![[Book Club | Part 1 Discussion] Bullshit Jobs](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/VeEzTLxq4X.jpg){kind=link}
David Graeber – ‘Bullshit Jobs’. In this book, David Graeber argues that there are millions of people across the world — clerical workers, administrators, consultants, telemarketers, corporate lawyers, service personnel, and many others — who are toiling away in meaningless, unnecessary jobs, and they know it. Capitalism is supposed to bring efficiency, but instead of freeing ourselves from the suffocating 40-hour workweek, we’ve invented a whole universe of futile occupations that are professionally unsatisfying and spiritually empty. Graeber argues that unions and a universal basic income can provide a potential solution to the phenomenon of bullshit jobs.
Reading/Discussion Schedule:
Preface, Chapters 1 & 2 - Sunday 21st November
Chapters 3 & 4 - Sunday 28th November
Chapters 5 & 6 - Sunday 5th December
Chapter 7 - Sunday 12th December
PDF of the original essay that led to the book
Enjoying this book. Framing this book by going through what is and what is not a bullshit job I’m learning that most of our jobs have some bs to them and Graeber also mentions this is a spectrum.
I find it interesting how most bs jobs are earned through employment time and the only way for them to legitimize their job is to create a whole apparatus of bs. This is how the problem has gotten so pervasive in our society.
Didn’t necessarily enjoy the part where the author is making false equivalencies through bs jobs under capitalism and the USSR. I think the example was having three butchers do the same job because everyone had the right to work.
I hope Graeber discusses the attractiveness of these jobs in a society where we are not paid for our labor and so finding jobs where you have to labor very little is a form of our power over one’s body.
The example with the USSR's relevant, because the book is decidedly about antiwork, as in not moralizing work at all and not predicating aid on doing (unnecessary) work, which is absolutely a failing of older leftist movements that tended to overvalorize work as being of almost spiritual importance,
It's also very useful when speaking to a liberal audience (like this website), because it makes a direct comparison between the US's imagination of Soviet beuracracy and the US's own hypocritical labor practices, due to an even more ingrained assumption that if you don't work you literally deserve to die.
:this: