Bullshit jobs (David Graeber)

 

Michel Drac

 

Une note de lecture sur l'ouvrage consacré par un anthropologue américain à la question des boulots inutiles qui prolifèrent dans notre économie tertiarisée https://www.amazon.fr/Bullshit-Jobs-D...

 

L'ouvrage : 00:15

L'auteur : 00:30

La démarche: 02:00

Constat : 05:15

Typologie et mise en perspective : 13:15

Vision du monde et interprétation : 28:45

Aperçu historique : 43:45

Quelle solution ? : 54:0

Annonce prochaine vidéo: 59:00

 

Vers une société de «jobs à la con» ?

Ex: http://fortune.fdesouche.com

Le pamphlet d’un anthropologue américain dénonçant la bureaucratisation de l’économie et la multiplication des emplois inutiles, baptisés «bullshit jobs», a lancé une polémique.

Avez vous un «job à la con» ? Si vous avez le temps de lire cet article devant votre ordinateur au boulot, la réponse est probablement oui. Et à en croire la viralité du pamphlet consacré aux «bullshit jobs» (en VO) signé David Graeber, anthropologue à la London School of Economics et une des figures du mouvement Occupy Wall Street, vous n’êtes pas pas le seul.

 

Dans un court essai publié dans le magazine de la gauche radicale britannique Strike ! le 17 août, l’universitaire, qui n’aime pas qu’on le définisse comme anarchiste, décrit ce qu’il a baptisé le «phénomène des jobs à la con». Soit, selon lui, l’aliénation de la vaste majorité des travailleurs de bureau, amenés à dédier leur vie à des tâches inutiles et vides de sens, tout en ayant pleinement conscience de la superficialité de leur contribution à la société.

 

«Tout un tas d’emplois inutiles»

En introduction, David Graeber cite Keynes, qui, en 1930, prédisait que les avancées technologiques permettraient d’ici la fin du XX^e siècle de réduire le temps de travail hebdomadaire à 15 heures par semaine. Pourtant, si la robotisation du travail a bien eu lieu dans de nombreux secteurs, «la technologie a été manipulée pour trouver des moyens de nous faire travailler plus», énonce Graeber.

«Pour y arriver, des emplois ont dû être créés et qui sont par définition, inutiles», explique-t-il, donnant en exemple «le gonflement, non seulement des industries de service, mais aussi du secteur administratif, jusqu’à la création de nouvelles industries comme les services financiers, le télémarketing, ou la croissance sans précédent de secteurs comme le droit des affaires, les administrations, ressources humaines ou encore relations publiques».

Et Graeber de conclure : «C’est comme si quelqu’un inventait tout un tas d’emplois inutiles pour continuer à nous faire travailler.»

Comment définir un emploi inutile ? Provocateur, Graeber propose la méthode empirique suivante : imaginer ce que serait le monde sans «les jobs à la con». «Dites ce que vous voulez à propos des infirmières, éboueurs ou mécaniciens, mais si ils venaient à disparaître dans un nuage de fumée, les conséquences seraient immédiates et catastrophiques, écrit-il.

Un monde sans profs ou dockers serait bien vite en difficulté, et même un monde sans auteur de science-fiction ou musicien de ska serait clairement un monde moins intéressant. En revanche, il n’est pas sûr que le monde souffrirait de la disparition des directeurs généraux d’entreprises, lobbyistes, chercheurs en relation presse, télémarketeurs, huissiers de justice ou consultants légaux. Beaucoup soupçonnent même que la vie s’améliorerait grandement.»

Tâches absconses

Dans le monde occidental, «les métiers productifs ont été automatisés» poursuit-il, alors qu’aux États-Unis et au Royaume-Uni, en un siècle, «les emplois en tant que professionnels, clercs, managers, vendeurs et employés de l’industrie de service ont triplé, passant de un quart à trois quarts des employés totaux». L’anthropologue remarque par ailleurs l’existence d’un corollaire paradoxal : plus un travail est utile à la société et moins il est payé.

Et bien souvent déconsidéré, même si Graeber reconnaît quelques exceptions, comme les médecins. Pendant ce temps-là, un nombre toujours plus important de «gratte-papiers» travaillent entre 40 et 50 heures par semaine à des tâches absconses, qu’ils accomplissent souvent dans les 15 heures prédites par Keynes, passant «le reste de leur temps à organiser ou aller à des séminaires de motivation, mettre à jour leur profil Facebook ou télécharger des séries télévisées».

L’auteur conclut que le néolibéralisme en est paradoxalement arrivé au même point que les systèmes soviétiques de la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle, c’est à dire à employer un très grand nombre de personnes à ne rien faire. Une aberration à l’encontre des principes même du capitalisme, et d’autant plus incompréhensible compte tenu de l’important nombre de chômeurs dans les pays industrialisés.

The Economist, journal libéral par définition, n’a pas attendu pour répondre à Graeber à travers une note de blog. Le magazine y défend les emplois administratifs et managériaux en mettant en avant la nature «progressivement complexifiée» de l’économie mondiale moderne.

«Les biens qui sont produits sont plus complexes, la chaîne de fabrication utilisée pour les produire est plus complexe, le système qui consiste à les marketer, les vendre et les distribuer est plus complexe, les moyens de financement de tout ce système sont plus complexes, et ainsi de suite. Cette complexité est ce qui fait notre richesse. Mais c’est extrêmement douloureux à manager.»

Modes de vie anxiogènes, ultra-contrôlés et aseptisés

Sur Slate.fr, le journaliste Jean-Laurent Cassely pousse l’analyse de Graeber un peu plus loin, énumérant les symptômes des «bullshit jobs» dans la société, du «syndrome de la chambre d’hôte» à ses infinies représentations dans la pop culture, du film Fight Club à la série télé The Office, en passant par l’œuvre de Michel Houellebecq. Il cite aussi la politologue Béatrice Hibou, directrice de recherche au CNRS et auteur de La bureaucratisation du monde à l’ère néolibérale (Éditions La Découverte).

Selon elle, l’émergence des «jobs à la con» va de pair avec les modes de vie anxiogènes, ultra-contrôlés et aseptisés, adoptés par le monde occidental. «Contrairement à une vision un peu critique de gauche qui dit que c’est de la faute du grand capital, en fait, nous sommes tous bureaucrates. Parce qu’au nom de la sécurité, du principe de précaution, de la facilité de la vie, on promeut cette extension de l’usage de la norme.»

Une chose est sûre : le succès de l’article de David Graeber, partagé frénétiquement sur les réseaux sociaux bien au-delà du cercle des universitaires ou des anarchistes et spontanément traduit dans de multiples langues par des blogueurs enthousiastes, témoigne ainsi de la validité d’une partie de sa théorie. Les ronds-de-cuir ont décidément beaucoup de temps libre devant leur ordinateur de bureau…

Libération

David Graeber: Bullshit Jobs

David Graeber: Bullshit Jobs

Ex: http://robertgraham.wordpress.com

Here is a piece by David Graeber from the online Strike magazine, which even elicited a rebuttal from that venerable organ of capitalist propaganda, The Economist. The loss of meaningful, productive work is something that both Paul Goodman and Noam Chomsky have often commented on. I included pieces by Goodman and Chomsky in Volume Two of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas and by Chomsky and Graeber in Volume Three: The New Anarchism (1974-2012).

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. 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.

Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialize? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.

So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).

But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the sort of very problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, 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.

While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; 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, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.

The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.

Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. 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. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.

I think this is actually a pretty accurate description of the moral dynamics of our own economy.

Now, I realise any such argument is going to run into immediate objections: “who are you to say what jobs are really ‘necessary’? What’s necessary anyway? You’re an anthropology professor, what’s the ‘need’ for that?” (And indeed a lot of tabloid readers would take the existence of my job as the very definition of wasteful social expenditure.) And on one level, this is obviously true. There can be no objective measure of social value.

I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless? Not long ago I got back in touch with a school friend who I hadn’t seen since I was 12. I was amazed to discover that in the interim, he had become first a poet, then the front man in an indie rock band. I’d heard some of his songs on the radio having no idea the singer was someone I actually knew. He was obviously brilliant, innovative, and his work had unquestionably brightened and improved the lives of people all over the world. Yet, after a couple of unsuccessful albums, he’d lost his contract, and plagued with debts and a newborn daughter, ended up, as he put it, “taking the default choice of so many directionless folk: law school.” Now he’s a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm. He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist.

There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, 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% 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.) But even more, it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely. Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.

This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.

Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralyzing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyze London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people. It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told “but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorized stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days.

David Graeber