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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 loo
by beaconstudios 5y 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 5y agoI 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.
- beaconstudios 5y agoThe 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.
- smugglerFlynn 5y ago“Everything is automated” world would still require maintenance, but all the maintenance jobs would be “bullshit” by Graeber’s definition, as they help to maintain some technological system. Which means any kind of technologically developed society will have these “bullshit” jobs, even anarchist one.
- beaconstudios 5y agoOK so getting down into the nitty gritty, we have to distinguish between the types of work that are not directly productive - there's jobs that are indirectly productive, and thus contribute to the productive process (like machine maintainence), and there's jobs that do not. The latter are the "bullshit jobs" - they just exist to protect and maintain power structures, they're not contributing to production in any meaningful sense.