{"id":181,"date":"2014-02-06T23:27:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-06T23:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/?p=181"},"modified":"2022-03-13T10:45:58","modified_gmt":"2022-03-13T10:45:58","slug":"critique-of-graeber-on-bullshit-jobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/?p=181","title":{"rendered":"Critique of Graeber on Bullshit Jobs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I was reminded of a piece of writing I did last summer. I didn’t publish it at the time, when all and sundry were facebooking and tweeting David’s piece, because it was unfinished. It’s still unfinished but I thought I’d stick it up here anyway. It tapers off towards the end. I’ve put some glosses on the final remarks for clarity but don’t have time to write them up fully.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Last week David Graeber put out an article in Strike Magazine \u2018On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs\u2019<\/a>. I have to admit that I don\u2019t think that I followed all of the arguments and how they fit together: there was something about the piece that made it feel like a loose constellation of grievances, with the author hopping from one to the next. But I do want to say something about a couple of the argument he makes. The first half of this will be a complaint about a pet hate:<\/p>\n

MY PET HATE<\/strong><\/p>\n

Amongst those bundled arguments David invoked a little argument that is a pet hate of mine, and which I think ought to be challenged:<\/p>\n

\n

Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don\u2019t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done \u2013 at least, there\u2019s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there\u2019s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it\u2019s all that anyone really does.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The fact that David feels the need to replace the jobs that he\u2019s referring to with cabinet-makers and fish-fryers (apparently in his eyes both jobs are for skilled workers) suggests that there might be something a little more distasteful behind this argument \u2013 or at least distasteful as long as it is made in these terms. Maybe we could re-interpolate those actual jobs to which Graeber refers:<\/p>\n

\n

Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don\u2019t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent academics and researchers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time doing admin. Neither does the task really need to be done \u2013 at least, there\u2019s only a very small amount of admin that actually needs doing. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time doing research, and not doing their fair share of the admin responsibilities, that before long there\u2019s endless piles of useless badly organised paperwork piling up all over the office and it\u2019s all that anyone really does.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s an argument (or rather an expression of resentment) that anyone who has spent any time around a university will be familiar with \u2013 and certainly David is right that academics tend to make fucking awful administrators. Certainly there is a great deal of entirely justified resentment amongst the UK academic community that nobody seems to get any proper time to do their research. \u00a0But there is a turn in this argument that makes me at least a little uncomfortable: that university administration ought to be done by people who are good at it. I\u2019ve worked as an administrator in a few different Higher Education institutions in London\u00a0 (Central St Martin\u2019s, Institute of Education, London College of Fashion, and one of the medical royal colleges). The truth is that this work is essentially unskilled; anyone who has spent fifteen hours trying to fill out a highly detailed application form about the fact that they are \u201ccapable of working with other people\u201d, \u201ccapable of working alone\u201d, \u201cable to complete tasks\u201d, \u201cable to manage a varied workload\u201d (I call bullshit!), or any other generic \u201ccompetency\u201d will know this. The work is almost always boring and tiresome, offers very little in the way of rewards (pay\u00a0 in these positions has been pretty much frozen or tied to 1% increases over the last few years against 5% inflation), and there is very little opportunity for most people working in these roles to go and get another job which might be more stimulating. If you\u2019re willing to demean yourself and suck up to management for several years you might get shunted over to something which requires less hours looking at a screen though. That\u2019s if you\u2019re lucky.<\/p>\n

Whatever David might think about this type of work it really does keep the universities as the currently exist ticking over. Whether or not that\u2019s a worthy cause is certainly an open question<\/a>\u00a0but certainly in those jobs I\u2019ve worked in have involved doing some things that mean that students are able to take courses, and academics are able to teach them (whether that\u2019s been sorting out placements in schools for PGCE students, or filling out paperwork so that students can get visas and financing from the government,\u00a0 making sure that students have housing sorted, writing course handbooks, or just booking rooms and doing huge batches of photocopying for classes.) Sure, this type of work has massively expanded, but that has happened alongside the massification of higher education over the last decades. And sure, lots of this work is entirely inefficient and needlessly bureaucratic, but almost all of it is necessary<\/strong> for the university to continue running as it does. Often this labour is hidden, but the notion that \u2013 at present \u2013 not very much admin needs doing in these institutions can only come from the mind of one who hasn\u2019t had to deal with all of the demands of students (as well as those from Government, and various other agencies.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of the lines of argument that I\u2019ve experienced in those jobs over and over again (although almost exclusively from older, white, male academics), mainly from academics heavily involved in their UCU branches, is that \u201cadministrators get paid to do administration, and we don\u2019t, so they should do it and we shouldn\u2019t.\u201d This is usually accompanied by some spiteful abuse towards whichever underpaid underling is closest to hand. I don\u2019t want to include David in this description \u2013 knowing him, I can\u2019t imagine him behaving like that \u2013 but I do want to point to the fact that this is a common experience for admin staff, and that is the context into which he is offering his thoughts. The reason, ultimately, that administrators are \u201cgood at this work\u201d is not because they have some profound affinity with it, something which these professors apparently lack, but because they have absolutely no choice in the matter: if they don\u2019t do the work and shut up they will be fired. Very few people in this type of work are in any position whatsoever to question the duties demanded of them (more on this later!)<\/p>\n

ADMIN AND RESEARCH<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of the arguments here is that \u201cdoing admin\u201d is something fundamentally antithetical to getting on with research, and that the disruption that is causes means that the quality<\/strong> of research must be sacrificed. It\u2019s not such a bad thought \u2013 I can\u2019t get out of my head those sentences from the beautiful letter that Adorno wrote to Thomas Mann on his 70th<\/sup> birthday: \u201ca sort of caesura might wrongly disturb the unfolding course of your spiritual experience, an experience that regards nothing as alien to itself, tolerates nothing imposed on it from without, and expresses what is most human about us through a kind of m\u00e9moire involontaire<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s worth considering the purpose of this argument, and what sort of images Graeber is wanting to support here. Perhaps more than any other profession, academics are resistant to acknowledging the complex division of labour that undergirds their productive efforts. The image of the individual scholar extemporizing on whatever topic is seductive to them for two reasons: firstly because it allows them the image of their work as non-alienated labour, as if even once externalized their intellectual productions still belong<\/em> to them. Articles and books are, to them, not just like any other replaceable commodity on the marketplace that has left its producer behind, is complicit in her bondage, suffering and destruction. Secondly, the image is seductive because it maintains for them an idea of doing a \u201cgood job\u201d (in this case a job which isn\u2019t a \u201cbullshit job\u201d). It is important to understand that for this notion of a good job to be sustained the work of others needs to be detested \u2013 indeed the means by which this labour might appear as non-alienated, as good work, is through the demeaning of the work and workers that fundamentally support it. Held aloft is the image of a bourgeois individual (qua sch\u00f6ne Seele<\/em>), for whom the work below appears as a task that doesn\u2019t really need to be done. This is of course a thought that is only sustainable from the standpoint of a professional class.<\/p>\n

My argument here is not that the work that administrators do is \u201cgood work\u201d in any sense. Mostly it is boring and miserable, and it of course props up a system that is entirely destructive to humanity. But that the figure that David invokes in his argument of those who are good at it is entirely illusory.\u00a0 But worse than that the justification for demeaning this work is to sustain an entirely ideological notion of \u201cgood work\u201d (as some untapped potential in the academic subject, which can never be expressed due to administrative commitments.) Instead it is necessary for us to understand that all work under capitalism is shit, but this can\u2019t happen while those in skilled professions imagine social freedom as the happy fulfillment of their jobs.<\/p>\n

It might be worth mentioning here that the privation goes in both directions too. Working in all of those office jobs I met a fair few people with PhDs who would rather be doing research too than mindlessly pressing numbers into computers. And I\u2019m sure that when my own PhD is over I\u2019ll be looking at returning to several decades of this kind of administrative work too. Perhaps to the academic doing admin really does get in the way of research, but it would certainly be healthy to remember that for plenty of administrators their day-jobs doing admin gets in the way of research too!<\/p>\n

It\u2019s strange also that for Graeber this difference between good jobs and bullshit jobs maps on to the notions of \u201cproductive\u201d and \u201cunproductive\u201d labour. It seems that what he has in mind are jobs that produce those goods that are necessary for human reproduction and social intercourse (lol, that sounded more sexual than I expected), like food and medicine and houses and so on and so forth. He imagines that capitalism used to produce all of these things through mass employment. There is a danger here of course, which is to suggest that those commodities that were produced in this way were somehow perfect \u2013 that they were without traces of the exploitation from which they were produced.\u00a0 That they supported the population without problems (of course never forcing them to living in cramped conditions, suffering from malnutrition etc.), that these commodities really did serve human need rather than the profit motive, and that the population was sustained and reproduced for some reason other than their future exploitation. All of this feels unfamiliar to me \u2013 despite all the reading I have tried to do about the condition of working class existence over the last couple of centuries. But it also makes a serious mistake about the nature of human reproduction today and what all of those \u201cbullshit jobs\u201d in finance are about. Whether you like it or not, under contemporary conditions, the superfast trading of derivatives on some mortgage in Alabama is tied up with someone in Indonesia putting food on their table (or not). Yes it is stupid, \u201cirrational\u201d, unnecessary for human existence, but that is the case. What this means is that this division between good jobs and bullshit jobs really isn\u2019t so simple: it\u2019s not as if some workers spend all of their lives doing stuff that is truly productive for humanity and all the others do \u201cbullshit\u201d, but that these parts are entirely intertwined and entangled with each other. The work of critique is to address this rather than merely reaffirming the strength of division in a divided labour.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What is most worrying about the ease with which David wants to make this division is that it aligns itself rather too smoothly with the Conservative policies on \u201cdefending front-line services\u201d<\/a> \u00a0– which seems to be another name for those good jobs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some extra points I wanted to write something about when I wrote but didn\u2019t finish this. Comments from now in square brackets.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Why are academics not involved in the cleaners\u2019 campaigns?<\/p>\n

[Like seriously, of all of the people in the university, from students to manual labourers, from admin staff, to professors, to managers, academics are by far the hardest to get to come out on a protest for wages for the worst paid outsourced staff. Perhaps this is a real, material reflection on attitudes to the division of labour. Let\u2019s change this.]<\/p>\n

The distinction of productive\/unproductive labour<\/p>\n

[Obviously this is a facile distinction: under capitalism production is organised irrationally. It isn\u2019t divided into neat piles of jobs where some are productive and some are unproductive. And furthermore, the assumption that the cognitions of one\u2019s needs isn\u2019t subject to ideology (the assumption necessary for the distinction between productive\/unproductive to be recognised) is just na\u00efve. But worse than this, the question ought to be \u201cproductive of what?\u201d In a sense the question can be answered simply in the present order. Productive work is work that produces profits and guarantees future profits: i.e. productive work is work that produces (and reproduces) society in toto in its present form. If it doesn\u2019t do that it is labelled unproductive. To see anything positive about this is perverse. The question ought to be, how can we produce (or non-produce) a society that is free, and how does that relate to work?]<\/p>\n

The notion of the interest of the minority as opposed to the autonomous interests of capital<\/p>\n

[In the world that Graeber presents us, interests are tied strangely to people. We work because it is in someone\u2019s<\/em> interest for us to. This is of course true to an extent: one does work for the possibility of the bourgeoisie to accrue profit. But the interest is there limited to an interest in profit. One doesn\u2019t do work because some bourgeois wants one too for any other reason. Indeed, this limitation on interest is more precisely the question of objectivity<\/em>\u00a0in contemporary society. And interests are driven, through this objectivity, as much by impersonal forces, by impersonal interests of capital as such, as by the desires of specific individuals. The reason for making this clear is that it changes what is demanded in the transformation of society. We shouldn\u2019t just want to be managed by people who have better, truly human interests because those people\u2019s desires will still be mediated by the objectivity of society. Instead one must address both the objects and subjects with transformation.]<\/p>\n

\u00a0A FRAGMENT BY MAX HORKHEIMER<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

The Pleasure Taken in Work: If I know that someone likes or dislikes working, I don\u2019t know anything about him. A stenographer who enthusiastically spends ten hours taking down business letters that are of no concern to her, a bookkeeper or an assembly line worker,\u00a0 is not a congenial individual if he does his work because he enjoys it and not for less obvious reasons. An intellectual or someone who is independent and can change around belongs to the elect. There are times when entrepreneurs spend longer hours in their offices than the greater number of their employees. This happens during particularly taxing periods, as when profits are calculated, for example. Then the boss will say: \u201cthe employees don\u2019t enjoy their work. I can\u2019t understand it. I could work all night long without getting tired.\u201d As regards the entrepreneur, this attitude holds not only during exceptional periods but really all year long. The employees know what their bosses are talking about.<\/p>\n

Note: In a socialist society, pleasure will not derive from the nature of work to be done. That is a reactionary aim. Rather, work will be done with enjoyment because it serves a solidary society.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I was reminded of a piece of writing I did last summer. I didn’t publish it at the time, when all and sundry were facebooking and tweeting David’s piece, because it was unfinished. It’s still unfinished but I thought I’d stick it up here anyway. It tapers off towards the end. I’ve put some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_eb_attr":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":6}},"yoast_head":"\nCritique of Graeber on Bullshit Jobs - Jacob Bard-Rosenberg<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/?p=181\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Critique of Graeber on Bullshit Jobs - Jacob Bard-Rosenberg\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Today I was reminded of a piece of writing I did last summer. 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I didn’t publish it at the time, when all and sundry were facebooking and tweeting David’s piece, because it was unfinished. It’s still unfinished but I thought I’d stick it up here anyway. It tapers off towards the end. I’ve put some […]","og_url":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/?p=181","og_site_name":"Jacob Bard-Rosenberg","article_publisher":"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jbardrosenberg","article_author":"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jbardrosenberg","article_published_time":"2014-02-06T23:27:00+00:00","article_modified_time":"2022-03-13T10:45:58+00:00","author":"Jacob Bard-Rosenberg","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_creator":"@http:\/\/twitter.com\/prolapsarian","twitter_site":"@prolapsarian","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Jacob Bard-Rosenberg","Est. reading time":"14 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/?p=181#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/?p=181"},"author":{"name":"Jacob Bard-Rosenberg","@id":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/#\/schema\/person\/381cbef3d141c04291e3d5a8e81fb6c7"},"headline":"Critique of Graeber on Bullshit Jobs","datePublished":"2014-02-06T23:27:00+00:00","dateModified":"2022-03-13T10:45:58+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/?p=181"},"wordCount":2890,"commentCount":0,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/#\/schema\/person\/381cbef3d141c04291e3d5a8e81fb6c7"},"articleSection":["Polemics and Essays"],"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"CommentAction","name":"Comment","target":["https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/?p=181#respond"]}]},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/?p=181","url":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/?p=181","name":"Critique of Graeber on Bullshit Jobs - Jacob Bard-Rosenberg","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/#website"},"datePublished":"2014-02-06T23:27:00+00:00","dateModified":"2022-03-13T10:45:58+00:00","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/?p=181#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/?p=181"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/?p=181#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Critique of Graeber on Bullshit Jobs"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/#website","url":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/","name":"Jacob Bard-Rosenberg","description":"Babbler, Scrawler, Dialectician","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/#\/schema\/person\/381cbef3d141c04291e3d5a8e81fb6c7"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":["Person","Organization"],"@id":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/#\/schema\/person\/381cbef3d141c04291e3d5a8e81fb6c7","name":"Jacob Bard-Rosenberg","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/jacobbr.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/image0-1-2-e1646959330737.jpeg?fit=300%2C400&ssl=1","url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/jacobbr.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/image0-1-2-e1646959330737.jpeg?fit=300%2C400&ssl=1","contentUrl":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/jacobbr.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/image0-1-2-e1646959330737.jpeg?fit=300%2C400&ssl=1","width":300,"height":400,"caption":"Jacob Bard-Rosenberg"},"logo":{"@id":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/jacobbr.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/image0-1-2-e1646959330737.jpeg?fit=300%2C400&ssl=1"},"sameAs":["http:\/\/jacobbr.com","http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jbardrosenberg","http:\/\/instagram.com\/prolapsarian","https:\/\/x.com\/http:\/\/twitter.com\/prolapsarian"],"url":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/?author=1"}]}},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=181"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":594,"href":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions\/594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacobbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}