I had earlier posted in detail about
David Graeber on bullshit jobs, and I'll repost some highlights.
David Graeber: “Spotlight on the financial sector did make apparent just how bizarrely skewed our economy is in terms of who gets rewarded” - Salon.com
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs - STRIKE!
From the second one,
Ever had the feeling that your job might be made up? That the world would keep on turning if you weren’t doing that thing you do 9-5? David Graeber explored the phenomenon of bullshit jobs for our recent summer issue – everyone who’s employed should read carefully…
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. 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.
DG proposes that much of the growth has been in administrative sorts of jobs, and related ones like financial services, telemarketing, corporate law, human resources, and public relations. He proposes calling them "bullshit jobs", empty jobs that don't really produce much of value, something like digging a hole and then filling it up again. However, such jobs often involve a lot of social intelligence, meaning that they are difficult to automate.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, there has been an enormous effort on the part of the people running this country to turn that around: to convince everyone that value really comes from the minds and visions of entrepreneurs, and that ordinary working people are just mindless robots who bring those visions to reality.
The ultimate in this position is Ayn Rand's
Atlas Shrugged, where the people who go on strike are mostly business leaders. The moochers and looters are helpless without these Heroes of Capitalist Labor, and civilization collapses outside of Galt's Gulch, the strikers' hideout.
But at the same time, they’ve had to validate work on some level, so they’ve simultaneously been telling us: work is a value in itself. It creates discipline, maturity, or some such, and anyone who doesn’t work most of the time at something they don’t enjoy is a bad person, lazy, dangerous, parasitical. So work is valuable whether or not it produces anything of value.
This leads to the position that one ought to dig holes and fill them up again, because it demonstrates what a work ethic that one has, how virtuous one is. That problem will only become worse as automation continues to advance.
Then this oddity:
Actually I saw something telling written by a right-wing activist on some blog—he said, well the funny thing is, when we first started our school reform campaigns, we tried to focus on the administrators. But it didn’t take. Then we shifted to the teachers and suddenly the whole thing exploded.
Though teaching involves a lot of social intelligence, one gets the impression from anti-teacher sentiment that many people consider some social-intelligence jobs more equal than others.
Teaching clearly isn't an administrative job, so according to the only-admins-good ideology, it is valueless, something that people should perform as a duty without expecting anything for it from their superiors.
