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It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs for the sake of keeping us all working.
Huge swaths of people spend their days performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.
The quotes were taken from London School of Economics anthropology professor and activist David Graeber's article " On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs," which explained that much modern employment is pretty much pointless, and that having to do them takes a toll on everyone's mentality. The article went viral in 2013 and hasn't lost its relevance since. The poster campaign seemed to be a re-run of the anti-police posters that went up before Christmas. Just like back then, the Bullshit Job posters were designed by Strike! magazine, which ran the original article.But nobody knows who put them up though, least of all Graeber, so I decided to call him up and chat about why everything I do is a meaningless waste of time.**VICE: Apparently 200 "counter-propaganda" posters have been put up on the tube today quoting an article you wrote on *"bullshit jobs."* How do you feel about that?**How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labor when one secretly feels one's job should not exist?
David Graeber: You know, to be perfectly honest, I didn't even know in advance about the action. I was thinking of going into work today myself. Oddly, I was going to bring a picture with me—the one from the "Bullshit Jobs" piece—that someone gave me as a birthday present, to my office, to use as a "Do Not Disturb" sign.
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When I came up with the phrase, I was particularly interested in what the subjective value of one's work is. There are millions of people who go to work everyday, and feel that maybe one hour of their work is actually contributing something to the world, and maybe not even that—maybe they're actually subtracting from the world by what they do. I was interested in the effect this has on people.So do you think someone is just making up pointless jobs to keep us working? One of the phrases on the posters suggested that.
Obviously it's not like people are sitting around in a room saying, you know, "Let's think up pointless jobs!" but it is true that people who talk about economic policy talk about creating employment but never talk about whether that employment is meaningful or not.This completely contradicts what should happen in a capitalist system. You know, we're used to thinking of the Soviet Union as an economy where they had an ideology of full employment and they had to make up jobs for people that were completely unnecessary and pointless; you'd go to a cashier and one gives you a ticket and another does something else and another something else—they were constantly making up these pointless jobs. It's understandable that this would happen in an economy that is based on the principle of work as a value unto itself and full employment and so forth and so on. But in a capitalist society, paying somebody to do nothing is the very last thing you'd expect a firm to do, but in fact they do and often you can observe it.
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I think one thing that's really significant is an ideological shift, away from the idea that work is valuable in that it produces stuff. It's kind of self-evident that, in the 19th century, work was important to produce the world around us.But over the course of the 20th century there's been a huge effort to re-imagine the world; it's the imagination of these great entrepreneurial geniuses that create all these things—workers are just robots, working in the factories, doing what they're told, extensions of the minds of these quite great people. It seems there has been an increased emphasis on work as of pure value unto itself.
There's this idea that work is discipline—you can't become a mature, responsible, self-contained, proper person without basically working more than you want to at things you don't really like. The more unpleasant work is, the more moralizing it is. And that logic has become stronger and stronger and stronger, so anybody who doesn't work you can revile as a parasite.
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I think there are any number of different ways. One interesting program would be a basic minimum income system—they're playing around with that in Switzerland. Instead of your wage being dependent on your work, you just give everybody a flat rate and have them decide for themselves how they want to contribute to society. And people do want to contribute in some way.
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I'm not really there to tell people what to do with their lives. But if you can find something that actually helps other people and you can still afford to feed your family, you might want to consider that. I think that's most people's dilemma: I remember this very clearly from Occupy Wall Street—people would tell the story of their lives on little post-it notes, and the vast majority complained about their lives a lot. They'd say, "I want to have a job where I actually contribute something to society—I want to be in education, I want to be a nurse, I want to help society."What is a non-bullshit job?
A job that isn't bullshit should have concrete benefits to other people. But we can't do jobs that aren't bullshit because of debt. That's a great dilemma from which that movement actually started I think. I would say to unions and organizers, think about that, redefine what is valuable about work—work is valuable if it makes other people's lives better. It would be nice if we were rewarded for making people's lives better, not punished. From an individual point of view, think about the way that you can navigate that with your own conscience.Follow Charlotte England on Twitter.