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Gavin Smith: ­­­Toward a non-theory of the reproduction of labour

Matan Kaminer’s reflections on the workshop, “Rethinking surplus populations” is full of interesting insights and challenging puzzles. As he says, “operationalizing this concept [surplus populations] for the analysis of particular ethnographic cases throws up real problems.” (Kaminer, 2022). A task preliminary to operationalizing the concept, however, is the task of clarifying what it refers to. This is especially so for two reasons.

First: currently the term is not derived specifically from Marx’s reflections but is used to refer to a wide range of phenomena not all of them by any means consistent with one another.  Indeed, it is no exaggeration to suggest that in the majority of its uses ‘surplus population’ (and similar terms like ‘wasted lives’ and so on) is not a problem produced by capitalism but to the contrary describes people who do not have enough of it (e.g., Ferguson and Li, 2018). As a result, conversations where the term has been operationalized risk being confusing from the start, interlocutors thinking they are dealing with the same apples when in fact what they share looks more like a fruit salad.

Second: even for those explicitly tying their use of the concept to Marx there is disagreement. How does it differ from a reserve army of labour? Is it indeed just surplus labour? Is the surplus population always a relative surplus or are there historical moments when it becomes absolutely surplus? (See for example, Nun, 1969; Quijano, 1974) And anyway: relative to what? To the non-surplus population? Or in temporal terms, surplus today but not so tomorrow? Then, whatever it is á la Marx, there are those who would argue that a population surplus to capital is simply inconceivable: capitalism is everywhere, its tentacles making even the most apparently surplus of populations simply one more cog in its machine of reproduction.

This makes it hard for me to agree with the opening of Matan’s final paragraph, that “regardless how we parse the concept… its continuing and even growing relevance shows that [Marx’s] analytic categories… are… relevant today,” (Kaminer, 2022) if by ‘relevant’ he means also useful. And my point is well illustrated by what he then suggests that, “even the possibility of being exploited has become a coveted privilege denied to billions.” For surely the question of who is exploited, over-exploited, or super-exploited and by what means has by no means been settled in such a way that we can assume that billions are denied this opportunity.

There is much that I agree with in Matan’s reflections. Indeed, it is the precision of his argument that so well illustrates the preliminary problems we face before we can operationalize the concept. Nevertheless, the almost matching pair ‘social reproduction’ and ‘surplus population’ now have such vast currency that any step towards clarity might be useful however small. And useful above all, as Matan would have it, to enable “a rethinking of political strategy.”

And so, in what follows, I would like to make some observations that help at least me, to think about surplus populations in the context of contemporary capitalism, and then make suggestions about political strategy that are intended to be more provocative than conclusive. To anticipate, it may be that some of the concepts/terms we use as though they were common currency may actually get in the way of contributing to the kind of subaltern praxis of populations of this kind.

On surplus and populations

What follows arises mostly from the second of the two difficulties I have spoken of. But we cannot so easily distinguish the two because many who use the often-paired concepts social reproduction/surplus population are either under the impression that their casual usage is more or less in line with Marx’s various uses, or are intentionally and explicitly seeking to refine it for contemporary application; they are not uncomfortable with Marx but they believe Marx would be uncomfortable in the present (and for some, should have been uncomfortable in the past too). Because of this discourse as it has unfolded at least since the seventies, there is a risk that the notes that follow appear to be overly rigid and uncompromising. This is not my intent. Rather I am hoping the following notes might function more as a foundation on which to continue a longstanding conversation.

I hope I am not saying anything too controversial to start with if I say that Marx set out to write a book called Capital. What concerned him was to study how capital was reproduced through the use of both a dialectical and an historical method. In the course of this study a figure emerges who time and again is spoken of in terms of a conflicted binary. On the one hand, this figure provides labour power to capital from which surplus value is produced. As a result this labour and its performer is valued. On the other hand, this same figure has to devote necessary labour to the reproduction of the performer and all that that implies. A peculiarity of this kind of society is that “necessary labour appears as superfluous, because the superfluous is . . . necessary only to the extent that it is the condition for the realization of capital” (Marx, 1973: 609). In other words, this figure is made up of valued labour and necessary labour. In the Alice in Wonderland world of capital the labour producing surplus is valued labour and the other, the necessary labour, is surplus. The value:surplus of this figure – and here we might see it as a person, a group, or a category of a population –  can be written as a ratio in which 9:1 looks more like a valued figure (person, population etc) working 90% of the time to produce surplus value, while a 1:9 ration gets closer to being a surplus figure working only 10% of the time for capital.

I hope it is clear why I put the valued labour/surplus labour notion in this way. It suggests that insofar as a person, a category of persons – even those resident in a specific space – devoting a mere 10% of their energies to reproducing capital are to that degree surplus. It doesn’t of course mean that capital runs so close to the bottom line that only those who devote absolutely none of their energies to its reproduction are rendered surplus. What it does mean is, in Marx’s words that “society in its fractional parts undertakes for Mr Capitalist the business of keeping his virtual instrument of labour . . . intact” (1973: 609–610). It is a service, in other words, that various spheres of society provide to Mr Capitalist. In fact, Marx goes on to say, “as reserve for later use,” but – since this temporal feature is not a transhistorical fact we will come back to it later. Anyway, even were this reserve function not performed, global capital does not run so close to extinction through loss of surplus value that it is unable to tolerate a population ‘surplus’, one way or the other.

‘Society’ then in its fractional parts is the component that matters when speaking of the necessary side of labour activity. We can assume that ‘society’ comes as a cost to capital. Politics is a lot to do with which ‘fractional parts’ across a spectrum capital is prepared to pay for. We will return to this but it does mean that the practices and relationships that involve this element of reproduction will vary as they are moved from one site in the social fabric to another. So, a mistake is made when the reproduction of ‘society’ – in other words ‘social reproduction’ – is understood as entirely a matter of the direct interrelationships among those performing necessary labour, in households and ‘families’ for example.

On social relations and their reproduction under capitalism

In any case, as I have said, Marx wrote a book called Capital about the social relations that are necessary for the reproduction of capital. This is because that’s what Marx was interested in: the reproduction of capital (via labour). What then are the social relations necessary for the reproduction of labour? From what we have said we can see that these cannot be entirely disentangled from the conditions required by capitalist relations. But as we move from one end of the ratio to the other, are there ‘logics’, embedded in the reproduction of labour that need to be understood as such? Is it possible that, insofar as Marx’s interest in labour really only extended to those closer to the 9:1 ratio, so he left for later study the reproduction of the class of labour itself?(Lebowitz, 2003; Smith 2022). While, through the reading of Capital and Grundrisse we can come to a useful understanding of the underlying mechanisms conditioning the reproduction of all forms of capital – and hence the social relations extending variously therefrom. The same is not so for the very different instances for the way combined labour is reproduced. By combined labour I mean both ‘valued’ and ‘necessary’, but the issue is specifically to do with the principles that must be in place for necessary labour to be reproduced.

Image 1: Laborers harvesting lavender in Kent, UK (photo: FR Lawrence Lew, July 2019, Creative Commons/Flickr)

We might begin by noting that no theory of the reproduction of labour can be adduced along the lines that Marx used in his study of capital. So, whereas the inroads of various Marxist versions of ‘social reproduction theory’ have been crucial in helping us understand different instances of capitalist society, they do not warrant use of the term ‘theory’ in the same way as the theory Marx developed through his historical realist method. Instead, beginning with the conditionalities we must take into account from the actual processes by which capital is reproduced in the specific setting we are studying, we need to explore through the methods of historical-realist ethnography specific instances of the social reproduction of labour as it articulates with capital. 

This then is the first hurdle to be crossed: that unlike the circuit that determines the reproduction of capital through the realization of surplus value, there is no such circuit for the reproduction of labour. In the former instruments – tools, machines, etc. – are made productive through the inputs of labour power. The value that results is realized in the market and any surplus arising thereby is retained by the owner of those instruments. In principle the circuit closes with the realization of value made possible by the market: no market → no realization → no value → no surplus: no capital. Such a circuit transferred to what I am calling combined labour can only refer to that labour ‘realized’ on the labour market: i.e., valued labour. Necessary labour does not reach a point of realization – completing a circuit. So, there is no ‘logic of realization’ in this sense.

A second hurdle paradoxically arises from the entanglement of necessary labour with the kind of society within which it is to be found – a capitalist one.  Neither the arena in which combined labour is to be found nor even just its ‘necessary’ component can ever be understood therefore as an ‘assemblage’ or package of multiple ‘contingent’ or ‘aleatory’ variables bumping into each other like billiard balls. Resort to such carpet-bagged bits and pieces reveals simply a failure to tackle the difficult terrain in which all forms of social practice are dialectically related to – that is to say mutually/reciprocally produced by – capital. So, the second hurdle arises because combined labour is articulated with capital, not autonomous from it.

These two conditionalities provide the challenge for understanding the myriad practices that are required to ensure the reproduction of necessary labour with the precision that is possible for the reproduction of capital for analytical purposes taken alone. This is well illustrated by the common practice in the literature of contrasting so-called ‘use values’ to be found in the arena of social reproduction with ‘exchange values’ found beyond it. As much as the distinction is useful it can be misleading since use values do not complete a circuit by being realized in the market. Along one dimension, in terms of labour they are better understood as an array of practices and relationships that, in being so, do not present themselves as complete or even in some cases named. (Williams, 1977: 115-20) Or put another way, their evident practice though often called upon, obviates the need to be named. Along another dimension, it is commonly overlooked that the realm of necessary labour requires tools and the occupation of physical space. Yet these ‘means of production’ tend to occupy an ambivalent position between their valuation as property on the one hand and as the necessities of survival on the other.

Taken together this means that the authorization of labour as value and of tools and space as property stand in dialectical opposition to necessary labour and the use of tools for undertaking it. It is in this sense that it is possible to understand this sphere of reproduction as inherently resistant to the value regime arising from labour-as-commodity and tools-as-property. (Smith, 2016). The particular point at which such structural tension is felt is a function of the historical moment or geographical setting where one or other form of capital is regnant in the dominant bloc. In my own work in Peru I showed how the move by capitalist agriculture to replace open-ended practices of labour with the fixed closure of wages gave rise to rebellion (i.e., from structural to willed resistance). (Smith, 1989) Extractive capital effects a similar transformation over space, just as finance capital does so over tools (credit schemes) and sites of necessary labour (rents).

These perpetually active ‘collectively orchestrated improvisations’ (Bourdieu, 1977:72) in the present to regulate the future are not well captured by terms like ‘use values’ or ‘non-commodified practices/relations’. While the following remark by the early Bourdieu is too emphatic….

“It is because subjects do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing that what they do has more meaning than they know.” (ibid: 79)

…. it does go some way toward capturing what Gramsci spoke of in terms of common sense and good sense. Williams identifies the point I am trying to make when he speaks of the strongest barrier we have as social analysts trying to capture the sense of presence in social activity being, “this immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished products.” Williams, 1977: 128). Finished products – a circuit completed, something we understand intuitively through our social engagement with a market that realizes our value as we step into the street. Yet what we are dealing with here is precisely a sphere that fails to realize – complete, condense, contract – practices and relationships that for populations of the 1:9 ratio constitutes most of their sociality. We should be careful what we ask for therefore, when we demand that such lifeworlds be taken from where they are hidden and brought within the norms of capitalist society.

The social relations of social reproduction

But this realm of social life is only one of the fractional parts undertaken for Mr Capitalist to keep his virtual instrument of labour intact. When it is remarked in respect to these populations, as it so often is, that what Mr Capitalist pays is below the socially necessary costs of reproduction, we are obliged to look for what the ‘fractional parts’ may be that Marx suggests come into play. One such part cannot be the unrecognized necessary labour of the kind I have been speaking of since, by definition, we have been told those social necessities cannot thus be met. Does this mean that, like lemmings, the chasm of extinction calls? While this is certainly the fate of many, one has the feeling that it is not this very obvious surplus population that these writers are referring to, so how do they survive? The kinds of fragments that Marx may have been alluding to were the poor houses, Speehamland arrangements and so on of the past. In the mid-twentieth century these were glossed under the term ‘welfare’ and mostly undertaken by the state. Later in that century and currently in this one, elements of the social reproduction of necessary labour became broken up very much into the fractional parts Marx (presciently?) spoke of. By relying on distinct sources of philanthropy church groups, secular non-governmental organizations, food banks, and so on exposed the very specific fractions he spoke of.

Simultaneously they brought into play a multiplicity of social relations and practices that crowded together to undertake the task of social reproduction for Mr Capitalist. In each case, however, whether we speak in the past, of the poor houses of the nineteenth century, or the schools and hospitals of the postwar period; or whether we speak in the present, of church groups or food banks, they come as costs for capital as a whole and, insofar as they are fractional, they are also factional: they impact on different kinds of capitalists in differing ways producing their own (class, ethnicized, regional, etc.) flavour of politics as a result. In other words, the social relations brought into play for the purposes of social reproduction, once removed from the necessary labour of workers themselves, vary considerably and articulate with capital in different ways.

Finance capital as a hegemonic bloc

Seen in this way we begin to understand why ‘neoliberalism’ is such an unhelpful, imprecise notion for deconstructing what is happening to reshape social reproduction. Rather we need to turn attention to the different fractions of capital that are regnant in a dominant bloc. This is not a question of ‘financialized capitalism’; capitalism has always needed to be financialized. It is a question of the dominance of finance capital as such that we need to address, the conditions it needs to have in place for its reproduction and the ways in which its dominance is reflected in the reproductive logics of other forms of capital – industrial, agricultural, extractive and so on. As for the conditions of possibility this presents to valued and necessary labour – the realm of ‘social reproduction’ if you like – there is a great deal that can be said and indeed has been said.

But I want to draw implications from a particular feature of finance capital which is that it takes the form of the direction of flow and then the capture of surplus value. It is, for example, this characteristic that helps us to untangle the multifarious flows of ‘the surplus’ that finance is able to direct and capture my being woven into the vast array of market valuated arrangements that now make up the fractured and competitive field of governmental, non-governmental, and privatized social ‘supports’.

There are three features of finance capital that underly its role in the reproduction of a capitalist society dominated by its form. First, as I have said, it is about flows of surplus value, their direction/regulation and always their capture (and then release). Second, while it relies on the amounts of surplus value available and its form – its liquidity, fungibility, quantifiability, etc. – it does not itself produce surplus value. Finally, while by no means the only way of doing so, a principle means of managing risk in the realm of finance is through diversification.

These three features have their cognate manifestations in society as a whole. In this setting the flow of goods and services are not only channeled through market principles, they allow the dyke to direct flow through financial instruments. Then, insofar as the management of risk is achieved through diversification it is essential that diversity of phenomena, material and social – their distinction from one another – can be reliably assessed. Difference cannot be simply perceptual; it must be sufficiently real to meet the requirements of investment diversification: including investment in a population. Thus, insofar as left to itself, finance capital does not increase the overall surplus value available to a social formation, so it cannot absorb a reserve army of labour.

Finally, we come to the politics. I have suggested elsewhere that once people and the perquisites can all be given an asset value it becomes important for managing risk that there be differences among them. These cannot be simply claims to difference. There must be social diversity that translates into risk reduction by diversifying investments in different kinds of population – identities if you like. Different elements of the population are then encouraged to negotiate to enhance their ‘asset value’ for society understood as a collectivity of this sort. The hegemony of the dominant bloc works as such by being openly selective: celebrating distinction, selection, difference. This heterogenous population then expresses participation by negotiating the best possible placement in the social field.

But surplus value is made available to finance – finance as such – only by means of capture. It seeks to enhance its position by expanding the field across which it can make this capture effective, legal and cost-effective. It is pre-eminently expansive in this sense, not in the sense that industrial capital expands, enhancing surplus value both in space and in time albeit unevenly: in regional and temporal crises. These latter produce relative surplus populations that can, if the conditions are right, serve as reserve armies of labour. No such cycle has this effect in the cases where finance capital dominates. The result is that populations come into being for whom a politics of negotiation has little or nothing to offer them because they have nothing with which to negotiate.

Externally and brutally, they are threatened by forces against which they must resist – in some way collectively. Yet internally and more subtly they are threatened by the destruction of their sense of collective ‘presence’, – of the form of subjectivity on which they rely. A kind of sociality that invokes their active imbrication in a necessarily inter-relational future: “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt” in Williams’ terms (1977: 132). This means that their daily existence is one of resistance. Their choice is being obliged to negotiate as wretched citizens and, as such, always failing; or finding means for turning the resistance that inheres in the lives they value into a politics of refusal: what we might term a counter-politics against the pervasive hegemony that selects among beneficiaries. (Smith, 2014)

And, still, no surplus population

It is only after a series of enquiries of this kind – globally and historically – that we can then begin to speak usefully of whether or not certain populations are surplus in the sense that they are unable to meet either capital’s requirements or those of the socially constituted necessities of population. Academics who for the purposes of their score on the Marxian league table (and its various social democratic extensions) argue that there are no surplus populations insofar as they are perforce obliged to consume capitalists’ commodities despite the fact that in doing so they cannot survive (and anyway when the absence of such minimal consumption would not make even an itch to be scratched for capital), or by pointing to the outsourcing of incarceration, or the administration of refugee camps etc. are thereby not surplus, detritus or of no value, display a coy intellectual condescension that simply reveals their splendid isolation from an unfortunately large part of the world they live in.

Gavin Smith is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto and has worked in South America and Western Europe.  Apart from ethnographic monographs he has published two books of essays, Confronting the present, 1999; and Intellectuals and (counter-) politics, 2014.

References

Bourdieu, 1977: Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge

Ferguson, James, and Tania Li. 2018. “Beyond the ‘Proper Job:’ Political-Economic Analysis after the Century of Labouring Man.” Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies. University of Western Cape.

Lebowitz, Michael 2002: Beyond Capital: Marx’s political economy of the working class Palgrave Macmillan. London

Nun, José 1969: “Sobrepopulación relativa, ejercito industrial de reserva y masa marginal,“ Revista Latino-Americano de Sociología, 5, 2  178-236.

Quijano Obregón, Aníbal 1974: “The Marginal Pole of the Economy and the Marginalized Labour Force,“ Economy and Society, 3, 4. 393-428.

Smith, Gavin, 1989: Livelihood and resistance: peasants and the politics of land in Peru. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Smith, Gavin 2014. Intellectuals and (counter-)politics: essays in historical realism. Berghahn, Oxford

Smith, Gavin 2016: “Against social democratic angst about revolution: from failed citizens to critical praxis.” Dialectical Anthropology 40: 221-239

Smith, Gavin, 2022: “Social reproduction and the heterogeneity of the population as labour” in Gill, L. & Kasmir, S. (eds): The Routledge Handbook of The Anthropology of Labor [Forthcoming] Routledge, New York

Williams, Raymond. 1977: Marxism and literature. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Cite as: Smith, Gavin. 2022. “Toward a non-theory of the reproduction of labour.” FocaalBlog, 9 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/09/gavin-smith-toward-a-non-theory-of-the-reproduction-of-labour/

Blog, Bullshit Jobs, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks

Andrew Sanchez: Work is Complicated: Thoughts on David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs

There’s a Committee for Committees!

A few weeks ago, I received a message from a colleague. It was the sort of funny thing that one friend says to another when their most ridiculous suspicions have been proven true. It said:

“There’s a committee for the membership of committees!”

My colleague discovered this while filling out a form at the University of Cambridge that required her to declare all the committees she sits on (ostensibly to keep an eye on conflicts of interest). I had to complete the form too because I am a Trustee of the University. This means that committees play a substantial role in my working life. Too substantial in fact. As of December 2021, I sit on about 20 of them.

I spend hours per month sitting in one committee, checking the minutes of other committees that I also sit on. Sometimes I write reports that are technically addressed to myself. This is not the satisfying and intellectually curious life I imagined when I became an academic. It feels like I am trapped in an Escher picture, walking endlessly up and down a looping stairway to nowhere. So of course, there would be a Committee for Committees. That’s what happens when a university has so many committees.

Image 1: Maurits Cornelis Escher lithograph “Convex and Concave” (1955), photo by Pedro Ribeiro Simões

Like so many aspects of human social life, Graeber has an idea about this experience. It is an idea about that feeling of wasting your time on tasks that are not worth doing. The idea is called Bullshit Jobs (Graeber 2013, 2018). It says that most of us spend our time doing jobs are unsatisfying and serve no real purpose for society. Graeber says that capitalism has given us these jobs to keep us busy.

The Bullshit Jobs book (2018) was adapted from an essay published in Strike! Magazine (2013). One of the most memorable arguments of the essay is that there is an inverse relationship between one’s salary and the genuine social importance of one’s work. The more important you are to society, the less you get paid. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Graeber was proven correct when lockdowns prompted many nations to categorise some people as essential workers without whom society would collapse. If you had to go to work, then you were genuinely important to society. But you probably didn’t get paid a lot for being so. This maps well onto Graeber’s vision of a world of dockers, nurses, and rubbish collectors, ranged against all the management consultants and people sitting on pointless committees.

Like so much of Graeber’s work, the essay made me question why we do the things that we do. In the true spirit of anarchism, the work was destabilising. Which means that it revealed the injustice and weakness of the existing social order and showed the possibility for change. As I once heard Graeber say in a 2010 London Teach-Out shortly before a riot, ideologies of power are like the glass windows of a jewellery store. They tell you to stay in your place. But if enough people smash them, it becomes clear that they were always just glass.

The Bullshit Jobs essay was in this spirit. It was a prompt to imagine a different world, and I loved it. But when that prompt was expanded to the length of a book, it was stretched so thin so that you could see through it. I am going to talk about Bullshit Jobs by considering three things. First, whether Graeber misunderstands how bullshit tasks relate to one another in complex systems. Second, whether the thesis misunderstands capitalism’s tendency towards profiteering and the disregard for marginal populations. Finally, whether the thesis is focussed on the wrong sort of human satisfaction in work. But this is a short essay, so each issue will only be addressed briefly.

Bullshit Tasks

One of the main problems with the book was the research method, which largely rested on asking people which aspects of their work were ‘bullshit’. This is a problem, because by focusing solely on the emic experience of work, we do not necessarily understand the structural significance of that work. A person paid to guard an empty warehouse may seem to be doing a ‘bullshit job’ and perhaps it feels that way too. But the work is generative of profit for somebody else, even in an attenuated manner. In this instance that job would be integral to an opaque structure of risk assessment and insurance that dooms some of us to stand in front of empty warehouses because doing so is in the economic interest of other people. The Bullshit Jobs model tends to conflate questions of work satisfaction with those of wider structural and economic significance.

More importantly the model does not grapple with the fact that there is no necessary consistency of experience in bullshit jobs through time. The model implicitly rests on the assumption of a continuous temporal imagination of work, where satisfaction is to be had all the time or not at all. That is not how work functions. And it is especially not how bullshit, box-ticking work functions. Such forms of bureaucratic work make up a substantial proportion of Graeber’s analysis. One may spend all day checking whether a box on a form has been ticked, and it might feel pointless. But on the odd occasion where it turns out that the box has not been ticked, or where the form contains a lie… that is the moment where the value of the exercise becomes clear and a bullshit job can be socially transformative.

Imagine that you are the absurd character of a (once) working class, Marxist academic in an elite university, spending hours a week trawling through committee papers. Perhaps your soul aches with the suspicion that you are wasting your time and have sold out. Until you find an innocuous line of text tucked away in a committee paper; a text that if unchallenged would quietly remove permanent employment status from everybody in your university that changed their institutional role at any point in the future. Suddenly it seems important that somebody is there to read all these papers. And it seems especially important that the people doing the reading should not assume that the work is bullshit.

Bullshit jobs are not usually bullshit all the time. It would probably make more sense to rather talk of bullshit tasks. One should then consider whether those tasks coalesce into something more impactful, and why this is integral to the nature of complex economic and institutional action. You would be prudent to pay more attention to the box ticking bureaucrats, because even if you consider their work to be ‘stupid’ (Graeber 2015) the combined aggregate of their tasks will nonetheless shape the world around you. However, you probably wouldn’t know about it, because bureaucracy is by its very nature quiet and anonymous (Kesküla and Sanchez 2019). The transformative dimensions of much bureaucratic work are slower, and they are crucially less individualised than other types of work. But they coalesce into forms of power (Bear and Mathur 2015), and as power they can never be bullshit.

Many of Graeber’s bullshit jobs are artefacts of social complexity, and their impact is distributed at a social and temporal scale that exceeds his model. I doubt the existence of a coherent category of bullshit jobs. There is also no evidence that they exist to keep people out of trouble.

Capitalism Doesn’t Have a Committee

Modern capitalism lacks the concerted agency to create mass pointless work for reasons of social engineering. It principally strives towards the economic exploitation of mass populations, and is content to abandon those that it cannot readily exploit.

Graeber (2013) says that the only societies that used to give people pointless work were state socialist ones. They did this to redistribute wealth and keep people out of trouble. However, he argues that in the late 20th century increasing mechanisation and the shifting of production to the developing world left much of the working population in wealthy capitalist societies with nothing to do. That population was a threat to the established social order, and needed to be given bullshit jobs to distract them and tire them out.

This claim is incorrect. Neoliberal capitalism doesn’t have a committee. It certainly doesn’t have the type of committee that engages in a coherent global endeavour to stop us from sliding into thoughtful idleness. Some people would like to believe that neoliberalism doesn’t exist at all and is only conjured into being by left wing social scientists. Those people are wrong. There are explicit packages of policies, reforms, professional networks, and ways of looking at the world that make neoliberalism a real thing. But still, neoliberal capitalism does not have a committee.

I appreciate anthropological attention to the discursive and moral life of neoliberalism, and I have written about how neoliberal actors may feel that they are doing good in the world (Sanchez 2012). However, for a structural analysis like Bullshit Jobs what matters is the core motivation of capitalism, which is profit. The notion of a world of pointless employment that does not exist to make money, simply does not fit with what we know about most of economic life. More broadly, there is the lingering issue that capitalism is untroubled by the fact that plenty of people in wealthy societies have not been given pointless work.

If I can be permitted to stick with the anecdotal style of Bullshit Jobs here is an example to illustrate my point: I was raised on a British council estate where a good proportion of people were completely without any form of work. Some tended to get into trouble, and aged into lives where they harmed themselves and others. Feasibly, those populations could be imagined as a threat to social order. But the Committee was untroubled by that possibility. Capitalism was happy for our family to live on state benefits for years, treading water below the poverty line, sliding into depression and violence. Although the hateful notion of a ‘Chav’ underclass would suggest otherwise, people in those environments often have critical perspectives on how the world works. And sometimes they try to do something about it. It was in just such an environment that I was radicalised as a young teenager, and grew into the person writing this essay. This personal example is perhaps a little cloying. But the fact remains that there are too many people left behind by the Bullshit Jobs Committee, for the idea to make sense.

Or less anecdotally we might consider populations at the acute end of the social marginality spectrum, those apparently expelled by capitalism as if they are somehow worthless, condemned to lives of floating marginality, living in refugee camps or prisons, standing by the road at labour markets waiting for a gig that never comes (Sassen 2014). It is mistaken to see such populations as lacking in creativity and will (Alexander and Sanchez 2019). It is also mistaken to not recognise them as sources of economic value for capitalism. Bourgois’ (2018) work on predatory accumulation shows this, as does older thinking on the Prison Industrial Complex. It turns out that those allegedly dangerous populations are still worth something to somebody. If this were not so, then marginalised communities would not be beset everywhere by landlords, credit agencies, racketeers, brokers, and for-profit providers of social and justice services.

Capitalism has not found ways of giving dangerous populations bullshit jobs to keep them out of trouble. Rather, capitalism is all too often immune to the trouble that they might cause, and indeed routinely finds them to be a useful area of exploitation.

What Isn’t Bullshit?

When Bullshit Jobs discusses how people feel about their work, it rests on Graeber’s theory of value, where action that is meaningful is that which is socially productive. I am a fan of Graeber’s theory of value. But his reconfiguration of it for a discussion of work tasks is not quite right. For Graeber, work is socially productive principally when it cares for the world. I believe that this idea is trained at the wrong level of action. The ability for one’s work to ‘care’ might be better conceived as just one expression of the ability to transform the world.

As I have argued elsewhere (Sanchez 2020), the single most important factor in peoples’ determination of satisfying work is an engagement with processes that make demands on one’s ability to affect change upon the world. Put simply, people like work that challenges them to alter something, be it the material form of an object, the value of a commodity, the dispositions of other people, or the skills and capacities of themselves. Troublingly, transformative work does not map onto ‘caring’ and some people may find it enjoyable to do impactful things that harm others. More broadly, transformation is not restricted to an impact on human relations, or a lasting contribution to social life.  

I have spent my working life talking to people about their working life. And because I am an enthusiast, I tend to do this even when I am not ‘working’. My experience is that there are many jobs that I would find pointless to do myself, but which other people do not. That is because they have found a meaningful transformative dimension in their work that would elude me, and they therefore find it satisfying to manage IPOs, trade stocks, or write advertising copy. The transformative action of work needn’t happen in an instant. And indeed, it often takes lots of people to make it happen at all. People are smart enough to know this, which is why the daily grind of bullshit tasks does not necessarily translate into a wholly bullshit job. Every now and again, the box hasn’t been ticked properly, and it matters.

Conclusion

I think that Bullshit Jobs is basically wrong. Nonetheless I like the fact that a book like this exists, and I wish that there were more of them.

Anthropology is often mired in citations and pedestrianism. Or else we are that other type of Anthropologist (my least favourite): the one mired in pretentious, performative theorising. As a consequence, we are a discipline that often struggles to say anything original and of wider social significance. But in Bullshit Jobs we have a work that is imaginative, fun to read, and about issues that most people can relate to. It is the voice of a man speaking to the reader not as an academic showing off or trying to intimidate you, but as though he had met you at a party, and you were lucky enough to be chatting to somebody that really made you think. 

That’s what I love about Graeber’s writing; the essential humanity of it. His work conveys the mind of a person that cares enough to look at things that matter to everybody else, and who cares enough to speak about them in a way that is exciting and intelligible. Even when Graeber was wrong, he made you think. And what he made you think about was invariably something important. That’s what an academic is for.

Andrew Sanchez is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He has published on economy, labour, and corruption, including Criminal Capital: Violence, Corruption and Class in Industrial India, Labour Politics in an Age of Precarity co-edited with Sian Lazar, and Indeterminacy: Waste, Value and the Imagination co-edited with Catherine Alexander. 

This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on “Bullshit Jobs”.

References

Alexander, C. & Sanchez, A. (eds). 2019. Indeterminacy: Waste, Value and the Imagination. Berghahn

Bear, L. & Mathur, N. 2015. ‘Introduction: Remaking the Public Good’ The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 33(1): 18–34

Bourgois, P. 2018. ‘Decolonising drug studies in an era of predatory accumulation’ Third World Quarterly, 39(2): 385-398

Graeber, D. 2013. ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant’ Strike! 3

Graeber. D. 2015. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Melville House

Graeber, D. 2018. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Allen Lane

Kesküla, E. & Sanchez, A. 2019. “Everyday Barricades: Bureaucracy and the Affect of Struggle in Trade Unions” Dialectical Anthropology 43(1): 109-125

Sanchez, A. 2012. ‘Deadwood and Paternalism: Rationalising Casual Labour in an Indian Company Town’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18(4): 808-827

Sanchez, A. 2020. ‘Transformation and the Satisfaction of Work’ Social Analysis 64(3): 68-94

Sassen, S. 2014. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Harvard University Press.

Cite as: Sanchez, Andrew. 2022. “Work is Complicated: Thoughts on David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs.” FocaalBlog, 4 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/04/andrew-sanchez-work-is-complicated-thoughts-on-david-graebers-bullshit-jobs/

Blog, Bullshit Jobs, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks

Massimiliano Mollona: Why the End of Work Will Not Be the End of Capitalism

One of the lowest moments of my undergraduate studies in Economics back in the 1990s happened whilst reading Tom Peters’ Liberation Management (1992), where the management guru/McKinsey-associate proposes to abolish the tedious, repetitive, and pointless jobs associated with bureaucratic and hierarchical capitalism, and create instead leaner horizontal, collectivist, and autonomous structures, based on meaningful, self-directed, and relationally expanded workers’ actions. I thought to myself: “These bloody managers are appropriating even creativity!” Indeed, that was the beginning of what Boltanski and Chiappello (2005) later called ‘the new spirit of capitalism’. The same charismatic spirit of capitalist reformation echoes in David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (2019) despite it being an attempt to actually eliminate it.

Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs is based on the article ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’, published in 2013 on the blog of Strike! magazine, an umbrella of militant left-wing organizations, which is now closed. The original Strike! page received more than one million hits, and within a week, was translated into a least a dozen languages. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week.  And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, David argues, “technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more” and more importantly, on effectively pointless jobs. Crowds of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. This situation creates deep moral and spiritual damage, “it is a scar across our collective soul” David argues. Yet no one talks about it. Keynes’ promised utopia resurged briefly in the 1960s – remember Andre Gorz’s Farewell to the working-class (1980)? Yet, it never materialised.

Image 1: Fredi’s office, © Masimilliano Mollona

The standard line today is that Keynes didn’t predict the massive increase in consumerism, which rebooted the productive economy, in tandem with the financialization of poverty. Instead, David links the proliferation of bullshit jobs to the explosion of the financial economy. The turning point was the economic deregulation of the 1980s, associated with the new spirit of capitalism, when “the children of the 1960s, used their ideology of cultural liberation, to break the unions and implement the regime of flexible production”. And yet, as I have highlighted in my opening paragraph, flexible production was precisely the result of the managerialist orchestration of expanded and more meaningful tasks for the workforce, and of the sense of expanded agency associated with such “job expansion” – the delusional experience of the new financialised subjects – which Bullshit Jobs advocates as a means against financial capitalism.  Moreover, finance, and the new forms of extractivism associated with it, generates not just bullshit jobs, but also a feudal social system, based on a weirdly sadomasochist protestant work ethics in which the performance of boring and useless jobs and of actions totally separated form real life leads to salvation and economic remuneration whereas the jobs with higher social value are systematically devalued and underpaid. The aim of Bullshit Jobs is to show that neoliberalism is a political project, of the dystopian kind, and not an economic one. In fact, unlike classical capitalism, which was about profit and sound economics, financial capitalism is inherently inefficient and bureaucratic, as is shown by its declining rate of growth worldwide.

By showing that capitalism is a cultural and ideological social construction, which we unconsciously reproduce every day, Bullshit Jobs opens a potential space of collective refusal. By understanding the performative dimensions of economics, we can appreciate that, if we decide so, we can produce a different society, first, by eliminating bullshit jobs. The policy of Universal Basic Income is a possible means to such end.

On the difference between bullshit jobs and shit jobs

Bullshit jobs involve being paid by someone else either on waged or salaried basis for jobs “that are so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence”. They are jobs of smokes and mirrors. They are white collar jobs, full of perks and status, honour, and prestige. But those who perform them knows they are meaningless. In fact, the job holder must pretend their job is important. So, bullshit jobs always contain a degree of falsity and pretence. “The lives of bullshit workers are based on lies”. Shit jobs are the opposite of bullshit. They are jobs that are needed but are not well paid. Jobs that are of benefit to society. They are blue collar and paid by the hour. Undignified, but meaningful. Typically, they consist in the ‘reproductive jobs’ of looking after people, which involve care, empathy and emotional labour (Graeber 2019, 14).  Bullshit and shit jobs cut the private public divide, in the same way they equally flourish under capitalism and under socialism.

There are five types of bullshit jobs:

Flunky jobs exist only or primarily to make someone else feel or look important. They are the jobs of the servants, clients, sycophants, the entourage of those at the top of the feudal retainers. David writes: “imagine that a crowd of indigent, runaways, orphans, criminals, women in desperate situations and other disparate people gather around your mansion…. The obvious thing to do is to slap a uniform on them and assign them to minor task to justify their existence…. Such roles tend to multiply in economies based on rent extraction” (Graeber 2019, 29). Flunkies are modern versions of servants and maids, which David notes, have disappeared in the north Atlantic world.

Goonies are people whose jobs have an aggressive element: telemarketers, corporate lawyers, lobbyist. Working in advertising, marketing and publicity, goonies are always dissatisfied, even if their jobs tend to earn them six-figure salaries.  

Duct tapers are workers who make up for inefficiencies in the system. For instance: IT workers inputting information into excel spread sheets; programmers making different hardware compatible or female administrative assistants, who end up doing a lot of work for their (male) bosses, and with their affective labour, soothing their egos.  

Box tickers prepare reports and reproduce the bureaucratic apparatus of monitoring, surveillance, and performance assessment of work bureaucracies.

Taskmasters are the managers who formulate the strategic mission, assess business performances, compose grids of career progression, and keep the bullshit system alive.

Humorously parodying the kind of pointless categorizations that populate the bullshit workplace, David’s classification is loose and unground. On a closer inspection, it turns out that most bullshit jobs he mentions are in fact, shit jobs. Take for instance the IT workers who fix and repair programs or make different platforms compatible – the duct tapers. They may be bullshit jobs, but they are central in the reproduction of value under platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2016). The workers for the Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourced platform for so-called “post-human intelligence tasks”, which outsources small and alienating digital work are paid an average of 15 dollars per day, for anything between two and ten hours work, 100 hits per day. Platform capitalism is the productive side of finance, the new site of capitalist value creation and extraction, fully entangled with global industrial production, their digital infrastructures and automation systems. Amazon, Facebook and Google and their shareholders don’t think these jobs are bullshit and won’t let these jobs go without a fight. Or think of the Flunkies such as porters, security guards, maids, freelance care workers.  These ‘shit shit jobs’ are neither blue collar nor white collar but pertain to an unregulated and highly exploitative service economy, which also proliferates with the proliferation of finance.

The confusion seems to stem from the fact that David’s classification focuses on work, rather than on labour, which depoliticises the issue at stake because it discounts the social relation of production, that is, the field of articulations, negotiations and struggles around which some human actions are deemed to acquire more value than others, and underpin the social constructions of skills, tasks, and actions as building-blocks of the whole ritual edifice of bourgeois micro-economics.

Marxism in anthropology has never been too popular, but the attack to productivism and labour value theory in anthropology, from James Ferguson’s book on redistribution, Li Puma and Lee’s on financial circulation, to various analysis on the productivity of the informal economies of slums, has had the bizarre effect of generating a vast market for popular books about work  – whose more recent examples are Jan Lucassen’s (2021) monumental book The Story of Work a New History of Humankind and anthropologist James Suzman’s (2021) blockbuster book Work: A Deep History from Stone Age to the Age of Robots. Like David, Suzman has become a celebrity anthropologist, outspoken about the pointlessness of contemporary work mental and material structures and advocating the 15 hours a week from the perspective of the ‘stone age economics’ of the Ju/Hoansi bushmen of Namibia’s Kalahari desert, which he studied during his PhD in anthropology at Edinburgh university, started after he resigned as senior manager in the diamond mining giant De Beers. Now Suzman runs Antropos ltd, a think-tank that offers ‘anthropological approaches to present-day problem-solving’ at a corporate rate of up to £1,400 per day – half for NGOs (Hunt, 2020).

These culturalist and evolutionary studies of work undervalue the historical materialist aspects of labour, which Marx considers as a real abstraction that is both material and ideological – economic and political. Marxist labour theory of value says that capitalism is a political and economic construction that systematically undervalues and exploits those actions that are attached to a wage relation, which itself is a form of human devalorization. It is not the content of the action that matters. It is the relationships of production that matter, both at the local and global levels, in the entanglement between finance and industry, centres and peripheries, which generate complex entanglements of bullshit, shit, and shit shit jobs.

Besides, David’s argument that the economy of late capitalism is uneconomical, assumes that capitalism, at least at some point, was about economics rather than power and that the economy (or capitalism?) can be fixed, morally and productively, with an efficient work reorganization and that this reorganization consists in sorting out which jobs are more important than others. First, reproductive jobs are more important than productive ones, productive from the point of view capital. But when you look at his classification, nearly all jobs are reproductive, in fact the very problem of productivism, David argues, is that it forgets that the vast majority of the working-class fixes, maintains, looks after – machines, people and objects – rather than heroically fighting on the production line. David’s intuition about the value of maintenance and reproductive labour is a very important one. But, if nearly all human actions are reproductive in large sense, reproductive of the existent world and of existent institutions, how can we distinguish between those which reproduce capitalism such as unpaid housework, and those which reproduce life outside it?  

Image 2: Office work, photo by Andrea Piacquadio.

Instead of looking at how the value of work is socially constructed through the wage relation, David considers the degree of satisfaction afforded by different work, tasks or actions, satisfaction which is directly related to their different affordance of agency and freedom. The emphasis here is on the morality or ethics of freedom rather than the politics of labour, which resonates with Tom Peters’ ideology of freedom management, that is, the idea that work can be abolished or freed, without abolishing capitalist social relations (on this issue see also Ana Cecilia Dinerstein and Harry Pitts, 2021).

In fact, according to David, there is a clear moral divide between bullshit jobs and shit jobs. Shit jobs are morally satisfying and meaningful, whereas bullshit work is immoral, alienating and ultimately dissatisfying because it leaves the bullshitter without agency and creativity and such lack of agency clashes with humans’ natural tendency to find pleasure in seeing one’s action reaching its imagined end. But why is care work so satisfying despite it involving so little agency? Or can a sense of agency emerge from empowering other people’s actions or in the realization that all actions are ultimately equally powerless because deeply relational? An analysis of the social relations surrounding the evaluation of actions, and of the ethical performativity of value, as in Michael Lambek’s (2013) article ‘The Value of Performative Acts’, would have helped here.

Work as protestant ideology or ethics

But it turns out that freedom at work is heavily constrained by the morality of the time.

David is interested in the morality of labour of Northern Europe and North America and in its specific Christian protestant trajectory, and he explicitly leaves out the aristocratic and patriarchal vision of labour held in the Mediterranean and in ancient Greece, whereby physical labour is only for serfs and women. This historically and geographically essentialising classification, which characterises so much Mediterranean anthropology of the 1980s, doesn’t make much sense from the point of view of labour history.

In the feudal economy of Northern Europe, dominated by the Puritan and Protestant ethical framework, paid and waged labour were a form of education and disciplining of the working-class, of training to show good manners, limited to the initial part of one’s life. Its Judeo-Christian vision of humanity, which Sahlins (1996) highlights so well in his ‘The Sadness of Sweetness’, meant that work had to be self-mortifying, sacrificial and redemptive. In such male dominated society, human production is seen as an emulation of the heavenly process of world creation and reproductive labour is considered a mirror, although derivative, of the productive labour of men and God.

Capitalism transformed service into a permanent relation of wage labour but salvaged the ideology of feudalism. In fact, both managerialism and feudalism are forms of abstraction from real production, in which appropriation and distribution of goods, rather than actual production, creates elaborated ranked hierarchy. “Financial capitalism isn’t really capitalism but a form of rent extraction, where the internal logic are different from capitalism… since economic and political imperatives have come to merge… now it resembles managerial feudalism” (Graeber 2019, 181). But were previous forms of capitalism just economical? Is not always profit a form of rent extraction? David criticises the classical assumption shared by both Marxist and bourgeois economists that under feudalism the political and the economical blur because extraction is based on legal principle, whereas in capitalism the economical is abstracted from the political. In fact, he argues, capitalist economics, including work organization, is an entirely political construction. This depiction of Marxism is disingenuous. Marx clearly describes capitalism as a political construction, in which the fictions and abstractions of capital, embodied as much in bourgeois economics as in the material organization of the factory, become real.

More importantly, according to David, under financial capitalism, human life becomes progressively abstracted and surreal, which turns the ethics of Protestantism into a weird sadomasochistic ideology, in which the relation between social benefits and level of compensation is turned upside down; “people should be compensated for horrible jobs because meaningful jobs are already compensating” (Graeber 2019, 213). Productive labour becomes a form of punishment á la Foucault.

David’s Marxism

David’s Weberian and Foucauldian understanding of contemporary capitalism as a weird form of moral punishment and productive madness is a radical change of direction from his previous Marxist analysis of capitalist labour as an inverted form of slavery (Graeber 2006). There, David’s argument of the historical entanglement of capitalism and slavery was part of a broader reflection on structural Marxism, system theory and the political economy approach in anthropology (Sidney Mintz, Eric Wolf and Eric Williams) and engagement with the radical black Marxism of Cedric Robinson. Particularly, David shows that capitalism and slavery share the following traits: both rely on a separation of the place of social (re)production of the labour force, and the place where that labour-power is realized in production – in the case of slavery, this is achieved by transporting laborers bought or stolen from one society into another one; in capitalism, by separating the domestic sphere (the sphere of social production) from the workplace.

The transfer happens by exchanging human powers for money. One effect of that transfer is ‘social death’, in the sense of the devaluation if not annihilation of the community ties and kinship relations and their separation from the workplace. The financial transaction in both cases produces abstract labour, which is pure creative potential and the sheer power of creation. The ideology of freedom which conflicts with how most societies take it for granted that no human is completely free or completely dependent, rather, all have different degrees of rights and obligations. The modern ideal of political liberty, in fact, has historically tended to emerge from societies with extreme forms of chattel slavery.

Such Marxist analysis of the entanglement of capitalism and slavery, tells us much more about contemporary forms of feudal management, the systematic devaluation of reproductive labour and the social construction of unfreedom, than the Weberian approach of Bullshit Jobs.

Reproductive labour

The central theoretical reference in David’s theory of reproductive labour is the feminist scholar Nancy Folbre (2020). For Nancy Folbre, patriarchy is the systematic devaluation of the power of reproducing life by women or alien men such as slaves, which is achieved through three main mechanisms: (1) the creation of property rights and laws that limits the circulation of people and put it under male control; (2) restrictions of rights of women children and sexually non-conforming individuals and (3) under-remuneration of care work.

For Folbre slavery and capitalism are not just moral or cultural systems (associated with patriarchy, aristocracy, caste, or race) or simply work structures (in which factories and plantations mirror each other), but are interrelated political and economic systems in which the wage relation is entangled with and reinforced by conflicting ideological construction of personhood and forms of evaluation of human action. The link between slavery, devaluation of reproductive labour and capitalism is made by Meillassoux (1986) in his anthropology of slavery, which shows how the systematic devaluation of the labour of slaves and the denial of their reproductive powers become a generalised and sustainable economic system only when slavery becomes entangled in merchant capitalism; in the same way in which the systematic devaluation of working-class labour can only be sustainable through the systematic denial of the reproductive labour of women.

Finance

Another Marxist trope in Bullshit Jobs is the link between finance, abstraction, and alienation, whereby the FIRE sectors (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) systematically create abstractions and abstracted organizations which hire ‘complicators’ to increase financial abstractions and the speculation connected to them. Finance creates meaningless ritual and new age gurus, “who paint abstraction as reality, forgetting that there are some things more real than others”. Marx describes capitalism as a form of labour abstraction – CMC to MCM – and finance as a multiplication of such abstract logic. The Marxist philosopher Moishe Postone (1993) considered the abstracted and impersonal kind of work David associates with bullshit labour as the materialization of the commodity form – a real abstraction of capital. But David discusses the proliferation of finance, abstraction and rent extraction as unreasonable and unrealistic deviations from classical capitalism and precisely because unrealistic, to be easily overcome. Even if unrealistic, contemporary forms of rentier capitalism, of the kind described by Christopher Brett (2021) or by Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings (2020) cannot be challenged simply through work re-organizations or wage redistribution, because it is deeply attached to assets inequality and on feudal power relations which capitalism constantly re-produces, via its impersonal machine.   

Solidarity

But the best part of the book are the descriptions of the creative strategies of resistance of this new precarised and dispossessed class of bullshitters consisting of Wikipedia ghost-writers, occupational poets, toilet graffiti artists, deluded rock stars, professional dropouts, and gossipers. It is precisely in the creative agency of these workers, and in David’s empathy towards them, that the book’s call to action emerges. After all, the book is based on interviews with individuals who had read David’s original article and identified with his political project of demystifying the corporate world. That is, the book is based on a sense of solidarity between David and the bullshitters. In this sense, Bullshit Jobs’ greatest potential is as a work of fiction or an ethnography of direct action, which in defiance of the tragic post-workerist sociological narrative, gives voice to the creative withdrawal, artistic desires, and post-capitalist fantasies of platform workers – whose anti-heroic politics resonates with that of the lost people of Madagascar.  

David’s optimism reflected the hopes about the end of capitalism that opened after the economic crisis of 2008 and embodied in the UK by Corbynism with which David had a strong affiliation. At the time, even the gigantic productivist trade union UNITE supported the elimination of bullshit jobs via the Universal Basic Income as a way into what Aaron Bastani (2020) imagined as a ‘fully automated luxury communism’.

This sense of hope was wiped out by the recent global pandemic, which, if anything, widened the gap between overpriced bullshit jobs and undervalued shit jobs. On the one hand, the lawyers, corporate accountants, the platform managers, the internet influencers and gurus. On the other, the Amazon Turkers, the IT engineers who build new Zoomified working environments, or install powerful optical Internet cables in middle class neighbourhood, the gig workers who deliver groceries, parcels, or health services; the nurses, teachers, and carers who continue to be responsible for the reproduction of life. Deadly on humans, the global pandemic didn’t singlehandedly eliminate any useless job or revaluate productive labour. If anything, it introduced the new category of spectral labour, the labour of nurses who are both underpaid and operate daily under deadly working conditions. If a pandemic cannot change capitalism, interstitial changes, operating ‘through the cracks of capitalism’, as John Holloway (2010)  would say, or cultural prefigurations of ‘what could be’, to use a term of Murray Bookchin (1971), won’t do that either.

I have been working on Universal Basic Income project in Brazil for some time, and I must say that the problematic associated with Bullshit Jobs alerted me of the perils of thinking that work can be eliminated with targeted policy measures without the elimination of capitalist social relations. From where we stand now, and looking back at 2013, when the article was written, seems to glance into a different era, one of intellectual hope and political mobilization, so fully embodied in David’s charismatic figure of scholar and activist. His call to action, as hard to follow as it may seem, continues to strongly resonate with me.

Massimiliano Mollona is Associate Professor at the Department of the Arts at Bologna University and Visiting Research Fellow at the Anthropology Department, in Goldsmiths College, London. He specializes on the anthropology of class, labour and political economy, and the anthropology of art. Mollona is currently working on an ethnography of Universal Basic Income (UBI) in Marica’ Brazil, in collaboration with economists from the Federal Fluminense University of Rio de Janeiro.

This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on “Bullshit Jobs”.

References

Adkins Lisa, Cooper Melissa and Martijn Konings. 2020. The Asset Economy. London: Wiley.

Bastani, Aaron, 2020. Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. London: Verso.

Bookchin, Murray. 1971. Post-Scarcity Anarchism. Berkeley, California: The Rampants Press.

Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello. 2005. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso.

Brett, Christopher, 2021. Rentier Capitalism. London: Verso.

Ferguson, James. 2015. To Give a Men a Fish. Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution. Duke University Press.

Dinerstein Ana Cecilia and Harry Pitts. 2021. A World Beyond Work? Labour, Money and the Capitalist State between Crisis and Utopia. Bingley: Emerald Publishing.

Folbre, Nancy. 2020. The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems. An Intersectional Political Economy. London: Verso.

Graeber, David. 2006. Turning Modes of Production inside Out: Or Why Capitalism is a Transformation of Slavery. Critique of Anthropology, 26(1): 61-85.

Graeber, David. 2019. Bullshit Jobs. A Theory. London: Penguin Books.

Gorz, Andre. 1980. Farewell to the working-class. London: Pluto Press.

Holloway, John. 2010. Crack Capitalism. London: Pluto Press.

Hunt, Ellen. 2020. Blue sky thinking: is it time to stop work taking over our lives? The Guardian. Sunday 4, October 2020.

Lambek, Michael, 2013. The Value of Performative Acts. HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Vol 2 (2).

Lee, Benjamin and Edward Li Puma. Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity. Public Culture. 14(1): 191-213.

Lucassen, Jan. 2021. The Story of Work a New History of Humankind. Yale University Press.

Meillassoux, Claude. 1986. The Anthropology of Slavery. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Peters, Tom. 1992. Liberation Management. London: Alfred and Knopf.

Postone, Moishe. 1993. Time, Labor and Social Domination. A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1996. The Sadness of Sweetness: The Native Anthropology of Western Cosmology. Current Anthropology. 37(3): 385-428.

Srnicek, Nick. 2016. Platform Capitalism. Oxford: Polity Press.

Suzman, James, Work: A Deep History from Stone Age to the Age of Robots. London: Penguin Press.

Cite as: Mollona, Massimiliano. 2022. “Why the End of Work Will Not Be the End of Capitalism.” FocaalBlog, 22 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/02/22/massimiliano-mollona-why-the-end-of-work-will-not-be-the-end-of-capitalism/

Blog, Bullshit Jobs, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks

David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Bullshit Jobs

Chair: Alpa Shah

Discussants: Massimiliano Mollona & Andrew Sanchez

When David Graeber published his article ‘On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs’ in Strike! in 2013, he knew he struck a chord in the public imagination. As soon as the article went up, the Strike! website went down for too much traffic. The article quickly became viral and was translated into at least a dozen languages. Before long, quotes from the piece appeared in the form of guerrilla posters on the London Underground with messages such as: “It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working”. The essay’s main thesis was that work had become an end in itself to sustain the logic of neoliberal capitalism, thereby contradicting the myth of capitalist productivity. In 2018, David decided to turn this brief essay into a fully-fledged book with the intention to flesh out the argument more systematically. In this final instalment of the series, Massimilano Mollona and Andrew Sanchez move beyond the buzz sparked by the essay to sift through the conceptual and empirical claims presented in the book. Weaving personal working experience with anthropological theories of work and value (Sanchez), and considering it from the lens of Weberian and Marxist understandings of capitalism (Mollona), they show where the book succeeds and where, in their view, it is found wanting.  

These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.

Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at LSE, convenes a research theme at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and is author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas.

Massimiliano Mollona is Associate Professor at the Department of the Arts at Bologna University and Visiting Research Fellow at the Anthropology Department, in Goldsmiths College, London. He specializes on the anthropology of class, labour and political economy, and the anthropology of art. Mollona is currently working on an ethnography of Universal Basic Income (UBI) in Marica’ Brazil, in collaboration with economists from the Federal Fluminense University of Rio de Janeiro.

Andrew Sanchez is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He has published on economy, labour, and corruption, including Criminal Capital: Violence, Corruption and Class in Industrial India, Labour Politics in an Age of Precarity co-edited with Sian Lazar, and Indeterminacy: Waste, Value and the Imagination co-edited with Catherine Alexander. 

Blog

Matan Kaminer: Marxist anthropology in a world of surplus population: Reflections on a Frontlines of Value workshop

I was recently privileged to participate in a workshop about the Marxian concept of the “surplus population,” convoked by Stephen Campbell, Thomas Cowan, and Don Kalb as part of the Frontlines of Value research group at the University of Bergen. The workshop, featuring participants of different generations, academic fields and geographic specializations, was educating and revealing in a number of ways (see below for the full programme). In what follows, I will not try to do justice to the presentations or the engaging debates, but to pick out a few themes which seem to me to be of abiding importance for anthropology and related disciplines, and to make some tentative suggestions of my own.

As many have remarked, the Marxism now resurgent in certain sections of the academy, including European social anthropology (Neveling and Steur 2018), seems much more preoccupied than preceding generations of the tradition with questions surrounding the relations between this mode of production and its “outside” – whether conceived of in temporal terms, as pre-capitalist (or, much more rarely, post-capitalist); in spatial terms, as subsisting in regions outside the control of global capital; or in more complex theoretical terms. The concept of “primitive accumulation,” used by Marx himself to describe the events leading up to the flowering of capitalism in England, has been applied and even stretched (Glassman 2006), up to a point which some consider excessive. Accumulation by unequal exchange, backed up by the threat of force, certainly exists in our late-late capitalist society; but what do we gain, ask theorists like Henry Bernstein, by calling that accumulation “primitive”? (Agrarian Questions JAC 2019)

Additional questions regarding the relations between capitalism’s putative “inside” and “outside” are raised by the concept of the surplus population, which stood at the center of the workshop. As with other of Marx’s terminological choices, there is an easily missed irony at play here: proletarian populations can only be “surplus” from the point of view of capital itself, insofar as it does not find it profitable to exploit them as laborers. Furthermore, people deprived of access to their own means of production but denied the opportunity to participate in production by selling their labor-power to others are not necessarily superfluous to capital’s needs in every sense: they may be useful as consumers, as soldiers and guards, or indeed as a “reserve army” of strikebreaking laborers. They are only “surplus” in the specific sense that the ability of capital to absorb labor-power is limited on the one hand by aggregate effective demand – which grows sluggishly, due to the lopsided distribution of the fruits of capitalist development – and on the other by the productivity of labor, which grows swiftly as a result of capitalist competition. This is Marx’s “general law of capitalist accumulation”: the number of laborers required by the demands of profit-making enterprise, as a portion of the total proletarian population, will tend to fall (Marx 1990, chap. 25).

Anthropologists, who have always been curious about the lives of people outside Europe and outside wage-labor, have good reason to be interested in the concept of the surplus population. However, as the contributors to the workshop highlighted, operationalizing this concept for the analysis of particular ethnographic cases throws up real problems. The most obvious of these is that most people who lack access to “proper jobs” (Ferguson and Li 2018) do, after all, work. Some of them retain some access to land and other means of production, and engage in “petty commodity production”; others labor in the ill-defined “informal sector,” for example as petty merchants; still others do sell their labor-power, but not under conditions considered viable or legal by national and international institutions (Campbell 2020; Cowan 2019). All these people purchase at least some of their means of subsistence on the market, and are thus tied into capitalism as consumers, if nothing else. To be truly outside of capital, as one participant at the workshop remarked, one would need to be “undiscovered,” a member of one of those mythical, self-sufficient tribes of whose non-existence anthropologists are well aware. Hence, surplus populations are at best “inside-outside,” taking on a painfully ambiguous role.

The “functionality” of surplus populations is a related issue. Is the emergence of such populations a side-effect of the rise in the productivity of labor, primarily caused by capitalists’ desire to gain short-term “super-profits” by producing more efficiently than their competitors, or is it actively encouraged by these capitalists and their agents, such as the state? My own contribution to the workshop came down on the “functional” (if not functionalist) side of the debate. Setting aside the ample empirical evidence which could be used to make the case, I argued on purely theoretical grounds that exclusion from the labor market should not be understood as diametrically opposed to exploitation within it. It is easy enough to understand why lack of choice should force those at greater threat of exclusion to accede to greater exploitation, thus exposing the same individuals to the cruelest brunt of both processes.

There are, however, some important objections to this account. By all estimates, the surplus population is far vaster than capital could ever be expected to absorb into standard employment – perhaps around three quarters of the world’s total population (see Neilson and Stubbs 2011). Thus, most “surplus” workers have no hope of ever entering the army of labor, even as “reservists” or scabs, and any question of how they might behave given such a chance is moot. But the ethnographic evidence, which shows that many such people do in fact work and consume in quite recognizably capitalistic ways, casts doubt over such a formulation. Perhaps the calculations of scholars like Neilson and Stubbs are over-hasty? If surplus populations are only surplus from the point of view of capital, perhaps this perspective is less singular and unambiguous than the assumptions of such quantitative exercises require?

Image 1: Refugees on a boat crossing the Mediterranean Sea, heading from Turkish coast to the north-eastern Greek island of Lesbos, 29 January 2016 (Photo: Mstyslav Chernov/Unframe; Wikimedia Commons).

I would like to suggest one way of getting at the problem, through a category that remains under-theorized despite its crucial role in Marx’s labor theory of value: the value of labor-power. One of Marx’s greatest theoretical discoveries was the distinction between the value of labor-power and the value which labor can produce: in other words, the difference between what human beings need in order to live and work, and what they are capable of producing with their life and their work. It is only with the total commodification of life (and work) under capitalism that these two quantities become commensurable, as both the needs and the capacities of the worker can now be measured with one yardstick: money. At the same time, capitalism disguises the difference between the two quantities by insisting that after the costs of living and working are deducted and transferred to the worker as her wage, the remnant is not the product of her labor but a special sum called “profit,” which the employer is legally and morally entitled to appropriate.

But the value of labor-power is underdetermined. Even ignoring changes in productivity – we shall get to these in a moment – the needs of a worker, of the working family, and of the proletariat as a whole, are eminently contestable. Indeed, everyday class struggle consists to a great degree in disputations over the value of labor-power in the broad sense, which includes the wage itself as well as the length of the working day, “social wages” like health insurance and pensions, and so on. But despite this underdetermination, the value of labor-power can only fluctuate between two limits: at the top is the point where the wage begins to eat into profits to an extent unacceptable to employers, and at the bottom is the minimum of biological reproduction, below which the workers would begin to die off.

But even given a particular level of needs, the value of labor-power will shift with changes in the productivity of the types of labor which produce the essentials of life, however these are defined. The most obvious of these necessities, and the one which preoccupies Marx above all, is food. If the amount of labor necessary to produce the standard food basket goes down, for example through the introduction of agricultural technologies such as those of the Green Revolution, then so does the value of labor-power (Moore 2010). But many other technologies also play a role: for example, the great advances in hygienic and epidemiological science of the late 19th and early 20th centuries also lowered the value of labor-power by drastically reducing infant mortality and raising life expectancy. Here then is one of those paradoxical ironies of capitalism: the more we invest in improving the quality of life, the cheaper human life becomes, in a very literal sense.

The relation between the value of labor-power and surplus populations now becomes clear. Marx insists that there is no general “law of population” in capitalist societies, and specifically rejects (against Malthus) any tendency to exponential increase in population (Foster 2000). If anything, long-term trends appear to demonstrate that human populations adjust their birthrates to prevailing deathrates, such that population tends to increase quite slowly. The boom in world population over the last century, as Aaron Benanav (2019) shows, can be interpreted as following from an easily understandable lag between the introduction of the hygienic and medical reforms which lowered deathrates and the subsequent adjustment of birthrates. Thus, experts expect world population to stabilize by the end of the current century (United Nations 2015), while the environmental preconditions of cheap labor-power may be under threat from climate change and related environmental crises (Moore 2015), potentially triggering a secular rise in the price of food. Nevertheless, the minimum value of labor-power – the amount of work required to produce the basket of goods absolutely necessary to keep the proletariat capable of working and reproducing, per capita – has decreased drastically since the publication of Capital. Of course, the global working class is not satisfied with this level of bare subsistence: even in poor countries, workers demand additional goods, like electronics and education. But this only points to the growing extent to which the value of their commodity is not reducible to physical constraints, but determined by the outcome of political processes. So long as the supply of labor-power tends to outstrip demand – that is, for the next few decades at least – the pressure of competition over jobs will tend to push the value of labor-power toward the minimum. Only proletarian resistance can counter this trend.

But the agency of proletarians cannot be reduced to the extent to which capital needs them as laborers. Even the most outcast of populations have means of putting pressure on capital, and maintenance of global hegemony requires that their demands be dealt with in one way or another. One way is, of course, violence: when people are not needed as workers, the global power structure is happy to countenance their warehousing, and if need be, their mass death (Mbembe 2003). But since the necessities of life have become so cheap, maintaining them in a sort of social death while providing them with the means of bare existence through humanitarian aid or debt is also an option (Sanyal 2014). With regard to these populations, global capital has become something like the Calvinist God, capable of arbitrarily granting or denying their every wish yet devoid of any need for their labors and supplications.

Regardless of how precisely we parse the concept of the surplus population, its continuing and even growing relevance shows that the analytic categories of Marx’s Capital are as relevant to our world as they were to those of the 19th century. The workings of the “general law of capitalist accumulation” have produced a world in which even the possibility of being exploited has become a coveted privilege denied to billions. This certainly necessitates a rethinking of political strategy, one to which anthropology is particularly suited to contribute. However, the final goal of that strategy – a world in which each contributes according to her abilities and receives according to her needs – remains the same.

Matan Kaminer is an anthropologist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His article “Saving the Arabah: Thai migrant workers and the asymmetries of community in an Israeli agricultural settlement” is forthcoming in American Ethnologist. He is a member of Academia for Equality and LeftEast, among other political initiatives.

Sources

Agrarian Questions JAC. 2019. An Interview with Henry Bernstein. (4/8) Primitive Accumulation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwhX7fhZ-Z4.

Benanav, Aaron. 2019. “Demography and Dispossession: Explaining the Growth of the Global Informal Workforce, 1950-2000.” Social Science History 43 (4): 679–703.

Campbell, Stephen. 2020. “Debt collection as labour discipline: the work of finance in a Myanmar squatter settlement.” Social Anthropology 28 (3): 729–742.

Cowan, Thomas. 2021. “The Village as Urban Infrastructure: Social Reproduction, Agrarian Repair and Uneven Urbanisation.” Environment and Planning E 4 (3): pp. 736–755. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848619868106

Ferguson, James, and Tania Li. 2018. “Beyond the ‘Proper Job:’ Political-Economic Analysis after the Century of Labouring Man.” Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies.

Foster, John Bellamy. 2000. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Glassman, Jim. 2006. “Primitive Accumulation, Accumulation by Dispossession, Accumulation by ‘Extra-Economic’ Means.” Progress in Human Geography 30 (5): 608–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132506070172.

Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Volume I). Translated by Ben Fowkes. Middlesex: Penguin.

Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40.

Moore, Jason W. 2010. “The End of the Road? Agricultural Revolutions in the Capitalist World-Ecology, 1450–2010.” Journal of Agrarian Change 10 (3): 389–413. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2010.00276.x.

———. 2015. “Cheap Food and Bad Climate: From Surplus Value to Negative Value in the Capitalist World-Ecology.” Critical Historical Studies 2 (1): 1–43. https://doi.org/10.1086/681007.

Neilson, David, and Thomas Stubbs. 2011. “Relative Surplus Population and Uneven Development in the Neoliberal Era: Theory and Empirical Application.” Capital & Class 35 (3): 435–53.

Neveling, Patrick, and Luisa Steur. 2018. “Introduction: Marxian Anthropology Resurgent.” Focaal 2018 (82): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2018.820101

Sanyal, Kalyan. 2014. Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality & Post-Colonial Capitalism. 1. paperback ed. London: Routledge.

United Nations, ed. 2015. World Population Prospects. ST/ESA/SER.A 377. New York: United Nations.

This article is linked to a research workshop that was held at Bergen University in December. The full workshop program is below.

Rethinking Surplus Populations: Theory From the Peripheries
13-14 December 2021,
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen,
Frontlines of Value Research Program

Monday 13 December
10.00 – 10.15
Welcome and Introduction
Don Kalb (University of Bergen)

10.15 – 11.00
Rethinking Surplus Populations: Theory from the “Peripheries”
Stephen Campbell (Nanyang Technological University) and Thomas Cowan (University of Nottingham)

11.00 – 11.45
Surplus Labour, Surplus Population, Primitive Accumulation: Notes for Discussion
Henry Bernstein (SOAS, University of London)

11.45 – 12.30
New Exploitation of an Old Form of “Work”: Exploitation of Tenant Shopkeepers’ Livelihoods in South Korea
Yewon Lee (University of Tübingen)

14.00 – 14.45
Violence of Abstraction, Violence of Concretion: Surplus Population as an Element of a Marxist Theory of Racialization
Matan Kaminer (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

14.45 – 15.30
The Death of the Proper Job? Aspiration, Class, and Labour in Urban Brazil and Egypt
Harry Pettit (Northumbria University) and Mara Nogueira (Birkbeck, University of London)

15.30 – 16.15
Surplus Population/Surplus Labour: Past and Present
Marcel Van Der Linden (University of Amsterdam)

Tuesday 14 December
10.00 – 10.45
From Assumed Reluctancy to Enforced Redundancy: The Changed Depreciation of Labour in the Transition Towards Global Capitalism
Jan Breman (University of Amsterdam)

10.45 – 11.30
Land/Ocean Grabs and the Relative Surplus Population in Ghana
Jasper Abembia Ayelazuno (University of Development Studies, Tamale)

11.30 – 12.15
‘Productive’ Migrants and ‘Dependent’ Left-behind Brothers
Hadia Akhtar Khan (University of Toronto)

13.30 – 14.15
Surplus Population In-Situ: Brick Kiln Labour and the Production of Idle time
Pratik Mishra (King’s College, University of London)

14.15 – 15.00
The Social Reproduction of Pandemic Neoliberalism: Planetary Crises and the Reorganization of Life, Work and Death
Alessandra Mezzadri (SOAS, University of London)

15.00 – 15.45
A Surplus Population? The Making of a Racialized (Non) Working Class in a Former Romanian Mining District
Sorin Gog and Enikö Vince (Babes-Bolyai University)

15.45 – 16.30
Comment and General Discussion
Gavin Smith (University of Toronto)

Cite as: Kaminer, Matan. 2022. “Marxist anthropology in a world of surplus population: Reflections on a Frontlines of Value workshop.” FocaalBlog, 26 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/01/26/matan-kaminer-marxist-anthropology-in-a-world-of-surplus-population-reflections-on-a-frontlines-of-value-workshop/