David Graeber is an American anthropologist who teaches at the London
School of Economics. He is the author of the classic “Debt: The First
Five Thousand Years” and played an important role in the launching of
Occupy Wall Street. Last year, he wrote a much-discussed essay asking
what happened to society’s old promise of more leisure time for
workers; for the tasks that have come to occupy the hours that were once
promised to be ours, Graeber invented the delicate and slightly obscure
label, “bullshit jobs.”
I wanted to know exactly what he meant by that, and so we discussed the matter over email. The following conversation has been lightly edited.
Let’s start at the beginning: Keynes’ prediction, back in the 1930s, that before too long workers would have all sorts of leisure time because of improving productivity. Is there a history of this idea? I mean, others have argued this as well, correct?
Well, radical elements in the labor movement began embracing such visions from quite early on. After the successful campaigns for the eight-hour day in the 1880s, people immediately started thinking, can we move this to seven, six, or less. Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law, and author of “The Right to Be Lazy,” was already calling for something along those lines in 1883. I have a Wobbly T-shirt with a turn-of-the-century style design that says “join the IWW for a new dawn,” it has a sun rising over the rooftops, and on the sun is written, “four-day week, four-hour day.” I don’t know how old the image really is but I’m guessing it’s from the Teens or the ’20s.
In the 1930s, a lot of labor unions did move their industries to a 35-hour week. My mom was a garment worker at the time and that’s how she ended up getting involved in the ILGWU musical review “Pins and Needles,” because everyone had moved to a shorter week and the union started providing leisure activities.
David Graeber: “Spotlight on the financial sector did make apparent just how bizarrely skewed our economy is in terms of who gets rewarded” - Salon.com
I wanted to know exactly what he meant by that, and so we discussed the matter over email. The following conversation has been lightly edited.
Let’s start at the beginning: Keynes’ prediction, back in the 1930s, that before too long workers would have all sorts of leisure time because of improving productivity. Is there a history of this idea? I mean, others have argued this as well, correct?
Well, radical elements in the labor movement began embracing such visions from quite early on. After the successful campaigns for the eight-hour day in the 1880s, people immediately started thinking, can we move this to seven, six, or less. Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law, and author of “The Right to Be Lazy,” was already calling for something along those lines in 1883. I have a Wobbly T-shirt with a turn-of-the-century style design that says “join the IWW for a new dawn,” it has a sun rising over the rooftops, and on the sun is written, “four-day week, four-hour day.” I don’t know how old the image really is but I’m guessing it’s from the Teens or the ’20s.
In the 1930s, a lot of labor unions did move their industries to a 35-hour week. My mom was a garment worker at the time and that’s how she ended up getting involved in the ILGWU musical review “Pins and Needles,” because everyone had moved to a shorter week and the union started providing leisure activities.
David Graeber: “Spotlight on the financial sector did make apparent just how bizarrely skewed our economy is in terms of who gets rewarded” - Salon.com
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