Bullshit Jobs – An overworked provocation

#nonfiction #politics

After discussing Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism in my last post, it felt appropriate to follow it up with a seminal text by one of the other key representatives of the early 21st Left: David Graeber. Graeber was strongly involved with the Occupy Movement and is credited with coining its famous “we are the 99%” slogan. An anthropologist by training, Graeber, like Fisher, applied his critical eye to a whole range of social phenomena, including debt, bureaucracy and social resistance. Sadly, also like Fisher, Graeber died too young, succumbing to acute necrotic pancreatitis in 2020.

Where Fisher gave us the insight that it remains easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, one of Graeber’s enduring concepts is that of ‘bullshit jobs’. Bullshit jobs made their debut in a short essay in STRIKE! Magazine in 2013, which remarkably is still online. The essay generated a flurry of interest, including several surveys commissioned by pollsters like YouGov, which led Graeber to expand it into a full sized book. Unfortunately, what makes for a strong provocative essay does not necessarily translate into convincing social analysis. I had a vague recollection of Graeber’s argument from having read the essay years ago, and as with Fisher’s Capitalist Realism remember the sense of it expressing a truth that we all feel but can find hard to express. I was intrigued how Graeber had developed the original argument of the essay into a full length book, so decided to give the audiobook a listen. This was, sadly, a disappointment. The book is a padded out version of the essay, with the padding reinforcing its weaknesses and diminishing its strengths.

Bullshit Jobs starts by recalling the original essay and sets out how the events that followed led to the publication of the book. Graeber informs us that the polls conducted after his essay suggested up to 40% of workers in some Western countries considered themselves to be in a bullshit job. To interrogate these findings, Graeber invited correspondence with these workers, creating a body of case studies for anthropological analysis. The findings are undeniably interesting and provocative, but a couple of unscientific polls and self-selected case studies are not a very solid foundation to base a totalising social theory on.

The case studies themselves are of variable persuasiveness. Bullshit Jobs offers them up as anecdotes supporting the particular argument it is making at a given point, but this obviously cannot avoid the suspicion that the examples are cherry picked. And while some of the case studies clearly describe jobs without any redeeming qualities, others contain complaints that rather indicate a lack of experience or insight. For example, there is the worker who objects to participating in a prioritisation workshop using the rather common MoSCoW method. Another worker objects to having to actually write reports of their employees’ performance, and a third complains about an excess of pointless planning surveys on environmental impacts involved with infrastructure projects. Any of these activities can be pointless of course, but that does not mean they are intrinsically so. The key here is context, which we don’t get, and so the reader can be forgiven for thinking that Graeber objects to prioritisation, record keeping and not killing bats. Many examples seem to come from people who have recently entered the workforce, and it is reasonable to ask whether their assessment is born of a full grasp of their function in their organisation, or of a lack of familiarity with their workplace. Graeber counters this with the argument that since no objective measure of the utility of a job exists, it is justified to take a worker’s self-assessment as measure. Maybe, and I can see how this fits with his anthropological background. But some insights require knowledge, experience or both, which can only be gained over time. I say this as someone who has, with time, begrudgingly come to respect a risk register.

The sparseness of the evidence is compounded by a lack of methodological precision that borders on intellectual dishonesty.  In Chapter 2, Graeber introduces a schema of five different types of bullshit jobs (flunkies, goons, box tickers, duct tapers and task managers) based on what ostensible function they perform. But this typology obscures a more fundamental difference, which is whether a job is a bullshit job because the worker is not doing work at all, is doing work that is objectively pointless, or is doing work that is socially harmful. While Bullshit Jobs acknowledges that these are different, its argument repeatedly treats them as equivalent, or relies on a shift between the particular and the universal. Specific examples are brought to bear to make a point or rebuttal, but Bullshit Jobs then proceeds as if either all bullshit jobs, or large subsets of them, share the features of the particular examples cited. For example, Bullshit Jobs at different points provides examples both of workers with nothing to do and workers who are very busy being socially harmful, but in both cases refers back to the same 40% statistic to generalise these observations, even though they cannot both apply to the same sets of workers. This assumed equivalence is hence merely assumed, never proven and often implausible.

This analytical imprecision forces Graeber towards an almost conspiratorial theory to explain why bullshit jobs exist, because his framework cannot allow ‘because it makes sense for organisation X to create said job’ as an answer. Instead, Graeber suggests bullshit jobs were invented to prevent the masses from having too much spare time on their hands, which they might use to come up with ‘unhelpful’ political demands (the Trilateral Commission is namechecked in the book). Yet clearly, it makes sense for organisations to employ tax lawyers to reduce their tax bill, or for governments who want to reduce the welfare bill to employ people to hamper access to social security. The fact that Graeber is politically opposed to these practices does not mean that they are not rational at a more systemic level of analysis.

And that, ultimately, is the fundamental double flaw of the whole book. ‘Bullshit jobs’ makes a great provocation, but as an analytical concept it containers too many different types of work together and remains stuck at the individual job as the level of analysis. This makes it blind to more systemic explanations, and Graeber is not able to ascend from bullshit jobs to higher levels of abstraction in the way that for example Marx manages dialectically with the commodity form in Capital. Instead, the book often reads as a screed against all the things Graeber dislikes (university administrators, lawyers, the rich, etc.) with the argument reverse-engineered to support the desired outcome.

All of this is a shame, because something of that kernel of truth of the original essay remains. It is a good question why so many people are engaged in jobs they don’t like and that don’t seem to have any socially useful output. And Bullshit Jobs still serves as an entry point to other concepts and theories that have much greater systemic explanatory power, such as alienation, hegemony, social value, etc. The provocation remains productive in making us think, but ironically, would have worked better if less work had been spent on it.

Notes & Suggestions