David Graebar’s thesis of “Bullshit Jobs” is one which incites much disagreement. Essentially, Graebar’s idea is that many of the jobs which exist in the 21st century are pointless, or meaningless. A YouGov poll of British workers in 2015, inspired by Graeber’s essay on bullshit jobs, found that 37% of British working adults did not think their job made a meaningful contribution to the world. 33% of the workers found their job unfulfilling. Graebar collected many testimonials from workers who believed their jobs to be bullshit. This included: a receptionist at a publisher’s office whose primary responsibilities were taking one call a day and refilling a bowl of mints, a corporate lawyer who saw their job as pure exploitation on behalf of the 1% and a military subcontractor who had to drive hundreds of miles when a soldier moved a computer into another room. The list is endless.
Adorno’s essay Free Time (freizeit) examines a similar problem, from the opposite side of the coin. Whereas Graebar investigated the sphere of production, work, Adorno investigated the sphere of consumption, free time. Strictly speaking, the title of this article “Bullshit Jobs and Bullshit Leisure” is slightly erroneous, as Adorno delineates between “Leisure” and “Free Time”. Adorno states that leisure “denoted the privilege of an unconstrained, comfortable life-style”, whereas “ Free time is shackled to its opposite.” Simply put, free time can only exist in a context where one’s time is otherwise occupied by waged work.
Although free time is a product of social relations, it is not necessarily a site of unfreedom. The possible freedom in free time is implied by Adorno when he states that “unfreedom is gradually annexing ‘free time’ “. The “Bullshit” in the title of this essay could be thought of as meaning “unnecessary”. Hence, Graebar’s Bullshit Jobs are ones in which the worker sees no justification in their own job, or as Graebar defines it: “a bullshit job 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 this is not the case.”
Similarly, Adorno identifies “hobbies” as pointless applications of free time. Adorno defines hobbies as “preoccupations with which [one is] mindlessly infatuated merely [with] in order to kill the time”. The preoccupations Adorno mentions in his essay are: tourism, camping, sunbathing, do-it-yourself, sport and watching the televising of a royal wedding. What is important is not the content of both Graebar and Adorno’s critiques, it does not matter necessarily what particular job is bullshit and what particular occupation of free time is merely a pastime, but rather, the conclusion both critics make.
Marxists critique Graebar’s bullshit jobs thesis as they believe capitalism must be exploiting labour which has some productive function in order to facilitate the accruing of capital for the bourgeoisie. Pro-capitalist free-marketeers critique Graebar since they believe that, if there are bullshit jobs, they necessarily must only exist in the public sector, since the private sector will always produce efficient outcomes. Graebar concludes that bullshit jobs came into prominence because of the rise of what he calls “managerial feudalism”. The overarching economic logic is no longer about growth, but about a zero-sum game of feudal CEOs extracting wealth through acquisitions and political means rather than simply pursuing more efficient production.
However, Graebar also notes that bullshit jobs also function to facilitate the reproduction of social relations. Specifically speaking, Graebar refers to the “sadomasochistic power dynamics” of bullshit jobs, where the boss constantly attempts to assert dominance and punish their workers, but the workers are unable to even meet those demands because the bullshittiness of their job renders the task impossible. This is of course, very different to actual BDSM play – where the bottom can opt out at any point, and both participants are aware of their roles and the fact this is a mutually consensual game.
Graebar says that “This violence has affected our culture. […] Young people in Europe and North America in particular, but increasingly throughout the world, are being psychologically prepared for useless jobs, trained in how to pretend to work, and then by various means shepherded into jobs that almost nobody really believes serve any meaningful purpose.” If bullshit jobs offer little productivity, they can still serve as an opportunity to instill, in workers, submission towards capitalist society.
Adorno states that “free time is nothing more than a shadowy continuation of labour.” This takes a literal form in one of David Graebar’s observations: “Coders are often happy to perform the interesting and rewarding work on core technologies for free at night but, since that means they have less and less incentive to think about how such creations will ultimately be made compatible, that means the same coders are reduced during the day to the tedious (but paid) work of making them fit together.”
Adorno writes that “Pseudo-activities are fictions and parodies of the same productivity which society on the one hand incessantly calls for, but on the other holds in check and, as far as the individual is concerned, does not really desire at all. “ The parallel of this can be seen in Graebar’s work, where programmers are employed as “box tickers”. A “box-ticker” merely exists to temporarily fix issues which, if they were addressed structurally, would result in a longer-term fix and save effort in the long-term. So even within paid labour there is “pseudo-activity”, where the task carried out is merely a parody of the actually useful work which could be taking place. The most ironic part of this, is that the actually useful and structurally necessary code the programmer creates is often unwaged.
It is possible that in labour-time, people are given tedious work to do, so that in their free-time, they need to find fulfilling, yet unpaid, work. This can create a lamentable situation where the logic of labour permeates almost all of someone’s time, since corporations benefit hugely from the free labour performed by open-source software developers, while the corporation also justifies its own position in society through its feudal-managerial structure.
David Graebar’s definition of what makes a job “bullshit” is a rather pragmatic one and one which makes sense from the perspective of an anthropologist. He chooses to let people self-report as working in bullshit jobs, rather than judging for himself whether a job role is bullshit or not. Adorno in contradistinction, is content to judge for himself whether certain activities are “fictions and parodies” and goes as far as to refer to name the object of his study “hobby ideology”. As a Marxist, Adorno is well aware people act under “false consciousness” and may work against their own interest, and coupled with a psychoanalytic background, Adorno recognises that people may not even be conscious of this. Adorno describes how the culture industry “dominates both the conscious and the unconscious of those people at whom it is directed”. Therefore, it would not suffice from Adorno’s perspective to rely on people to self-appraise whether their jobs or hobbies are bullshit or not: their judgement would already be sullied by bourgeois ideology.
But what marries the two perspectives is the recognition that the highly instrumentalised “exchange society” leads to irrational results. Graebar sees that work ends up as useless toil, at best wasting time and at worst harming the employee through “spiritual violence” and resulting in the foregoing of socially-beneficial activities which do not remunerate well. Adorno sees that free time is increasingly colonised by capitalist logic, where activities exist only by virtue of signifying the absence of labour or by being an imitation of labour.
Adorno’s criticism of “hobby ideology” is controversial and is often met with accusations of Adorno being a fusty old killjoy professor, who is unable to appreciate the simple pleasures of leisure activity. How is it that something as innocuous as idle pastimes could be symptoms of bourgeois ideology? The final page of Adorno’s 1951 book “Minima Moralia” contains the aphorism “Finale”.
Adorno states that: “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. […] Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.”
We may infer that the anti-hobby argument Adorno puts forward in “Free Time” is precisely one of those perspectives that “estrange the world”. We should not appraise Adorno’s argument on the level of content, rather, we should appreciate it for its formal aspects: the connection he draws between the ideology of labour and how this seeps into free time, the very idea of work and pleasure being bifurcated into two strict spheres, which reduce the friction of capital accumulation: one sphere for consumption and another for production. The fact that genuine needs “get functionalized, extended and reproduced by business” is a phenomenon present in our contemporary society from the supplement industry to the mindfulness industry.
Similarly, with Adorno’s critiques of popular music, jazz, popular film, television and even astrology, it is prudent to not focus on the content of what is being critiqued but the form of criticism and the form of the object of critique. By trying to assess society “from the standpoint of redemption”, IE: from the imagined view of the individual living in a future emancipated society, Adorno perhaps came too early and critiqued these cultural objects too harshly, and yet, the decline of film, popular music and television makes Adorno critiques truer today than they were in his time. For example, Adorno’s criticism that the film is pre-digested by the filmmakers and production companies so that there is nothing left for the audience to think about, leaving them as cognitively passive voyeurs, more accurately applies to the latest blockbusters than the films of Orson Welles.
To return to Bullshit Jobs, Graebar’s big claim of the superfluity of most jobs also estranges the world, forcing us, not only to rethink how the labour system we exist in actually meets genuine needs, but even to what extent our labour system even meets its own criterion of productivity. Only an irrational society can consistently produce outcomes which are the antithesis of its own metric of success.