Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber review – the myth of capitalist efficiency
I had a bullshit job
once. It involved answering the phone for an important man, except the phone
didn’t ring for hours on end, so I spent the time guiltily converting my PhD
into a book. I’ve also had several jobs that were not bullshit but were
steadily bullshitised: interesting jobs in the media and academia that were
increasingly taken up with filling out compliance forms and time allocation
surveys. I’ve also had a few shit jobs, but that’s something different. Toilets
need to be cleaned. But to have a bullshit job is to know that if it were to
disappear tomorrow it would make no difference to the world: in fact, it might
make the world a better place.
When I read David
Graeber’s essay On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs in Strike! magazine in 2013,
I felt somehow vindicated. I had sat in the pub on many a Friday evening
moaning to colleagues about data entry and inefficient meetings. But with the
Martian gaze of the anthropologist, Graeber managed to articulate my plight in
a way that made me feel part of some grand, absurdist outrage.
I wasn’t alone. The
essay went viral, receiving more than 1m hits, and was translated into a dozen
languages. “Guerrilla” activists even replaced hundreds of ads in London tube
carriages with quotes from the essay, presumably in order to jolt commuters out
of their apathetic stupor. As is the way in the world of reactive non-fiction
publishing, a book followed. As well as documenting
personal misery, this book is a portrait of a society that has forgotten what
it is for
The argument of both
essay and book is this: in 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technological
advances would enable us to work a 15-hour week. Yet we seem to be busier than
ever before. Those workers who actually do stuff are burdened with increasing
workloads, while box-tickers and bean-counters multiply. In an age that
supremely prizes capitalist efficiency, the proliferation of pointless jobs is
a puzzle... read more: