The Bullshit Conspiracy

Introduction

Only a minor part of the population is engaged in the production of goods and services in advanced economies. Still, job statistics suggest that most people have an employment. Disregarding unemployed and those essential to the production of goods and services:

–  What do people in wealthy countries do all day?

According to David Graeber (2019), most people still have to waste their time under supervision or in constrained environments with few opportunities to carry out meaningful tasks. This is arguably also true in imperialist countries.

This paper discusses the theory of fictitious employment all the way from basic definitions of bullshit jobs, to the explanation of the phenomenon and its political implications. As the discussion is fundamental, the critique is not limited to one single person or particular clusters of individuals. A completely different approach is developed and applied to his data.   

• Bullshit-Job theory is fake. The first section shows that Graber’s basic definitions and concepts about fictitious employment, i.e. his bullshit jobs are irrational. Contradictions and logical inconsistencies immediately emerge even when a friendly treatment is pursued.
• Bullshit-Job theory requires pretence and duct taping. Graeber is unable to apply his own definitions. But even if given the benefit of the doubt, i.e. we pretend he makes sense, he still manages to be inconsistent by applying double standards on analogous examples.
• Bullshit-Job theory creates unnecessary tasks. One of his main tasks is to argue a qualitatively new system or capitalism associated with bs-jobs. A highly contested assertion in terms of facts alone. More importantly, Graeber manages self-refutation once more, by giving a description sufficiently close of how capitalism was described over a century ago by the foremost experts of the time.
• Bullshit-Job theory is redundant. It is either false or a copy of previous work. His remaining valid or interesting points either coincide with my theory on the foundations – first published and discussed years before his; or coincides with one of the most influential political thinkers of the modern era – on the most important application, i.e. the explanation of the phenomenon – first published and discussed a century ago.
• Bullshit Jobs is a PR-flunky for the Right. Graeber’s engages in phrase-radicalism with pop-cultural references to Marx. Meanwhile, he refutes or bashes Marx or Marxists on most key issues. Still he manages to copy most of Lenin’s theory (arguably one of the originators of Marxism-Leninism), but omits all serious critique of imperialism. This smash-and-grab takeover was very lucrative and successful reputation-wise. It steals ideas and a tremendous amount of attention from solid work from leftists who are not impostors. As a minor remark, he portrays key institutions as left-wing, even Marxist.

Therefore, the work of Graeber (2019) is a bullshit theory in the sense of Graeber (2019) – loosely speaking of course. Whatever his intentions may have been, his behaviour, implied ethics, and the consequences of his work, are aligned with the alt-right project, also on a deeper level which involves deception. If Graeber represents the left within academia, then that left resides comfortably within the boundaries of an intellectual culture submissive to finance and power. A rhetoric Centre-Liberalism or Conservatism of sorts, which I dearly hope people around the world are free enough to favour. Common decency however, demands that we stop pretending otherwise.

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