Groucho Marxism

I recently reached something of a milestone in my career. In April this year, I passed the point at which I had been in full-time employment for exactly 20 years. I have done a variety of jobs during that time, but all of them have involved the same kind of work: setting up spreadsheets, writing documents, responding to emails, attending meetings, and so on. Typical office work, in other words. There have been some highlights I could mention, but these have been few and far between. My overall feeling when reflecting back is that the entire thing has been a complete waste of time. To be clear, I have done things outside of my professional life in the last 20 years which definitely have been a good use of time. But work-wise? Not so much.

What makes this all the more galling is that I did everything by the book. I worked hard, got good grades, went to a good university, and got a good degree (actually two good degrees). Entering into the working world in my mid-20s I was motivated by putting my skills to use in making the world a better place – as many young graduates are. Yet here I am 20 years later, realizing that despite all the hard graft I have put in, everything I have done in my professional life has basically been pointless. Or worse than pointless in fact, as being forced to work on meaningless tasks has effectively prevented me from doing things that would have had some positive impact on the world. How did this happen? Where did I go wrong?!

A sympathetic reader might argue that I am being too hard on myself, and that the work I have done might have had some positive impacts that I am unaware of. The problem with this argument is that there are many, many people in the same boat as me. A 2015 survey found that around a third of British workers feel their jobs do not make a meaningful contribution to the world. And in the 2015 American Working Conditions Survey, around 1 in 5 respondents answered ‘never’ or ‘rarely’ to the questions on whether they had  a feeling ‘of making a positive impact on community and society’ and ‘of doing useful work’. Clearly, millions of people across the Western world are doing jobs they consider to be pointless. These people can’t all be mistaken.

If anything I would say that surveys such as these significantly underestimate the number of person-hours wasted through performing pointless tasks, for two reasons. First, people in otherwise purposeful jobs are increasingly being forced to spend time on tasks that were not part of their job description and which add no value – filling in forms, attending corporate away days, and so on. And second, in my experience people in non-purposeful (or ‘bullshit’) jobs are often blissfully unaware of just how pointless their jobs are. Many seem to have convinced themselves that they are doing something of value. It appears there is a Stockholm syndrome-type phenomenon going on here, whereby people form an emotional bond to their pointless job as a kind of coping mechanism.

I totally understand why people would do this. I wish I could do the same myself! It must be a lot easier to get through the working day if you can convince yourself you are actually doing something useful. Unfortunately, it seems that once you’ve seen that your job is pointless, you can’t un-see it. And the spiritual damage that arises from this realization is profound. Karl Marx’s theory of alienation describes how capitalism causes a deep psychological and emotional disconnect, as workers feel estranged from the product of their labour. But in Marx’s day labour did at least have a product. These days, there is often no end product at all. It is as if we are being punished like Sisyphus, condemned to roll a rock up a hill for all eternity for no reason whatsoever.

What did we do to deserve this punishment?! The answer, of course, is nothing at all. A better question is: how has the situation arisen whereby millions of person-hours are wasted every day? As the American anthropologist David Graeber pointed out in his 2013 article on bullshit jobs (where coined the term), this is precisely the situation that isn’t supposed to arise under capitalism. To resolve this dissonance we can invoke the so-called POSIWID principle: the purpose of a system is what it does. If a system constantly fails to achieve its stated goal, you cannot claim that its purpose is to achieve that goal. Its purpose is proven only by its behaviour. The fact that people are continually forced to perform pointless tasks under capitalism shows that this is a feature of the system, not a bug.

It is not difficult to understand why capitalism has this feature. In the words of George Orwell, there is nothing the ruling class fears more than a populace with time on its hands. In early-stage capitalism this wasn’t an issue as there was more than enough work to go around. Under late-stage capitalism, however, that is no longer the case. Increasingly, the purpose of employment is not to get things done: on the contrary, it is to prevent people from getting things done, by keeping them busy on pointless tasks. (The Australian economist Steve Keen summed this up nicely when he said that he couldn’t wait to retire as then he might actually get some work done.) This ridiculous state of affairs causes deep psychological damage and demonstrates once again what a dystopian system capitalism is.