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Author : David Graeber

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[1] I’ve got a lot of push-back about the actuaries, and now think I was being unfair to them. Some actuarial work does make a difference. I’m still convinced the rest could disappear with no negative consequences.

[2] David Graeber, “The Modern Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” Canberra (Australia) Times online, last modified September 3, 2013, www.canberratimes.com.au/national/public-service/the-modern-phenomenon-of-bullshit-jobs-20130831-2sy3j.html.

[3] To my knowledge, only one book has ever been written on the subject of bullshit jobs, Boulots de Merde!, by Paris-based journalists Julien Brygo and Olivier Cyran (2015)—and the authors told me it was directly inspired by my article. It’s a good book but covers a rather different range of questions than my own.

[4] “Bullshit Jobs,” LiquidLegends, www.liquidlegends.net/forum/general/460469-bullshit-jobs?page=3, last modified October 1, 2014.

[5] “Spanish Civil Servant Skips Work for 6 Years to Study Spinoza,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), last modified February 26, 2016, www.jta.org/2016/02/26/news-opinion/world/spanish-civil-servant-skips-work-for-6-years-to-study-spinoza.

[6] Jon Henley, “Long Lunch: Spanish Civil Servant Skips Work for Years Without Anyone Noticing,” Guardian (US), last modified February 26, 2016, www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/12/long-lunch-spanish-civil-servant-skips-work-for-years-without-anyone-noticing. Perhaps he was inspired by Spinoza’s argument that all beings strive to maximize their power, but that power consists equally of the ability to have effects on other beings, but also, to be affected by them. From a Spinozan perspective, having a job where you affect and are affected by no one would be the worst possible employment situation.

[7] Post carriers are clearly not bullshit jobs but the implication of the story seems to be that since 99 percent of the mail they chose not to deliver was junk mail, they might as well have been. This seems unlikely to have actually been the case but the story reflects on public attitudes. For shifting attitudes toward postal workers, see my Utopia of Rules (2015), 153–163.

[8] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3410547.stm?a, accessed April 7, 2017.

[9] “Vier op tien werknemers noemt werk zinloos,” http://overhetnieuwewerken.nl/vier-op-tien-werknemers-noemt-werk-zinloos/, accessed July 10, 2017.

[10] Typical remark, from Rufus: “I’d love to tell you that my most worthless job was making lattes for very particular and peculiar people, but in retrospect, I understand I played a vital role in helping them through their day.”

[11] I should observe that the following is drawn mainly from pop culture representations of hit men, rather than any ethnographic or sociological analysis of real ones.

[12] Interestingly enough, “bull” is not an abbreviation for “bullshit,” but “bullshit” is an early-twentieth-century elaboration on “bull.” The term is ultimately derived from the French bole, meaning “fraud or deceit.” The term “bullshit” is first attested in an unpublished poem by T. S. Eliot. “Bollix” is another derivation from “bole.”

[13] I would have said “lying” but the philosopher Harry Frankfurt (2005) famously argued that bullshitting is not the same as lying. The difference between them is analogous to the difference between murder and manslaughter; one is intentional deception, the other, reckless disregard for the truth. I’m not sure the distinction entirely works in this context but I didn’t think entering a debate on the subject would be particularly helpful.

[14] To fully appreciate the feudal connection, the reader might consider the name “Corleone.” This was the name of the fictional Mafia family in Mario Puzo’s novel and Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Godfather but, in fact, it’s the name of a town in Sicily that is notorious for being the home of many famous mafiosi. In Italian it means “lion-heart.” The reason for this appears to be that the Normans who conquered England in 1066 had also conquered previously Arab-held Sicily, and imported many features of Arabic administration. Readers will recall in most Robin Hood stories, the archvillain is the Sheriff of Nottingham, and the distant king away at the crusades is “Richard the Lion-Hearted.” The word “sheriff” is just an anglicization of the Arabic sharif and was one of those positions inspired by the administration of Sicily. The exact connection between Corleone and the British king is debated, but some connection definitely exists. So however indirectly, the Marlon Brando character in The Godfather is named after Richard the Lion-Hearted.

[15] Many burgle in their spare time. An apartment complex in which I once lived was once plagued by a series of burglaries, that always took place on a Monday. It was eventually determined that the burglar was a hairdresser, who generally get Mondays off.

[16] Many thieves, ranging from art thieves to ordinary shoplifters, will hire out their services, but as such they are still just independent contractors, hence, self-employed. The case of the hit man is more ambiguous. Some might argue that if one is a long-standing but subordinate member of a criminal organization that does qualify as a “job,” but it’s not my impression (I don’t really know, of course) that most people in such positions see it quite that way.

[17] I do not say such a job is “a form of paid employment that feels so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence,” I say it’s “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.” In other words, I am not just saying that the employee believes his work to be bullshit, but that his belief is both valid and correct.

[18] Let me take my own situation as an example. I am currently employed as a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. There are people who consider anthropology to be the very definition of a bullshit subject. In 2011 Governor Rick Scott of Florida even singled out the discipline as his prime example of one his state’s universities would be better off without (Scott Jaschik, “Florida GOP Vs. Social Science,” Inside Higher Education, last modified October 12, 2011, www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/10/12/florida_governor_challenges_idea_of_non_stem_degrees).

[19] I’ve been told that inside Countrywide Financial, one of the key players in the subprime mortgage scandals of 2008, there were basically two ranks in the company—the lowly “nerds,” and the insiders—the insiders being those who had been told about the scams. I encountered an even more extreme example in my own research: one woman wrote to me that she had worked for almost a year selling advertising for an in-flight magazine that she gradually realized did not exist. She became suspicious when she realized she had never once seen a copy of the magazine in the office, or on an airplane, despite the fact she was a fairly frequent flier. Eventually her coworkers quietly confirmed that the entire operation was a fraud.

[20] There are exceptions to this as to all rules. In many large organizations like banks, as we will see, top-level managers will hire consultants or internal auditors to figure out what it is that people actually do; one bank analyst told me about 80 percent of bank workers are engaged in unnecessary tasks and most he felt were unaware of it, since they were kept in the dark about their role in the larger organization. Still, he said, their supervisors didn’t know much better, and his suggestions for reform were invariably rejected. It’s important to emphasize here, too, it’s not that people mistakenly believed their jobs to be bullshit, but quite the other way around.

[21] Even here one can imagine objections. What about Scientologists? Most of those who provide e-meter sessions to allow people to discover traumas in their past lives seem to be convinced their work has enormous social value, even as the great majority of the population is convinced they are delusional, or frauds. But again this isn’t really relevant as no one is really saying “faith-healer” is a bullshit job.

[22] A case could be made that often propaganda which is ostensibly aimed at tricking outsiders is really primarily aimed at assuaging the consciences of the propagandists themselves.

[23] The remarks were extempore and not written down. The quotation is reconstructed partly from the passages cited in John Adam Byrne, “Influential Economist Says Wall Street Is Full of Crooks,” New York Post online, April 28, 2013, http://nypost.com/2013/04/28/influential-economist-says-wall-streets-full-of-crooks, partly from a partial transcript in a Business Insider article by Janet Tavakoli, www.businessinsider.com/i-regard-the-wall-street-moral-environment-as-pathological-2013-9?IR=T, accessed April 21, 2017), and partly from my own notes taken at the time.

[24] In fact, over the course of my research, I’ve run into a surprising number of people (well, three) with college educations who, frustrated by the pointlessness of the office work available to them, actually did become cleaners simply to feel they were doing an honest day’s work.

[25] I really shouldn’t have to point this out but since I find there will always be some readers who have a hard time with basic logic: saying shit jobs tend to be useful and productive is not saying that all useful and productive jobs tend to be shit.

[26] House of the Dead, 1862, trans. Constance Garnett (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), 17–18. My friend Andrej Grubacic tells me this was actually done to his grandfather as a form of torture in a Titoist reeducation camp in Yugoslavia in the 1950s. The jailers had evidently read the classics.

[27] The three-part list is not meant to be comprehensive. For instance, it leaves out the category of what’s often referred to as “guard labor,” much of which (unnecessary supervisors) is bullshit, but much of which is simply obnoxious or bad.

[28] In David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015), 9, I refer to this as “the Iron Law of Liberalism”: that “any market reform, any government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing the total number of regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs.”

[29] In fact, that’s largely what making someone wear a uniform means, since uniforms are often placed on people (say, those working in a hotel laundry) who are never seen by the public at all. It’s a way of saying “you should think of yourself as being under military discipline.”

[30] Oddly, the survey did break down the results by political voting preferences (Tory voters were least, and UKIP voters most likely to think their jobs were bullshit) and region (Southern England outside London was highest at 42 percent bullshit rate, Scotland lowest at 27 percent). Age and “social grade” seemed relatively insignificant.

[31] The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, book #2) (London: Macmillan Pan Books, 1980), 140.

[32] There has been some debate as one might imagine among Douglas Adams fans on this topic but the consensus seems to be that while some jobs in the 1970s involved cleaning phones and other electronic equipment, “telephone sanitizer” as a separate profession did not exist. This did not stop Adams from collaborating with Graham Chapman of Monty Python in creating a TV special starring Ringo Starr called The Telephone Sanitizers of Navarone, which, sadly, was never produced.

[33] To be fair, we learn later that the joke was on the Golgafrinchams, since they all eventually die from a plague that started from an improperly sanitized telephone. But no one ever seems to remember that part.

[34] Hair salons in immigrant communities will often serve a similar role for both men and women. I even had some friends who became the in-house barbers for a big London squat who found this started happening to them as well: anyone new to town would stop in for a trim to find out what was going on.

[35] Not to mention, she added, the fact that the amount of money invested in keeping them dancing on boxes could, if redirected, easily suffice to head off the threat of climate change. “The sex industry makes it evident that the most valuable thing that many women can offer is their bodies as sexual commodities when they are very young. It determines that many women earn more at eighteen to twenty-five than they ever do again in their lives. This is definitely the case in my own life”—the author being a successful academic and author who still doesn’t make as much a year as she once might have in three months’ stripping.

[36] As evidence for this generalization: if telemarketers or useless middle managers were to be made illegal, a black market would be unlikely to emerge to replace them. Obviously, historically this has tended to happen in the case of sex work. This is why one might say the problem is patriarchy itself—the concentration of so much wealth and power in the hands of males who are then kept sexually unfulfilled or taught to seek out certain forms of gratification rather than others—and therefore something much more essential to the nature of society itself.

[37] “L’invasion des «métiers à la con», une fatalité économique?,” Jean-Laurent Cassely, Slate, August 26, 2013, www.slate.fr/story/76744/metiers-a-la-con. Accessed 23 September, 2013.

[38] I did this by creating an email account (“doihaveabsjoborwhat@gmail.com”), and asking for input on Twitter. Gmail, rather quaintly, does not allow the word “bullshit” in addresses.

[39] The names therefore are all made up, and I have avoided naming any specific employers, or geographic information that might give identities away: for instance, “a famous university in New Haven, Connecticut,” or “a small publishing firm based in Devon County, England, owned by a consortium in Berlin.” In some cases, such details are changed; in other cases, simply left out.

[40] The quotations that follow are all drawn from this database unless otherwise indicated. I have kept them largely as I received them, except for some light editing—changing abbreviations into full words, adjusting punctuation, minor grammatical or stylistic tweaks, and so forth.

[41] One BBC video that has been drawn to my attention divides “pointless jobs” into three types, “No Work at Work,” “Managers of Management that Manage Managers,” and “Negative Social Value.” See “Do You Have a Pointless Job?,” BBC online, last modified April 20, 2017, www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170420-do-you-have-a-pointless-job.

[42] So in 1603 one William Perkins wrote “it is required that such as are commonly called serving-men should have beside the office of waiting, some other particular calling, unless they tend on men of great place and state… For waiting-servants, by reason they spend most of their time in eating and drinking, sleeping and gaming after dinner and after supper, do prove the most unprofitable members both in Church and Commonwealth. For when either their good masters die, or they be turned out of their office for some misdemeanor, they are not fit for any calling, being unable to labor, and thus they give themselves either to beg or to steal” (in Thomas 1999: 418). On the history of the term “waiter” see chapter 6. I should also emphasize that I am not saying real feudal retainers were “bullshit jobs” in the modern sense, since they rarely felt obliged to claim to be anything other than what they were; insofar as they misrepresented themselves, it was by pretending to do less than they actually did, not more.

[43] They also ran occasional errands. One gets a sense of how common such characters used to be by how many different words for them there were: not just footmen, but flunkies, henchmen, gofers, minions, lackeys, cronies, menials, attendants, hirelings, knaves, myrmidons, retainers, and valets—and these are just those that most immediately come to mind. All these are not to be confused with toadies, cronies, sidekicks, sycophants, parasites, stooges, yes-men, and the like, who are more in the order of independent hangers-on. It’s worthy of pointing out that in European courts it was really the courtiers who performed no useful function; the uniformed attendants actually did all sorts of odd jobs when they weren’t standing around during ceremonial events. But the whole point was to look as if they didn’t.

[44] I recognize that it is extremely rare for the rate of extraction to be that high, but as I say, this is just a thought experiment to bring out the dynamics that tend to emerge in such situations.

[45] One might even say it’s one of those things of which what we call “honor” historically consisted of.

[46] The number of domestic servants in North Atlantic countries has declined precipitously since the First World War, but to a large extent their ranks have been replaced, first by what are called “service workers” (“waiter,” for instance, was originally the name for a kind of household servant), and second by ever-growing legions of administrative assistants and other such underlings in the corporate sector. For an example of old feudal styles of unnecessary labor bleeding into the present day, consider this account: “My friend is working on a film set at an old manor house in Hertfordshire, where he runs errands and ensures that the crew don’t mess up the nice old building. At the end of every day he has to spend two solid hours ‘candle watching.’ The Lord and Lady of the house told the crew that after the candles are extinguished in the main hall someone must watch them for at least TWO hours to make sure they don’t spontaneously burst into flames again and burn the house down. My friend is not allowed to douse the candles in water or ‘cheat’ it any way.” When asked why he wasn’t allowed to stick the candles in water, he replied, “They gave no explanation.”

[47] Just to be absolutely clear: there are plenty of receptionists who serve a necessary function. I am referring here to those who do not.

[48] The same remains true today, incidentally. I am personally acquainted with one young woman who, despite having no military experience whatsoever, ended up, as personal assistant to a NATO official, actually writing many strategic plans for operations in a war zone (neither do I have any reason to believe her plans weren’t just as good or better than any NATO general would have come up with).

[49] At the very least this is true of high-tech weaponry. One might argue that most countries also maintain armies to suppress real or potential civil unrest, but this rarely involves a need for fighter jets, submarines, or MX missiles. Historically, Mexico has had an explicit policy of not wasting money on such expensive toys, arguing that owing to their geographic position, the only countries they’d be likely to enter into hostilities with would be either the USA, or Guatemala. If they went to war with the USA, they’d lose, pretty much regardless of armament; if they went to war with Guatemala, they’d win, with or without fighter jets. Hence, Mexico merely maintains such equipment as would suffice to suppress domestic dissent.

[50] Such conversations are particularly challenging to me since in the 1980s academics such as myself largely abandoned the idea that consumer demand was the product of marketing manipulation, and took up the idea that consumers were basically patching together crazy-quilt identities by using consumer goods in ways that had never really been intended (as if everyone in America had turned into Snoop Dogg, or RuPaul). Granted I was always pretty suspicious of that narrative. But it’s clear that many of those who work in the industry are quite certain that they really are what everyone thought they were in the sixties and seventies.

[51] A crude natural language script dating back to the late 1960s.

[52] I have personal experience of this: lecturers at LSE are expected to fill out elaborate time-allocation reports, with an hour-by-hour breakdown of weekly professional activities. The forms offer endless fine distinctions between different sorts of administrative activity but no explicit category for “reading and writing books.” When I pointed this out I was told I could place such activities under “LSE-funded research,” that is, what was important about research from the school’s perspective was 1. that I had not got myself outside funding to pay for this reading and writing activity, and 2. that therefore they were paying me to do it when I could be doing my real job.

[53] A fairly typical testimony from within the IT industry: “I have often seen projects designed to obscure responsibility. For example, to evaluate an IT system. The purpose is not to affect the decision, which is taken somewhere in the corridors, but to claim that everyone was heard and all concerns were taken seriously. Since the project is only a pretense all work on the project is wasted, and people soon realize and stop taking it seriously.” This kind of false consensus-seeking is common in ostensibly collegial institutions like universities or NGOs, but is quite common in the more hierarchical corporations as well.

[54] To give a sense of the scale of this industry, Citigroup announced in 2014 that by the next year, it would have thirty thousand employes working in compliance, or about 13 percent of the total staff. Sital S. Patel, “Citi Will Have Almost 30,000 Employes in Compliance by Year-end,” The Tell (blog), MarketWatch, July 14, 2014, http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2014/07/14/citi-will-have-almost-30000-employes-in-compliance-by-year-end.

[55] Except, of course, by trying to make some special arrangement that would allow someone else to do the paperwork for her, this was considered, for some reason, quite out of the question.

[56] Another good example of a public/private box-ticking industry is in construction. Consider the following testimony: 

 Sophie: I’m in this lucrative ‘consultant’ line of work for planning permissions. Back in the sixties just about the only consultant who submitted information for a planning permission was the architect. Now a planning permission for a large-ish building is accompanied by a long list of reports by consultants (including me!): 

 Environmental impact assessment 

 Landscape and visual impact assessment 

 Transport report 

 Wind microclimate assessment 

 Sunlight/daylight analysis 

 Heritage setting assessment 

 Archaeology assessment 

 Landscape maintenance management report 

 Tree impact assessment 

 Flood risk assessment… 

 . . . and there’s more than that! 

 Each report is about 50 to 100 pages, and yet the strange thing is, the resulting buildings are ugly boxes remarkably similar to the ones we built in the sixties, so I don’t think the reports are serving any purpose!”

[57] Or only ostensible role.

[58] One corporate consultant wrote: “I look forward to the day that someone in my industry steps up and goes full Sokal affair—i.e., submits a consulting report that is entirely made up of vague business buzzwords, and doesn’t actually contain any structured information at all. Although I suspect this has already happened many times, just without the consultants in question being conscious of it.”

[59] This made sense, in retrospect, because if you are a medical researcher, you already have all these journals in the library or have access to digitized versions; there would be no reason to fall back on interlibrary loan.

[60] It’s interesting to compare corporate magazines with the ones that Labor unions put out, which I suspect predate them as a literary form. They certainly have their share of puff pieces, but also discuss serious problems. My father was a member of Amalgamated Lithographers Local 1 in New York, a printers’ union, and I remember as a child taking pride in the fact that their in-house magazine, Lithopinion, was by far the most beautiful magazine I’d ever seen, owing to their eagerness to show off new graphic techniques. It also contained real hard-hitting political analysis.

[61] For instance, a recent survey determined that 80 percent of employes feel their managers are useless and that they could do their job just as well without them. It does not appear to document how many managers agree, but one has to assume the number is substantially lower (“Managers Can be Worse than Useless, Survey Finds,” Central Valley Business Times, December 5, 2017, http://www.centralvalleybusinesstimes.com/stories/001/?ID=33748, accessed December 18, 2017.

[62] As we shall see, this is no less true of America, or anywhere else.

[63] Here Chloe seems to be responding to the title of a version of my original essay that had run on evonomics.com under the title “Why Capitalism Creates Pointless Jobs.” I didn’t make up the title. Normally I avoid attributing agency to abstractions.

[64] This must be assumed unless there is some reason to believe that pointless occupations require either more or less support work than useful ones.

[65] This figure is obviously inexact. On the one hand, a very large percentage of cleaners, electricians, builders, etc., work for private individuals and not for firms at all. On the other hand, I am counting the 13 percent who say they aren’t sure if their jobs are bullshit or nonbullshit jobs. The 50 percent figure (actually 50.3 percent) is based on the assumption these two factors would roughly cancel each other out.

[66] And as we’ll see even these tended to be highly ambivalent.

[67] After writing this I presented my analysis to Eric, who confirmed it and added details: “I could definitely see that the middle- and upper-middle-class kids in the lower rungs of that job were seeing it as a path to career advancement—partly in terms of how they socialized around work (watching the rugby on a weekend in someone’s suburban Bovis-home conservatory; cocktails in tacky wine bars but always networking, networking), and that for some it was merely a stop-gap that filled in an otherwise-blank spot on the CV until a family member found them a better opportunity.” He added, “It’s interesting that you mention the idea of the caring classes. My father’s first remark when I quit that position was to say that I was a nonsensical idiot to turn down such a good paycheck. His second was to ask, ‘What good could that job do for anyone anyway?’ ” 

 On the other hand, Eric pointed out he does now have two advanced degrees, a research fellowship, and a successful career—he attributes much of this to the knowledge of social theory he gained while living in the squat.

[68] Rufus more or less confirmed this when I asked about his father’s motivations: he said his father couldn’t stand the company, either, felt he was basically in a bullshit job himself, and just wanted his son to have something to put on his CV. The question remains why, as VP, he couldn’t just have lied.

[69] It is interesting to note that the British welfare state, like most post–World War II welfare states, was consciously constructed against the principle that the poor need to be compelled to labor. This started to change almost everywhere starting in the 1970s.

[70] Since the seventies, surveys have regularly revealed that 74 percent to 80 percent of workers claim that, if they won the lottery or came into some similar fortune, they would continue working. The first study was by Morse and Weiss (1966), but it has been replicated frequently since.

[71] Classic source on this: Robert D. Atkinson. 2002. “Prison Labor: It’s More than Breaking Rocks.” Policy Report, Washington, DC, Progressive Policy Institute—though by citing I am in no sense supporting his policy conclusions that prison labor should be made generally available to industry!

[72] And also, crucially, that they might just as easily not have done it. Hence, Groos defined the attendant joy as being the feeling of freedom.

[73] So, for instance, another psychoanalyst, G. A. Klein, writes, “[W]hen the baby starts to grasp articles, sits up, tries to walk, he begins a process that eventually yields the sense that the locus and origins of these achievements is in himself. When the child thus feels the change as originating within himself, he begins to have a sense of being himself, a psychologically, not simply physically, autonomous unit” (1976: 275). 

 Francis Broucek, “The Sense of Self,” Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 41 (1977): 86, feels this doesn’t go far enough: “The sense of efficacy is at the core of the primitive sense of self and not a property of some already defined self. This primitive feeling of efficacy is what the psychoanalytic literature refers to as infantile omnipotence—a sense of efficacy, the limits of which are not yet apprehended… The primary sense of self emerges from effectance pleasure associated with the successful correspondence of intention and effect.” There is thus a fundamental joy in the knowledge of one’s own existence that is tied to one’s freedom to have effects on the world around you, including others, at first regardless of what those may be.

[74] Francis Broucek, “Efficacy in Infancy: A Review of Some Experimental Studies and Their Possible Implications to Clinical Theory,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 60 (January 1, 1979): 314. “The total inner separation from the environment in response to such traumata may foreshadow later schizophrenic, depressive, narcissistic or phobic behavior, depending on the frequency, severity and duration of the experiences of failed influence or invalidated expectancy, the age at which such traumata occur, and how much of a sense of self based on efficacy experiences has been established prior to the traumata.”

[75] I am, of course, offering an extremely simplified version of Schiller’s philosophy.

[76] In legal terms, most slaveholding societies justify the institution by the legal fiction that slaves are prisoners of war—and, in fact, many slaves in human history were captured as the result of military operations. The first chain gangs were employed in Roman plantations. They were made up of slaves who had been placed in the plantation’s ergastulum, or prison, for disobedience or attempted escape.

[77] There is certainly work on moralists in China, India, the classical world, and their concepts of work and idleness—for instance, the Roman distinction of otium and negotium—but I am speaking here more of the practical questions, such as when and where even useless work came to be seen as preferable to no work at all.

[78] Writing of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century weavers, E. P. Thompson informs us: “The work pattern was one of alternate bouts of intense labor and of idleness, wherever men were in control of their own working lives. (The pattern persists among some self-employed—artists, writers, small farmers, and perhaps also with students—today, and provokes the question whether it is not a “natural” human work rhythm.) On Monday or Tuesday, according to tradition, the hand-loom went to the slow chant of Plen-ty of Time, Plen-ty of Time: on Thursday and Friday, A day t’lat, A day” (1967:73).

[79] When I was in high school there was a kind of macho game among the coolest students, before exams, where they would boast how many hours they’d gone without sleep-cramming beforehand: thirty-six, forty-eight, even sixty hours. It was macho because it implied such students had not done any study at all before, since they had been thinking about more important things. I rapidly figured out that if one reduced oneself to a mindless zombie, the extra hours of study weren’t actually going to help. I suspect this is one reason I am now a professor.

[80] Hunting versus gathering again being the paradigmatic example. Child-care is probably the most dramatic exception: it’s largely a woman’s domain, but it is always generating stories.

[81] I am ignoring here the managerial functions of running their estates, but it’s not clear this was considered labor at the time. I suspect it wasn’t.

[82] Historically speaking, the institution of wage labor is a sophisticated latecomer. The very idea of wage labor involves two difficult conceptual steps. First, it requires the abstraction of man’s labor from both his person and his work. When one purchases an object from an ancient craftsman, one has not bought his labor but the object, which he has produced under his own time and his own conditions of work. But when one purchases an abstraction, labor power, which the purchaser then uses it at a time and under conditions which he, the purchaser, not the “owner” of the labor power, determines (and for which he normally pays after he has consumed it). Second, the wage-labor system requires the establishment of a method of measuring the labor one has purchased, for purposes of payment, commonly by introducing a second abstraction, labor time.) M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 65–66: “We should not underestimate the magnitude, speaking socially rather than intellectually, of these two conceptual steps; even the Roman jurists found them difficult.”

[83] An early Christian would have been outright offended, since time, properly speaking, belonged only to God.

[84] Though, in fact, Homer represents the fate of the thes, or occasional agricultural hireling, who rented himself out in this manner, as actually worse than a slave, since a slave at least is a member of a respectable household (Odyssey 11.489–91).

[85] The only notable exception to this rule is that free citizens in democracies were often willing to hire themselves out to the government for public works: but this is because the government being seen as a collective of which the citizen was a member, it was essentially seen as working for oneself.

[86] See David Graeber, “Turning Modes of Production Inside Out: Or, Why Capitalism Is a Transformation of Slavery (Short Version),” Critique of Anthropology 26, no. 1 (March 2006): 61–81.

[87] E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutes of a Nilotic People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), 103. Maurice Bloch, in Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 80–94, argues that Evans-Pritchard overstates things, and is no doubt correct if Evans-Pritchard really is making arguments as radical as is sometimes attributed to him, but I don’t think he truly is. Anyway, the counterarguments have to do mainly with a sense of historical time rather than day-to-day activity.

[88] E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38 (1967): 56–97.

[89] See Jacques LeGoff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), for classic essays extending E. P. Thompson’s insights back to the High Middle Ages.

[90] Those who designed modern universal education systems were quite explicit about all this: Thompson himself cites a number of them. I remember reading that someone once surveyed American employers about what it was they actually expected when they specified in a job ad that a worker must have a high school degree: a certain level of literacy? Or numeracy? The vast majority said no, a high school education, they found, did not guarantee such things—they mainly expected the worker would be able to show up on time. Interestingly, the more advanced the level of education, however, the more autonomous the students and the more the old episodic pattern of work tends to reemerge.

[91] The West Indian Marxist Eric Williams (1966) first emphasized the history of plantations in shaping the techniques of worker control later employed in factories; Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (London: Penguin, 2004), adds ships, focusing on merchant vessels active in the slave trade, as the main other experiment-zone for rationalized work discipline during the period of merchant capital. Naval vessels are relevant, too, especially as they often employed unfree labor as well, since many of the sailors were “pressed” into service against their will. All of them involved contexts where in the absence of long traditions of what one could or could not demand of an employee—which were still felt to apply in areas that had emerged more directly from feudal relations—closely supervised work could itself be reorganized around new ideals of clocklike efficiency.

[92] One reason all this is not obvious is that we have been conditioned to think, when we think of “wage labor,” first of all of factory work, and factory work, in turn, as production-line work where the pace of labor is set by the machines. In fact, only a very small percentage of wage labor has ever been factory work and a relatively small percentage of that based on conveyor-belt-style production lines. I’ll be writing more about the effect of such misconceptions in chapter 6.

[93] Don’t believe me? You can hire them here: www.smashpartyentertainment.com/living-statues-art.

[94] I was slightly surprised that someone born around 1900 or 1910 had already internalized such an attitude and asked Wendy if her grandmother had ever been a supervisor or employer. She didn’t think so, but later discovered that her grandmother had briefly helped run a chain of groceries many years before.

[95] As noted in the last chapter, it’s true that the entire class-period structure is really just a way to teach students time discipline for later factory work, and might now be considered redundant on that basis. But that’s the system that exists.

[96] My translation from the French: Je suis conseiller technique en insolvabilité dans un ministère qui serait l’équivalent de l’Inland Revenue. Environ 5 percent de ma tâche est de donner des conseil techniques. Le reste de la journée j’explique à mes collègues des procédures incompréhensibles, je les aide à trouver des directives qui ne servent à rien, I cheer up the troops, je réattribue des dossiers que “le système” a mal dirigé. 

 Curieusement j’aime aller au travail. J’ai l’impression que je suis payé 60 000$/an pour faire l’équivalent d’un Sudoku ou mots croisés.

[97] Obviously, such environments are not always nearly as carefree for members of the public who have to interact with such officials.

[98] Obviously, the 4 percent figure would only be the case if no workers surveyed felt their work was both useful and unfulfilling, which is unlikely.

[99] While it is quite rare for supervisors to tell workers directly they are supposed to pretend to work, it does happen occasionally. One car salesman wrote: “According to my superiors, if I’m being paid a salary, I have to be doing ‘something’ and ‘pretend’ to be productive even though there’s no real value to the work. So, I spend several hours a day making phone calls to nobody. Does that make any sense?” Too much honesty in such matters appears to be a profound taboo almost anywhere. I remember once in graduate school, I had a gig doing research for a Marxist professor who among many other things specialized in the politics of workplace resistance. I figured if I could be honest with anyone, it would be him, so after he had explained to me how the timesheet worked I asked, “So how much can I lie? How many hours is it okay to just make up?” He looked at me as if I’d just said I was a starseed from another galaxy so I quickly changed the subject and assumed the answer was “a discrete amount.”

[100] Many workplaces are keenly aware of the dangers of easygoing supervisors and take active measures to head them off. Those who work counters in fast-food chains, which, of course, are in my terms generally shit jobs and not bullshit jobs, often tell me that each branch is carefully wired by closed-circuit TV to ensure that workers with nothing to do are not allowed to just sit around relaxing; if they are observed to do so by those monitoring in some central locations, their supervisor is called up and chewed out.

[101] Roy Baumeister, Sara Wotman, and Arlene Stillwell, “Unrequited Love: On Heartbreak, Anger, Guilt, Scriptlessness, and Humiliation,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64, no. 3 (March 1993): 377–94. One friend of mine who once had a prolonged affair with a married man noted a similar difficulty—unlike the betrayed wife, there’s very little in the way of cultural models telling the “other woman” how she’s supposed to feel. She’s thinking of writing a book to begin to make up the gap. I hope she does so.

[102] Nouri, the software developer, provides an interesting insight, suggesting that the hostility and mutual hatreds in a bullshit office might actually be functional in inspiring workers to act at all. He reports that while working in an obviously doomed banner ad company, an enterprise that made him depressed and sick, “I was so bored that a couple programmers snitched to management (excuse me, Scrum Master) about my productivity. So he hostilely gave me a month to prove myself, trying to accumulate evidence that I was missing doctor’s notices. In two weeks, I outperformed the rest of the team combined, and the company’s lead architect declared my code ‘perfect.’ Scrum Master was suddenly all smiles and rainbows again, telling me the doctor’s notes were of no concern. 

 “I advised him to continue insulting me and threatening my job, if he wanted me to remain a high-performer. It was my twisted version of fun. Like an idiot, he refused. 

 “Lesson: hate is a great motivator, at least when there’s no passion and fun. Maybe explains a lot of workplace aggression. Picking fights with someone at least gives you reason to carry on.”

[103] Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973). Fromm’s prime example of a nonsexual sadist is Joseph Stalin, and of a nonsexual necrophiliac, Adolf Hitler.

[104] Lynn Chancer, Sadomasochism in Everyday Life: The Dynamics of Power and Powerlessness (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

[105] Romance novels, for instance, tend to feature attractive men who appear cruel and heartless but are ultimately revealed to be kindhearted and decent instead. One might argue that BDSM practice, from a submissive woman’s perspective, encodes the possibility of this transformation as part of the structure of the event and under her own ultimate control.

[106] Article 23 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, states: “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.” It also guarantees equal pay for equal work, compensation adequate to support a family, and the right to form labor unions. It says nothing about the purpose of the work itself.

[107] The office was also “rife with bullying and deeply, deeply strange office politics”—the usual sadomasochistic dynamics one can expect to ensue in hierarchical environments, as usual, too, exacerbated by the shared guilty knowledge that there’s nothing really at stake.

[108] There is a happy ending to this one, at least temporarily: Rachel reports she was soon after able to find work for a program teaching remedial math to poor children. It is everything her insurance job is not and pays well enough that she should be able to afford grad school.

[109] Patrick Butler, “Thousands Have Died After Being Found Fit for Work, DWP Figures Show,” Guardian (US), last modified August 27, 2015, www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/27/thousands-died-after-fit-for-work-assessment-dwp-figures.

[110] Mark: “Personally I often used to wish I wasn’t aware that my job was bullshit. Kind of like how Neo in the Matrix movies may sometimes have wished he hadn’t taken the red pill. I’d despair (and still do) that I’m working in the public sector to help people, but I rarely if ever help anyone. I also feel a sense of guilt that I’m paid by taxpayers to do this.”

[111] He adds: “Herbert Read’s ‘To hell with culture’ best describes this situation.” I checked. It isn’t bad.

[112] It is important to emphasize that in professional environments, the ability to play the role is generally far more important than the ability to actually do the work. Mathematician Jeff Schmidt in his excellent Disciplined Minds (2001) carefully documents how the bourgeois obsession with prioritizing form over content has played havoc with the professions. Why is it, he asks, that Catch Me If You Can–style impostors can often successfully pretend to be airline pilots or surgeons without anyone noticing they have no qualifications for the job? The answer he suggests is that it’s almost impossible to get fired from a professional job—even pilot or surgeon—for mere incompetence, but very easy to get fired for defiance of accepted standards of external behavior, that is, for not properly playing the part. The impostors have zero competence, but play the part perfectly; hence, they are much less likely to be dismissed from their positions than, say, an accomplished pilot or surgeon who openly defies the unspoken codes of external comportment attendant on the role.

[113] Psychological studies have shown that taking part in protests and street actions, at least, tend to have overall health benefits, reducing overall stress and with it rates of heart disease and other ailments: John Drury, “Social Identity as a Source of Strength in Mass Emergencies and Other Crowd Events,” International Journal of Mental Health 32, no. 4 (December 1, 2003): 77–93; also M. Klar and T. Kasser, “Some Benefits of Being an Activist,” Political Psychology 30, no. 5 (2009): 755–77. The study, however, focuses on street actions; it would be interesting to see if this also extends to less embodied forms of protest.

[114] Many, of course, then quit in horror and disgust. But we don’t know the real numbers. Rachel suggested to me that many young people, unless in expensive metropolises like London, were less inclined to stick it out than their parents had been simply because the cost of housing and life in general is so ridiculously inflated that nowadays even an entry-level corporate job is not going to guarantee stability and security anymore.

[115] Louis D. Johnston, “History Lessons: Understanding the Declines in Manufacturing,” MinnPost, last modified February 22, 2012, www.minnpost.com/macro-micro-minnesota/2012/02/history-lessons-understanding-decline-manufacturing.

[116] It would be vain to try to list them all but Reich’s book was The Work of Nations (1992), and the classic statement on immaterial labor is Maurizio Lazzarato (1996), though it became famous largely through Hardt and Negr’s Empire (1994, 2000), which predicted the revolt of the computer geeks.

[117] There are many such studies. For one example, see Western and Olin Wright 1994.

[118] I had a friend who was addicted to heroin and went on a methadone program. Bored of waiting for doctors to decide he was “ready” to begin reducing his dosage, he started pouring off a little of the drug each day until, some months later, he was able to announce triumphantly that he was clean. His doctor was furious, and told him only professionals have the competence to decide when he should have done this. It turns out the program was funded on the basis of the number of patients they served and had no incentive to actually get anyone off drugs. 

 One should never underestimate the power of institutions to try to preserve themselves. One explanation for the thirty-year impasse of the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process”—if at this point one can even call it that—is that on both sides, there are now powerful institutional structures which would lose their entire raison d’être if the conflict ended, but also, a vast “peace apparatus” of NGOs and UN bureaucrats whose careers have become entirely dependent on maintaining the fiction that a “peace process” is, in fact, going on.

[119] UKIP doesn’t count.

[120] To head off any possible accusations of essentialism: I am proposing these three levels as modes of analysis, and not suggesting the existence of autonomous levels of social reality that in any sense exist in their own right.

[121] I sometimes ask my students, when discussing Marx, “What was the unemployment level in ancient Greece? Or medieval China?” The answer, of course, is zero. Having a large proportion of the population who wish to work, but cannot, appears to be peculiar to what Marx liked to call “the capitalist mode of production.” But it appears to be, like public debt, a structural feature of the system which must nonetheless be treated as if it were a problem to be solved.

[122] To take a random example, the famous March on Washington in 1963, at which Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, was officially called the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom: demands included not just antidiscrimination measures but also a full-employment economy, jobs programs, and a minimum-wage increase” (Touré F. Reed, “Why Liberals Separate Race from Class,” Jacobin 8.22.2015, www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/bernie-sanders-black-lives-matter-civil-rights-movement/), accessed June 10, 2017.

[123] David Sirota, “Mr. Obama Ges to Washington,” Nation, June, 26, 2006.

[124] Of course, some might argue that Obama was being disingenuous here, and downplaying the political power of the private health industry, in the same way that politicians justified bank bailouts by claiming it was in the interest of millions of minor bank employes who might otherwise have been laid off—a concern they most certainly do not evince when, say, transit or textile workers are faced with unemployment. But the very fact that he was willing to make the argument is revealing.

[125] To those who accuse me of being a paranoid conspiracy theorist for suggesting that government plays any conscious role in creating and maintaining bullshit jobs, I hereby rest my case. Unless you think Obama was lying about his true motives (in which case, who exactly is the conspiracy theorist?), we must allow that those governing us are, in fact, aware that “market solutions” create inefficiencies, and unnecessary jobs in particular, and at least in certain contexts look with favor on them for that very reason.

[126] I might note in passing that the same is true of many orthodox Marxists, who argue that since by Marx’s definition all labor within the capitalist mode of production must either produce surplus value, or aid in the reproduction of the apparatus of value-creation, the appearance that a job is useless must be an illusion based on a false folk theory of social value on the part of the jobholder. This is really just as much a statement of faith as the libertarian insistence that the market can never be responsible for social problems. One might argue whether this position was really held by Marx but even this is basically a theological debate. It ultimately depends on whether one accepts the premise that capitalism is a totalizing system: that is, that within a capitalist system social value is determined only by the market system. I will discuss this further in the next chapter.

[127] This is then preemptive. I acknowledge that historically, for an author to head off obvious objections almost never succeeds in stopping future critics from raising those objections anyway; generally, they just pretend their objections were never anticipated and ignore any counterarguments to them that might have been made. But I figured it was worth a try.

[128] www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labourlabor-markets-0. Accessed April 1, 2017.

[129] For instance, it contained glaring flaws in basic logic: the author attempted to refute my argument that giving workers security and leisure time will often result in social unrest by noting unrest by workers who did not have security and leisure time. Even those who have received no training in formal logic, and therefore have never heard of the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent, but still have basic common sense, are generally aware that the statement “if A then B” is not the same as “if B then A.” As Lewis Carroll adroitly put it ,“You might as well say ‘I see what I eat’ is the same as ‘I eat what I see’ ”.

[130] The piece has no byline.

[131] If you ask: “Are you really saying the market is always right?” they will often reply, “Yes, I am saying the market is always right.”

[132] Instead, it’s always assumed the burden of proof is on those who question such assertions.

[133] I note in passing—and this will be important later—that while the number of administrators has gone up, the real explosion has been in administrative staff. This figure does not, I should emphasize, refer to caterers or cleaners, who were, in fact, being largely outsourced during this period, but to administrative underlings.

[134] Most of the changes that did directly affect teaching, such as, say, class chat rooms, were managed by the (proportionally declining numbers of) teachers themselves.

[135] Some phrases generated by the random Financial Bullshit Generator, accessed July 4, 2017, www.makebullshit.com/financial-bullshit-generator.php.

[136] There are other enterprises, of course, that are basically fraudulent in nature—or, in some cases, are dedicated to providing the means for others to commit fraud. A number of testimonials I received were from college paper writers. There have always been smart students or graduates willing to pick up a little cash writing term papers for lazy classmates, but in America in recent decades, this has coalesced into an entire industry, coordinated on a national level, employing thousands of full-time paper writers. One of them suggested to me that the industry was the predictable result of the convergence of credentialism—the fact that one now needed a degree of some kind to gain access to almost all desirable jobs in America—and business logic. 

 Barry: When I first started this work, I imagined I would be constantly learning fascinating, new information about a broad array of subjects. While I have had the opportunity to write the rare, interesting essay on queer theory or the history of Roman blood sport, I’ve found that I’m largely writing countless papers about business and marketing. 

 After some consideration, this makes a lot of sense to me. Higher education is constantly justified on the basis that it is an investment in your future. The crippling load of student debt is worth it because it is going to allow for a stable six-figure income someday. It’s hard for me to imagine that many folks are studying to get a Bachelor of Business Administration because it’s their passion—I’m pretty sure they’re just jumping through the hoops to get the degree that they see as their path to a high-paying job. As for my clients, I think they see themselves as willing to increase their level of investment in return for a lower workload and guaranteed good marks. The amount I charge for writing a few key term papers is only a tiny fraction of the average tuition cost. 

 This makes sense to me, too. If you’re actually paying attention in business courses when the professor tells you that it’s normal and even admirable to attempt to get the greatest benefit for the least amount of investment, and that same professor then assigns you a paper, there’s really no reason not to hire someone else to write it if that’s the most efficient thing to do.

[137] For the record, I don’t know which of the four it was.

[138] Another reason sometimes cited for the multiplication of unnecessary levels of executive or administrative staff is protection from the threat of lawsuits. Here’s the account of one bank employee, Aaron: “It’s common to now see ‘Chief of Staff’ roles in large financial institutions… they are simply an ineffectual buffer between senior managers and any potential litigation from regulators or disgruntled employes. This buffer never works because in litigation, the plaintiff will always name the senior manager in the court papers as this maximizes the likelihood the case gets settled to avoid embarrassment. So what do the Chiefs of Staff end up doing? Well, they tend to organize meetings with senior managers and their leadership teams and commission lots of pointless management consultant surveys to try and work out why morale is so low (a question that could be answered much more easily by simply asking employes what they think. You often see them organizing charity days and puff pieces in newspapers or journals.” According to Aaron, HR staff are now less likely to fulfill such roles, as they, too, fear legal liability. Clearly, the situation varies in different banks.

[139] It’s probably relevant, admittedly, that the economics department in my college was entirely dominated by Marxists; the phrase goes back at least to Perry Anderson (1974).

[140] Much of this argument and several of the examples are taken from the first chapter of Graeber, Utopia of Rules, 3–44.

[141] Of course, this is not the way things are represented, and, naturally, in any branch of industry defined as “creative,” whether software development or graphic design, production is typically outsourced to small groups (the celebrated Silicon Valley startups) or individuals (casualized independent contractors) who do work autonomously. But such people are often largely uncompensated. For a good recent critical history of managerialism, see Hanlon, 2016.

[142] Definitions of feudalism vary, from any economic system based on tribute-taking, to the specific system prevalent in Northern Europe during the High Middle Ages, in which land was granted in exchange for military service in ostensibly voluntary relations of vassalage—a system which outside Europe is documented mainly in Japan. From this perspective most other Asian empires and kingdoms operated with, as Weber called them “patrimonial prebendal” systems where lords or important officials collected the income from a certain territory but did not necessarily occupy or directly administer it, an approach European kings also later attempted to impose when they had the power. All this could be endlessly dissected but here I really only want to make the point that in such systems, where there are people who are primary producers, and others whose basic job it is to move those things around, the latter almost invariably end up organized into very elaborate chains of command. The nineteenth-century Ganda kingdom in East Africa might seem a particularly telling example in this regard: all farming and most productive work was done by women; most men, as a result, ended up part of an elaborate hierarchy of titled officials running from the village to the king, or as flunkies or retainers to such officials. When too many idle men accumulated, rulers would start wars or sometimes simply round thousands up and massacre them. (For the best recent synthesis on feudalism from a Marxist perspective, Wood, 2002; on the Ganda, Ray, 1991.)

[143] Cited as an anonymous source in Alex Preston, “The War Against Humanities in Britain’s Universities,” Guardian, Education Section, 1, March 29, 2015.

[144] One might argue that Marcel Duchamp, by placing a urinal in a gallery and declaring it a work of art, opened the door to the entry of managerialism into the arts. At any rate he eventually became horrified by the door he’d opened up, and spent the last decades of his life playing chess, which, he argued, was also one of the few things he could do that could not possibly be commodified.

[145] Many suggest to me one reason for the dishwater mediocrity or even plain incoherence of so many contemporary movie scripts is that each of these supernumeraries will typically insist on changing at least a line or two, just to be able to say they had some influence on the final product. I first heard about this when after seeing the endlessly terrible 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. The entire plot seemed to be designed to lead up to a moment of realization, where the alien comes to understand the true nature of humanity (that they are not basically evil, just very bad at handling grief). Yet when the moment came, the alien never actually said this. I asked a friend in the industry how this could have happened and he assured me that the line I was expecting was almost certainly in the original script; some useless executives must have intervened to change it. “You see there are usually dozens of these guys hovering around any production and every one of them will feel they have to jump in and change around at least one line—or else what’s the excuse for their even being there?”

[146] Joseph Campbell was an historian of religion whose book The Hero with a Thousand Faces argued that all hero myths have the same basic plot. The book was an enormous influence on George Lucas in developing the plots for the original Star Wars trilogy. While Campbell’s argument for a universal archetypal hero narrative is now considered at best something of an entertaining curio by scholars of epic or heroic myth, the analysis he offers probably would be valid now for Hollywood movies, since almost all screenwriters and producers are familiar with the book and attempt to use it in designing plots.

[147] Holly Else, “Billions Lost in Bids to Secure EU Research Funding,” Times Higher Education Supplement, October 6, 2016, accessed June 23, 2017. www.timeshighereducation.com/news/billions-lost-in-bids-to-secure-european-union-research-funding#survey-answer.

[148] “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” Baffler, no. 19 (Spring 2012): 66–84, with an expanded version in Graeber, Utopia of Rules, 105–148.

[149] These titles were, in fact, produced by using the random bullshit job title generator at the website BullShit Job, www.bullshitjob.com/title.

[150] The argument of this paragraph is a very abbreviated version of the argument of the introductory essay in Graeber, Utopia of Rules, 33–44.

[151] For instance, at the height of the Greek debt crisis, public opinion in Germany was almost unanimous that Greek debt should not be forgiven because Greek workers were entitled and lazy. This was countered by statistics showing Greek workers actually put in longer hours than German ones; which, in turn, was countered by the argument that this might be true on paper but Greek workers slacked off on the job. At no point did anyone suggest that German workers were working too hard, creating an overproduction problem that could only be solved by lending foreign countries money to be able to import their goods, let alone that the Greek ability to enjoy life was in any way admirable or a model for others. To take another example, when, in the 1990s, the French Socialist Party ran on the platform of a thirty-five-hour workweek, I remember being struck by the fact that no American news source I was able to find that deigned to mention this fact suggested that reducing working hours might be seen as, let alone be, good in itself, but only presented it as a tactic for reducing unemployment. In other words, allowing people to work less could only be treated as a social good if it allowed more people to be working.

[152] Technically the measure is “marginal utility,” the degree to which the consumer finds an additional unit of the good useful in this way; hence, if one already has three bars of soap stockpiled in one’s house, or for that matter three houses, how much additional utility is added by a fourth. For the best critique of marginal utility as a theory of consumer preference, see Steve Keen, Debunking Economics, 44–47.

[153] And I should note just for the sake of clarity that most of those who embrace the labor theory of value do not make this argument; some value comes from nature, as Marx himself, the most famous advocate of the labor theory of value, did occasionally point out.

[154] Of course, this is exactly the position also taken by the most radical free market libertarians.

[155] Since reproduction is technically “the production of production,” then maintaining the physical infrastructure or other elements exploited by capitalism would also count.

[156] Similarly, in the domain of values, when market comparisons can be made, they are assumed to be somehow incidental, not a reflection of the object’s true worth. No one would actually insist that a Damien Hirst shark is worth, say, two hundred thousand Vipassana meditation retreats, or a Vipassana retreat, one hundred fudge sundaes. It just happens to come out that way.

[157] Civil servants in particular would favor the term “help” over “value,” though its use was by no means limited to civil servants.

[158] See Graeber 2013:84–87.

[159] I’m assuming that there is no genre of music, art, etc., that doesn’t cause more happiness for some than it annoys others. I could be wrong.

[160] Some Belgian friends told me the net effects were extremely beneficial, as almost all major parties were committed to the then European-wide consensus about the need for austerity, but the lack of a government in Belgium at that critical moment meant reforms were not carried out, and the Belgian economy ended up growing substantially faster than its neighbors’. It’s also worth noting that Belgium does have seven different regional governments that were unaffected.

[161] Caitlin Huston, “Uber IPO Prospects May Be Helped by Resignation of CEO Travis Kalanick,” MarketWatch, last modified June 22, 2017, www.marketwatch.com/story/uber-ipo-prospects-may-be-helped-by-resignation-of-ceo-travis-kalanick-2017-06-21.

[162] Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: The Case for Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek (New York: Little, Brown, 2017). 

 Even police strikes rarely have the anticipated effects. In December 2015 New York police carried out a work stoppage for all but “urgent” police business; there was no effect on crime rate, but city revenues plummeted owing to the lack of fines for traffic violation and similar infractions. The complete disappearance of police in a major city, either owing to a full strike, or in one documented case in Amsterdam during World War II, mass arrest by German occupiers, tends to lead to a rise in property crime like burglary, but leave violent crime unaffected. In rural areas with some tradition of self-governance, like the part of Madagascar where I lived between 1989 and 1991, the withdrawal of police due to IMF austerity measures made almost no difference at all—when I visited again twenty years later people were almost universally convinced that violent crime had increased sharply since the police had returned.

[163] Benjamin B. Lockwood, Charles G. Nathanson, and E. Glen Weyl, “Taxation and the Allocation of Talent,” Journal of Political Economy 125, no. 5 (October 2017): 1635–82, www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/693393. The reference to Marketers is however taken from an earlier (2012) version of the same paper, with the same title, published at https://eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/12/TaxationAndTheAllocationOfTalent_preview.pdf, 16.

[164] Eilis Lawlor, Helen Kersley, and Susan Steed, A Bit Rich: Calculating the Value to Society of Different Professions (London: New Economics Foundation, 2009), http://b.3cdn.net/nefoundation/8c16eabdbadf83ca79_ojm6b0fzh.pdf. I have standardized and averaged out some of the salaries, which the original report gave sometimes as hourly wages, sometime as yearly salaries, but in the latter case, usually as ranges.

[165] See, for instance, Gordon B. Lindsay, Ray M. Merrill, and Riley J. Hedin, “The Contribution of Public Health and Improved Social Conditions to Increased Life Expectancy: An Analysis of Public Awareness,” Journal of Community Medicine & Health Education 4 (2014): 311–17, which contrasts the received scientific understanding of such matters with popular perception, which assumes improvements are almost entirely due to doctors. https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/the-contribution-of-public-health-and-improved-social-conditions-to-increased-life-expectancy-an-analysis-of-public-awareness-2161-0711-4-311.php?aid=35861.

[166] Another exception would be highly paid athletes or entertainers. Many get paid so much they are often held out as avatars of bullshit, but I would tend to disagree. If such people succeed in bringing happiness or excitement into others’ lives, why not? Obviously, questions could be raised about how much more they are responsible for that happiness and excitement than the teams surrounding them, support staff, and the like, most of whom are paid far less.

[167] If it had anything to do with the dangers of the job, on the other hand, the highest-paid workers in America would be either loggers or fishermen, and in Britain, farmers.

[168] One (in my opinion rather obtuse) economist and blogger named Alex Tabarrok wrote a response to my original bullshit jobs piece that claimed my point about the inverse relation of pay and social benefit was “a great example of faulty economic reasoning,” since, he said, I was simply talking about the diamonds-water paradox (which goes back to the Middle Ages, and Adam Smith famously used to propose a distinction between use value and exchange value), that he said had been “solved” a century ago with the introduction of the concept of marginal utility. Actually, my impression was that it had been “solved” at least as far back as Galileo, but the bizarre thing about his claim is that I hadn’t engaged in economic reasoning at all, since I didn’t propose any explanation for the inverse relation, but just pointed out that it exists (http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/10/bs-jobs-and-bs-economics.html). How can simply pointing out a fact be faulty reasoning? The example of the relative supply of nurses is drawn from Peter Frase’s reply to that piece (www.jacobinmag.com/2013/10/the-ethic-of-marginal-value/); for the glut of lawyers, see, for instance, L. M. Sixel, “A Glut of Lawyers Dims Job Prospects for Many,” Houston Chronicle online, last modified March 25, 2016, http://wtonchronicle.com/business/article/A-glut-of-lawyers-dims-job-prospects-for-many-7099998.php. 

 I might note that Tabarrok’s ploy—take a simple empirical observation and pretend it’s an economic argument, and then “refute” it—seems to be common among bad economic bloggers; I once saw a simple observation I had made that kindhearted merchants will sometimes give poor customers a discount on necessities characterized as an attempted “refutation” of economic theory, which the blogger then went on to disprove—as if economists really believed no merchant ever did anything out of kindness!

[169] I first encountered the argument in G. A. Cohen, “Back to Socialist Basics,” New Left Review, no. 207 (1994): 2–16, his critique of the Labor Party manifesto. Various versions of it can be found in his other work, notably in “Incentives, Inequality, and Community: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values” (lecture, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, May 21 and 23, 1991, https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/c/cohen92.pdf).

[170] Back in the 1990s, when I still used to argue with libertarians, I found they would almost invariably justify inequality in terms of work. If I would observe, say, that some disproportionate share of social wealth was being distributed upward, a typical response would be along the lines of “to me this just shows that some people are working harder, or working smarter, than others.” This particular formulation always stuck in my head because of the telltale slipperiness. One cannot, of course, really argue that a CEO who makes a thousand times more than a bus driver is working a thousand times harder, so you slip in “smarter”—which implies “more productive” but, in fact, here just seems to be “in a way for which you’re paid much more.” All that saves this statement from absolutely meaningless circularity (they’re smart because they’re rich because they’re smart, and on and on) is that it emphasizes that (most of) the very rich do have jobs.

[171] This is why the books they produce become ever shorter, more simplistic, and less well researched.

[172] Geoff Shullenberger, “The Rise of the Voluntariat,” Jacobin online, last modified May 5, 2014, www.jacobinmag.com/2014/05/the-rise-of-the-voluntariat.

[173] Bertrand Russell puts it nicely in his essay “In Praise of Idleness”: “What is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.” (1935:13).

[174] Genesis 3.16. Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (1958:107n53) makes the argument that nowhere in the Bible is it suggested that work itself is punishment for disobedience; God simply makes the labor more harsh; others are simply reading Genesis through Hesiod. This might be true, but it doesn’t really affect my argument; especially since Christians writing and thinking on the subject have assumed that was the meaning of the biblical passage for centuries. For instance, in 1664 Margaret Cavendish argued “neither can tennis be a pastime, for … there can be no recreation in sweaty labor; for it is laid as a curse upon man, that they shall live by the sweat of their brows” (in Thomas 1999: 9). For the best discussion of the early Christian debates on Adam and Eve, which argues that it was Saint Augustine who was really responsible for the notion that all humans are tainted, and, hence, cursed, because of original sin, see Pagels (1988).

[175] Much of the next section is a summary of an earlier essay of mine, “Manners, Deference, and Private Property” (1997), itself an abbreviated version of my master’s thesis, The Generalization of Avoidance: Manners and Possessive Individualism in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 1987). Some of the classic works on traditional Northern European marriage patterns and life-cycle service include Hajnal (1965, 1982), Laslett (1972, 1977, 1983, 1984), Stone (1977), Kassmaul (1981), and Wall (1983); for a more recent survey of the state of the literature, see Cooper (2005). The primary difference between Northern European and Mediterranean marriage patterns from the Middle Ages through the Early Modern period is that in the latter, while men also would often marry late, women married much earlier, and life-cycle service was limited to certain social and professional groups but in no sense a norm.

[176] Nowadays, of course, the word “waiter” is used only for those who “wait” tables at restaurants, a mainstay of the “service economy,” but the term was still being used primarily for domestic servants—ranking one step below the butler—in Victorian households. The word “dumbwaiter,” for example, originally referred to the fact that servants who brought food to the master’s table would often gossip about what they overheard people saying around it; mechanical dumbwaiters performed the same function but could not speak.

[177] This is inaccurate. Most were apprenticed in early adolescence.

[178] I have quoted it myself in the Manners paper (1997:716–17). The translation goes back to: Charlotte A. Sneyd, A relation, or rather A true account, of the island of England; with sundry particulars of the customs of these people, and of the royal revenues under King Henry the Seventh, about the year 1500, by an Italian, Camden Society volume xxxvi, 1847, 14–15.

[179] Susan Brigden, “Youth and the English Reformation,” Past & Present 95 (1982): 37–38.

[180] In Renaissance England, for example, one frequent representative of the king was a noble servant entitled the “Groom of the Stool,” because he was in charge of emptying the king’s chamber pot (Starkey 1977).

[181] My father, for example, was for most of his life a plate stripper in offset photo lithography shops. At one point, while first learning my medieval history, I was telling him about the guild system. “Yes,” he said, “I served an apprenticeship, too. I retired as a ‘journeyman printer.’ ” When I asked if there were any master printers, he said, “No, we don’t have masters anymore. Well, unless you want to say that’s the boss.”

[182] Phillip Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, 1562. This line of objection, of course, reached its peak with Malthus, who came to argue that the working classes would thus tend to breed everyone into poverty, and famously advocated fostering unsanitary conditions to kill them off. Cazenove, who is cited later, was a disciple of Malthus.

[183] K. Thomas 1976:221.

[184] Max Weber’s (1905) arguments about the relation of Calvinism and the origins of capitalism, I believe, should be understood in this light. That there was some connection between Protestantism, an ethic of self-disciplined work, and economic growth was considered self-evident by many at the time (Tawney 1924) but few examine the confluence of the three factors: Northern European life-cycle service, Protestantism, and emerging capitalism, even though they appear to broadly coincide.

[185] Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (London: Chapman and Hall, 1843), 173–74. It is interesting to contrast Carlyle’s praise of work for freeing the soul from cares to Nietzsche, who condemned it for that very reason: “In the glorification of ‘work’ and the never-ceasing talk about the ‘blessing of labor’ I see … fear of everything individual. For at the sight of work—that is to say, severe toil from morning till night—we have the feeling that it is the best police, viz., that it holds everyone in check and effectively hinders the development of reason, of greed, and of desire for independence. For work uses up an extraordinary proportion of nervous force, withdrawing it from reflection, meditation, dreams, cares, love, and hatred” (Daybreak, 1881 [1911:176–77]). One wonders if this is a direct response to Carlyle.

[186] Carlyle, Past and Present, 175. Much of the essay is a condemnation of capitalism, as “Mammonism,” and like so many nineteenth-century works sounds vaguely Marxist to the modern ear, even when it comes to conservative conclusions: “Labor is not a devil, even while encased in Mammonism; Labor is ever an imprisoned god, writhing unconsciously or consciously to escape out of Mammonism!” (257).

[187] John Cazenove, Outlines of Political Economy; Being a Plain and Short View of the Laws Relating to the Production, Distribution and Consumption of Wealth (London: P. Richardson, 1832), 21–22. As far as I know, the first use of the labor theory of value to argue that workers are exploited by their employers is found in a pamphlet called The Rights of Nature Against the Usurpations of Establishments, written by the British Jacobin John Thelwall in 1796.

[188] From Edward Pessen, Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1967), 174: Faler’s (1981) study of the town of Lynn in Massachusetts from 1780 to 1860 documents at length the degree to which the labor theory of value formed the framework of public debate for almost a century after the Revolution.

[189] Marx’s own works, for example, were little known in the US at the time, though not completely unknown, since Marx himself was working as a freelance newspaper opinion writer and would often publish columns in US papers. Marx, in his capacity as head of the Workingmen’s Association, also wrote directly to Lincoln with his own analysis of the American situation a few years later, in 1865, and while Lincoln seems to have read the letter, he had one of his adjuncts respond.

[190] Already in 1845, New York state assemblyman Mike Walsh was arguing along explicitly anticapitalist lines: “What is capital, but that all-grasping power which has been wrung, by fraud, avarice, and malice from the labor of this and all ages past.” In Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 2008), 149.

[191] E. P. Goodwin, Home Missionary Sermon, 1880, in Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1891), 159. Denis Kearney was a California labor leader of the time, now remembered largely for his campaigning against Chinese immigration, and Robert Ingersoll, the author of well-known refutations of the Bible, is now mainly known secondhand through Clarence Darrow’s arguments against the literal interpretation of Genesis in the play Inherit the Wind, which appear to be taken directly from Ingersoll’s writings. I can add a personal testimony here: my own grandfather Gustavus Adolphus (“Dolly”) Graeber, who, owing to my family’s peculiarly long generations, was born before the US Civil War and worked as a musician for many years along the Western frontier at exactly the time Goodwin was writing—he is reputed to be the man who introduced the mandolin into American music—was, my father once told me, “an Ingersoll man” and, hence, a fervent atheist. He was never a Marxist, but my father became one later.

[192] The movie Treasure of the Sierra Madre is based on a novel of the same name by B. Traven, the pseudonym for a German anarchist novelist who fled his own country and lived most of the years of his life in southern Mexico. His real identity remains the object of speculation to this day.

[193] Thus, for instance, when in 1837 the group of businessmen from Amherst, Massachusetts, proposed to create a limited-liability carriage company, the proposal was opposed by a petition by journeymen on the grounds that “as journeymen, they looked forward to being their own masters when they would not have to relinquish to others the value they created,” stating “ ‘incorporations put means into the hands of inexperienced capitalists, to take from us the profits of our art, which has cost us years of labor to obtain, and which we consider to be our exclusive privilege to enjoy’ ” (Hanlon 2016:57). Ordinarily such requests were only approved if the company was dedicated to creating and maintaining public works of an obviously useful nature such as a railroad or canal.

[194] Durrenberger and Doukas 2008:216–17.

[195] 1974:246.

[196] There is some debate over the relative weight, in medieval Christian theology, of the degree to which work was seen as an imitation of divine creation, and as a means of perfecting the self (see the discussion in Ehmer and Lis 2009:10–15), but both principles appear to have been present from the very beginning.

[197] Classic studies include Kraus, Côté, and Keltner 2010, and Stellar, Manzo, Kraus, and Keltner 2011.

[198] As a result underlings will also tend to care more about their superiors than their superiors will care about them, and this extends to almost any relation of structural inequality: men and women, rich and poor, black and white, and so on. It has always seemed to me this is one of the main forces that allows such inequalities to continue. (I’ve discussed this in various places, but the curious reader might consult the second chapter of Graeber, Utopia of Rules, 68–72.)

[199] From this perspective, for instance, money, markets, finance are just ways of strangers alerting us to what they care about, because we care that caring is directed appropriately; which implies, in turn, that contemporary banking is simply a bad form of caring labor, insofar as it aims it in the wrong direction.

[200] The book was eventually renamed Crack Capitalism (2010), which I’ve always felt was a far inferior title.

[201] One oft-quoted passage from Studs Terkel’s Working: “Unless a guy’s a nut, he never thinks about work or talks about it. Maybe about baseball or about getting drunk the other night or he got laid or he didn’t get laid. I’d say one out of a hundred really get excited about work” (1972:xxxiv); but at the same time, from the same testimony, “somebody has to do this work. If my kid ever goes to college, I just want him to have a little respect” (1972:xxxv).

[202] Gini and Sullivan 1987:649, 651, 654.

[203] Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White (1995) is the classic study of this phenomenon.

[204] The formula was later reduced to “the greatest good for the greatest number,” but Bentham’s original theory was based on hedonistic calculation and that’s what Carlyle was responding to.

[205] Carlyle 1843:134.

[206] Ibid.

[207] Matthew Kopka, “Bailing Out Wall Street While the Ship of State is Sinking? (Part 2),” The Gleaner, January 25, 2010, http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20100125/news/news5.html, accessed July 22, 2017. At the time, one frequently circulated claim was that autoworkers were making as much as $75 an hour, but this was based on an industry PR statement that took the total costs of all wages, benefits, and pensions for all workers, and divided them by the total number of hours worked. Obviously, if one calculated by these means, almost any worker in any industry could be represented as getting two or three times his or her actual hourly wage.

[208] The second reason was that as factory workers they were all concentrated in the same place, which made it easy to organize together. This meant that they could threaten strikes that would have a serious effect on the economy.

[209] Eli Horowitz, “No Offense Meant to Individuals Who Work With Bovine Feces,” http://rustbeltphilosophy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/no-offense-meant-to-individuals-who.html, accessed August 31, 2013.

[210] What follows is drawn largely from an essay that appeared in long format as “Introduction: The Political Metaphysics of Stupidity.” In The Commoner (www.thecommoner.org.uk), Spring 2005, and shorter format in Harper’s as “Army of Altruists: On the Alienated Right to Do Good,” Harper’s, January 2007, 31–38.

[211] Insofar as there are not quite enough children of privilege to go around—since elites almost never give birth to enough offspring to reproduce themselves demographically—the jobs are likely to go to the most remarkable children of immigrants. Executives with Bank of America, or Enron, when facing a similar demographic problem, are much more likely to recruit from poorer white folk like themselves. This is partly because of racism; partly, too, because corporations tend to encourage a broadly anti-intellectual climate themselves. It is well known at Yale, where I once worked, that executive recruiters tend to prefer to hire Yale’s “B” students, since they are more likely to be people “they’ll feel comfortable with.”

[212] There has been a great deal of effort to normalize the idea that caring tasks can or should be carried out by machines, but I don’t think it has been or really could be successful in the long run.

[213] It is interesting to note in this context that Vonnegut had, in fact, been enrolled for a master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago immediately after the war, though he never completed his dissertation. This no doubt explains why one of the main characters in the book is an anthropologist. Perhaps if he’d studied harder, he’d have realized that his premise—that workers would not be able to handle too much leisure—was profoundly flawed. (Ray Fogelson, who was there at the time, told me he returned many years later with a thesis so obviously dashed together it left the department in a quandary, so they decided to grant him a degree, instead, for Cat’s Cradle.)

[214] The most likely at #702 is Telemarketer; the least, at #1, Recreational Therapist; Anthropologists such as myself are fairly safe at #32. See Frey and Osborne (2017)—the original, online version of the paper appeared in 2013, and received a good deal of news coverage at the time.

[215] Stanislaw Lem, Memoirs of a Space Traveler: The Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), 1981 [1971] 19–20.

[216] Lem was writing in still-Socialist Poland in the 1970s; but for what it’s worth, his satire of Stalinism is just as merciless. On another journey, Ijon Tichy finds himself in a planet governed by a vast irrigation bureaucracy that has become so caught up in their mission that they have developed the ideology that humans are naturally evolving into fish. The inhabitants are forced to practice “breathing water” for increasing numbers of hours every day.

[217] Bear in mind that, averaged over a year, even medieval serfs did not work even close to a forty-hour week.

[218] I’m not going to dignify here arguments put forward in some quarters that reducing hours of employment will lead to an increase in crime, unhealthy practices, or other negative social effects. I’m sure identical arguments could have been made against freeing slaves, and likely were. I see them as having an equivalent moral standing. How is arguing that people should be forced to work forty hours a week they would not otherwise have to work because they might otherwise drink, smoke, or commit crimes any different from arguing that the entire population should be placed in prison for an equivalent amount of time as a form of preventative detention?

[219] One might call it “human production,” and I have done so elsewhere; but in this context, even that seems to hit the wrong note.

[220] No doubt one could quibble over who received the most money from whom in what circumstances, but it was Bill Clinton who presided over the repeal of Glass-Steagall, thus “liberalizing” finance and opening the way to the 2008–09 crisis, and Tony Blair in the UK who first introduced tuition in the British universities.

[221] Frank 2016.

[222] Brown 1983.

[223] Gorz’s actual words: “The search for higher productivity would lead to the standardization and industrialization of such activities, particularly those involving the feeding, minding, raising and education of children. The last enclave of individual or communal autonomy would disappear; socialization, ‘commodification’ and preprogramming would be extended to the last vestiges of self-determined and self-regulated life. The industrialization, through home computers, of physical and psychical care and hygiene, children’s education, cooking or sexual technique is precisely designed to generate capitalist profits from activities still left to individual fantasy” (Gorz 1997:84, originally published in French in 1980, which makes it really quite prophetic). The more specific engagement with the Wages for Housework movement is in Critique of Economic Reason 2010:126, 161–64, 222).

[224] The details can be found in Sarath Davala, etc. Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2015).

[225] For the most thorough recent exploration of the current arguments for basic income, see Standing (2017).

[226] In fact, in some ways, they might have to be expanded. One could make the argument UBI wouldn’t work with a rent-based economy because, say, if most homes were rented, landlords would just double rents to grab the additional income. At the very least controls would have to be imposed.

[227] This is also why conditional versions of the same program, or guaranteed jobs programs, are in no sense variations on—let alone “improved versions of”—the same thing. The key to UBI is the unconditional element, which allows for a massive reduction of the role of government intrusion in citizens’ lives. These supposedly “modified” or “improved” versions either will not do this, or will have the opposite effect.

[228] Obviously, moral philosophy tends to assume that the “free rider” problem is a fundamental question of social justice, outweighing considerations of human freedom, and therefore usually concludes that it would be justifiable to set up a system of surveillance and coercion so as to ensure that not even a small number of people live off of others’ work (unless they’re rich, in which case that’s usually somehow totally okay). My own position, which is the typical Libertarian Socialist position, is, “So what if they do?”

[229] I never met Foucault, but I base my descriptions on some of those who did.

[230] It is sometimes said that Foucault never defines “power” and it’s true that he was often slightly coy about the matter, but when he did, he defined power as “a set of actions on other actions,” and its exercise as “acting on another’s actions” (1982:789). This is, surprisingly, closer to the Parsonian tradition than anything else.

[231] Foucault 1988:18–19.


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