tears posted:any good books with spaceships in them?
check this out
https://tinyurl.com/hwhrudl
and it turns out yeah, Graeber is allergic to researching employment data before trying to write about jobs:
Graeber draws a line through the service sector itself: “The proportion of the workforce made up of actual waiters, barbers, salesclerks and the like,” he hallucinates, is “really quite small.”
lol
cars posted:here's a review of Graeber's new book
and it turns out yeah, Graeber is allergic to researching employment data before trying to write about jobs:
Graeber draws a line through the service sector itself: “The proportion of the workforce made up of actual waiters, barbers, salesclerks and the like,” he hallucinates, is “really quite small.”
lol
He culls examples from the “great deal of online discussion” generated, he tells us, by his initial piece, while also soliciting confirmation from his Twitter following.
Oh my god his research data is just reading Retail Is Hell threads lmfao. If there wasn't a class component to being a Celebrity Leftist Intellectual (hello Sam) we would all be rolling in cash by now just summarizing shit that happens online.
Also we've found it, the definitive identification of the US hamster wheel left:
Graeber’s conceptual schema is imprecise and elusive, and it seems so almost by design.
This is his colleague at yale and another anarchist anthropologist who's work is useless and derivative
On graduation, James C. Scott received a Rotary International Fellowship to study in Burma, where he was recruited by an American student activist who had become an anti-communist organizer for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Scott agreed to do reporting for the agency and at the end of his fellowship a post in the Paris office of the National Student Association, which accepted CIA money and direction in working against communist-controlled global student movements over the next few years
Hmm...
Ruzbihan posted:Looks like David Grabber isn’t Marxist andconstantly erases class. That’s wild
his analysis methods are gonna be terrible obviously but i'm honestly a little surprised if he did the dumb kid / cokehead grad student tactic of just ignoring publicly available numbers that might wreck his thesis. he could've at least tried to bullshit them into fitting his argument, he knows how to find employment by category
babyhueypnewton posted:Debt the first 5000 years has aged very poorly as well, the hype around it here among other places is embarrassing in hindsight (tbf it was babyfinland and other reactionaries who no longer post). When I knew nothing about the history of money it was like the book to read but even a cursory knowledge reveals it's just restating the chartalist theory of money with the only original part being a bunch of wild overstatements and silly anarchist asides. I'm starting to wonder if any of his work is legitimate or if anarchist anthropologists are allowed to exist for anti-communist reasons.
This is his colleague at yale and another anarchist anthropologist who's work is useless and derivative
On graduation, James C. Scott received a Rotary International Fellowship to study in Burma, where he was recruited by an American student activist who had become an anti-communist organizer for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Scott agreed to do reporting for the agency and at the end of his fellowship a post in the Paris office of the National Student Association, which accepted CIA money and direction in working against communist-controlled global student movements over the next few years
Hmm...
i found debt 5000 revelatory at the time but i cant imagine revisiting it
cars posted:his analysis methods are gonna be terrible obviously but i'm honestly a little surprised if he did the dumb kid / cokehead grad student tactic of just ignoring publicly available numbers that might wreck his thesis. he could've at least tried to bullshit them into fitting his argument, he knows how to find employment by category
No I agree for sure, I just saw the opening for a 10 year old or whatever “joke”, and hit the post button excitedly like a trained gibbon.
Edited by Ruzbihan ()
1. Jobs that are unnecessary, even under capitalism.
. a. Jobs that are productive from the firm’s perspective but amount to attempts to cut the firm a larger slice of a fixed pie (Example: most marketing jobs).
. b. Jobs that are productive from some internal manager’s perspective, but undercut the firm (This seems to be the class Graeber is most incensed by—unnecessary bureaucrats, among others.)
2. Jobs that are necessary under capitalism, but not necessary under socialism. (Example: most contract lawyers).
3. Jobs that are necessary under any feasible, functional mode of production, but have a bureaucratic or managerial character, or otherwise feature a remove from the direct act of production (Example: managers, analysts).
There are important differences between 1 and 2—jobs under 1 are unequivocal indictments of existing capitalism and are possible targets for reformists, jobs under 2 are in a very different rhetorical space—convincing someone that they’re bullshit requires openness to socialism, lest they be dismissed as “the cost of doing business”. 3 represent false positives for (some of) his definitions.
His failure to tease out the differences between 1 and 2 pose a problem for his most aphoristic definition: jobs where it wouldn’t matter if they all disappeared. This definition corresponds exactly to 1, but doesn’t cover 2 at all. He seems to talk a lot about the uselessness of business law, but if you suddenly eliminated contract law in a capitalist country the economy would fall apart. Capitalism devolves production decisions to individuals encouraged to be selfish and pitted against one another in ruthless competition—not just with peer businesses but with other links in the supply chain, consumers, and workers. Without a legal framework to punish defection, most business agreements--from wage contracts to supplier deals--would be reneged on, and companies would have to fall back on less effectual (and more violent) organizational structures. An economy based on cooperation can get away with less tortuous rules, but that economy requires many more changes than simply getting rid of lawyers.
The other major definition, something along the lines of the classical definition of productive labor—work that creates capital goods--with some allowances made for other forms of physical labor, puts group 3 in the “bullshit” category. Graeber’s not a big fan of bureaucracy—surprise!—and it seems like his position really boils down to a reflexive dismissal of any job that carries its stink. However, some form of information gathering, analysis, and “management” (not necessarily under that word or with the same baggage) is necessary for any sufficiently complex productive enterprise to function well, regardless of the mode of production. The effort cost of sharing information between all members of organization increases with the square of the number of people (actually n(n-1), but whatever), so at a certain point it’s unavoidable that tasks related to collecting information, identifying problems, and directing production will be concentrated in a small group of individuals, and in sufficiently large and complex settings multiple layers of “management” may be needed. This doesn’t need to correspond to a class difference or be exploitative, but totally unstructured workplaces don’t generally work beyond a certain scale and complexity. Given the technological changes of the last few decades and the shift in the composition of labor in the core, we could expect an increase in the number of managers and the time spent collecting, inputting, and analyzing data and forms to have increased even in the absence of “bullshit” jobs.
None of which is to say that these jobs don’t exist. I think every category of “bullshit” job Graeber identifies does exist. But it doesn’t seem like he’s contributed much to our understanding of how prevalent they are. As Cars mentioned, he could have answered some of these questions just by looking at SOC/NAICS crosstabs of employment data. That would get you categories 2 and 1a, which you can identify by industry or occupation (marketers, finance, lobbying, etc.). That’s useful information, but I think the pointlessness of these jobs and their prominence in the economy pretty is well established and widely known at this point—no new insights there.
What you couldn’t get with that sort of basic analysis, and what would make a really interesting book, is a deep dive into 1b—pointless jobs created by the internal politics of capitalist firms. These jobs absolutely exist, but it’s very difficult to identify them from headline employment numbers, much less from armchair musings and convenience samples of your friends on Twitter. Individuals involved in data collection/form filling may be providing valuable (to the firm) information used to make pivotal decisions, or they may be filling hard drives with files no one reads. Assistants may have sinecures provided by a boss who just wants minions, or they may perform a variety of valuable (again, to the firm) functions. You need to get in very close to identify which is which. Given that Graeber is an anthropologist, I’d hoped he would have done the footwork and worked through some organizations top to bottom, interviewing workers and connecting the dots to figure this out.
Even if he didn’t want to do all the legwork himself, there’s a huge literature from business anthropologists and business sociologists that looks at exactly these issues in granular detail. While these papers are obviously funded by capital and written for CEOs and shareholders, they contain a huge trove of qualitative and quantitative data about pointless jobs, and since they’re written with the aim of improving profits by “trimming the fat”, they don’t ignore or minimize these problems. Repurposing and synthesizing that literature from a left perspective would be really valuable, and was what I was hoping this book would be.
Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:i found debt 5000 revelatory at the time but i cant imagine revisiting it
cars posted:here's a review of Graeber's new bookand it turns out yeah, Graeber is allergic to researching employment data before trying to write about jobs:
Graeber draws a line through the service sector itself: “The proportion of the workforce made up of actual waiters, barbers, salesclerks and the like,” he hallucinates, is “really quite small.”
lol
thats a good review and im gonna read the same author's stuff on automation now
ghostpinballer posted:reading "boys in zink". very good but very heavy.
Aspie_Muslim_Economist_ posted:
I’m curious about how far Graeber’s allergy to quantitative analysis extends here. My current job is something that would almost certainly necessarily exist after transition to socialism, but there would probably be a lot fewer people shunted into it because of the evaporation of the current collection of firms competing, with heinous inefficiency, to do the same thing. It seems to me like this would apply to a lot of jobs, and so much the better.
But I think you’ve put your finger on something that may explain why Graeber isn’t inclined to go deeper into the data, if I’m reading you right: one reason he may not be able to address effectively the sort of jobs that are useful in action, but “useless” in current numbers, is because he won’t advance a strong idea of a future state for society.
I can see how that would lead to trying to support or condemn jobs on their qualities alone, or on what sector of industry currently houses them, but given the overwhelming movement toward farming out job roles to firms that provide the same long-term services to clients all over the market, it seems kind of nuts to look at where the job sits as the main way to determine its qualities... not to mention that finance skims the cream under capitalism, sometimes including integrating recent developments in methods and technology first because they have money to burn on that, so some jobs that overwhelmingly adhere to financial firms right now may end up keeping or growing their numbers under socialism rather than reducing them.
Aspie_Muslim_Economist_ posted:
he actually does sort of come down to a specific definition of a bullshit job, and its a pretty weak one. its in essence any job where the person doing it themself believes it to be useless, without any productive or social benefit. he kind of just asserts that it makes sense as a definition, because a person has all sorts of incentive to believe their job is worthwhile, so if someone does not than its a good argument for it being a bullshit job. he then has to do some acrobatics to include such jobs as middle managers, who will never admit that they are useless, and forces him to fall back on anecdotal evidence, where the handful of corporate lawyers he knows personally tell him privately that their jobs are worthless and they know it. it also gets funky with administrative assistant jobs who do the work of their superior; is their job bullshit, or are they productive and its their boss's job that is bullshit because they aren't actually doing anything?
the closest thing he has to a quantitative analysis, beyond folks sending him shit on twitter and through email, is a single yougov poll where something like 32% of britons say their job is pointless and another 17% dont know. this is really the crux of why its a bad book, although i think its more because he wants it to be a popular sensation rather than a dry academic text. its about 25% anecdotes from the obviously highly educated people he interacts with over the internet so its a primarily middle class/managerial/professional jobs analysis.
personally, when i think of bullshit jobs the example that jumps to mind is the guy standing on the side of the road waving an arrow sign trying to get you to go to cricket mobile or wherever, often in a silly costume. its turning a human being into a signpost. this is humiliating and degrading but it beats starving to death/being evicted/having your parole revoked. this kind of job isnt really addressed by the book.
in essence, this paragraph from the above review:
In fact, since the 1970s, the advanced economies of the “West” have seen a dizzying expansion of low-wage, low-skill employment across the board, not least in retail and restaurants, but especially in healthcare and education. A recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report on the fastest growing occupations in the US offers a sobering correction to Graeber’s tableau of do-nothing “salaried paper pushers:” personal care aides, home health aides, “combined food preparation and serving workers, including fast food,” retail salespersons, nursing assistants, customer service representatives, restaurant cooks, medical assistants, and “janitors and cleaners, except maids and housekeeping cleaners.” Eleven of the fifteen occupations require no college degree, most no formal education at all. The median pay for most is $25,000 annually, or less.10 This is the “current regime of work,” for those who have eyes to see. It is a world in which a sizable share of employment in the putatively rich countries takes the form of poorly-paid work tending to the sick and the young, making and serving cheap food to other poor people, or cleaning offices, warehouses, and hotel rooms, after the salaried paper-pushers are off the clock.
ironically enough, graeber thinks that none of these are bullshit jobs - he instead calls them shit jobs, which are not the subject of the book nor really addressed that much. he even repeatedly cites a friend who quit a bullshit, highly paid office job to be a cleaner, who ends up finding much more satisfaction in it because theres something measurable in cleaning something dirty.
by focusing on managerial and professional class jobs, his ultimate conclusion, which is an argument for universal basic income, falls somewhat flat. deputy assistant directors for quality control or whatnot would likely still prefer their jobs for the social status and high income that they provide, rather than living a comfortable if comparatively meager existence off of a ubi while they build model trains or whatever, so ubi would likely do little to trim the fat of the kinds of jobs he focuses on. he brings in an analogy to bdsm, because the humiliation of a manager/employee relationship is similar, but theres no "safe word" where the employee can put an end to the degradation. he argues a ubi would provide that safe word: i quit, and thats ok because i dont need this job to survive. the irony, of course, is that most of his bullshit job examples have that. its called having a high enough salary to save and live somewhat comfortably while you look for other work - not the same lifestyle you enjoy from your high salary, but still not really starving
cars posted:Aspie_Muslim_Economist_ posted:
But I think you’ve put your finger on something that may explain why Graeber isn’t inclined to go deeper into the data, if I’m reading you right: one reason he may not be able to address effectively the sort of jobs that are useful in action, but “useless” in current numbers, is because he won’t advance a strong idea of a future state for society.
I think that's an intrinsic challenge with this sort of analysis--it really depends on the counterfactual. The most straightforward thing would be to look at historical and existing socialist states
and see what roles they are able eliminate, but obviously Graeber has no interest in valorizing any real world state, and it would undermine his thesis.
TG posted:Aspie_Muslim_Economist_ posted:
he actually does sort of come down to a specific definition of a bullshit job, and its a pretty weak one. its in essence any job where the person doing it themself believes it to be useless, without any productive or social benefit. he kind of just asserts that it makes sense as a definition, because a person has all sorts of incentive to believe their job is worthwhile, so if someone does not than its a good argument for it being a bullshit job.
Yeah, I elided that definition because it's so hard to interpret. He himself constantly points out the distinction between "bullshit" and "shit" jobs--explicitly because people confuse them! But if that's such a common error to make, why would you take answers to "do you have a bullshit job?" at face value? I would guess responses have much more to do with alienation and exploitation than they do with the net social value of that person's labor, however you want to define that.
getfiscal posted:that's all interesting. there really does seem to be a definitional problem where there are political economic reasons why any particular job exists within a system in motion and therefore no possible way to say it doesn't have a function.
I think you can make some headway by focusing on a firm's putative goal of making profits and seeing how the organizational structure fails from that perspective, and I think that's essentially how capital is oriented with regard to these sort of "useless" jobs. Graeber seems to posit a static world where middle managers carve out fiefdoms and enserf their employees. I don't think that's really wrong, but it's not a new phenomenon and it's a dynamic, dialectical process. When times are good or the upper management is lax, these sorts of internal cultures develop, but eventually the company changes hands, they hire a new CEO, or the upper management brings in McKinsey. In each case, the new decision maker is chosen precisely because they're an outsider who only cares about profits and has no interest or investment in the internal politics of the firm, and they hollow out these structures with massive firings and reorganization.
That's why I think Graeber's big idea that capital is intentionally recapitulating feudalism at the expense of profits is so wrongheaded. He seems to think that they're in harmony because employing and co-opting the bottom the PMC is necessary to prevent revolution. But even if that were in the interest of the capitalist class as a whole, the way capital actually interfaces with middle management would-be barons is the opposite--they're in fundamental tension. These dalliances hurt the bottom line, and however much a manager might like to lord over a team of useless flunkies, shareholders do not care. If I'm a shareholder, perhaps providing sinecures for college educated office workers makes capitalism more stable, but 99.99% of those benefits accrue to other capitalists, so why should I be so charitable? It seems like Graeber literally anthropomorphizes capital as a rational, unitary will coordinating every CEO and shareholder.
Also, any other typological studies of Asian social formations (or even socialist ones! If it even exists) would be cool as hell too
now i am reading ten myths about israel by ilan pappe and it s cool so far
dimashq posted:Does anyone know of any general typological/historical surveys of the bourgeois revolutions of Europe, a la Anderson’s study of Absolutist Europe?
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3856068
1/2/3
provides some insight into military culture and recent genealogy of different design practices. there are some interesting examples along the way.
the same topic is developed a bit more in his white paper here from a recent ibm military and intelligence conference.
i really dig this sort of stuff so if you somehow have access to proceedings from these kinda conferences please pm.
This little anecdote about Greenglass made me laugh:
David Greenglass reportedly had come under the influence of his sister when he was about 12 years old and when the 19-year-old Ethel was being courted by Julius Rosenberg. At first David opposed the efforts of Ethel and Julius to convert him to communism and disliked Julius, but after Julius brought David a chemistry set, the two became very friendly and Julius was able to influence David considerably.