Bullshit Jobs -- Book Reviews

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, by Graeber

David Graeber is a London-based anthropologist and anarchist activist, perhaps best known for his 2011 volume Debt: The First 5000 Years. He is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. His activism includes protests against the 3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, and the 2002 World Economic Forum in New York City. Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and is sometimes credited with having coined the slogan, "We are the 99 percent."

His new book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory sees bullshit throughout in modern economy, including government and education. As he says:

I think this system creates absurd forms of resentment where people actually resent people who have real jobs. You see this [...] with all the austerity programs after the financial crash. There is all this talk about tightening belts, except for the guys who caused the crash. They still get their bonuses, but the ambulance drivers and the nurses and the teachers have all got to sacrifice.

Note, too, his criticism of federal student debt and bullshit education:

A lot of these student work jobs have us doing some sort of bullshit task like scanning IDs, or monitoring empty rooms, or cleaning already-clean tables. . . . I’m not altogether familiar with how the whole thing works, but a lot of this work is funded by the Feds and tied to our student loans. It’s part of a whole federal system designed to assign students a lot of debt—thereby promising to coerce them into labor in the future, as student debts are so hard to get rid of—accompanied by a bullshit education program designed to train and prepare us for our future bullshit jobs.

Additional reviews:

• "Bullshit jobs: why they exist and why you might have one" at Vox
• "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber review – the myth of capitalist efficiency" at the Guardian
• "The Bullshitn-Job Boom" at the New Yorker

Library availability:

The Lone Star College Library does not own a copy [no comment], but Montgomery County Public Library has a copy for transfer to college libraries.