******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
The vision of the world proposed by Bullshit Jobs is reminiscent above all of the prognostications developed by the academic sociology of the 1950s and 1960s, which predicted the near coming of a white-collar, middle-class world in which a constantly fatter layer of the salaried labor force would be tasked with carrying out administrative tasks: a world of “salaried paper pushers.” Where those theories, like the competing accounts of state capitalism developed in the decades just prior, imagined a world in which market dynamics and price signals would play less and less of a role in economic decisions, Graeber paints a world in which rent-seeking bureaucrats in the private and public sector alike allocate labor and capital in pursuit not of higher rates of return on capital investment, but of personal domination, of “hierarchy” and power. To make this claim, which one could expect of an anarchist who works in public sector higher education, he must turn a blind eye to the world around; he reaches for Twitter, and followers, for the testimony of “rebel banker[s]” and “corporate lawyers”—his cited interlocutors—instead. Rather than take aim at the predations of the labor market, which forces workers to compete against one another for fewer, poorly-paid jobs, Graeber offers his readership a group self-portrait, an office comedy sending up the minor slights of the cubicle, the email chain, and prepared lunches. In the face of a capitalist world lurching from crisis to catastrophe, shaped by a dramatic polarization of the workforce, tepid productivity figures, a stagnant technology sector operating in monopoly-like conditions, and a decades-long tapering off of profit rates across economic sectors, Bullshit Jobs plays us an old standard: the bureaucratization of the world. That most workers in capitalist societies find their work pointless and pernicious has as much to do with the social relations that envelop it as the content of the work itself. That wage labor is compulsory for all but a few and conducted under capitalist conditions—rationalized, disciplined—transforms even attractive labor into an experience of servility. We have every reason to believe that, in a world in which production is no longer organized on capitalist lines, a sizable share of such bullshit jobs will be rendered, like the human appendix, unnecessary, their residual presence a mystery, a matter for the natural sciences. But in this case, we will have abolished wage-labor altogether.
full: https://brooklynrail.org/2018/07/field-notes/Jobs-Bullshit-and-the-Bureaucratization-of-the-World
_________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
