Comment by 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.
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).
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.
The reason I put "real" in scare quotes was to appeal to the colloquial meaning of "real job", which is basically to be close to the production of actual materials and goods.
If everything were automated then labour would no longer be necessary at all. If we were still working at that time it would not only be abstract, but completely pointless.
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