{"id":61232,"date":"2015-07-20T12:00:35","date_gmt":"2015-07-20T11:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=61232"},"modified":"2015-07-20T09:18:19","modified_gmt":"2015-07-20T08:18:19","slug":"david-graeber-interview-so-many-people-spend-their-working-lives-doing-jobs-they-think-are-unnecessary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/07\/david-graeber-interview-so-many-people-spend-their-working-lives-doing-jobs-they-think-are-unnecessary\/","title":{"rendered":"David Graeber Interview: \u2018So Many People Spend Their Working Lives Doing Jobs They Think Are Unnecessary\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

The anarchist author, coiner of the phrase \u2018We are the 99%\u2019, talks about \u2018bullshit jobs\u2019, our rule-bound lives and the importance of play.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Radical<\/a>

Radical heritage \u2026 David Graeber. Photograph: Frantzesco Kangaris for the Guardian<\/p><\/div>\n

A few years ago David Graeber\u2019s mother had a series of strokes. Social workers advised him that, in order to pay for the home care she needed, he should apply for Medicaid, the US government health insurance programme for people on low incomes. So he did, only to be sucked into a vortex of form filling and humiliation familiar to anyone who\u2019s ever been embroiled in bureaucratic procedures.<\/p>\n

At one point, the application was held up because someone at the Department of Motor Vehicles had put down his given name as \u201cDaid\u201d; at another, because someone at Verizon had spelled his surname \u201cGrueber\u201d. Graeber made matters worse by printing his name on the line clearly marked \u201csignature\u201d on one of the forms. Steeped in Kafka, Catch-22<\/em><\/a> and David Foster Wallace<\/a>\u2019s The Pale King<\/em><\/a>, Graeber was alive to all the hellish ironies of the situation but that didn\u2019t make it any easier to bear. \u201cWe spend so much of our time filling in forms,\u201d he says. \u201cThe average American waits six months of her life waiting for the lights to change. If so, how many years of our life do we spend doing paperwork?\u201d<\/p>\n

The matter became academic, because Graeber\u2019s mother died before she got Medicaid. But the form-filling ordeal stayed with him. \u201cHaving spent much of my life leading a fairly bohemian existence, comparatively insulated from this sort of thing, I found myself asking: is this what ordinary life, for most people, is really like?\u201d writes the 53-year-old professor of anthropology in his new book The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy<\/em>. \u201cRunning around feeling like an idiot all day? Being somehow put in a position where one actually does end up acting like an idiot?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI like to think I\u2019m actually a smart person. Most people seem to agree with that,\u201d Graeber says, in a restaurant near his London School of Economics office. \u201cOK, I was emotionally distraught, but I was doing things that were really dumb. How did I not notice that the signature was on the wrong line? There\u2019s something about being in that bureaucratic situation that encourages you to behave foolishly.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Graeber\u2019s book doesn\u2019t just present human idiocy in its bureaucratic form. Its main purpose is to free us from a rightwing misconception about bureaucracy. Ever since Ronald Reagan said: \u201cThe most terrifying words in the English language are: I\u2019m from the government and I\u2019m here to help\u201d, it has been commonplace to assume that bureaucracy means government. Wrong, Graeber argues. \u201cIf you go to the Mac store and somebody says: \u2018I\u2019m sorry, it\u2019s obvious that what needs to happen here is you need a new screen, but you\u2019re still going to have to wait a week to speak to the expert\u2019, you don\u2019t say \u2018Oh damn bureaucrats\u2019, even though that\u2019s what it is \u2013 classic bureaucratic procedure. We\u2019ve been propagandised into believing that bureaucracy means civil servants. Capitalism isn\u2019t supposed to create meaningless positions. The last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don\u2019t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.\u201d<\/p>\n

Graeber\u2019s argument is similar to one he made in a 2013 article called \u201cOn the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs\u201d<\/a>, in which he argued that, in 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes<\/a> predicted that by the end of the century technology would have advanced sufficiently that in countries such as the UK and the US we\u2019d be on 15-hour weeks. \u201cIn technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn\u2019t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which jobs are bullshit? \u201cA world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble. But it\u2019s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.\u201d He concedes that some might argue that his own work is meaningless. \u201cThere can be no objective measure of social value,\u201d he says emolliently.<\/p>\n

In The Utopia of Rules<\/em>, Graeber goes further in his analysis of what went wrong. Technological advance was supposed to result in us teleporting to new planets, wasn\u2019t it? He lists some of the other predicted technological wonders he\u2019s disappointed don\u2019t exist: flying cars, suspended animation, immortality drugs, androids, colonies on Mars. \u201cSpeaking as someone who was eight years old at the time of the Apollo moon landing, I have clear memories of calculating that I would be 39 years of age in the magic year 2000, and wondering what the world around me would be like. Did I honestly expect I would be living in a world of such wonders? Of course. Do I feel cheated now? Absolutely.\u201d<\/p>\n

But what happened between the Apollo moon landing and now? Graeber\u2019s theory is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was mounting fear about a society of hippie proles with too much time on their hands. \u201cThe ruling class had a freak out about robots replacing all the workers. There was a general feeling that \u2018My God, if it\u2019s bad now with the hippies, imagine what it\u2019ll be like if the entire working class becomes unemployed.\u2019 You never know how conscious it was but decisions were made about research priorities.\u201d Consider, he suggests, medicine and the life sciences since the late 1960s. \u201cCancer? No, that\u2019s still here.\u201d Instead, the most dramatic breakthroughs have been with drugs such as Ritalin, Zoloft and Prozac \u2013 all of which, Graeber writes, are \u201ctailor-made, one might say, so that these new professional demands don\u2019t drive us completely, dysfunctionally, crazy\u201d.<\/p>\n

His bullshit jobs argument could be taken as a counterblast to the hyper-capitalist dystopia argument wherein the robots take over and humans are busted down to an eternity of playing Minecraft<\/em>. Summarising predictions in recent futurological literature, John Lanchester has written<\/a>: \u201cThere\u2019s capital, doing better than ever; the robots, doing all the work; and the great mass of humanity, doing not much but having fun playing with its gadgets.\u201d Lanchester drew attention to a league table drawn up by two Oxford economists of 702 jobs that might be better done by robots: at number one (most safe) were recreational therapists; at 702 (least safe) were telemarketers. Anthropologists, Graeber might be pleased to know, came in at 39, so he needn\u2019t start burnishing his resume just yet \u2013 he\u2019s much safer than writers (123) and editors (140).<\/p>\n

Graeber believes that since the 1970s there has been a shift from technologies based on realising alternative futures to investment technologies that favoured labour discipline and social control. Hence the internet. \u201cThe control is so ubiquitous that we don\u2019t see it.\u201d We don\u2019t see, either, how the threat of violence underpins society, he claims. \u201cThe rarity with which the truncheons appear just helps to make violence harder to see,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n

In 2011, at New York\u2019s Zuccotti Park, he became involved in Occupy Wall Street, which he describes as an \u201cexperiment in a post-bureaucratic society\u201d. He was responsible for the slogan \u201cWe are the 99%\u201d. \u201cWe wanted to demonstrate we could do all the services that social service providers do without endless bureaucracy. In fact at one point at Zuccotti Park there was a giant plastic garbage bag that had $800,000 in it. People kept giving us money but we weren\u2019t going to put it in the bank. You have all these rules and regulations. And Occupy Wall Street can\u2019t have a bank account. I always say the principle of direct action is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Occupy<\/a>

Occupy Wall Street protests in New York in 2011. Photograph: Keystone USA-ZUMA \/ Rex Features<\/p><\/div>\n

He quotes with approval the anarchist collective Crimethinc<\/a>: \u201cPutting yourself in new situations constantly is the only way to ensure that you make your decisions unencumbered by the nature of habit, law, custom or prejudice \u2013 and it\u2019s up to you to create the situations.\u201d Academia was, he muses, once a haven for oddballs \u2013 it was one of the reasons he went into it. \u201cIt was a place of refuge. Not any more. Now, if you can\u2019t act a little like a professional executive, you can kiss goodbye to the idea of an academic career.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why is that so terrible? \u201cIt means we\u2019re taking a very large percentage of the greatest creative talent in our society and telling them to go to hell \u2026 The eccentrics have been drummed out of all institutions.\u201d Well, perhaps not all of them. \u201cI am an offbeat person. I am one of those guys who wouldn\u2019t be allowed in the academy these days.\u201d Indeed, he claims to have been blackballed by the American academy and found refuge in Britain. In 2005, he went on a year\u2019s sabbatical from Yale, \u201cand did a lot of direct action and was in the media\u201d. When he returned he was, he says, snubbed by colleagues and did not have his contract renewed. Why? Partly, he believes, because his countercultural activities were an embarrassment to Yale.<\/p>\n

Born in 1961 to working-class Jewish parents in New York, Graeber had a radical heritage. His father, Kenneth, was a plate stripper who fought in the Spanish civil war, and his mother, Ruth, was a garment worker who played the lead role in Pins and Needles<\/em>, a 1930s musical revue staged by the international Ladies\u2019 Garment Workers\u2019 Union.<\/p>\n

Their son was calling himself an anarchist at the age of 16, but only got heavily involved in politics in 1999 when he became part of the protests against the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle. Later, while teaching at Yale, he joined the activists, artists and pranksters of the Direct Action Network in New York. Would he have got further at Yale if he hadn\u2019t been an anarchist? \u201cMaybe. I guess I had two strikes against me. One, I seemed to be enjoying my work too much. Plus I\u2019m from the wrong class: I come from a working-class background.\u201d The US\u2019s loss is the UK\u2019s gain: Graeber became a reader in anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2008 and professor at the LSE two years ago.<\/p>\n

His publications include Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology<\/em><\/a> (2004), in which he laid out his vision of how society might be organised on less alienating lines, and Direct Action: An Ethnography<\/em> (2009), a study of the global justice movement. In 2013, he wrote his most popularly political book yet, The Democracy Project<\/em><\/a>. \u201cI wanted it to be called \u2018As if We Were Already Free\u2019,\u201d he tells me. \u201cAnd the publishers laughed at me \u2013 a subjunctive in the title!\u201d But it was Debt: The First 5,000 Years<\/em><\/a>, published in 2011, that made him famous and has drawn praise from the likes of Thomas Piketty<\/a> and Russell Brand<\/a>. Financial Times journalist and fellow anthropologist Gillian Tett argued that the book was \u201cnot just thought-provoking but exceedingly timely\u201d, not least, no doubt, because in it Graeber called for a biblical-style \u201cjubilee\u201d, meaning a wiping out of sovereign and consumer debts.<\/p>\n

At the end of The Utopia of Rules<\/em>, Graeber distinguishes between play and games \u2013 the former involving free\u2011form creativity, the latter requiring participants to abide by rules. While there is pleasure in the latter (it is, to quote from the subtitle of the book, one of the secret joys of bureaucracy), it is the former that excites him as an antidote to our form\u2011filling red-taped society.<\/p>\n

Just before he finishes his dinner, Graeber tells me about the new idea he\u2019s toying with. \u201cIt\u2019s about the play principle in nature. Usually, he argues, we project agency to nature insofar as there is some kind of economic interest. Hence, for instance, Richard Dawkins<\/a>\u2019s The Selfish Gene<\/em><\/a>. I begin to understand the idea better\u2013 it\u2019s an anarchist theory of organisation starting with insects and animals and proceeding to humans. He is suggesting that, instead of being rule-following economic drones of capitalism, we are essentially playful. The most basic level of being is play rather than economics, fun rather than rules, goofing around rather than filling in forms. Graeber himself certainly seems to be having more fun than seems proper for a respected professor.<\/p>\n

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