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
