Comment by beaconstudios

4 years ago

David Graeber is an anarchist, his criticism of bullshit jobs is about sustaining the centralisation of power, not techbro idealism.

There is no reason outside of power dynamics why airline desk staff need to exist to comfort disgruntled passengers, because the existence of disgruntled passengers who need to be shooed off is a consequence of the airline industry.

12 comments

beaconstudios

stale2002 4 years ago

> is a consequence of the airline industry

So then yes you are assuming that anarchism can wave a magic wand and make it so airlines never lose people's bags, or that it won't ever create any extra work to track down those bags.

beaconstudios 4 years ago
No, but that airlines hire essentially customer service reps to face the brunt of people's anger while the company changes nothing to prevent the problems is a classic corporate strategy. They exploit customers and neglect their responsibility and then hire some poor mug to get shouted at.
I don't know if that's David Graeber's specific criticism but it is mine.
- Aunche 4 years ago
  
  >airlines hire essentially customer service reps to face the brunt of people's anger while the company changes nothing to prevent the problems is a classic corporate strategy.
  I'm sure airlines do a lot behind the scenes to make sure they don't lose their luggage. Even if they didn't, I don't see why a worker co-op wouldn't have the exact same incentives.
  
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sam_lowry_ 4 years ago

Don't assume vested interest, like techbros do. Graeber was an anthropologist, and the book builds on his work more than on his views.

beaconstudios 4 years ago

I don't doubt that, but being an anarchist doesn't mean you can't criticise authority from an objective position. If anything, critiquing authority and power might lead you to both write this book, and take an anarchist position.

smugglerFlynn 4 years ago

Noise insulation in the airplane exists because it tries to shield passengers from the aircraft noise, which is a consequence of modern airplane design. Following the same logic, shall we call it bullshit insulation?

This line of thought assumes three bold ideas:

   1. that existing model is bad
   2. that alternative model for airline (or any other industry) exists
   3. that alternative model won’t suffer from similar issues

I will now quote Graeber to see what kind of arguments he uses to support these three ideas in his original infamous essay[1].

Re. 1

   — author uses anecdotal evidence from friends who consider their jobs ‘pointless’: (talking about a friend) “*Now he's a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm. He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist.*”
   - author extrapolates this anecdote to other fields and people: “*it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever met a corporate lawyer who didn't think their job was bullshit*”
   - after establishing negative nature of these jobs on this purely anecdotal basis, author then proceeds to blame capitalism for creating them: “*<…> making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen*”
   — he concludes that “*the ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger.*”

Re. 2 and 3:

   - author provides a hypothesis for the root cause of the issue: “*if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call ‘the market’ reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else*“

Unfortunately, no solution is discussed at all. Neither there is a validation for this hypothesis to be found anywhere.

I’m sorry, but this line of logic cannot be refuted. Simply because there is no logic, there is an emotionally charged narrative supported by anecdotes and directed at very broad and abstract problem (“ruling class”), with no solution provided by author. Anarchism is assumed to be a solution, but I hope at this point it should be obvious, with the level of problem analysis involved, we could also use a magic wand.

1 - https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/

beaconstudios 4 years ago
If his actual argument is "they do it to keep us busy" with no further elaboration, that's just wildly conspiratorial and a pretty stupid argument.
How I'd look at it (as a postmodernist) is like this: after the owning class moved all the "real" (ie, related to manufacturing) work overseas to places where labour is cheap, first world jobs have been increasingly focused on problems within the abstraction itself - we're not dealing with harvesting or processing grain or rolling steel, we're managers of managers of people who generate sales contracts for rolled steel made somewhere in China. Our jobs feel like bullshit because they're entirely removed from material production, and are generally quite "meta". It's a form of labour alienation, which is a consequence of the capitalist division of labour (as compared to the artisan/craft system under feudalism, which people in the West are often seeking to imitate now).
- smugglerFlynn 4 years ago
  
  I disagree with the definition of “real” here. If we fully automate the production, would that suddenly make all the work “abstract”? Or would developers working on automation be the only ones doing “real” work?
  If yes, then modern jobs of US-based policy makers who write organizational scripts are also “real”, because they basically define exact same thing, only for people-based systems overseas instead of fully automated systems.
  
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