Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

John Maynard Keynes had great confidence that capitalism will improve not only the wealth but also the well-being of all in society. One of the specific predictions he made that, sadly, did not come true, was that by the end of the twentieth century, the major Western societies would have achieved the fifteen-hour work week because technology would have alleviated hitherto long menial hours. Why has that not happened and instead employees are working longer and longer hours? Graeber blames the creation of what he calls ‘BS jobs’ (I had to shortened the word to pass Amazon censorship rules) and the ‘BSization’ of proper jobs. Graeber’s defines a BS job as ‘a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case’. He also says that ‘Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not particularly good at’. He provides plenty of examples, cabinetmakers compelled to fry fish is one of them. There is the story of a corporate lawyer who went on to become a happy singer in an indie rock band when he became disillusioned with his job as a corporate lawyer. He had taken ‘the default choice of many directionless folk: law school’ but has found his job as a lawyer to be ‘utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist’. Some such BS jobs are so pointless that no one notices even if the employee vanishes. One case involved a Spanish civil servant who skipped work for six years to study philosophy and became an expert in Spinoza before he was found out. In another case, an employee had been sitting at his desk, dead for four days before his colleagues realised that he had died. BS jobs can also be defined by the scope of work. People who are employed in jobs that exist primarily to make someone else look or feel important are known as ‘flunkies’. Doormen are examples in this category. There are also ‘goons’ who exist only because people employ them – soldiers, for example; and ‘duct-tapers’ who are employed to help one part of an organisation communicate with another in the same organisation. In addition to financial consultancy, middle management is where one might find BS jobs aplenty. A sign that you have a job like this is when you are designated to provide ‘strategic leadership’. This is what Graeber has to say in middle management in academia: ‘Now, those of us toiling in the academic mills who still like to think of ourselves as teachers and scholars before all else have come to fear the word “strategic”. “Strategic statement” (or even worse, “strategic vision documents”) instil a particular terror, since these are the primary means by which corporate management techniques – setting up quantifiable methods for assessing performance, forcing teachers and scholars to spend more and more of their time assessing and justifying what they do and less and less time actually doing it – are insinuated into academic life’. Graeber interviewed employees from various sectors. From one he quoted, ‘in banking, obviously the entire sector adds no value and is therefore BS’. Then there is the Human Resources Department that sets up intranet and instruct employees to make it ‘into a kind of internal “community”, like Facebook. They set it up; nobody uses it. So they then started to try and bully everyone into using it…Then they tried to entice people in by having HR post a load of touchy-feely crap or people writing “internal blogs” that nobody cared about.’ Graeber argues that the rise of such jobs was not due to economic factors but political and moral ones. He discusses how jobs can truly have value, and how exactly can value be measured. What is clear that we must resist ‘The pressure to value ourselves and others on the basis of how hard we work at something we’d rather not be doing…if you’re not destroying your mind and body via paid work you’re not living right’. The last part of the book is devoted to answering the question, ‘How have so many humans reached the point where they accept that even miserable, unnecessary work is actually superior to no work at all?’ From there Graeber discusses the modern culture of managerial feudalism and the resentment it generates, yet is itself oblivious to it. If Graeber is right that this is not an economic problem but a political and moral one, then the solution cannot be economic either. Unfortunately, Graeber is loath to make policy recommendations. That keeps us then, in utter suspense – unless workers revolt.