"Bullshit Jobs: A Theory” is the latest fascinating and infuriating book from David Graeber, a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. If you’re not familiar with Graeber, he’s an anarchist who does anthropology, or an anthropologist who does anarchism (he strongly dislikes being called an “anarchist anthropologist,” along with another Nickname That Cannot Be Uttered). The dislike of this first moniker—we shall never utter the second—has always struck your authors as strange. The best way to describe Graeber’s anthropology is as anarchist anthropology. It’s different than other studies or ethnographies. His writing, to the extent that it has a uniform style, is made up of five thousand word anecdotes that somehow coalesce into an overarching theory. Much like anarchism, his anthropology is less grand theory and more “here are a bunch of cool things that seem to say something about the world.” There are flaws with this approach, of course, but it does make for an engaging and bottom-up type of writing.
Graeber’s own family and personal history is equally interesting. He comes from a long line of radicals—his grandfather was a late 19th century atheist and frontier musician, his father fought for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, and his mother was a garment worker-turned Broadway star whose story is very much worth reading. Graeber himself played a key role in the Occupy Wall Street movement, where he was credited with popularizing the phrase “we are the 99%.” Bullshit Jobs is not remotely his first book: some of his other notable works include: “The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy,” “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” and “Direct Action: An Ethnography.”
“That’s all very well,” you may be thinking, “but isn’t this review about Bullshit Jobs,and didn’t it come out about a year ago, and isn’t that an unreasonably long time to wait to review it?” To this we will say two things, the first being that this is Current Affairs and we do not bow to the tyranny of clocks, and the second is that, if anything, Graeber’s book is even more relevant today than when it was first published, because the foul trends it examines have only grown stinkier since then.
The Five Types of Bullshit Jobs
The first chapters of the book finds Graeber in classic form, wielding anecdotes about German military contractors (apparently it takes three different subcontractors and around twenty man-hours of labor to move a computer from one office to another) and Spanish government workers (specifically, the hero Joaquín García, who skipped work for six years without anyone noticing) that are as hilarious as they are illustrative about the point Graeber is trying to make—bullshit jobs are plentiful, they are often created for the most asinine reasons, and doing them breaks our brains.
Bullshit jobs invoke an intense cognitive dissonance in large part because they shouldn’t be able to exist under capitalism (more on this later). For now, the important thing to remember is that bullshit jobs are, essentially, the “fat” that today’s sleek, ulta-efficient corporations are always seeking to trim—and yet it comprises an enormous, ever-burgeoning percentage of their workforce and budget. According to the theorists, this isn’t possible: companies with bloated advisory boards and expensively useless brand consultants should perish at the hands of their leaner rivals. But the thousands upon thousands of personal stories that Graeber’s book is based upon suggests otherwise.
From these anecdotes, Graeber constructs a catalogue of the various forms and flavors of bullshit jobs. As he describes them:
Flunky jobs are those that exist only or primarily to make someone else look or feel important….
Goons [are] people whose jobs have an aggressive element, but, crucially, who exist only because other people employ them….
Duct tapers are employees whose jobs only exist because of a glitch or fault in the organization; who are there to solve a problem that ought not to exist….
Box tickers [are] employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing….
Taskmasters fall into two categories. Type 1 contains those whose role consists entirely of assigning work to others…. [Type 2 contains those] whose primary role is to create bullshit tasks for other to do, to supervise bullshit, or even to create entirely new bullshit jobs.”
As Graeber explains the intricacies of each category of bullshit job, you may find yourself thinking, “Wow, there are a lot of jobs that sound like flunkies—bodyguards, personal shoppers, ‘special assistants to the chairman.’ And there’s a lot of jobs that sound like goons: P.R. gurus, SEO marketers, and—with apologies to most of the Current Affairs editorial board—lawyers. And the duct tapers: Couldn’t that describe pretty much everyone in I.T.? Box tickers sound like every H.R. manager, diversity consultant, and sustainability advisor you’ve ever met, and ‘taskmaster’ could be a synonym for ‘project manager’ and its related mutations. Oh god, are all jobs bullshit jobs?”
Graeber’s own family and personal history is equally interesting. He comes from a long line of radicals—his grandfather was a late 19th century atheist and frontier musician, his father fought for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, and his mother was a garment worker-turned Broadway star whose story is very much worth reading. Graeber himself played a key role in the Occupy Wall Street movement, where he was credited with popularizing the phrase “we are the 99%.” Bullshit Jobs is not remotely his first book: some of his other notable works include: “The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy,” “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” and “Direct Action: An Ethnography.”
“That’s all very well,” you may be thinking, “but isn’t this review about Bullshit Jobs,and didn’t it come out about a year ago, and isn’t that an unreasonably long time to wait to review it?” To this we will say two things, the first being that this is Current Affairs and we do not bow to the tyranny of clocks, and the second is that, if anything, Graeber’s book is even more relevant today than when it was first published, because the foul trends it examines have only grown stinkier since then.
The Five Types of Bullshit Jobs
The first chapters of the book finds Graeber in classic form, wielding anecdotes about German military contractors (apparently it takes three different subcontractors and around twenty man-hours of labor to move a computer from one office to another) and Spanish government workers (specifically, the hero Joaquín García, who skipped work for six years without anyone noticing) that are as hilarious as they are illustrative about the point Graeber is trying to make—bullshit jobs are plentiful, they are often created for the most asinine reasons, and doing them breaks our brains.
Bullshit jobs invoke an intense cognitive dissonance in large part because they shouldn’t be able to exist under capitalism (more on this later). For now, the important thing to remember is that bullshit jobs are, essentially, the “fat” that today’s sleek, ulta-efficient corporations are always seeking to trim—and yet it comprises an enormous, ever-burgeoning percentage of their workforce and budget. According to the theorists, this isn’t possible: companies with bloated advisory boards and expensively useless brand consultants should perish at the hands of their leaner rivals. But the thousands upon thousands of personal stories that Graeber’s book is based upon suggests otherwise.
From these anecdotes, Graeber constructs a catalogue of the various forms and flavors of bullshit jobs. As he describes them:
Flunky jobs are those that exist only or primarily to make someone else look or feel important….
Goons [are] people whose jobs have an aggressive element, but, crucially, who exist only because other people employ them….
Duct tapers are employees whose jobs only exist because of a glitch or fault in the organization; who are there to solve a problem that ought not to exist….
Box tickers [are] employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing….
Taskmasters fall into two categories. Type 1 contains those whose role consists entirely of assigning work to others…. [Type 2 contains those] whose primary role is to create bullshit tasks for other to do, to supervise bullshit, or even to create entirely new bullshit jobs.”
As Graeber explains the intricacies of each category of bullshit job, you may find yourself thinking, “Wow, there are a lot of jobs that sound like flunkies—bodyguards, personal shoppers, ‘special assistants to the chairman.’ And there’s a lot of jobs that sound like goons: P.R. gurus, SEO marketers, and—with apologies to most of the Current Affairs editorial board—lawyers. And the duct tapers: Couldn’t that describe pretty much everyone in I.T.? Box tickers sound like every H.R. manager, diversity consultant, and sustainability advisor you’ve ever met, and ‘taskmaster’ could be a synonym for ‘project manager’ and its related mutations. Oh god, are all jobs bullshit jobs?”
by Oren Nimni & Nick Slater, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
