lived in a fair society everyone would be well-off no matter what imaginary numbers (money and markets) have decided for them today.
But we don't. And we never will. Period. Full stop. Human nature doesn't work that way. I can't even see a way that you can argue that it does with a straight face. Even if there were no bad people (and there will always be bad people), there's always luck/randomness coming into play. Life is not an can not be fair. The best we can hope for it to make it as far as we can, and mitigate the cases where it isn't.
If everyone grew their own gardens and was a vegetarian, only consuming what they grew themselves, then the people working in grocery stores wouldn't be essential. But our society doesn't do that, so they are.
Have everyone who wants help in the fields (more people like that than you think), and if my neighbors think it's useful we'll have a grocery store but without money. We'll just take turns to feed the shelves and clean the floor and worry about the logistics. And if we grew too many potatoes for our local consumption, the people from other neighborhoods may well enjoy them and have some other stuff to send in our direction as well.
Mind you, capitalism certainly has it's issues, too... but it seems to better limit the negatives than every "share everything utopia" I've read about beyond tight knit groups of friends/family. Every single large scale example of what you describe seems to end in "and then it all burned to the ground", more or less.
People forget that agriculture is hard. We have it good now in comparison, but lots of changes are needed to make it great.
Agriculture without mechanisation is absolutely brutal on human body, plus you are dependent on random fluctuations in weather. A bad year or, God forbid, two bad years in a row meant a credible threat of starvation in the 1910s or 1920s for "ordinary" peasants.
And if the men were called to military service, as in the Great War (some were exempt, but not nearly enough), then women and the elderly had to do all the heavy work such as tiling, which they often could not.
People have all kinds of romantic concepts of rural life. It was rather harsh.
Unfortunately, the primary source for the graph (https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours) does not say anything about agricultural working hours pre-industrialization. They note efficiency increases in agriculture through automation, but since the agricultural workforce declined at the same time, there is no clear answer at least from this source.
The weird thing is that they are so ridiculously productive compared to the past having learned all these new tools, but their compensation is about in line with prior generations, because most all the productivity gains have gone to capital owners.
That's a good thing! But what i'm arguing is that:
1) Productivity increase has led to more shit being produced (thanks to planned obsolescence) instead of creating abundant material comfort for everyone
2) Productivity increase has not correlated with decreasing actual workload, and instead we have created new jobs which do not produce anything meaningful but continue to justify the protestant work-hard-or-die philosophy of life
I believe we could have the best of both worlds.
I get the romantic appeal of anarchism, but these people were not calling for more government regulation of labor markets.
It was unions, not anarchists, who were advocating for 8 hour work days, and some of them were attacked by police as well as private security, but also some of them were pretty violent themselves, for example attacking strike breakers and immigrants. There was a lot of street violence going on.
And you would be wrong. In the USA, you can look up the Haymarket Square affair or Sacco & Vanzetti trials, for example. These are just the most famous examples, but obviously not the only ones. More recently (1950-70s) you can take a look at Cointelpro which oversaw the assassination of dozens (hundreds?) of revolutionary militants.
In the history of France, the Paris Commune (and other Communes) have been repressed in blood by the government, killing dozens of thousands of civilians. Defecting from a military draft was also punishable by death, eg. during WWI when "decimating" was the norm.
But beyond that, the rule of law explicitly states that you have basic human rights that should be respected no matter what. In a democratic country, you don't execute people because they may have killed someone else previously; you arrest them to stand trial.
> I get the romantic appeal of anarchism
I don't see anything romantic about it. In my view, it's just the only fair system (or rather, systems) we can come up with to ensure freedom and equality for all. It's very pragmatic: changing chiefs has not helped us, so why not change the rules of the game entirely and let everybody decide?
> It was unions, not anarchists, who were advocating for 8 hour work days
Some unions are anarchist. Famously, IWW was founded by anarchists (such as Lucy Parsons) and they for sure advocated for the 8 hour work day: not as a great solution to all problems, but as a rallying point for further social change through a global revolution. General strike was articulated by Émile Pouget and other anarcho-syndicalists back when the CGT (in France) was anarchist, as a tool for the exploited to demonstrate their power and help topple the capitalist system.
> attacking strike breakers and immigrants
Not saying it couldn't happen, but i'd be interested in sources and numbers. Especially in regards to immigrants, considering labor unions and anarchist circles in the USA were especially populated with immigrants who published propaganda in their own languages.
> some of them were pretty violent themselves
What does that say? Desperate people calling for justice will defend themselves against the oppressors crushing them. It cannot be compared to the cold violence used by bosses and politicians to silence any form of opposition. Or, put as a meme: https://i.imgur.com/LMCJBpU.jpg
I do remember. There were massive shortages of goods and services. It sucked.
Strongly agree. And yet the system didn't collapse. I don't know about where you're from, but here in France:
- products shortages was due to people piling up, and was very localized
- the services shortage was organized by people in power to create drama: hospitals refusing non-covid cases, food banks and other NGOs closing their doors... it was all architectured as part of a "shock doctrine"
All in all, i agree some useful jobs have been deemed non-essential and stopped, and that's a problem. But still, i think a lot of people usually working in offices (which are 99% useless jobs [0]) suddenly realized how their employment does not contribute to society.
[0] You could argue working behind a desk to help people fill forms for social security and whatnot is a useful job, but i personally consider it a useless job because it's only required because the bureaucracy makes it hard to access social services on purpose (so people don't get it). If we had free healthcare, housing and food for all, there would be close to 0 (though never 0) useful office jobs.
Not really, no. Studying requires time but little resources. Is there a reason we don't have more free time? At the end of the 19th century, anarchist thinkers predicted with modern techniques we'd be down to 10h weekly work. Instead, society took the wrong turn and doubled down on "bullshit jobs" (see David Graeber) and the social control apparatus (police, surveillance industry, private security).
If we shared work equally and stopped working for greedy soulless corporate overlords, everyone would have time to spend on a PHD!
EDIT: If you doubt how much work is required by capitalist society but actually useless by any meaningful standard, remember what happened during the COVID lockdowns. Most jobs are not "essential". If you work in an office, you're mostly (if not entirely) useless to society as a whole.