In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the end of the century, technology would be sufficiently advanced so that in countries such as the United Kingdom or the United States, the work week could be reduced to 15 hours. There is no doubt that he was right. From a technical point of view, there is indeed such a possibility, but it has not been implemented. On the contrary, technology was used to make us all work harder. For this, the jobs created must actually be meaningless. A lot of people in Europe and North America spend all their working time on tasks that they themselves don't believe in. The moral and intellectual damage caused by this situation is well known - it is a scar on the soul of our society, and at present this topic is practically not discussed.
Why was Keynes' promised utopia, so passionately desired in the 60s, was never realized? The standard answer to this question today is that Keynes did not take into account the growing importance of consumerism, and when choosing between reduced working hours and more toys and pleasures, we collectively preferred the latter. But after thinking for just a minute, we can say that this cute moralizing tale is not true. Yes, since the 1920s we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of jobs and industries, but only a few of them were related to the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones and fashion sneakers.
What exactly was the activity in the new jobs? A recent report comparing the structure of employment in the United States between 1910 and 2000 provides a very clear answer (I emphasize that the situation is similar in the UK). Throughout the last century, the number of workers employed in industry, agriculture and communal services has declined sharply. At the same time, the number of "managers, clerks, specialists and employees in the sales and service sector" tripled, from "one to three quarters of the total employed." In other words, manufacturing jobs were predicted to be automated and cut (even taking into account industrial workers worldwide, including sweatshops in India and China, the percentage of those employed in this area is not comparable to what it was before) …
But instead of reducing the working time and freeing up the world's population to pursue their own projects, hobbies, dreams and ideas, we have witnessed not so much the bloat of the "services" sector as the administrative sector, the creation of the financial services and telemarketing sectors, an unprecedented expansion of the corporate law and management sectors. education and health care, human resources and public relations. Moreover, the number of people employed in them does not even take into account all those people whose employment is related to the implementation of security, administrative and technical support for these industries and, for that matter, additional areas of activity (for example, round-the-clock pizza delivery or dog washing) that exist only because all other people spend most of their time doing other work.
This is exactly what I call useless work.
As if someone creates all these meaningless specialties on purpose, just to keep us busy. And this is where the secret lies. For capitalism, this is exactly what should not happen. Of course, in old, inefficient socialist countries such as the USSR, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system created just as many jobs as needed (which is why three vendors in Soviet supermarkets sold one piece of meat). But it is assumed that competition and the free market should solve just such problems. According to economic theory, a firm seeking to maximize profits should never spend money on workers who need not be hired. However, it somehow happens.
When corporations engage in meaningless layoffs, it is the people who actually do, change, and manage things that suffer. Through some kind of special manipulation that no one can really explain, the number of salaried paper changers is somehow expanding, and more and more people, almost like in the Soviet Union, find that they work 40 or 50 hours a week, of which 15 are effective, as Keynes predicted, since the rest of the time they are busy organizing or attending motivational seminars, editing their facebook pages, or downloading TV shows.
And the answer is clearly not economic: it lies in the realm of morality and politics. The ruling class has long realized that a happy and productive people with free time is deadly (think back to when it all just began to appear in the 60s). On the other hand, the feeling that work itself has moral value and that someone who is unwilling to spend most of their time on a particular job deserves nothing is incredibly convincing to them.
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One day, while observing the seemingly endless rise in the number of administrative positions in British academic institutions, I got an idea of what hell might look like. Hell is a group of people who spend a lot of time on work that they don't like and don't really get. Let's say they've been hired as great carpenters, but they find that they have to fry fish most of the time. And their labor is not particularly in demand - in fact, you need to fry a very small amount of fish. Somehow, however, they all find themselves so obsessed with resentment that their colleagues are spending more time making furniture than their part of the frying job, that until everything is littered with stacks of poorly cooked fish, this will become their main occupation.
I think this is a fairly accurate description of the shift in morality in our economy.
I understand that such arguments will be subject to immediate objections: “Who are you to decide which professions are truly“necessary”? What is the need? You're a professor of anthropology, what's the use of you? (Indeed, many tabloid readers will undoubtedly classify my work as a waste of public expense.) On the other hand, this is all true. There is no objective way to measure the value of work to society.
I am not suggesting to overpersuade those who believe that their work makes the world a better place. What about people who themselves are convinced that their work is meaningless? Not so long ago, I met with a school friend whom I hadn’t seen since I was 12. I was incredibly surprised that from that time on, he first became a poet and then a singer in an indie rock band. I heard his songs on the radio and did not even realize that a person I knew was singing them. He was obviously talented and original, and his work certainly illuminated and improved the lives of people around the world. Despite this, after two unsuccessful albums, he lost his contract, got bogged down in debt and worries with his newborn daughter, and ended, in his own words, "choosing the main path of so many aimless guys: law school." He is now a legal consultant for a well-known New York company. He was the first to admitthat his work is absolutely pointless, does not bring any benefit to the world, and in his own opinion, should not exist.
A lot of questions arise, starting with "why does our society form such small requests for talented poets and musicians and virtually endless needs for specialists in corporate law"? (Answer: when 1% of the world's population controls most of all goods produced, what we call the "market" reflects their idea of what is useful and important, and not someone else's). Moreover, it shows that most people in these professions are aware of their position. I’m not even sure if I’ve ever met a lawyer in my life who didn’t consider his job useless, the same situation is typical for almost all the new industries mentioned above. Try talking to someone in this solid-salary class somewhere at a party and mentionthat you are doing something interesting (anthropology, for example), and you will see a tendency to completely avoid any discussion of their field. Take a few glasses with them, and they will indulge in arguments about how stupid and pointless their work is.
Such trauma is well known. How can you talk about pride in your work when, deep down, you feel that your work is not needed? How can feelings of resentment and hidden anger not arise? The evil fate of our society lies in the fact that its rulers have found a way to translate our rage on those who are engaged in really useful work, as in the case of fish fryrs. It is as if a global law is at work in our society: the more clearly the benefits of the work of a person for other people are, the less he is paid for it. Let me repeat myself, it is difficult to assess the objective scale of the problem, but it makes sense to pose the question: “what will happen if this whole class simply disappears”? You can say whatever you want about nurses, scavengers or mechanics, but obviously if they dissolve like a haze in the air,the results will be immediate and disastrous. A world without teachers or dock workers is likely to be in trouble, and a world without science fiction writers or ska musicians may be less enjoyable. It is not at all clear how humanity will suffer if all the chairmen of the board, PR specialists, lobbyists, specialists in insurance calculations and telephone sales, bailiffs or legal advisers disappear (the list can be significantly increased). Apart from a small number of highly qualified specialists (such as doctors), this law works surprisingly well.specialists in insurance calculations and telephone sales, bailiffs or legal advisers (the list can be significantly increased). Apart from a small number of highly qualified specialists (such as doctors), this law works surprisingly well.specialists in insurance calculations and telephone sales, bailiffs or legal advisers (the list can be significantly increased). Apart from a small number of highly qualified specialists (such as doctors), this law works surprisingly well.
Moreover, as if there is a feeling in the air that this is how it should be. This is one of the secrets of the power of right-wing populism. Notice how newspapers incite discontent with London Underground workers during their strike over terms of employment: the very fact that the underground workers were able to paralyze London shows that their work is really necessary, but this seems to annoy people. In the United States, this became even more apparent when Republicans had notable success in stirring up anger towards school teachers and auto workers (mind you, not the high school administrators and not the auto industry managers who are actually causing the problem) for their alleged inflated wages and social benefits. As if they were saying, “But you’re teaching children! Make cars!You have a real job! And besides all this, you have the nerve to demand the same level of pensions and medical care as the middle class?"
If someone specially designed an operating regime ideal for maintaining the power of finance capital, it is difficult to imagine that he could make it better. In fact, workers in productive areas are subjected to ruthless pressure and exploitation. Their remnants are located between the terrorized, widely condemned stratum of the unemployed and the much larger stratum of those who, in essence, receive their salaries for doing nothing in positions designed in such a way that those who occupy them are in solidarity with the prospects and feelings of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)) and in particular with his financial avatars, but at the same time experienced a barely contained rage against those whose work has a clear and unconditional social significance. The system was certainly not deliberately created. It came about through a century of trial and error. And this is the only explanation for the fact that despite our technological capabilities, we still do not work 3-4 hours a day.
Author: David Graeber is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His latest book, Project Democracy: History, Crisis, Movement, is published by Spiegel & Grau.