Period as a semi-retired pensioner: 226 days
Although I have a rapidly growing band of highly devoted groupies, I confess that I admire certain non-conventional thinkers and I was one of David Graebers groupies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber He has been one of my most frequent sources of inspiration for Ruminant Pink Friday ™. This week I went to check what he has been up to lately and there is the recently published posthumous publication entitled, “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity”. I have not yet read this book. Future homework for further rumination. At the age of 59, he died suddenly, from necrotic pancreatitis, on September 2, 2020, while on holiday with his wife and friends in Venice. Instead of a funeral, his family organised an “Intergalactic Memorial Carnaval”. I am saddened by his death.
So why the interest in David Graeber? He is described as a left-wing anarchist activist, which is hardly an accurate description of me. Much of Graeber’s scholarship focused on bureaucracy, managerialism, and “bullshit jobs” and this resonates with me. I will briefly explore each of these topics today.
Graeber coined the term, “bureaucratic violence” and he argues very convincingly that bureaucracy can be a form of violence and that it can be a means of expressing power and dominance just as effective as physical violence. This formed the topic of an earlier blog post. https://ruminantpinkfriday.com/2021/02/22/ruminations-on-bureaucratic-violence/.
Bureaucracy is pervasive all over the world. Those of us who have South African passports know all about visa violence. South Africa’s passport is the global equivalent of the “dompas” of apartheid. South Africa has lots of poor undesirable people living in it and with the growing antipathy to “foreigners” particularly rapists from less affluent countries the visa nightmare has arisen. If you come from a poor country, you need to be scrutinised in detail with rubber gloves before a civilised country will let you in.
Dianne my 81-year-old mother-in-law would, ideally, like to visit her son who lives in Florida in the USA for Thanksgiving and Christmas. She has not seen him for several years. Owing to Covid-19 it is only recently that the United States has started allowing fully vaccinated South Africans to travel to the USA and there is a visa backlog. The visa application process is complex and requires many hours of patience to ensure that people exhibiting “moral turpitude” don’t enter the USA. This term appears in U.S. immigration law beginning in the 19th century. It has been defined as, “an act of baseness, vileness, or depravity in the private and social duties which a man owes to his fellowmen, or to society in general, contrary to the accepted and customary rule of right and duty between man and man.” Ok well, that explains it then. She had to state that she was not entering the United States for the purposes of prostitution. British prostitutes, on the other hand, are free to travel to the USA without a visa.
Lest you think I am singling out the United States I am not. Our very own South African department of home affairs is none too keen on foreigners either. The United States has rapists from Mexico and South Africa has makwerekwere (a derogatory term for Africans to our north). https://www.iol.co.za/sundayindependent/bloody-makwerekwere-get-raw-deal-from-biased-south-africans-2013661. In South Africa decolonisation is all the rage except decolonisation of the borders is not on the agenda. The colonial borders are alive and well and crossing them is no fun. Keeping the foreigners out is popular and good politics. They are, after all, completely to blame for everything bad that is happening and often display moral turpitude.
Let’s now turn to managerialism and bullshit jobs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs. In the book “Bullshit Jobs”, Graeber posits that the productivity benefits of automation have not led to a 15-hour workweek, as predicted by economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930, because of “bullshit jobs”: workers who pretend that their role isn’t as pointless or harmful as they know it to be. This is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.
Graeber contends that more than half of societal work is pointless. He argues that these jobs are largely in the private sector despite the idea that market competition would root out such inefficiencies. In companies, he credits “managerial feudalism” as employers need underlings to feel important. In society, he credits the Puritan-capitalist work ethic for making the labour of capitalism into religious duty: that workers did not reap advances in productivity as a reduced workday because, as a societal norm, they believe that work determines their self-worth, even as they find that work pointless. Graeber describes this cycle as “profound psychological violence”.
He describes five examples of entirely pointless jobs:
- Flunkies ,who serve to make others feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants
- Goons, who act aggressively on behalf of their employers, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations
- Duct Tapers, who fix problems that shouldn’t exist, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code
- Box Tickers, e.g., performance and compliance managers, in-house magazine journalists, leisure coordinators
- Taskmasters, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals
This is by no means a complete list. One of the purposes of my blog is so that I can slowly reveal all my dirty little secrets before I die. Today I am going to confess to you that in the latter part of my 30-year corporate career I spent several years in bullshit job roles. I have the utmost respect for jobs in the core of the business, like operations, supply chain, and marketing. They are essential. It’s in the service functions where things can go awry.
Towards the end of my career, I was employed in various strategy roles to assist with corporate strategy but my position in the corporate dominance hierarchy was junior. Every year, we spent months toiling on elaborate growth plans, models, and studies preparing attractive PowerPoint slides with management consultants. It was a lot of work. These plans were never implemented and every couple of years there was a new strategy and we started with new plans and models. Wash, Rinse, Repeat. Of course, strategy is not an exact science but the questions regarding the credibility of the many very ambitious strategies from those lower down in the dominance hierarchy were brushed aside as ill-informed. I am not surprised that the strategies were not successful. I was well paid for my labour and I’m very grateful for that, but I cannot pretend it was meaningful or memorable. I don’t miss doing that.
Thank you very much for your comments and suggestions and please keep them coming.
Regards
Bruce
Ruminant Pink Friday 
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