David Grae­ber had a hypoth­e­sis. The anthro­pol­o­gist grew up work­ing-class in New York, and while his schol­ar­ship gar­nered acco­lades, he’s nev­er felt at home in the world of acad­e­mia. From his time as a pro­fes­sor at Yale (end­ed pre­ma­ture­ly, he believes, due to his anar­chist activism) to his cur­rent gig at the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics, he kept run­ning into pro­fes­sion­al man­agers who didn’t seem to do much. Over drinks, some con­fessed they actu­al­ly didn’t do much; they spent a few hours a week work­ing and the rest brows­ing cat memes.

We have an irrational economy that makes people work eight hours whether or not there’s anything to do. Can you have a surer sign of a stupid economic system than one in which the prospect of getting rid of onerous labor is considered a problem? Any rational economic system would redistribute the necessary work in a reasonable way and everybody would work less.

Grae­ber devel­oped a sus­pi­cion that this was rather com­mon and, in 2013, wrote an essay for Strike! mag­a­zine, ​“On the Phe­nom­e­non of Bull­shit Jobs.” It was just a hypoth­e­sis — halfway a joke — but the piece was trans­lat­ed into at least a dozen lan­guages and reprint­ed all over the inter­net, where it elicit­ed floods of com­ments from peo­ple say­ing: ​“I have a bull­shit job.”

A sub­se­quent YouGov sur­vey found that 37 per­cent of British work­ers believe their job makes no ​“mean­ing­ful con­tri­bu­tion to the world” — more than Grae­ber expect­ed. So, he dug deep­er, solic­it­ing tes­ti­mo­ni­als and research­ing the polit­i­cal, cul­tur­al and eco­nom­ic struc­tures that encour­age mil­lions of peo­ple to effec­tive­ly waste 40 hours a week. The result is Bull­shit Jobs: A The­o­ry, a play­ful and provoca­tive take on what he calls ​“a scar across our col­lec­tive soul.” In These Times spoke to Grae­ber about the jobs prob­lem, its caus­es and the future of capitalism.

How did you deter­mine what counts as a ​“bull­shit job”?

DG: I’m not going to tell any­one who thinks their job is mean­ing­ful and impor­tant that it isn’t. Peo­ple weren’t say­ing, ​“I mar­ket self­ie sticks, self­ie sticks are stu­pid, that’s a bull­shit job.” They assumed that, if some­one actu­al­ly wants some­thing, then it’s not bull­shit. They weren’t judg­men­tal about con­sumer taste.

A bull­shit job is a job that the per­son doing it believes is point­less, and if the job didn’t exist it would either make no dif­fer­ence what­so­ev­er or it would make the world a bet­ter place.

The exis­tence of bull­shit jobs seems to cut against the idea that cap­i­tal­ism is effi­cient and squeezes labor.

DG: Cap­i­tal­ism treats blue-col­lar and white-col­lar wage earn­ers dif­fer­ent­ly than salary earn­ers. Since the 1980s, any­body who has a non-bull­shit job, who is doing actu­al work, has seen their work down­sized, sped up and Taylorized.

Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, cap­i­tal­ism has pro­duced end­less bull­shit white-col­lar jobs, which are designed to make you iden­ti­fy with the sen­si­bil­i­ties of man­agers. I call this man­age­r­i­al feu­dal­ism, where­by they keep adding more and more and more lev­els of inter­me­di­ary exec­u­tives. If you’re an exec­u­tive you need to have an assis­tant or else you’re not impor­tant, so they hire these flunkies. It has to do with pow­er, really.

It screws up the cre­ative indus­tries. Movies have sev­en dif­fer­ent lev­els of exec­u­tives, who all have these com­pli­cat­ed titles. They all fuck with the script and every­thing turns into mush. Peo­ple point out this is why movies are so bad now.

In uni­ver­si­ties, you have this man­age­r­i­al class that’s tak­en over from the pro­fes­sors. They don’t know what the hell pro­fes­sors do. The more dis­tant the man­agers are from what they’re man­ag­ing, the more num­bers they need because they don’t under­stand teach­ing them­selves, and as a result we pro­fes­sors have to spend a larg­er and larg­er per­cent­age of our time trans­lat­ing our activ­i­ties into these quan­ti­ta­tive terms that they set out.

You would think that some­body would raise an objec­tion to this. It’s quite remark­able actu­al­ly how you have some­thing that’s such a glar­ing con­tra­dic­tion in the basic ide­ol­o­gy of cap­i­tal­ism and nobody talks about it.

Why else have bull­shit jobs been increasing?

DG: There is this rise-of-the-robots log­ic, this fear that grad­u­al­ly tech­nol­o­gy is going to throw more and more peo­ple out of work. Peo­ple say, ​“Look, it hasn’t happened.”

I think it did hap­pen, but they made up these imag­i­nary jobs to keep us work­ing any­way, because we have an irra­tional econ­o­my that makes peo­ple work eight hours whether or not there’s any­thing to do. Can you have a sur­er sign of a stu­pid eco­nom­ic sys­tem than one in which the prospect of get­ting rid of oner­ous labor is con­sid­ered a prob­lem? Any ratio­nal eco­nom­ic sys­tem would redis­trib­ute the nec­es­sary work in a rea­son­able way and every­body would work less.

It’s strik­ing how much peo­ple report hat­ing their bull­shit job.

DG: They’re mis­er­able! Two or three peo­ple said they kind of like their bull­shit jobs, but the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty, they’re sick all the time. They talk about depres­sion, they talk about com­plex ill­ness­es, psy­cho­log­i­cal and phys­i­cal and immune prob­lems that all clear­ly have to do with ten­sion and anx­i­ety and depression.

And also they’re mean to each oth­er. They scream at each oth­er. The more mean­ing­less the work, the more peo­ple suf­fer doing it and the worse they treat each other.

Does this unhap­pi­ness indi­cate some­thing more fundamental?

DG: Psy­chol­o­gist Karl Groos used this phrase, and it always struck me, ​“the plea­sure of being a cause.” When chil­dren first real­ize that when they knock some­thing over, they can do it again in the same way and it will have the same result, there is a kind of pure joy and hap­pi­ness. This becomes the basis of your sense of agency and sense of self for the rest of your life.

When you deprive chil­dren of that agency, they almost feel cata­ton­ic. That shows we are crea­tures who need projects of trans­form­ing the world around us. If we can’t do that, we hard­ly exist.

So this the­o­ry of human nature pro­mul­gat­ed by econ­o­mists and right-wing politi­cians that peo­ple basi­cal­ly want some­thing for noth­ing — that if you just give them mon­ey they’re going to laze around and watch TV and get drunk all day — it’s not true.

What are some of the ways out?

DG: I’ve been work­ing with peo­ple who’ve become big advo­cates for a uni­ver­sal basic income. It’s not the only solu­tion, but it con­forms with my polit­i­cal instincts. Peo­ple think that is odd because I’m an anar­chist. Why would I want a pol­i­cy where the gov­ern­ment would just give peo­ple mon­ey? Isn’t that giv­ing pow­er to the gov­ern­ment? I say, no.

A basic income would be the per­fect left­ist antibu­reau­crat­ic pol­i­cy. It would not only reduce the num­ber of bureau­crats, but it would get rid of the worst of them, the annoy­ing ones who decide whether you’re real­ly poor enough to deserve this, or whether you’re real­ly mar­ried to that per­son or whether you real­ly live in that room.

Besides, they’re unhap­py, those intru­sive bureau­crats about whom you won­der, ​“How can they live with them­selves?” Well a lot of them can’t. Those guys would be off the hook. They could go form a rock band or restore antique fur­ni­ture or do some­thing nice.

What drew you to explore bull­shit jobs?

DG: I have tend­ed to focus on the ide­o­log­i­cal strong points of the oth­er side. That’s what my book Debt: The First 5,000 Years came out of— most peo­ple think that peo­ple who owe mon­ey and don’t pay it back are bad. With bull­shit jobs, there is the idea that if you’re not work­ing hard at some­thing you don’t enjoy, then you’re a bad per­son and don’t deserve pub­lic relief. Those deeply root­ed beliefs are the strongest weapons cap­i­tal­ism has.

The anthropologist’s role is to take things that seem nat­ur­al and point out that they’re not, that they’re social con­structs and that we could eas­i­ly do things anoth­er way. It’s inher­ent­ly liberating.

Your expla­na­tion sug­gest cap­i­tal­ism is a less total­iz­ing sys­tem than some might think.

DG: It’s rapid­ly trans­form­ing into some­thing that might not even be cap­i­tal­ism, though it might be just as bad. When we think of some­thing as total­iz­ing, we assume that to get from one total­iz­ing thing to anoth­er you need some kind of fun­da­men­tal break. But his­tor­i­cal change tends to be some­what grad­ual and com­pli­cat­ed. At what point does the oth­er stuff mixed in with cap­i­tal­ism mean it’s not even cap­i­tal­ism anymore?

I remem­ber hav­ing this argu­ment with con­ven­tion­al Marx­ists about the tran­si­tion from feu­dal­ism to cap­i­tal­ism. Okay, say that cap­i­tal­ism start­ed around 1500. And the Marx­ists insist that cap­i­tal­ism is orga­nized around wage labor. But wage labor was mar­gin­al until the indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion, around 1750. How can you say that wage labor is cen­tral to cap­i­tal­ism if, for 250 years, it was a tiny element?

And of course the Marx­ist will say, ​“Well you’re not think­ing dialec­ti­cal­ly. From 1500 to 1750, peo­ple were in a process that was going to lead to wage labor, they just didn’t real­ize it yet.” And I real­ized, wait a minute, if that’s the case, how do we know that we are even in cap­i­tal­ism now? Maybe we are already 100 years into a process lead­ing us to some­thing and we don’t even know what it is. By that log­ic, cap­i­tal­ism could have end­ed in like 1950, and we’ll only ful­ly know what replaced it in 2175.