Have you ever met someone at a party who, after a drink or two, admits their job is pointless? The anthropologist David Graeber met so many of them that he gave the phenomenon a name: bullsh*t jobs. In this clip from his 2015 London Real interview, he tells Brian Rose where the idea came from and why he thinks it reveals something strange about modern capitalism.
It was recorded three years before his bestselling book on the subject.
▶ Watch the full episode: David Graeber – American Anarchist
Refusing to repeat himself
Graeber begins with a decision he made after his book on debt became a success. There is a pattern, he says: say something new and interesting, and the world conspires to make you say “the same damn thing over and over”. The money is in talks and articles that repeat the hit.
He chose the opposite, using his new platform to publish the oddball ideas nobody would print before. When a new radical magazine called Strike! asked if he had anything unusual lying around, he wrote about bullsh*t jobs.
Confessions at parties
The idea grew out of small talk. As an anthropologist, he says, people always want to hear about his work. But when he asks about theirs, many are embarrassed. Press them a little, and they confess: they file reports nobody reads, sit on committees, pass paperwork back and forth. Many told him their real work could be done in a few hours a week, and that a computer could do the whole thing. Just don’t tell the boss.
The opposite of what capitalism should do
What fascinated Graeber is that this is exactly what capitalism is not supposed to do. He compares it to the Soviet Union, where full employment meant inventing jobs: one queue to get your beef, another to hand over a ticket. Yet the people he met mostly worked for private, competitive firms. Why would a business pay people to do nothing?
He guesses these jobs make up a big part of the economy, and lists examples. If all telemarketers vanished, he says, most people would be pleased. Many corporate lawyers, in his experience, admit the world would not change if their job disappeared, and he compares them to armies: you only need one because the other side has one. Then there are the managers who organise meetings and supervise the people filling in forms.
Where did the 15-hour week go?
This, he argues, explains a puzzle. In 1930 the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that, a century on, technology would let people work around 15 hours a week. Graeber believes we could have done it. Industrial, farm and domestic jobs have largely gone, but rather than simply moving into services, he says, work has shifted into administrative, clerical and supervisory roles: “all these people administering other people.”
His explanation is cultural, not economic. It is not consumerism, he says, since most of these jobs give us no extra sushi or iPhones. It is the idea that work is a value in itself, rooted in the 19th-century belief that value comes from labour. The trouble, in his view, is that people pictured all labour as factory work, when most work was always about care and maintenance. As he puts it, “you produce a cup once, but you wash it a thousand times.”
What to take from it
Whatever you make of his figures, Graeber’s question is a useful one to ask of your own week: how much of what you do actually makes something, or looks after someone?
Who is David Graeber?
David Graeber (1961–2020) was an American anthropologist and professor at the London School of Economics. He was the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullsh*t Jobs: A Theory, which grew out of the 2013 essay he describes in this clip, and co-wrote The Dawn of Everything with David Wengrow, published after his death. He was also a prominent voice in Occupy Wall Street.
In his full 2015 London Real episode, American Anarchist, he talks with Brian Rose about debt, anarchism and how society could be organised differently. You can also watch his Success Secrets.
More on London Real
Transcript
Transcript: David Graeber – Bullsh*t Jobs: Why So Much Modern Work Is Pointless
0:00 Brian Rose: What’s a bullsh*t job? What is that? Do I have a bullsh*t job here?
0:06 David Graeber: No, this is the opposite of a bullsh*t job. I mean, people watch the show. It’s not a bullsh*t job.
0:11 Brian Rose: This is fun.
0:12 David Graeber: One of the things that I told myself when the debt book was successful was that I was going to take advantage of this to widen my opportunities of expression rather than narrow them. What I mean by that is, I was saying this earlier before the interview, there’s this weird thing where if you say something that people decide is interesting and creative and unusual, and people actually pay attention to it, here’s a person able to say creative and new things, the world will somehow conspire to ensure that you never do it again. They will try to make you say the same damn thing over and over again.
0:53 David Graeber: You don’t get that much money for the book, but you do get money for talks or articles where you just say the same thing in a slightly different format, over and over again, until you just become this robot repeating things. And I thought: I’m not going to do that. It’s one reason I can’t afford a house. But nonetheless, I think it’s worth it.
1:10 Brian Rose: So they wanted you to keep talking about debt.
1:13 David Graeber: Yeah, the same thing. And I could have made a lot of money, because rich people are interested in money. They like that. If I got myself a personal assistant and arranged deals, I could probably get talks all over the place. But I said I wasn’t going to do that. Instead I’m going to see if I can do the opposite: turn this into an opportunity to take all those crazy rants and obsessions and interesting things I’ve been thinking about that no one would ever print, and actually figure out a way to get them out there. And that’s why I came up with the thing about the flying cars and technology, or my analysis of [unclear], all sorts of things like that.
1:46 David Graeber: But this one: there were some people who formed this new radical magazine called Strike! And they said: got anything kind of oddball that you’ve got lying around, that maybe nobody else will print? This is your big opportunity, we’ll print anything. So I said, OK, yeah.
2:05 David Graeber: I had noticed over the years that you keep meeting people who are embarrassed by what they do. You meet them at a party, and especially if you’re someone like me, I’m an anthropologist, most people think that’s kind of interesting. So they’ll say: oh, you’re an anthropologist, what is that? Do you go to foreign countries? Do you live in villages? What’s that like? They’ll start asking all these questions, and then you say: well, what do you do? You don’t really want to know.
2:30 David Graeber: And you get them a little drunk, you press them, and they’ll say: I want to tell you the truth. I’ve got this job, I’m the senior East Coast [unclear] manager for this company, and I don’t really do anything. I just file reports and nobody really reads them. They create these committees and pass things back and forth. And so I started asking people: what about yours? Do you actually do anything at your job? How many hours a day do you really work? And a lot of people say: well, to be honest, what I do, you could probably do in three hours a week. But I stretch it out. And they always say: don’t tell my boss, OK, but a computer could do this whole thing.
3:11 David Graeber: So you get all these people, and I thought about it, and I thought: this is really interesting, because this is exactly what capitalism isn’t supposed to do. Back in the Soviet Union, they did stuff like that. They made up all these jobs because they had a full employment programme. Everybody had to have a job whether or not they actually needed you to be doing anything. So they would set up these things where, to buy a piece of beef in the store, you’d have to go to one person to get the beef, and then you’d have a ticket, and then you’d have to take the ticket to another line. They’d just make up employment.
3:42 David Graeber: But we’re doing something like that, except it’s all being done by the private sector. Most of these people weren’t working for the government. They were working for private, competitive firms. So how on earth do you have a situation where private firms are making up jobs where they pay people not to do anything? That’s the last thing you’d think a competitive firm would do.
4:03 Brian Rose: The opposite of capitalism.
4:04 David Graeber: Yeah, except they’re capitalist firms. So what’s going on? And I thought about this, and in fact these jobs constitute a pretty big sector of our economy. I didn’t know how much at the time. I was guessing 20, 25%. It turns out it’s more.
4:20 David Graeber: But think about it. There are all these industries that, basically, if they disappeared, it wouldn’t make any difference. Telemarketing: if all telemarketers vanished, most people would not complain. They’d be pretty happy, actually. Corporate lawyers: if you talk to corporate lawyers, there’s one or two big shots who think what they do is important, but the vast majority say: well, yeah, it’s completely unnecessary. If I didn’t have this job, the world would not change in any way.
4:47 David Graeber: And some of these are jobs where, if nobody did it, nobody would need to do it. One guy needs a corporate lawyer because somebody else has a corporate lawyer. It’s like armies. No country needs an army unless other countries have armies. Corporate lawyers are a little bit like armies, or telemarketers, or like that. But there are other things that aren’t even like that: all of these middle management guys who just organise meetings or fill out forms, or supervise the way other people are filling out forms, or create meaningless paperwork and reports.
5:20 David Graeber: And I suddenly thought: well, this is why people are not working 15-hour days. Because back in the 30s, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay called, I can’t remember, something like “The Economic Prospects for the Next Century”, where he basically said that in 100 years we shouldn’t be working more than 15 hours a day. Technology will have improved to the point where we can have a society mainly based on leisure. Work will be a relatively unimportant part of our lives.
5:55 David Graeber: And I thought, well, the interesting thing is, if you look at what jobs existed in the 1930s, they could have done that. They could have kept up the same type of job profile. Because back then there were a lot of people working in industry, a lot of people working in agriculture, a lot of domestic servants. All that’s gone. A lot of the domestic servants have now been replaced by service jobs in Starbucks or whatever.
6:20 David Graeber: We have this idea that, oh yeah, in industry there aren’t as many people employed, even if you count the ones in China and other places where the factories have gone. But actually, it’s not so much service. People think it’s gone to the service sector. What it’s gone to is the administrative, clerical and supervisory sector. So if you count service and that together, it’s gone from, I think, a quarter of all jobs to 75% now. So you have all these people administering other people. So what is going on here? And why is this happening?
6:58 Brian Rose: Exactly. And they’re not really doing anything, they’re just pretending.
7:00 David Graeber: And then think about all the people. You have some company where all they do is take German forms and translate them into French forms. It’s a completely meaningless job. But then there are all the people who are cleaning their bathrooms and doing the reception and the security for that building. And those jobs are unnecessary too. How does this happen? Huge swathes of our economy are completely unnecessary.
7:24 David Graeber: And I tried to think about it, and I thought: well, it’s not consumerism. That’s the usual. Because most of these jobs have nothing to do with giving us more sushi and more iPhones and things like that. It seems to be this idea that work is a value in itself. Back in the 19th century, people really got the idea of the labour theory of value. Social movements really managed to get that out there, and it became common sense: value comes from labour. We collectively make our world. We manufacture things.
8:00 Brian Rose: Protestant work ethic.
8:01 David Graeber: Yeah, there’s a Protestant work ethic that kind of jibed with that. But if you listen to speeches that politicians made in the 1860s, 1870s, they all sound like Marxists. Abraham Lincoln: all capital comes from labour. They had that idea. But the idea of labour they had was industrial labour, and I think this was part of the problem. The paradigm for all work was going and hammering something, casting steel, manufacturing automobiles, whatever.
8:32 Brian Rose: Hard physical work that makes something.
8:34 David Graeber: So one of the problems they had is they focused on production as if it were the paradigm of all labour, even though most people, even then, were not factory workers, even working-class people. More of them were cabbies and nurses and gardeners, caretakers. I always say: you produce a cup once, but you wash it a thousand times. Most labour is actually maintaining things.
