How do Marxists explain 'Bullshit Jobs'?

Why would capitalists hire people they don't need to? What is the material reason? Are bullshit workers proles? Are they exploited? How do we spread class conscious to the workers of the bullshit sector? Does Marxist ltv even apply to these people?

libcom.org/library/phenomenon-bullshit-jobs-david-graeber

Other urls found in this thread:

counterpunch.org/2017/02/10/tpp-is-not-dead-its-now-called-the-trade-in-services-agreement/
youtube.com/watch?v=kehnIQ41y2o
youtube.com/watch?v=E-tIAlRgNpc
youtube.com/watch?v=jHx5rePmz2Y
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

they hire people so they have money, and can in turn buy products. Someone who has no money cant buy commodities from capitalists.

But… they don't.

wait, they do that? is there anyone who I can talk to?

Yeah, where did this meme come from? How do this meme and the automation meme go together?

Maybe you're talking about servants? They hire servants to stand around and do nothing in uniform to make them seem important. It's like a cheap decoration.

because the economy would collapse otherwise

go outside

Excellent argument comrade.

bullshit jobs do exist and quite honestly it's becoming an epidemic

Fake jobs for fake businesses, they hire people but make money from screwing them over.

Just because you don't like your job or think its very useful doesn't mean that it isn't useful to capitalists–and that's the only thing that counts. Service industry jobs at the very least help with the preservation and realization of surplus-value.

Working as a greeter in a retail store may not really be that helpful to society in anyway but the subjective experience that customers have from having someone to kiss their ass and to help them also helps the retail chains make sales. They don't hire people for these shit-jobs out of the goodness of their hearts or to keep the economy from collapsing.

A lot of service jobs have some element of production in it or blur the two lines. What is a McDonald's for instance but a burger factory? A lot of retail places hire people to assemble goods and to do repairs etc.

Even a lot of jobs having to do with production are mischaracterized as mere service jobs by bourgeois political economy and Trump is hoping to take advantage of this with the whole TISA agreement:
counterpunch.org/2017/02/10/tpp-is-not-dead-its-now-called-the-trade-in-services-agreement/

The bullshit jobs article doesn't talk about menial jobs that contribute to making profits, it's about jobs that the employees themselves know to be bullshit, and would make no difference if it disapeared.

There are jobs that are useless in the grand scheme, like people working at Juicero or Funko Pop. That's because the business as a whole is useless. Those workers are useful to the junk business that employs them and to other businesses as consumers. The point is capitalism has them wasting their lives on bullshit work so there can be more "economic activity" for more profit and to keep money circulating. In socialism, the economy would not need to grow indefinitely just to remain functional, so bullshit jobs would not exist.

Labour aristocracy.

But they do bring a profit, or at least allow you to continue making a profit. They are bullshit because they are not serving any real needs. They don't need to, however, since exchange-value now completely dominates use-value and falsifies it.

Bullshit jobs such as an office worker that only spends 6 hours a week doing actual work, and spends the rest of his time browsing facebook only allows capital to continue making profits by maintaininrg a class of subservient consumers. It is a political, not an economical issue
What do you mean?

Has no one here actually read Graeber's essay?

...

What the fuck man. I litterally just found this guy on youtube and theres a thread about him.

Very good video that explains it pretty well.
youtube.com/watch?v=kehnIQ41y2o
youtube.com/watch?v=E-tIAlRgNpc

Yes.
They dont really create value but they are forced to do these jobs to survive. So they are exploited in that sense, they do not have any agency.

Explain them that capitalism keeps them busy and keeps them from doing actual functional work. Socialism will do away with bullshit jobs like advertisers, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, etc.
We socialists just have to make sure bullshit jobs are not created to achieve "full employment". A strong anti-work aspect should be part of the modern socialist idea. Work is not a virtue, it is a means to survival, the ideal is non-work.

I dont know honestly.

Because middle-managers, compliance officers, paper pushers and other assorted "bullshit jobs" exist to enforce rules and norms within a firm, to ensure compliance with various laws and regulations, and to ultimately keep other employees in line.
Also because communication within firms is usually terrible, and most people are smart enough to not running around telling the boss their job is "bullshit" and that their position should be automated or given to somebody else. Even so, that does happen a lot anyways.

Those are not even close to all the bullshit jobs that exist.
Marketing, lawyers for companies, stock brokers, telemarketers, patent lawyers, etc etc.

How new are you?

youtube.com/watch?v=jHx5rePmz2Y

Bullshit jobs explained in video format for the brainlets

Bullshit jobs exist because, as a smaller portion of humanity's labor is required to meet human needs, an ever larger portion of humanity's labor must be devoted to the conflict between individual capitalist enterprises or between the capitalist class and the working class.

That's why so many people feel like their jobs are pointless - they ARE pointless as far as humanity is concerned, but they result in the individual capitalist boss getting a larger share of humanity's total money.

Those are most certainly not bullshit jobs. They help companies establish legal monopolies, allowing them to charge monopoly prices. Patents do this in direct fashion, but even marketing is about establishing a monopoly market - to convince people no other competitor truly exists, so to speak. All other brands are inferior, as if they belonged to a different class of commodity. Now they don't need a cola, they need a coca cola, and only one company owns that entire market - the coca cola company.
It is not productive, but from the standpoint of a firm it's an excellent investment.

Those are bullshit jobs. They dont do anything usefull for society. This is precicely the type of job the guy who started the bullshit job thing is talking about. Phone marketeers and corporate lawyers are bullshit jobs, they only exist because other corporations have them. Its a prisoners dilemma. They dont add value to human society, which is exactly what a bullshit job is.

Graeber calls these types of bullshit jobs "goons"
>You don't need them unless somebody else has them, sort of like armies, right. If nobody had an army, no one would need an army. Same is true of corporate lawyers, telemarketers, all people like that. They often say, "This is total bullshit. There's no need for this."
From this vid:

The reason that industry hires so many people to do so little actual work is because they are in competition with one another. Some people are in marketing or are lawyers or whatever, and their actual work is directly aimed at harming the other companies in the market. But for those millions of middle managers, all they do is Hoover up talent. They essentially warehouse millions of people who would otherwise be creating new, competitive enterprises that would hurt the profits of the existing companies.
Imagine if Myspace had hired Zuckerberg and stuck him in a mail room somewhere, doing nothing productive. No Facebook.

I don't disagree. But you have to recognize that our current world system rewards these jobs nonetheless. They are not bullshit in the sense that people make very real livings of it. Companies make real billions. To call them bullshit jobs mystifies things - they have perfectly logical explanations, and exist for a very clear reason. Bullshit jobs sounds too much like "your job don't real", which isn't the case.
Unproductive jobs is closer to the mark.

Anyway, no use bitching about them except as a symptom. They are a logical part of our life world, which has to change for bigger reasons than just the unproductive jobs. has the right of it.

That doesnt make them not bullshit jobs. The whole concept of a bullshit job is a paying job that doesnt add any value to society. The people doing them often feel like their jobs are bullshit.

Yea thats me

Can you at least read the article posted before commenting

Can't believe nobody has said this yet, but you all realise governments bribe companies into making bullshit jobs, right? Tax cuts for jobs is one I hear about the most.

I can't even get a job at a warehouse. I'm on the verge of killing myself.

Yup. Governments also contribute to it in the form of busywork.

This is why Keynes and all Keynesian economists are mouth breathers who have zero concept of how human beings operate under capitalism. Let's say I can make 10 teddy bears a day by hand. Then, I get a sewing machine and can make 10 teddy bears in an hour. Keynes thinks a capitalist is just going to work 1 hour a day and continue to only produce 10 teddy bears a day. Since the capitalist is motivated principally by profit, he will then make 80 teddy bears a day, as to maximize his profit. He might even work extra hours, since it's less physically taxing to produce the bears than making them by hand. Automation never reduces the length of the workday, it just increases the amount of things you produce in your full days work.

I've heard this explained as your importance in the public sector being measured by how many people are under your control, so people will always hire more people when possible, and put minimum effort into making the system more efficient and automating simple shit like spreadsheets and making people fill them out. It's why the NHS gets such a trash talking for too many bureaucrats.

Yea and add to that that people win elections by promising more jobs for the ever increasing unemployed population and it really gets out of hand.

I actually did, long before this thread was even ever posted, which is why you don't see me disagreeing with anything except the naming. I don't like the name, and I laid out why.

From OP's article for reference

Now we're getting somewhere. You cannot explain bullshit jobs through corporate interests, you need the state to support capitalism as it's not worth it for individual corporations to pay people just so that they have money to consume.

Listen to your heart.

bad advice tbh

By the way, not actually bullshit jobs. This bucolic vision of bringing work back into the house is primitive. There is a value in being able to order a pizza online late in the evening.

Keynesians never did understand capitalism.

This notion that capitalists give a shit about capitalism is retarded. They only care about their profits. They will sell their consumers the ropes they hang themselves with or something.

This is one answer. Imperialist exploitation helps artificially prop up (already low) profit rates in the developed world. This takes some of the pressure off companies and governments to take the hatchet to jobs in the private-sector and government, allows an unsustainable levels of unproductive labor to continue, and creates segments of the workforce that are relatively well-off.


This is actually a decent explanation. The company I work for is always hiring people even though they don't have enough work to go around for people who want to work full-time or over-time. Why? I think on a simpler, less-abstract level it allows them to always have someone who can replace a given person for a position. And, it makes full-time work and benefits seem like a nice carrot they can offer to their "good" workers. Besides, they pretty much can get most of what they want from part-timers anyway and if the hired on comparatively fewer people at full-time they'd risk having to pay benefits. Perhaps they would risk unionization or labor strife since the casualization of labor seems to help convince people that their shitty conditions are of their own making, that they prefer "flexible" hours and/or they'd be happier working at a different place which did offer those things. Working almost becomes like choosing your shoes, its sold as a personal choice rather then a means to making a living. Most everyone under the age of 40 convinced that its merely a temporary situation and so there's no reason to really cause a fuss, their going to school,seeking other work, or tinkering with some cool venture in their off-time anyway and so people keep clocking in day in and day out without ever really grumbling to management. They mostly take their frustration out on each other it seems.


Right, but it obviously is worth more to hire someone and get the tax break then just to pay the full-rate. Let me play devil's advocate here, I'm sure a libertarian or conservative economist would probably say that if we didn't have all those taxes or such high-tax rates that companies would hire more people since they don't have to share so much of their profit with the government. Assuming the reason that companies hire people for bullshit jobs due to tax breaks is not a far logical leap from the position that unemployment can be significantly ameliorated through tax breaks.


Good posts.

I honestly wasn't even sure this was such a common term. Anyway, everyone else has answered better than I would.