This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
A Practical Utopian’s Guide To The Coming Collapse: David Graeber On "The Phenomenon Of Bull$hit Jobs
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
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
- 64847 reads
- Printer-friendly version
- Send to friend
- advertisements -


Great stuff. The future "Mad Max" will be a renegade in a hidden garage building his own vehicle with the scraps salvaged from an old NASCAR facility.
Screw this, I'm a liberal. What will happen when the Americans can't take it back from the corporate overlords? I don't mean your friendly, neighborhood catering dude who, well, just wants to introduce you to dishes, I mean the guy who runs casting interviews across the board that may put you 275k in debt just for sniffing at him, what happens? A global resurgence of capitalist thinking. Heaven.
I keep sounding like a broken record regarding this topic. The reason we still work as hard as if we ride around on horseback and plow fields by hand is because of inflation targeting. What the central bank's price stability mandate means is that they inject annually the same amount of cash that accounts to the steady increase in industrial productivity. Instead of letting prices fall 2% every year for the last 100 years, until every luxury can be bough by a common worker, they've been keeping everything expensive, while pocketing the difference (plus interest, plus collateral if the loan defaults, plus a buck pocketed here and there for ol'time sake).
The Fed was established roughly the same time the world was discovering uses for oil. The oil boom that should've made everyone prosperous made banks cosmically rich. It put them at the center of the economic universe, pushing actual wealth producers to the outer rims.
A man that makes things today is typically the poorest. Meanwhile a parasite that manufactures nothing is rolling in dough and gets to spend freshly printed fiat on just about anything.
I like the clarity of your comment, especially the first paragraph. Thanks for the perspective.
"Meanwhile a parasite that manufactures nothing is rolling in dough and gets to spend freshly printed fiat on just about anything."
Oh. You mean Hillary?
Whatever it is, a social venture, like capitalism shares with all the other collaborative work the search for the best solution in the field by generating a competition about.
The competition about capitalism in short goes, who has the most money.
And there's a ranking in place.
The chance to catapult out the idea of to be meaningless is given already here. To have money is not identical with to have done a good job, thus meaningless.
That the plunder works is due it gears on emergency mode.
Not having money but wanting all driven. The losers pay in and the winners take out, sparing no space for a behavior of the third kind.
That this works, additional, a lot of very important jobs must be in place to check that the money goes this way.
"Capitalism isn't supposed to create meaningless positions" - hm.
Think again. The more the winners take out of the game the more the need for this sort of occupation is asked "to count meaningless money."
Running to the realization for what the whole stands for.
most men live lives of quiet desperation.........same as it ever was. there is no utopia. there is only life.
Meh I don't like this guy's stuff - more libtard "dreamer" bullcrap. Like John Lennon's Imagine or Karl Marx. It is Utopian claptrap with little value. "We should all just play, you know?" Umm, no.
Meh I don't like this guy's stuff - more libtard "dreamer" bullcrap. Like John Lennon's Imagine or Karl Marx. It is Utopian claptrap with little value. "We should all just play, you know?" Umm, no.
You had me really interested in this guy's books until you said it was a favorite of Russell Brand. Why did you have to say that? What possible reason could you find to think that this would be a sure fire selling point. I wouldn't piss on brand if he was on fire. You ruined it.
? Thomas Wolfe
Our problem remains the same: Selfish unbounded greed.
Debt: The first 5000 years is a must read IMHO.
https://libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf
Just a note to Racical Marijuana. I agree with your take on Government and the whole meme about lies and deadly force, and I think what you have to say enriches the Zero hedge community. But Jesus, man, can you keep it short? I have quit reading your rants because they are just too long, and really, if something can be said in a few phrases, the minimum will do. We are not morons that need constant lengthly repetition. Keep it short, we get the point.
It isn't the length that's the problem if he said anything relevent with it. It's the useless gymnastics involved in saying the same 5 sentences hundreds of times with slightly different wordings.
This is a guy who's found his 'groove', albeit deep, but quite narrow.
Coherent clarity and brevity are not RM's strong hand but I'll bet the weed he grows is really very good.
We love you RM, we just don't bother reading you because we already have. Money/murder. We get it.
Since you're so smart shovelhead, perhaps you would be able to explain the concept of UNITARY MECHANISMS for We. I've been working pretty hard for over a year to grasp it. TIA
You don't realize that your comment exemplifies the very thing RM rails against, namely antiquated POLITICAL SCIENCE. Your username is backwards, it's really shallowhead as you use your shovel not to dig but to lean on. Like Deek_Truth. But by all MEANS, share your thoughts on the matter because they are so valuable! Given the output, the level of difficulty, and the lack of assistance, I stand in awe of the coherence, clarity, and brevity of RM's comments.
Someone may have visited ZH for the first time and saw this...
Yup. RM is the man. Anyone who doesn't have the time or inclination can just shuffle right along. Tldr doesn't hold here. Lazy pseudo-intellectuals abound looking for their 30 second sound byte.
eddiebe:
I amuse myself posting my kinds of comments on Zero Hedge. Nobody has to read them. There is a slow evolution of what I have to say, like stones tumbling in a polisher ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qn0jYqrONPw
art of stone tumbling & polishingI have decided to participate in registered politics, and what politicians DO is repeat the same messages over, and over, and over again ... Sure, those who have heard it all before a hundred times get bored. However, there are many who have never heard it once. The favourite part of my job as the leader of a fringe political party is when I get to talk to students. For them, it is all quite novel. They tend to be the most willing to listen to my bla, bla, blah ...
As MEAN BUSINESS pointed out: "Someone may have visited ZH for the first time and saw this..." Overall, I tend to get more up-votes and compliments here than the relatively ad hominem replies that ask me to shut up.
Furthermore, as MEAN BUSINESS also pointed out, what I have to say are facets of an overall way of thinking that is radically different than most people have ever considered, and therefore, it takes me more background explanations of the overall situation, to set up the kinds of comments that I like to make.
It is not merely that there are money/murder systems, but that there necessarily must be! That is not the kind of perspective that you will easily find anywhere else. My efforts to develop political science to become more consistent with physical science require quite a bit more pounding upon the fundamental paradigms that most people continue to take too much for granted. There ARE globalized electronic frauds, backed by atomic bombs. There are NOT any generally understood political ideologies which are even remotely close to being consistent with quantum mechanics or the special theory of relativity!
Not to be a sycophant, but please keep doing what you're doing. I read your comments regularly and I'm a pretty smart guy, but what you say and how you say it is just starting to permeate my thick skull. I need and appreciate your repetition. In case you don't hear it enough, thanks for your enlightening posts.
I have seen the enemy and it is us...
Antigone or Cassandra could not have said it better and the House of Atreus played it out to their very own demise.
Oligarchs always end up hanging themselves. But they take a lot of innocent people along the way.
The Trojan War, the Trojan Horse and the rape of Troy all for "Belle Hélène".
Rinse and repeat. What has the Internet invented that Homer had not already said ?
Power and Riches (dominus et mercator).
Very well said.
Except in Sophocles' world-view, there were Gods who meted out final justice and who could not be ignored without peril.
Today, not so much......
That's powerful stuff. Even our children can see what is going on here. The first time I noticed my dad come home exhausted from a a long work week, eat dinner, watch the news and gripe about millions going to Israel and Egypt (this was over 30 years ago), I knew work was more about control and feudalism than it was about making money.
Tyler Durden: Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.
I hate that soliloquy.
He was batting 1000 until he hit millionaires and rock stars. If anyone past the age of 21 really thought that, they were and are fucking retarded.
Sure, hope keeps us going in the possibility that tomorrow will bring a better day, but success requires supreme effort, if not in perfecting your skills, then in cultivating those to advance your position.
Either way, it takes a lot of work and anyone who doesn't understand that, by that age remains a deluded child.
That curve isn't bell shaped for no reason. The truth is the vast majority of us are quantifiably...average.
to 22winmag, I like the screen name and your comment. My dad worked 2 to 3 jobs rasing 7 of us kids. He taught us 2 things. Work hard and yes sir and yes maam. We live lives of quiet frustration doing the right thing. We pay taxes. We build businesses. We give to those less fortunate than us.
Along the way we chase things that when we finally buy/own them realize the chasing of things isn't necessarily what makes our life have meaning. I will be 60 this summmer. Along the way I have seen many things in America. I have seen the buildings burning in the 1968 riots. I have seen the neighborhood guys that returned from Vietnam whole in body but not in mind. I have seen our country turn into a bunch of belly button gazers unwilling to work hard.
For those of you who will call me a baby boomer and the most selfish generation I say this. Talk to me in 30 years when you have spent some time on this earth. Our nation has been stolen from us, pure and simple. And it is this simple. It used to be in a business or management meeting you heard people say this is what I think. Now days it is this is how I feel. Feelings don't build bridges. Giving everyone a trophy for showing up does not process beef cattle on a slaughter house kill floor. Refusing to work and still being fed for being lazy will kill a man's soul.
Our war is spirtitual. Truthfully it always has been. Here in Chicago earlier this week a 15 year old kid got on a Chicago CTA train at 3 in the afternoon and raped and then robbed a woman in broad daylight. Our country is in a spiritual war as well. We have lost our soul. We have lost our goals. We have lost our sense of purpose. It can and most likely will get a whole lot worse. Prepare accordingly.
"Here in Chicago earlier this week a 15 year old kid got on a Chicago CTA train at 3 in the afternoon and raped and then robbed a woman in broad daylight. Our country is in a spiritual war as well. "
One of the reasons that I left 21 years ago and have not nor will I be back.
All true.
The most pertinent point is Chicago lost conceal carry even if it was overturned. Some cold steel to the temple would've put that kids pants to his armpits.
I believe there are practical solutions for most problems. Unfortunately, most of them are distasteful to a large segment of society who don't believe in personal responsibility.
You got that right Deerhunter.
A few of my friends were highly decorated in 'Nam
My son in law got a purple heart in Iraq
What good is a fucking medal
When a 20 year old comes home
And I see he has changed
I asked him and he told me
He was a gunner on a gun ship
He said he was so scared he pissed himself
Came home and no one understood
Just gave him a trinket and called him hero
Just so he could die alone....
The strongest evidence Apollo was faked is this:
Every single achievement or voyage of discovery in the history of humanity has been imitated and duplicated and eventually achieved by others soon after the initial success. These duplications are achieved by different people from different cultures and different countries eventually using different methods. Each iteration of the subsequent successes are easier and cheaper than their previous versions due to the fact that humans learn from both the mistakes and successes of prior attempts. This holds true across all fields and all technological breakthroughs from the dawn of civilization to today. That is, with one exception.
Good point, nodoctor!
As samsara quoted what Joe Bageant eloquently stated below, a well-recognized fundamental principle of propaganda, or public relations, is that Huge Lies work better in that context than littler lies.
Didn't the Chinese land on the moon last year? "Soon" is a relative term. Nixon supported the STS program over others, presumably based on ROI?
A piece from Joe Bageant (may he rest in peace)
The Great American Media Mind Warp
All Americans, regardless of caste, live in a culture woven of self-referential illusions. Like a holographic simulation, each part refers exclusively back to the whole, and the whole refers exclusively back to the parts. All else is excluded by this simulated reality. Consequently, social realism in this country is a television commercial for America, a simulated republic of eagles and big box stores, a good place to live so long as we never stray outside the hologram. The corporate simulacrum of life has penetrated us so deeply it now dominates the mind's interior landscape with its celebrities and commercial images. Within the hologram sparkles the culture-generating industry, spinning out our unreality like cotton candy.
For instance, a while back I saw a video clip of an ethanol-fueled automobile driving past waves of grain with the Rockies in the background and a rippling American flag ghosted into the sky. These four elements of the clip, food grain fields, the automotive industry, the natural beauty of the Rockies and the national emblem have not much to do with each in the natural world, but they have everything to do with one another in the context of corporate empire. Together, they indicate the national ethos. We accept such an image as naturally as the baby accepts the tit, and the idea of burning the earth's food to create gasses that will turn the snowcapped mountains into desertified mountains is greeted happily as something newer and better than the old system of destroying the atmosphere and environment. Mentally we can identify separate elements, isolate things into categories. But the hologram nevertheless remains seamless in its interconnection of all things that benefit the corporate state generating it. Parsed, divided and isolated, any part contains the entire logic (or governing illogic) of the whole -- consuming.
In effect, the economic superstate generates a superhologram that offers only one channel, the shopping channel, and one sanctioned collective national experience in which every aspect is monetized and reduced to a consumer transaction.
<Snip>
Great writer... Read the rest. Great stuff. Like this one.
Madmen and Sedatives: Inside the Iron Theater
Excellent description of
the problems, samsara:
"We accept such an image as naturally as the baby accepts the tit ..."
For generation after generation, Americans have been the victims of the best scientific brainwashing that money could buy. At least 99% of the science of psychology has actually been paid to be applied to make people less sane, rather than saner, because the goals were to take advantage of their weaknesses, rather than to assist them to overcome their weaknesses.
MAD MEN at work!
What scares me about this site is that the people saying there will be a collapse sound not only smart but intelectual.
I read Graeber's full "Bull$hit Jobs" aritcle and the Guardian interview. Now I'm reading "Debt." Great stuff! Thanks for turning me onto this writer.