Graeber’s argument is similar to one he made in a 2013 article called “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”, in which he argued that, in 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the end of the century technology would have advanced sufficiently that in countries such as the UK and the US we’d be on 15-hour weeks. “In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.”
But what happened between the Apollo moon landing and now? Graeber’s theory is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was mounting fear about a society of hippie proles with too much time on their hands. “The ruling class had a freak out about robots replacing all the workers. There was a general feeling that ‘My God, if it’s bad now with the hippies, imagine what it’ll be like if the entire working class becomes unemployed.’ You never know how conscious it was but decisions were made about research priorities.” Consider, he suggests, medicine and the life sciences since the late 1960s. “Cancer? No, that’s still here.” Instead, the most dramatic breakthroughs have been with drugs such as Ritalin, Zoloft and Prozac – all of which, Graeber writes, are “tailor-made, one might say, so that these new professional demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally, crazy”
Graeber believes that since the 1970s there has been a shift from technologies based on realising alternative futures to investment technologies that favoured labour discipline and social control. Hence the internet. “The control is so ubiquitous that we don’t see it.” We don’t see, either, how the threat of violence underpins society, he claims. “The rarity with which the truncheons appear just helps to make violence harder to see,” he writes.
– From the Guardian article: David Graeber: ‘So Many People Spend Their Working Lives Doing Jobs They Think are Unnecessary’
Embarrassingly, it was only very recently that I became familiar with the writings of David Graeber, an author, anthropologist and professor at the London School of Economics. I read a decent amount, and very few writers connect with me in the way Mr. Graeber does. Of course, I don’t agree with everything he says (if you ever find yourself in total agreement with someone else there’s a problem), but I promise he will make you think. That’s worth a lot in the propagandized and dumbed down culture we inhabit.
About a month ago, I read an extremely thought provoking excerpt from his 2013 book, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement. The piece was titled, A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse, and I strongly suggest you read it.
Immediately after I read that, I found him on Twitter and began following. Today, I came across a profile of him published by the Guardian, and I was once again reminded of how much I enjoy his thought process. So much so, that I decided to dedicate an entire post to him and encourage all of you to explore his work. Here are some excerpts from the Guardian article:
A few years ago David Graeber’s mother had a series of strokes. Social workers advised him that, in order to pay for the home care she needed, he should apply for Medicaid, the US government health insurance programme for people on low incomes. So he did, only to be sucked into a vortex of form filling and humiliation familiar to anyone who’s ever been embroiled in bureaucratic procedures.
At one point, the application was held up because someone at the Department of Motor Vehicles had put down his given name as “Daid”; at another, because someone at Verizon had spelled his surname “Grueber”. Graeber made matters worse by printing his name on the line clearly marked “signature” on one of the forms. Steeped in Kafka, Catch-22 and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Graeber was alive to all the hellish ironies of the situation but that didn’t make it any easier to bear. “We spend so much of our time filling in forms,” he says. “The average American waits six months of her life waiting for the lights to change. If so, how many years of our life do we spend doing paperwork?”
The matter became academic, because Graeber’s mother died before she got Medicaid. But the form-filling ordeal stayed with him. “Having spent much of my life leading a fairly bohemian existence, comparatively insulated from this sort of thing, I found myself asking: is this what ordinary life, for most people, is really like?
Capitalism isn’t supposed to create meaningless positions. The last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.”
This is a very important point. How does this happen? My answer is that our political and economic system is in fact a centrally planned oligarchy masquerading as a free market.
Graeber’s argument is similar to one he made in a 2013 article called “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”, in which he argued that, in 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the end of the century technology would have advanced sufficiently that in countries such as the UK and the US we’d be on 15-hour weeks. “In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.”
But what happened between the Apollo moon landing and now? Graeber’s theory is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was mounting fear about a society of hippie proles with too much time on their hands. “The ruling class had a freak out about robots replacing all the workers. There was a general feeling that ‘My God, if it’s bad now with the hippies, imagine what it’ll be like if the entire working class becomes unemployed.’ You never know how conscious it was but decisions were made about research priorities.” Consider, he suggests, medicine and the life sciences since the late 1960s. “Cancer? No, that’s still here.” Instead, the most dramatic breakthroughs have been with drugs such as Ritalin, Zoloft and Prozac – all of which, Graeber writes, are “tailor-made, one might say, so that these new professional demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally, crazy”
Graeber believes that since the 1970s there has been a shift from technologies based on realising alternative futures to investment technologies that favoured labour discipline and social control. Hence the internet. “The control is so ubiquitous that we don’t see it.” We don’t see, either, how the threat of violence underpins society, he claims. “The rarity with which the truncheons appear just helps to make violence harder to see,” he writes.
He quotes with approval the anarchist collective Crimethinc: “Putting yourself in new situations constantly is the only way to ensure that you make your decisions unencumbered by the nature of habit, law, custom or prejudice – and it’s up to you to create the situations.” Academia was, he muses, once a haven for oddballs – it was one of the reasons he went into it. “It was a place of refuge. Not any more. Now, if you can’t act a little like a professional executive, you can kiss goodbye to the idea of an academic career.”
Why is that so terrible? “It means we’re taking a very large percentage of the greatest creative talent in our society and telling them to go to hell … The eccentrics have been drummed out of all institutions.” Well, perhaps not all of them. “I am an offbeat person. I am one of those guys who wouldn’t be allowed in the academy these days.” Indeed, he claims to have been blackballed by the American academy and found refuge in Britain. In 2005, he went on a year’s sabbatical from Yale, “and did a lot of direct action and was in the media”. When he returned he was, he says, snubbed by colleagues and did not have his contract renewed. Why? Partly, he believes, because his countercultural activities were an embarrassment to Yale.
His publications include Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004), in which he laid out his vision of how society might be organised on less alienating lines, and Direct Action: An Ethnography (2009), a study of the global justice movement. In 2013, he wrote his most popularly political book yet, The Democracy Project. “I wanted it to be called ‘As if We Were Already Free’,” he tells me. “And the publishers laughed at me – a subjunctive in the title!” But it was Debt: The First 5,000 Years, published in 2011, that made him famous and has drawn praise from the likes of Thomas Piketty and Russell Brand. Financial Times journalist and fellow anthropologist Gillian Tett argued that the book was “not just thought-provoking but exceedingly timely”, not least, no doubt, because in it Graeber called for a biblical-style “jubilee”, meaning a wiping out of sovereign and consumer debts.
At the end of The Utopia of Rules, Graeber distinguishes between play and games – the former involving free‑form creativity, the latter requiring participants to abide by rules. While there is pleasure in the latter (it is, to quote from the subtitle of the book, one of the secret joys of bureaucracy), it is the former that excites him as an antidote to our form‑filling red-taped society.
He is suggesting that, instead of being rule-following economic drones of capitalism, we are essentially playful. The most basic level of being is play rather than economics, fun rather than rules, goofing around rather than filling in forms. Graeber himself certainly seems to be having more fun than seems proper for a respected professor.
David Graeber’s latest book was recently published and is titled, The Utopia of Rules.
For related articles, see:
Ex-CIA Officer Claims that Open Source Revolution is About to Overthrow Global Oligarchy
Networks vs. Hierarchies: Which Will Win? Niall Furguson Weighs In.
The Comcast/Time Warner Merger and the War Between Centralization and Decentralization
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Michael Krieger
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Great article Michael…keep up the good work amplifying clear thinkers, solution narratives and the call for reason.
i think when you look at the explosion in lawyering, legal and non legal beauracracy, as well as accounting, and endless parades of consultants—you realize that a substantial amount of the investment in these fields is lobbying to require MORE work be done, of any sort.
the legal field is incredibly destruction of society as a whole. i woudl argue accounting is as well given the great productivity gains that should have allowed for largely autonomous accounting by now.
you’d think with all the computers , there’d be systems that largely eliminated accounting and taxation by now, but instead you have ever more complications and more human beings necessary.
this is NO accident. sorbanes oxley was nicknamed the full lawyer and accountant employment act.
my sister an accountant who herself dropped ship before a huge accounting scandal broke at a firm she worked at had said that sorbanes oxley did absolutely nothing different to prevent the same things from happening without it. only more people had to do more needless work.
the biglaw defense legal field is a lobbying raquet that lobbyies the DOJ and regulatory agencies in DC to ensure they have a steady stream of work on civil and corporate matters, effectively ensuring that not only they get to suck on the large mega corporations blood supply , but that in return for doing so, the regulatory agencies implicity guarantee that small upstart firms cannot afford the lawyering necessary to get into the game of getting passed the agencies.
at this point the fda exists specifically to ensure that if you or your small to medium sized company invent a drug that you cannot take that drug to market without selling out entirely or in pieces to a large corporate drug outfit in order to finance the stage 3 trials on humans which are incredibly expensive. worse, the major mega corporates can cherry pick their way through these trials and get drugs passed through the fda and the drugs aren’t even really guaranteed to be safe or helpful always before they pas through the golden door to qualify for massive healthcare government reimbursements .
and that’s just one agency…the fda.
“Consider, he suggests, medicine and the life sciences since the late 1960s. “Cancer? No, that’s still here.”…….EXACTLY…….
Rally for Faster Drug Approval
We are people with ALS (PALS) and their families and friends and we’re advocating faster drug approvals to treat ALS. With over 100,000 people dying from ALS every year, the conventional drug approval process (10-15 years) is too long!
Please join us to express your concern about the slowness of the FDA to utilize the “accelerated approval” program (AAP) to provide quicker access to promising new drugs, especially for fast-moving terminal illnesses.
http://www.meetup.com/ALS-Faster-Drug-Approval/
A Dispute Flares Over Data for a Nascent ALS Drug and an FDA Review
http://blogs.wsj.com/pharmalot/2015/04/20/a-dispute-flares-over-data-for-a-nascent-als-drug-and-an-fda-review/tab/comments/?sort_order=desc
read the comments…people are disgusted and know what’s going on….
Spouse of a patient wrote:
I have tried for 6 months to have access to GM6 for my wife who has ALS to no avail and now she is dying while the ALS Association, ALSTDI and the FDA play their games of whether it meets their experimental criteria. The ALS Association and ALSTDI should have been at the forefront of the push to get this medicine to all ALS patients from the very beginning instead of trying to block patients access to it. I can think of no other reasons other than big inflated egos and loss of financial backing to their own organizations and to their own jobs by not backing this from the beginning. 12:54 am April 21, 2015
Louis S wrote:
O’Neal: “Think about it, what would all these “allegedly” ALS research experts would do, if suddenly a small underestimated company comes up with an ALS med that actually works, like Genervon for example? All these other major organizations ALSA, ALSTDI, the stem cell companies NurOWN, NeuralStem, etc., even crooked FDA employees who engage in lobbying will lose millions of dollars.”
I fully agree. The ALS therapy research industry is nothing but a cartel. It’s an industry of a- built by a- for a- with the blessing of the FDA and politicians. Steve Perrin and ALS TDI are thriving in this community of vultures. And now, they’re swimming in the public’s “ice bucket” money. My wife died before her time thanks to those a-holes. It’s time that somebody put a stop to this nonsense.
“…a power that sees society as an obedient herd whose duty is to be permanently grateful that is has what it has.”
“Far more suitable to the real interests of the authorities today is what I have called the aesthetics of banality…culture of the consumer philosophy: not to excite people with the truth, but to reassure them with lies.
“This kind of artistic output, of course, has always predominated. But in our country, there had always been some chinks at least through which works of art that could truthfully be said to convey a more genuine kind of human self awareness reached the public. The road for such works was never particularly smooth. They met resistance not only from the authorities, but from the easygoing inertia of conventional attitudes as well. Yet until recently they had always managed in some mysterious way, by devious paths and seldom without delay, to get through to the individual and to society, and so to fulfill the role of culture as the agent of social self-awareness.”
From the writings of Vaclav Havel 1965-1990, Czech dissident, playwright, president.
His writing seems today to be more relevant than ever, especially his ‘The Power of the Powerless.’
How do I know about him? My actor husband appeared in one of the first American productions of Havel’s play about the evils of bureaucracy, ‘Memorandum.’ thomasorourkeactor.blogspot.com