(July 27th, 2018)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s been a pretty hot summer and with that has come a lot more time for catching up on some reading, away from the glaring sun. \u201cBullshit Jobs: A Theory\u201d by David Graeber, is a 368 page book published this past May. It\u2019s a book filled with personal narrative, critique, and other tales of shitty jobs from people around the world, spliced together with Graeber\u2019s excellent story telling ability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The book originally started off as an essay back in 2013 titled \u201cOn the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs\u201d published in \u201cStrike!\u201d Magazine. The reception to the essay caused such a stir that years later, Graeber has complied everything into a tightly knit book examining bullshit jobs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of course, the critique of work is nothing new for anarchist thinkers. Some well known modern authors on the subject include the infamous Bob Black and their text \u201cThe Abolition of Work\u201d that starts off by stating \u201cNo one should ever work.\u201d The aesthically pleasing design and writing from the CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective in their recent book titled \u201cWork\u201d. The 2016 book \u201cAbolish Work: An Exposition of Philosophical Ergophobia\u201d edited by Nick Ford and published by Little Black Cart, which also includes the original Graeber essay. To name just a few.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Have you had a bullshit job before? Probably. One of my favorite aspects of the book is reading other peoples stories about how much of a joke their job is and relating it back to my own experiences. I started working officially when I was 14 years old, but before that had known work as the chores on a small farm growing up. And to this day, I still hate it when upon meeting someone new, one of the first questions that people often ask is \u201cwhat do you do for a living?\u201d The identity of work and trying to stay alive in this world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, what do anarchists do for a living? And that\u2019s just the thing \u2013 everyone wanted to talk about what we spend the most hours of our waking life doing, slogging away at some workplace. How is yours?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe reality of the situation first came home to me over a decade ago when attending a lecture by Catherine Lutz, an anthropologist who has been carrying out a project studying the archipelago of US overseas military bases. She made the fascinating observation that almost all of these bases organize outreach programs, in which soldiers venture out to repair schoolrooms or to perform free dental checkups in nearby towns and villages. The ostensible reason for the programs was to improve relations with local communities, but they rarely have much impact in that regard; still, even after the military discovered this, they kept the programs up because they had such an enormous psychological impact on the soldiers, many of whom would wax euphoric when describing them: for example, \u201cThis is why I joined the army,\u201d \u201cThis is what military service is really all about\u2014not just defending your country, it\u2019s about helping people!\u201d Soldiers allowed to perform public service duties, they found, were two or three times more likely to reenlist. I remember thinking, \u201cWait, so most of these people really want to be in the Peace Corps?\u201d And I duly looked it up and discovered: sure enough, to be accepted into the Peace Corps, you need to already have a college degree. The US military is a haven for frustrated altruists. \u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe pieces are all there to create an entirely different world history. For the most part, we\u2019re just too blinded by our prejudices to see the implications. For instance, almost everyone nowadays insists that participatory democracy, or social equality, can work in a small community or activist group, but cannot possibly \u2018scale up\u2019 to anything like a city, a region, or a nation-state. But the evidence before our eyes, if we choose to look at it, suggests the opposite. Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale \u2013 the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude \u2013 the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don\u2019t count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place.\u201d – David Graeber & David Wengrow<\/p>\n\n\n\n