Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

by David Graeber

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 sixties.) 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.

(Answer: If 1 percent 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.)

We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.

He explained that while he had worked for many years dutifully monitoring the city’s water treatment plant, the water board eventually came under the control of higher-ups who loathed him for his Socialist politics and refused to assign him any responsibilities. He found this situation so demoralizing that he was eventually obliged to seek clinical help for depression. Finally, and with the concurrence of his therapist, he decided that rather than just continue to sit around all day pretending to look busy, he would convince the water board he was being supervised by the municipality, and the municipality that he was being supervised by the water board, check in if there was a problem, but otherwise just go home and do something useful with his life.

Those who work bullshit jobs are often surrounded by honor and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well paid, and treated as high achievers—as the sort of people who can be justly proud of what they do. Yet secretly they are aware that they have achieved nothing; they feel they have done nothing to earn the consumer toys with which they fill their lives; they feel it’s all based on a lie—as, indeed, it is.

Hard labor, as it is now carried on, presents no interest to the convict; but it has its utility. The convict makes bricks, digs the earth, builds; and all his occupations have a meaning and an end. Sometimes the prisoner may even take an interest in what he is doing. He then wishes to work more skillfully, more advantageously. But let him be constrained to pour water from one vessel into another, to pound sand, to move a heap of earth from one place to another, and then immediately move it back again, then I am persuaded that at the end of a few days, the prisoner would hang himself or commit a thousand capital crimes, preferring rather to die than endure such humiliation, shame, and torture.

Obviously, I’m not going to deny that the latter is often the case. In fact, the pressure on corporations to downsize and increase efficiency has redoubled since the mergers and acquisitions frenzy of the 1980s. But this pressure has been directed almost exclusively at the people at the bottom of the pyramid, the ones who are actually making, maintaining, fixing, or transporting things. Anyone forced to wear a uniform in the exercise of his daily labors, for instance, is likely to be hard-pressed.26 FedEx and UPS delivery workers have backbreaking schedules designed with “scientific” efficiency. In the upper echelons of those same companies, things are not the same. We can, if we like, trace this back to the key weakness in the managerial cult of efficiency—its Achilles’ heel, if you will.

It’s as if businesses were endlessly trimming the fat on the shop floor and using the resulting savings to acquire even more unnecessary workers in the offices upstairs. (As we’ll see, in some companies, this was literally the case.) The end result was that, just as Socialist regimes had created millions of dummy proletarian jobs, capitalist regimes somehow ended up presiding over the creation of millions of dummy white-collar jobs instead.

As we’ll see, testimonies from consultants hired to introduce efficiencies in a large corporation (say, a bank, or a medical supply corporation) attest to the awkward silences and outright hostility that ensue when executives realize those efficiencies will have the effect of automating away a significant portion of their subordinates. By doing so, they would effectively reduce managers to nothing. Kings of the air. For without flunkies, to whom, exactly, would they be “superior”?

Rather, I’m referring to people whose jobs have an aggressive element, but, crucially, who exist only because other people employ them. The most obvious example of this are national armed forces. Countries need armies only because other countries have armies.12 If no one had an army, armies would not be needed. But the same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers. Also, like literal goons, they have a largely negative impact on society.

I believe we passed the point where most jobs were these type of jobs a long time ago. Supply has far outpaced demand in most industries, so now it is demand that is manufactured. My job is a combination of manufacturing demand and then exaggerating the usefulness of the products sold to fix it. In fact, you could argue that that is the job of every single person that works in or for the entire advertising industry. If we’re at the point where in order to sell products, you have to first of all trick people into thinking they need them, then I think you’d be hard-pressed to argue that these jobs aren’t bullshit.

Workplaces are fascist. They’re cults designed to eat your life; bosses hoard your minutes jealously like dragons hoard gold.

(Perhaps one could paraphrase Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 here: to forestall their fears of alienation from their own labor, they had to sacrifice me up to a greater alienation from potential human growth.)

I’m not altogether familiar with how the whole thing works, but a lot of this work is funded by the Feds and tied to our student loans. It’s part of a whole federal system designed to assign students a lot of debt—thereby promising to coerce them into labor in the future, as student debts are so hard to get rid of—accompanied by a bullshit education program designed to train and prepare us for our future bullshit jobs.

Of course, we learned our lesson: if you’re on the clock, do not be too efficient. You will not be rewarded, not even by a gruff nod of acknowledgment (which is all we were really expecting). Instead, you’ll be punished with meaningless busywork. And being forced to pretend to work, we discovered, was the most absolute indignity—because it was impossible to pretend it was anything but what it was: pure degradation, a sheer exercise of the boss’s power for its own sake. It didn’t matter that we were only pretending to scrub the baseboard. Every moment spent pretending to scour the baseboard felt like some schoolyard bully gloating at us over our shoulders—except, of course, this time, the bully had the full force of law and custom on his side.

I called BS on that right off. Those fields had been plowed many times before I ever saw them, plus the frost heaves of the severe winters there would just raise more rocks to the surface over time. But it kept the paid hands “busy” and taught us proper work ethic (meaning obedience, a very high principle as taught in Mormonism), blah, blah.

When the old boss came back to pick me up to do something else, he looked disapprovingly at my pile and declared that I hadn’t really done very much work. As if being told to do menial labor for menial labor’s sake wasn’t degrading enough, it was made more so by my being told that my hours of hard work, performed entirely by hand with no wheelbarrow or any other tool whatsoever, simply wasn’t good enough. Gee, thanks. What’s more, no one ever came to haul off the rocks I had collected. From that day, they sat in that field exactly where I had piled them, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were still there to this day. I hated that old man every day until the day he died.

Ultimately, the woman quit. When she did, my mother said to her, “Why? My mother looks great!” To which the woman responded famously, “Sure, she looks great. I’ve lost fifteen pounds, and my hair is falling out. I can’t take her anymore.”

Such jobs are likely to be not waged but salaried. There may not even be an actual boss breathing down one’s neck—in fact, usually there isn’t. But ultimately, the need to play a game of make-believe not of one’s own making, a game that exists only as a form of power imposed on you, is inherently demoralizing.

The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren’t free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smallest details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent or disobedience are punished. Informers

report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing. And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. —Bob Black, “The Abolition of Work”

But there’s one obvious difference, too, between bullshit jobs and a dishwasher being made to clean the baseboards in a restaurant. In the latter case, there is a demonstrable bully. You know exactly who is pushing you around. In the case of bullshit jobs, it’s rarely so clear-cut. Who exactly is forcing you to pretend to work? The company? Society? Some strange confluence of social convention and economic forces that insist no one should be given the means of life without working, even if there is not enough real work to go around?

Psychologists sometimes refer to the kind of dilemmas described in this section as “scriptlessness.” Psychological studies, for instance, find that men or women who had experienced unrequited love during adolescence were in most cases eventually able to come to terms with the experience and showed few permanent emotional scars. But for those who had been the objects of unrequited love, it was quite another matter. Many still struggled with guilt and confusion. One major reason, researchers concluded, was precisely the lack of cultural models. Anyone who falls in love with someone who does not return their affections has thousands of years’ worth of romantic literature to tell them exactly how they are supposed to feel; however, while this literature provides detailed insight on the experience of being Cyrano, it generally tells you very little about how you are supposed to feel—let alone what you’re supposed to do—if you’re Roxane.7

My academic degree was pretty interesting and involved a lot of work, so, again, I had no concept of the horrible dread I would feel getting up in the morning to spend all day sitting in an office trying to inconspicuously waste time.

My job was to do therapy to essentially tell them it was their own fault and their responsibility to make their lives better. And if they attended the program daily, so the company could bill their Medicaid, staff would copy their medical records to send to the Social Security office so they could be reviewed for disability payments. The more paperwork in their charts, the better their chances. I had groups to run like “anger management,” “coping skills” . . . They were so insulting and irrelevant! How do you cope with lack of decent food or control your rage toward the police when they abuse you? My job was useless and harmful. So many NGOs profit from the misery created by inequality. I made a very poor living doing what I did, but it still pains me deeply that I was a poverty pimp.

One might imagine that leaving millions of well-educated young men and women without any real work responsibilities but with access to the internet—which is, potentially, at least, a repository of almost all human knowledge and cultural achievement—might spark some sort of Renaissance. Nothing remotely along these lines has taken place. Instead, the situation has sparked an efflorescence of social media (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter): basically, of forms of electronic media that lend themselves to being produced and consumed while pretending to do something else. I am convinced this is the primary reason for the rise of social media, especially when one considers it in the light not just of the rise of bullshit jobs but also of the increasing bullshitization of real jobs.

the need to be on call, to spend at least a certain amount of energy looking over one’s shoulder, maintaining a false front, never looking too obviously engrossed, the inability to fully collaborate with others—all this lends itself much more to a culture of computer games, YouTube rants, memes, and Twitter controversies than to, say, the rock ’n’ roll bands, drug poetry, and experimental theater created under the midcentury welfare state. What we are witnessing is the rise of those forms of popular culture that office workers can produce and consume during the scattered, furtive shards of time they have at their disposal in workplaces where even when there’s nothing for them to do, they still can’t admit it openly.

While no central directives of this kind were ever sent out under capitalist regimes, at least to my knowledge, it is nonetheless true that at least since World War II, all economic policy has been premised on an ideal of full employment. Now, there is every reason to believe that most policy makers don’t actually want to fully achieve this ideal, as genuine full employment would put too much “upward pressure on wages.” Marx appears to have been right when he argued that a “reserve army of the unemployed” has to exist in order for capitalism to work the way it’s supposed to.

Universities were basically craft guilds run for and by scholars, and their most important business was considered to be producing scholarship, their second-most, training new generations of scholars. True, since the nineteenth century, universities had maintained a kind of gentleman’s pact with government, that they would also train civil servants (and later, corporate bureaucrats) in exchange for otherwise being largely left alone. But since the eighties, Ginsberg argues, university administrators have effectively staged a coup. They wrested control of the university from the faculty and oriented the institution itself toward entirely different purposes. It is now commonplace for major universities to put out “strategic vision documents” that barely mention scholarship or teaching but go on at length about “the student experience,” “research excellence” (getting grants), collaboration with business or government, and so forth.

The moral of the story is that when a profit-seeking enterprise is in the business of distributing a very large sum of money, the most profitable thing for it to do is to be as inefficient as possible.

Another one is they have some big drive to do charity for a week. I refuse to participate as though I give to charity, I will not give through my bank, as for them it’s just a big advertising drive in an attempt to shore up morale internally and make it look like banking isn’t appropriating labor through usury.

In such an arrangement, it makes little sense to speak of separate spheres of “politics” and “the economy” because the goods are extracted through political means and distributed for political purposes. In fact, it was only with the first stirrings of industrial capitalism that anyone started talking about “the economy” as an autonomous sphere of human activity in the first place.

JPMorgan Chase & Co., for example, the largest bank in America, reported in 2006 that roughly two-thirds of its profits were derived from “fees and penalties,” and “finance” in general really refers to trading in other people’s debts—debts which, of course, are enforceable in courts of law.

Even those firms we see as the very heart of the old industrial order—General Motors and General Electric in America, for example—now derive all, or almost all, of their profits from their own financial divisions. GM, for example, makes its money not from selling cars but rather from interest collected on auto loans.

Yet for some reason, we as a society have collectively decided it’s better to have millions of human beings spending years of their lives pretending to type into spreadsheets or preparing mind maps for PR meetings than freeing them to knit sweaters, play with their dogs, start a garage band, experiment with new recipes, or sit in cafés arguing about politics, and gossiping about their friends’ complex polyamorous love affairs.

who was convinced most doctors contribute very little to human health or happiness but are mainly just dispensers of placebos. This may or may not be the case; frankly, I don’t have the competence to say; but if nothing else, the oft-cited fact that the overwhelming majority of improvement in longevity since 1900 is really due to hygiene, nutrition, and other public health improvements and not to improvements in medical treatment,15 suggests a case could be made that the (very poorly paid) nurses and cleaners employed in a hospital are actually more responsible for positive health outcomes than the hospital’s (very highly paid) physicians.

Work, Aristotle insisted, in no sense makes you a better person; in fact, it makes you a worse one, since it takes up so much time, thus making it difficult to fulfill one’s social and political obligations.

In fact, there was never a time most workers worked in factories. Even in the days of Karl Marx, or Charles Dickens, working-class neighborhoods housed far more maids, bootblacks, dustmen, cooks, nurses, cabbies, schoolteachers, prostitutes, caretakers, and costermongers than employees in coal mines, textile mills, or iron foundries. Are these former jobs “productive”? In what sense and for whom? Who “produces” a soufflé? It’s because of these ambiguities that such issues are typically brushed aside when people are arguing about value; but doing so blinds us to the reality that most working-class labor,

After all, he noted, even though we all act as if capitalism is some kind of behemoth towering over us, it’s really just something we produce. Every morning we wake up and re-create capitalism. If one morning we woke up and all decided to create something else, then there wouldn’t be capitalism anymore. There would be something else.

In well over a hundred studies in the last twenty-five years, workers have regularly depicted their jobs as physically exhausting, boring, psychologically diminishing or personally humiliating and unimportant. [But at the same time] they want to work because they are aware at some level that work plays a crucial and perhaps unparalleled psychological role in the formation of human character. Work is not just a course of livelihood, it is also one of the most significant contributing factors to an inner life . . . To be denied work is to be denied far more than the things that work can buy; it is to be denied the ability to define and respect one’s self.”52

She made the fascinating observation that almost all of these bases organize outreach programs, in which soldiers venture out to repair schoolrooms or to perform free dental checkups in nearby towns and villages. The ostensible reason for the programs was to improve relations with local communities, but they rarely have much impact in that regard; still, even after the military discovered this, they kept the programs up because they had such an enormous psychological impact on the soldiers, many of whom would wax euphoric when describing them: for example, “This is why I joined the army,” “This is what military service is really all about—not just defending your country, it’s about helping people!” Soldiers allowed to perform public service duties, they found, were two or three times more likely to reenlist. I remember thinking, “Wait, so most of these people really want to be in the Peace Corps?” And I duly looked it up and discovered: sure enough, to be accepted into the Peace Corps, you need to already have a college degree. The US military is a haven for frustrated altruists.

Star Trek solved the problem with replicators, and young radicals here in the United Kingdom sometimes talk about a future of “fully automated luxury communism,” which is basically the same thing. A case could easily be made that any future robots and replicators should be the common property of humanity as a whole, since they would be the fruit of a collective mechanical intelligence that goes back centuries, in much the same way as a national culture is the creation of, and thus belongs to, everyone. Automated public factories would make life easier.

For the moment, it would appear to be a stand-off. The mainstream Left largely controls the production of humans. The mainstream Right largely controls the production of things.

This is one of the elements that startles and confuses a lot of people when they first hear about the concept of Basic Income. Surely you aren’t going to give $25,000 a year (or whatever it is) to Rockefellers, too? The answer is yes. Everyone is everyone. It’s not like there are so many billionaires this will come to a particularly large amount of money; rich people could be taxed more anyway; if one wanted to start means-testing, even for billionaires, then one would have to set up a bureaucracy to start means-testing again, and if history tells us anything, it’s that such bureaucracies tend to expand.