|
f4b9a04
|
If someone fixing a broken water pipe says, "Hand me the wrench," his co-worker will not, generally speaking, say, "And what do I get for it?"--even if they are working for Exxon-Mobil, Burger King, or Goldman Sachs. The reason is simple efficiency (ironically enough, considering the conventional wisdom that "communism just doesn't work"): if you really care about getting something done, the most efficient way to go about it is obviously to..
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
5dd9326
|
it's no coincidence that the more jobs requiring college degrees become suffused in bullshit, the more pressure is put on college students to learn about the real world by dedicating less of their time to self-organized goal-oriented activity and more of it to tasks that will prepare them for the more mindless aspects of their future careers.
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
354c68a
|
This is presumably also why in the immediate wake of great disasters--a flood, a blackout, or an economic collapse--people tend to behave the same way, reverting to a rough-and-ready communism. However briefly, hierarchies and markets and the like become luxuries that no one can afford. Anyone who has lived through such a moment can speak to their peculiar qualities, the way that strangers become sisters and brothers and human society itsel..
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
809b886
|
I am not speaking strictly of slavery here, but of that process that dislodges people from the webs of mutual commitment, shared history, and collective responsibility that make them what they are, so as to make them exchangeable--that is, to make it possible to make them subject to the logic of debt. Slavery is just the logical end-point, the most extreme from of such disentanglement. But for that reason it provides us with a window on the..
|
|
war
slavery
commercial-markets
social-imagination
conquest
property
debt
capitalism
|
David Graeber |
|
fb48ac5
|
Lilian testifies eloquently to the misery that can ensue when the only challenge you can overcome in your own work is the challenge of coming to terms with the fact that you are not, in fact, presented with any challenges; when the only way you can exercise your powers is in coming up with creative ways to cover up the fact that you cannot exercise your powers; of managing the fact that you have, completely against your choosing, been turne..
|
|
pretentiousness
challenge
job
miserable
|
David Graeber |
|
880485c
|
One extreme possibility might be the situation the French anthropologist Jean-Claude Galey encountered in a region of the eastern Himalayas where as recently as the 1970s, the low-ranking castes--they were referred to as "the vanquished ones," since they were thought to be descended from a population once conquered by the current landlord caste many centuries before--lived in a situation of permanent debt dependency. Landless and penniless,..
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
30be7c3
|
Finally, once we start thinking of communism as a principle of morality rather than just a question of property ownership, it becomes clear that this sort of morality is almost always at play to some degree in any transaction--even commerce. If one is on sociable terms with someone, it's hard to completely ignore their situation. Merchants often reduce prices for the needy. This is one of the main reasons why shopkeepers in poor neighborhoo..
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
e1b4720
|
Even in the most impersonal shopping mall or supermarket, clerks are expected to at least simulate personal warmth, patience, and other reassuring qualities; in a Middle Eastern bazaar, one might have to go through an elaborate process of establishing a simulated friendship, sharing tea, food, or tobacco, before engaging in similarly elaborate haggling--an interesting ritual that begins by establishing sociality through baseline communism--..
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
5097903
|
Someone once figured out that the average American will spend a cumulative six months of her life waiting for the light to change.
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
36d6ad1
|
Olaudah Equiano, born sometime around 1745 in a rural community somewhere within the confines of the Kingdom of Benin. Kidnapped from his home at the age of eleven, Equiano was eventually sold to British slavers operating in the Bight of Biafra, from whence he was conveyed first to Barbados, then to a plantation in colonial Virginia. Equiano's further adventures--and there were many--are narrated in his autobiography, The Interesting Narrat..
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
f3951a6
|
Kingdoms rise and fall; they also strengthen and weaken; governments may make their presence known in people's lives quite sporadically, and for many people in history, it was not at all clear whose government they were actually in. Even until quite recently, many of the world's inhabitants were not quite sure of what country they were citizens, or why it should matter.
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
1fd0954
|
If being forced to pretend to work is so infuriating because it makes clear the degree to which you are entirely under another person's power, then bullshit jobs are...entire jobs organized on that same principle. You're working, or pretending to work--not for any good reason, at least any good reason you can find--but just for the sake of working.
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
db52aae
|
top-down chains of command are not particularly efficient: they tend to promote stupidity among those on top and resentful foot-dragging among those on the bottom.
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
9597a18
|
States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least,
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
488d65f
|
Consider the custom, in American society, of constantly saying "please" and "thank you." To do so is often treated as basic morality: we are constantly chiding children for forgetting to do it, just as the moral guardians of our society--teachers and ministers, for instance--do to everybody else. We often assume that the habit is universal, but as the Inuit hunter made clear, it is not.62 Like so many of our everyday courtesies, it is a kin..
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
271cf5c
|
Credit money is based on trust, and in competitive markets, trust itself becomes a scarce commodity.
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
22e77c2
|
In English, "thank you" derives from "think." It originally meant, "I will remember what you did for me"--which is usually not true either--but in other languages (the Portuguese obrigado is a good example) the standard term follows the form of the English "much obliged"--it actually does mean, "I am in your debt." The French merci is even more graphic: it derives from "mercy," as in begging for mercy; by saying it you are symbolically plac..
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
b9c3669
|
Managerialism has become the pretext for creating a new covert form of feudalism, where wealth and position are allocated not on economic but political grounds - or rather, where every day it's more difficult to tell the difference between what can be considered 'economic' and what is 'political.
|
|
jobs
managers
capitalism
|
David Graeber |
|
bf052d4
|
The promulgation of consumerism also coincided with the beginnings of the managerial revolution, which was, especially at first, largely an attack on pupular knowledge...the new bureaucratically organized corporations and their 'scientific management' sought as far as possible to literally turn workers into extensions of the machinery, their very move predetermined by someone else.
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
0319c51
|
Through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves...working forty or even fifty hours on paper but effectively working fifteen hours...since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their Facebook profiles, or downloading TV box sets.
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
3685449
|
Part of the problem is the extraordinary place that economics currently holds in the social sciences. In many ways it is treated as a kind of master discipline. Just about anyone who runs anything important in America is expected to have some training in economic theory, or at least to be familiar with its basic tenets. As a result, those tenets have come to be treated as received wisdom, as basically beyond question (one knows one is in th..
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
0233275
|
All of this helps explain why the Church had been so uncompromising in its attitude toward usury. It was not just a philosophical question; it was a matter of moral rivalry. Money always has the potential to become a moral imperative unto itself. Allow it to expand and it can quickly become a morality so imperative that all others seem frivolous in comparison. For the debtor, the world is reduced to a collection of potential dangers, potent..
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
e22ba7e
|
In the first century AD, for example, it was not uncommon for educated Greeks to have themselves sold into slavery to some wealthy Roman in need of a secretary, entrust the money to a close friend or family member, and then, after a certain interval, buy themselves back, thus obtaining Roman citizenship. This despite the fact that, during such time as they were slaves, if their owner decided to, say, cut one of his secretary's feet off, leg..
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
d12e438
|
Bullshit jobs proliferate today in large part because of the peculiar nature of managerial feudalism that has come to dominate wealthy economiesbut to an increasing degree, all economies. They cause misery because human happiness is always caught up in a sense of having effects on the world; a feeling which most people, when they speak of their work, express through a language of social value. Yet at the same time they are aware that the gr..
|
|
work
social-theory
social-value
jobs
|
David Graeber |
|
69fd81d
|
It is one of the great ironies of history that modern racism--probably the single greatest evil of our last two centuries--had to be invented largely because Europeans continued to refuse to listen to the arguments of the intellectuals and jurists and did not accept that anyone they believed to be a full and equal human being could ever be justifiably enslaved.
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
044ab43
|
Bullshit jobs proliferate today in large part because of the peculiar nature of managerial feudalism that has come to dominate wealthy economies--but to an increasing degree, all economies. They cause misery because human happiness is always caught up in a sense of having effects on the world; a feeling which most people, when they speak of their work, express through a language of social value. Yet at the same time they are aware that the ..
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
6ec64eb
|
So what are people actually referring to when they talk about "deregulation"? In ordinary usage, the word seems to mean "changing the regulatory structure in a way that I like."
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
f73d07e
|
In fact, it often happens that, at the very top of organizations, apparently crucial positions can go unfilled for long periods of time without there being any noticeable effect--even, on the organization itself.
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
683612b
|
As the great classicist Moses Finley often liked to say, in the ancient world, all revolutionary movements had a single program: "Cancel the debts and redistribute the land."
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
b04065b
|
Still, Lincoln went on to insist, what made the United States different from Europe, indeed what made its democracy possible, was
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
9f2a182
|
Almost all of those making the key decisions had attended college in the 1960s, when campuses were at the very epicenter of political ferment, and they felt strongly that such things must never happen again. As a result, while they might have been concerned with declining economic indicators, they were also quite delighted to note that the combination of globalization, gutting the power of unions, and creating an insecure and overworked wor..
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
1d494d8
|
Similar declarations are to be found again and again, in Sumerian and later Babylonian and Assyrian records, and always with the same theme: the restoration of "justice and equity," the protection of widows and orphans, to ensure--as Hammurabi was to put it when he abolished debts in Babylon in 1761 BC--"that the strong might not oppress the weak."14 In the words of Michael Hudson, The designated occasion for clearing Babylonia's financial ..
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
cdcf09b
|
In a sense, those critics who claim we are not working a fifteen-hour week because we have chosen consumerism over leisure are not entirely off the mark. They just got the mechanics wrong. We're not working harder because we're spending all our time manufacturing PlayStations and serving each other sushi. Industry is being increasingly robotized, and the real service sector remains flat at roughly 20 percent of overall employment. Instead, ..
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
0eaa927
|
I always wonder how banks manage to go bankrupt at all considering they can just make up the money, and especially, what is stopping them from lending money to themselves.
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
3a55b28
|
The designated occasion for clearing Babylonia's financial slate was the New Year festival, celebrated in the spring. Babylonian rulers oversaw the ritual of "breaking the tablets," that is, the debt records, restoring economic balance as part of the calendrical renewal of society along with the rest of nature. Hammurabi and his fellow rulers signaled these proclamations by raising a torch, probably symbolizing the sun-god of justice Shamas..
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
2a0166c
|
The question of why one player won a game rather than another is different from the question of how hard the game is to play.
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
aca8716
|
How vain the opinion is of some certain people of the East Indies, who think that apes and baboons, which are with them in great numbers, are imbued with understanding, and that they can speak but will not, for fear they should be imployed and set to work. --Antoine Le Grand, c. 1675
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
f1ae803
|
it would appear to be a general truth that the more harm a category of powerful people do in the world, the more yes-men and propagandists will tend to accumulate around them, coming up with reasons why they are really doing good--and the more likely it is that at least some of those powerful people will believe them.
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
3a940ea
|
Let us return to our initial problem. We may begin by asking why we assume that someone being paid to do nothing should consider himself fortunate. What is the basis of that theory of human nature from which this follows? The obvious place to look is at economic theory, which has turned this kind of thought into a science. According to classical economic theory, homo oeconomicus, or "economic man"--that is, the model human being that lies b..
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
f7913d0
|
The more the economy becomes a matter of the mere distribution of loot, the more inefficiency and unnecessary chains of command actually make sense, since these are the forms of organization best suited to soaking up as much of that loot as possible.
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
05e7bfd
|
Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don't like and are not especially good at.
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
ae15494
|
Cest bojovnika spociva v jeho ochote stavit do hry vsetko. Jeho velkost je priamo umerna tomu, ako hlboko moze klesnut.
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
b8fa879
|
It all began when I was asked to write an essay for a new radical magazine called Strike! The editor asked if I had anything provocative that no one else would be likely to publish. I usually have one or two essay ideas like that stewing around, so I drafted one up and presented him with a brief piece entitled "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs." The essay was based on a hunch. Everyone is familiar with those sort of jobs that don't seem, ..
|
|
|
David Graeber |
|
883a078
|
What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: If 1 percent of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call "the market" reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.)"
|
|
|
David Graeber |