Woodside Library has a “take a book, recommend a book shelf”. I’ve borrowed from it multiple times. The last time I did so, I picked up David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs and recommended North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell.

I had previously read Debt: The First Five Thousand Years and his last published work, The Dawn of Everything. Both of these books changed the way I think about things deeply. I never find myself 100% agreeing with Graeber but he always presents something novel and challenging, so I was happy to accept the recommendation.

Graeber’s central thesis is that a large proportion of “work” carried out in the Western world is entirely without utility and the world would be no worse off without it. What’s more, the people engaged in these tasks feel this to be the case and more often than not make no protest.

This theory is presented as a phenomenon of late capitalism. However, occupational bullshit has existed for centuries, if not millennia. It’s just that it used to be the preserve of the aristocracy and their entourage, whereas now bullshit has been greatly democratised.

A bullshit job is essentially a “gentlemanly” occupation. In other words, it’s about the status of the employed person or the status of the employer much more than it is the real value of the work they do. In the 19^th century, such jobs existed. One example leaps out from the page of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence:

“he arrived late at the office, perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life. […] No one was deceived by his pretense of professional activity. In old-fashioned legal firms like that of which Mr. Letterblair was the head, and which were mainly engaged in the management of large estates and “conservative” investments, there were always two or three young men, fairly well-off, and without professional ambition, who, for a certain number of hours of each day, sat at their desks accomplishing trivial tasks, or simply reading the newspapers. Though it was supposed to be proper for them to have an occupation, the crude fact of money-making was still regarded as derogatory, and the law, being a profession, was accounted a more gentlemanly pursuit than business. But none of these young men had much hope of really advancing in his profession, or any earnest desire to do so; and over many of them the green mould of the perfunctory was already perceptibly spreading.”

Since the 1870s these “two or three young men” have multiplied exponentially. According to Graeber almost half of the working population are engaged in “elaborate futility”. While “simply reading the newspaper” has been replaced by social media scrolling, “trivial tasks” remain a mainstay of a great proportion of contemporary employment.

Having an occupation for the sake of having an occupation is an idea explored in Graeber’s book. Although the idea of economic growth as a yardstick by which the success of all governments should be measured has been challenged prominently in recent years[1], fewer people seek to challenge the narrative of jobs for jobs’ sake in public discourse. Quite the opposite; a job is seen as inherently a good thing no matter its actual contribution to society. Graeber draws the reader’s attention to an instance of Barack Obama justifying this precise assumption, which often remains unspoken, where he argues against dismantling America’s profoundly unjust private health insurance system primarily because doing so would wipe away thousands of claims processing jobs whose main purpose is to restrict and limit access to healthcare. Obama values “having a job” as worth more than a just society.

There are, of course, inherent benefits of having a job other than a reliable source of regular income. One can feel proud of having of a job, of making a living, of providing for one’s family. There is a certain amount of dignity in working in itself. It seems that there are few people on benefits who are particularly proud of the fact despite certain sections of the media encouraging us to believe that flagrant benefit cheats abound in the UK.

But what if these are really just societally conditional states of consciousness? After all, being on benefits is a kind of reliable source of regular income. The government could decide to take them away if it wanted to, but so could an employer if they decided your position was redundant. One can hypothetically provide for one’s family by claiming the correct benefits (that is if you have two children or fewer). Why is it then that having no job is stigmatised and any job at all affords one dignity?

I came across an instance of this ideology in play when observing a criminal trial a couple of weeks ago. The witnesses had given their evidence and it came to summing up. In her submissions, the procurator fiscal framed the central issue of the case to be whether the judge found the witnesses for the defence or the witnesses for the crown credible and reliable. She effectively implied that the crown witnesses should be believed because they were professionals; both the defence witnesses were unemployed.

Is there truly a case for job creation solely for “feel-good factor” or, more soberly, dignity? It is straightforward to see why in a capitalist society having a job affords one dignity inherently. By having a job, one is participating in society because society is predicated on people exchanging their time and labour for money used to purchase goods and services from businesses whose profitability, in theory, allows them to create more jobs, perpetuating the cycle. On a meta level, though, you have “earned” that money because you sacrificed your time and toil for it. Taking this logic, people on benefits neither participate in society nor earn the money they receive. People with jobs do “an honest day’s work”, the implication being that unemployed people are dishonest and undeserving.

What happens, though, when so many people who have jobs experience no “feel-good factor” and when the role they have affords them no real dignity if not actively humiliates them? Almost half of people in employment, Graeber claims, feel their jobs bring no benefit to society. Yes, people are spending an increasing amount of time at work or on call – despite efforts to introduce a four-day week – but they are doing far less in that time, and it appears they secretly believe they are pulling off a scam by being paid so generously for that meagre exertion in relative terms.

What’s the harm in that? One might reasonably suggest. Well, it is that the “certain number of hours” one is obligated to show face constitute the majority of one’s time on planet Earth in our current culture of work. Keeping up the pretence is psychologically exhausting, and to spend most of one’s waking adult life involved in elaborate make-believe you know to be so is spiritually corrosive.

In the past, Graeber contends, the medieval European adolescent entered into the service of a wealthier household and completed a period of employment which was an apprenticeship. At the end of that apprenticeship, he would marry and set up independently, in turn employing apprentices himself. His adolescence was over. The years of deference and submission to the will of the master were able to be tolerated because there was a high degree of certainty that he would one day be his own master and could do as he pleased.

Today a certain pride still persists in “men wi’ a trade” and rightly so; their skills are demonstrably useful to society. I have talked about the phenomenon of the neo-self-employed as a growing fraction of society in a previous post. The joiner, the plumber and the electrician still live the medieval model of apprentice-to-master. Because of this, they are much more likely to see the capitalist model as unproblematic. They can “serve their time” in a relatively short period and escape wage labour for good while still retaining the dignity of work. Contrast this with the average modern worker living in a state of perpetual adolescence.

David Graeber’s solution is to collectively give up the pretence and introduce Universal Basic Income. This would, in his view, reduce the stigma and indignity of unemployment (deliberately stigmatised and made undignified by politicians committed to means testing and bureaucratic humiliation). Bullshit would evaporate. Those with occupational pride in their usefulness to society, or plain entrepreneurial spirit, would continue to work or do business and earn on top of their guaranteed income. People not inclined to enlist in “essential services” would be free to pursue other projects unburdened from the need to account for their economic inactivity to the state.

Graeber has clearly diagnosed something hugely prevalent in Western society in the phenomenon of “bullshit jobs” that says something about how we view and experience work. I am not convinced, however, of his proposed solution. Graeber is an anarchist and as such is against the state as a concept. His solution demonstrates the weaknesses of anarchism and, seemingly, the weakness of his anarchism.

Firstly, UBI is prima facie a huge state intervention. Graeber refuses to address the practicalities, which no doubt would involve a large amount of bureaucracy, albeit eventually less than the current means testing regime, one would hope. In order for the government to redistribute huge amounts of wealth it needs to extract taxes (or borrow), which if not just expropriation, requires a large, developed state bureaucracy.

Secondly, this one giant state intervention is presented as a silver bullet. It seems that UBI with a single shot will cause a chain reaction that will eliminate bullshit wherever it is or may have otherwise arisen. Effectively, with UBI in play, “market forces” will strangle bullshit in its cradle because there is no rational economic need for it. This is a strange conclusion to make given what the book has previously said about private sector bullshit being far worse than public sector “inefficiencies”. Graeber has spent many pages detailing the cultural, unconscious reasons why bullshit jobs abound and persist especially in the private sector. He fails to address how this single economic intervention would subvert, or perhaps even invert, cultural norms that have persisted for decades in the corporate world.

UBI alone will not usher in a utopia. It is undoubtedly capable of effecting profound cultural change and is a solution to certain problems of contemporary culture around work. I’m sure it would allow creative lifestyles to be more viable and allow people to reduce their working hours without fear of not being able to pay the bills. However, Graeber overstates the disincentivising impact it would have on employers in the creation and maintenance of bullshit jobs whose raisons d’être are economically irrational (ideological) and unlikely to disappear when the social relations underpinning production remain unchallenged.

[1] For the record, I am not a de-growther but I do not believe that addressing Britain’s ubiquitous social decay should be predicated solely on economic upturn driven primarily by private investment.