Tag Archives: working class

Don Nonini: Scoring the U.S. Working Class: Expropriation and Digitalization

Introduction

Working-class people in the United States are now at a turning point – whether to compliantly return to the pre-Covid conditions capital set for them, or to shift toward a new militancy toward capitalism. Now, two years into the pandemic, they have suffered severe personal hardships due to Covid-related illness, hospitalizations and deaths, and sudden loss of employment. These traumas have occurred even as they have experienced an historically unprecedented hiatus of relative economic security, given the Covid-related payments and protections they received from the US state, while many have been praised as “essential workers.” This essay seeks to review what has happened to them over the last four decades that has made this into such a turning point.

Anthropologists speak of the period since the 1970s as one of neoliberalism. Instead, in this essay I adopt a different perspective by exploring the conditions prevailing under the transition from the liberal nation-state to the corporate-oligarchic state that has occurred widely with the integration of platform-surveillance capitalism into state administration and the use of massive databases by corporations and governments to govern populations (Kapferer and Gold 2018). Freedom and enslavement in the contemporary United States are linked to two now converging phenomena. One is digitalization; the other is the expansion of expropriation as a mechanism of capital accumulation beyond its historically racially marked boundaries to encompass the racially dominant white population. These changes have taken place with the rise to domination of finance capitalism in the world economy, a new period of economic decline and social crisis in the West.

A large sign reads "CHECKS CASHED" on a small building with a curved roof, stone facade, and glass walls in a parking lot.
Image 1: Payday Lender in Durham, North Carolina, photo by Don Nonini

First, as to digitalization. It has not only led to unprecedented levels of economic inequality among the population, but also to new mechanisms of accumulation organized around the generalized dispossession of working-class people made possible by their indebtedness combined with corporate and state deployment of digital technologies with large-scale predictive capabilities. The rise of surveillance capitalism and its integration into the corporate state has taken the form of a massive, commercialized apparatus of surveillance – “a single behemoth of a data market; a colossal marketplace for personal data” (Harcourt 2015, 198).

The ascendance of finance capital has come to operate in tandem with a racialized corporate state formation using an apparatus of analog surveillance and control of working people combined with digital surveillance over them. This apparatus has come to rationally extract and then realize large volumes of surplus value from them outside the capitalist workplace. This apparatus employs digital technologies (i.e., artificial intelligence) to increase the hyper-exploitation and expropriation of racially vulnerable groups, but also extends to the racially dominant white population. I focus my attention on the United States because its relentless attachment to new forms of financialized repression of working people through capitalizing (on) their debt repayment and petty income streams leads the way for capitalist regimes in other “advanced industrialized” countries undergoing economic decline.

Second, connected to the dominance of finance capital since the 1970s there has been the generalization of mechanisms of expropriation beyond racially marked vulnerable groups to the broader majority/plurality white population. In an important article, Nancy Fraser (2016) argues that capitalism throughout its history has always been accompanied by the racialization of the populations governed by the states that support it, and that this has continued up to the present. She distinguishes the industrial exploitation of a Euro-descended or white population within the cores and peripheries of the European (British, French, etc.) and United States empires that has been set apart from the expropriation of people of color within the cores and peripheries of these empires. By expropriation Fraser means, “distinct from Marxian exploitation, expropriation is accumulation by other means. Dispensing with the contractual relation through which capital purchases ‘labor power’ in exchange for wages, expropriation works by confiscating capacities and resources and conscripting them into capital’s circuits of self-expansion” (Fraser 2016, 166). This is important: dispossession as such is only the loss of labor-power, reproductive capacity, land, money, or property by those dispossessed. Expropriation, however, goes beyond dispossession to confiscate these use-values and transform them into exchange-values incorporated into capital’s circuits of accumulation. Expropriation leads to accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2004: 74-75).

Fraser goes further to assert that as an historical regularity until quite recently capitalism has survived at times of economic crisis only because the expropriation of people of color accelerates the rate of capital accumulation beyond that possible through sustained exploitation of white workers within industrial production. “Expropriation… covers a multitude of sins, most of which correlate strongly with racial oppression… such as territorial conquest, land annexation, enslavement, coerced labor, child labor, child abduction, and rape” but also “assumes more ‘modern’ forms – such as prison labor, transnational sex trafficking, corporate land grabs, and foreclosures on predatory debt, which are also linked with racial oppression” (Fraser 2016, 167).

Although Fraser has captured an historical regularity of capitalism in the United States, she points out that expropriations by corporations and the US state are increasingly imposed on the dominant racial group of whites as well as on racially subordinate groups. In her periodization of capitalism since the 17th century, she refers to the current period of “financialized capitalism” which she dates from the 1990s to the present as characterized by the emergence of “the expropriable-and-exploitable citizen-worker, formally free but acutely vulnerable” (Fraser 2016, 176). To be more accurate, they are also exploitable and expropriable when they own petty property (e.g., low-end real estate), or are not “legal” U.S. citizens (e.g., “non-documented” Latinx immigrants among hyper-sweated workers in the meat processing industry). This figure refers to working people who racially may be of color or may be white.

Fraser’s (2016, 176) argument that “expropriation has become ubiquitous, afflicting not only its traditional [racial] subjects but also those who were previously shielded by their status as citizen-workers” has much support. This can be identified in the events leading up to the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 when subprime mortgage lenders in 2000-2001 shifted their target demographic for peddling these mortgages away from African-American elderly couples and women toward “a white, blue-collar construction worker who drinks beer,’” in the words of Roland Arnall, the CEO of Ameriquest, one of the largest and most fraudulent subprime mortgage lenders (Hudson 2010, 148). Other subprime mortgage lenders followed suit. In consequence, 3.8 million families from 2007-2010 lost their homes due to foreclosures. Is the racialized class hierarchy within US capitalism being reordered by redefining the white/non-white boundary? Are déclassé whites becoming less “white” or even “non-white”?

How do generalized expropriation and digitalization now combine to characterize capitalist society in the United States? Expropriation made more precise and discriminating in its objectives by artificial intelligence is often but not always centered on taking advantage of working people through indebtedness (from subprime mortgages, payday lending, student loans, etc.). It allows for the rationalized and sustained extraction of working peoples’ income streams, thus allowing such extraction to be scaled up and “securitized.” Under these conditions, expropriation enhanced by digitalization directed at working people has become a major mode of realizing (surplus) value from working people, outside the “normal” profit-making by corporations through consumer markets.

The New Digital Scores and the Corporations’/States’ Management of Life

Consider persons’ awareness in the U.S. of their FICO credit score when applying for a loan. Most soon learn of their FICO Score and its importance but they may not know of other less-regulated consumer scores that evaluate their potential to incur, manage and repay debt, and tap on their income streams for money – scores like “ChoiceScore,” “Risk IQ”, the geographically defined “Median Equivalency Score,” and the “Consumer View Profitability Score” (Dixon and Gelman 2014, 43-44). Similarly, persons in the US may not know about many other aspects of their lives that are being quantified and analyzed through AI-based algorithms to create scores for them that predict and shape their lives. 

These scores are commercially available to any corporate or state buyer that can afford to purchase them. They assess the individuals forming the US population as debtors, potential job occupants, rent or utility payers, real estate buyers, hospital patients, disease sufferers, consumers of specific commodities, securitized air travelers, student borrowers, political dissidents, “street people,” defaulting child supporters, perpetrators of domestic violence, or criminals, among many other possibilities. My analysis of the data in Dixon and Gelman (2014) discovered more than 50 such common scores, and eight years later there undoubtedly are dozens more that have been invented and applied to the US population.

The Dynamics of Dual Enslavement: Analog and Digital

In addition to extracting super-profits from debtors (e.g., via “foreclosures”), there are other ways in which expropriation and digitalization appropriate value from working people. The Behemoth’s algorithms – the FICO credit scores, the legally unregulated “consumer scores” that profile individuals’ work, consumption, and credit histories, the predictive policing scores, the digitalized background checks for prospective job applicants and apartment renters, and much more – dynamically reinforce and cement the connections between the surveillance by digital technologies and the “on the ground” analog expropriations that once only targeted racial groups like African Americans for special treatment, but now extend to the working class as a whole. 

The defining characteristic of the putative “middle class” individual is the job. African-Americans are known to have lower average and median credit ratings than whites (Garcia Perez, Gaither and Darity 2020). One survey found that the 60% of employers surveyed ran credit checks of job applicants as part of the job application and review process (Wang 2018: 129). These could involve the applicant’s official FICO score, but more likely include one of the financial consumer scores referred to above (e.g., “Consumer Profitability Score”). In one study, one out of ten respondents who were unemployed were informed that they would not be hired for a job because of their credit report, while one in seven applicants with “blemished” credit histories were told they were not being hired because of their credit record. Those not even aware of the use of their electronic scores against them constitute many more who have been discriminated against. There is evidence that employers concerned about curbing their future health insurance costs due to unhealthy employees use health scores, scores from personality tests, and reputation scores to exclude persons with medical conditions when they apply for jobs (O’Neil 2017:213).   

Credit scores are now used routinely by landlords who require these from prospective renters before agreeing to rent to them. These credit scores are increasingly derived from massive digital databases of prior renters as well as applicants without prior rental histories, are increasingly refined by electronic vetting corporations, and are resorted to by the large-scale absentee corporate landlords that took over distressed apartment housing after the 2007-2008 financial crisis. TransUnion advertises its SmartMove ResidentScore as estimating “the reliability and level of risk” an individual rental applicant brings, draws on the prior credit, rental/eviction and criminal histories of the applicant, and brags that landlords will “get a 15% better prediction score than a typical credit score.” The codification of discrimination through these new scores that draw on underlying databases as one might expect leads disproportionate numbers of African-American applicants for rental housing to be rejected, but large numbers of whites and Latinx applicants are also excluded.

In the cases of job hires and rental applications, expropriations brought on by digital and analog surveillance not only deny applicants access to specific kinds of jobs and housing, but also drive them into more insecure hyper-exploitative labor and predatory rental markets – where their labor power and incomes can be confiscated and put to work for accumulation by employers and landlords.

Even those who are too impoverished to be creditworthy have use-values that can be capitalized by capitalists. This illustrates another connection between expropriation, digitalization, and value extraction. If the presence of “street people” in the way of gentrification jeopardizes the realization of the market value of real estate, they must be separated by force from its spaces. This leads to police harassment and arrests of young men and women, disproportionately African-Americans and Latinx, but also including many whites.

Their arrests transform incarceration itself into a commodity. Large numbers of urban poor people are arrested and remain in local jails on trivial misdemeanor charges because they cannot afford to pay bail – a form of debtors’ prison. The families of those arrested and jailed send them money to pay for their food and telephone calls, thus subsidizing the privately-owned industries providing these services ($1.6 billion and $1.3 billion respectively). Even though three-fourths of all prisoners in local jails are never convicted of a crime, their jailing leads their families to raise money to pay for their bail, thus providing a $1.5 billion subsidy to the bail industry.

Criminalization and imprisonment of poor people are not only inscribed in the official hardcopy records of City Hall, but also in the digital data on “justice-involved” African-Americans and others collected, analyzed with algorithms, and commercially disseminated as scores by data brokers. Their electronic “criminal records”, even just arrests without convictions, follow them into the digital world and are used against them in job interviews and rental applications. Algorithms for predictive policing software (e.g., PREDPOL, COMPAS) pull the impoverished urban defendant down more tightly under the yoke of electronic prediction and control. PREDPOL concentrates police “stop and frisk” in specific urban areas with “high crime” and reinforces previous discrimination and leads to more arrests, injuries, and deaths among the urban poor. COMPAS scores the degree of “risk” of those convicted of “crime” to help judges determine whether they should be allowed free on probation or conversely sentenced for longer periods of time.

Employers, realtors, bankers, speculators, et al. profit from the expropriation of use values from poor people when such confiscations yield the values these economic elites realize (e.g., lower wages paid, higher rents extracted, houses foreclosed on and resold, higher payday loan and student debt interest payments, court fines and fees assessed, bails posted). Allies of these economic elites also profit from such expropriations. Judges set high court fees and impose steep fines on arrested and convicted poor people to raise revenues for local governments (Wang 2018, 155-161). Police confiscate the cash, houses, and cars of arrestees suspected of  committing a crime through “civil forfeiture,” and use the plunder to benefit the local police force. Local Chambers of Commerce attract new capital to invest in gentrifying urban neighborhoods by supporting the evictions of poor residents from their rental units.

The Age of Covid: “Essential Workers,” Ironic Respite, Labor Militancy

Since March 2020, working-class people in the United States, especially African-Americans and other people of color, have suffered disproportionately from Covid-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. They have witnessed  one of the largest direct transfer of wealth from the state to corporations and the 1% in US history – more than $2 trillion alone in one year in payments and tax breaks to corporations from the Covid-relief CARES Act. At the same time, they have also experienced the temporary economic security provided them by Covid-related transfer payments from the US state (CARES Act and American Rescue Plan), while a CDC-imposed eviction moratorium has only recently come to an end. Historically, this is the first time that the US state has intervened to provide basic income support for most of the working-class population over a protracted period of time, irrespective of whether they were employed. Finally, many have been rhetorically elevated in their status to “essential workers,” that is the idealized national sacrifice – most at risk of contracting and dying from Covid yet deemed most indispensable to “the economy.”  

These contradictory experiences – temporary economic security, awareness that corporations received far more support than workers, disproportionate losses from Covid and unemployment, and for some, praise as essential workers – have been a revelation for many considering the decades of expropriation and hyper-exploitation recounted in this essay. Deadly pandemics, like war, tend to revolutionize one’s self-awareness and concentrate one’s imagination of the possible

It is therefore not surprising that nurses, hospital orderlies, oil rig workers, Amazon warehouse laborers, and workers in cereals and agricultural equipment manufacturing  are showing a profound unwillingness to rejoin “the economy” on capitalism’s terms – including persisting risks to their health from Covid imposed by employers – through workers’ militancy. In increasing numbers, for the first time since the emergence of the corporate state and the domination of finance capital, they are organizing themselves to confront the abuses of capital. Hopefully, these militants will soon be joined in larger numbers by low-end service and gig workers, as is already occurring in the fast foods industry.


Don Nonini is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has published extensively on Chinese trans-nationalism, on class and ethnic relations among the Chinese diaspora of Malaysia and Australia, and on local politics and race relations in the US. He has authored, co-authored, and edited numerous books and reviewed journal articles on these topics.


References

Dixon, P., and R. Gelman. (2014). “The Scoring of America: How secret consumer scores threaten your privacy and your future.” World Privacy Forum, 1-89.

Fraser, N. (2016). “Expropriation and exploitation in racialized capitalism: A reply to Michael Dawson.” Critical Historical Studies 3(1), 163-178.

García-Pérez, M., S. Gaither, and W. Darity Jr. (2020). “Baltimore study: Credit scores.” Working Paper Series, Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Washington, DC.

Harcourt, B. E. (2015). Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in The Digital Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Harvey, D. (2004). “The New Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession.” Socialist Register 40, 63-87

Hudson, M. W. (2010). The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America – and Spawned a Global Crisis. New York: Times books/Henry Holt and Company

Kapferer, B. and M. Gold (2018). A nail in the coffin. Arena Magazine 152, 37-43.

O’Neil, C. (2017). Weapons of Math Destruction. New York: Broadway Books.

Wang, J. (2018). Carceral Capitalism. Intervention Series, 21. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e).


Cite as: Nonini, Don. 2022. “Scoring the U.S. Working Class: Expropriation and Digitalization.” FocaalBlog, 28 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/28/don-nonini-scoring-the-u-s-working-class-expropriation-and-digitalization

Massimiliano Mollona: Why the End of Work Will Not Be the End of Capitalism

One of the lowest moments of my undergraduate studies in Economics back in the 1990s happened whilst reading Tom Peters’ Liberation Management (1992), where the management guru/McKinsey-associate proposes to abolish the tedious, repetitive, and pointless jobs associated with bureaucratic and hierarchical capitalism, and create instead leaner horizontal, collectivist, and autonomous structures, based on meaningful, self-directed, and relationally expanded workers’ actions. I thought to myself: “These bloody managers are appropriating even creativity!” Indeed, that was the beginning of what Boltanski and Chiappello (2005) later called ‘the new spirit of capitalism’. The same charismatic spirit of capitalist reformation echoes in David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (2019) despite it being an attempt to actually eliminate it.

Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs is based on the article ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’, published in 2013 on the blog of Strike! magazine, an umbrella of militant left-wing organizations, which is now closed. The original Strike! page received more than one million hits, and within a week, was translated into a least a dozen languages. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week.  And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, David argues, “technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more” and more importantly, on effectively pointless jobs. Crowds of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. This situation creates deep moral and spiritual damage, “it is a scar across our collective soul” David argues. Yet no one talks about it. Keynes’ promised utopia resurged briefly in the 1960s – remember Andre Gorz’s Farewell to the working-class (1980)? Yet, it never materialised.

Image 1: Fredi’s office, © Masimilliano Mollona

The standard line today is that Keynes didn’t predict the massive increase in consumerism, which rebooted the productive economy, in tandem with the financialization of poverty. Instead, David links the proliferation of bullshit jobs to the explosion of the financial economy. The turning point was the economic deregulation of the 1980s, associated with the new spirit of capitalism, when “the children of the 1960s, used their ideology of cultural liberation, to break the unions and implement the regime of flexible production”. And yet, as I have highlighted in my opening paragraph, flexible production was precisely the result of the managerialist orchestration of expanded and more meaningful tasks for the workforce, and of the sense of expanded agency associated with such “job expansion” – the delusional experience of the new financialised subjects – which Bullshit Jobs advocates as a means against financial capitalism.  Moreover, finance, and the new forms of extractivism associated with it, generates not just bullshit jobs, but also a feudal social system, based on a weirdly sadomasochist protestant work ethics in which the performance of boring and useless jobs and of actions totally separated form real life leads to salvation and economic remuneration whereas the jobs with higher social value are systematically devalued and underpaid. The aim of Bullshit Jobs is to show that neoliberalism is a political project, of the dystopian kind, and not an economic one. In fact, unlike classical capitalism, which was about profit and sound economics, financial capitalism is inherently inefficient and bureaucratic, as is shown by its declining rate of growth worldwide.

By showing that capitalism is a cultural and ideological social construction, which we unconsciously reproduce every day, Bullshit Jobs opens a potential space of collective refusal. By understanding the performative dimensions of economics, we can appreciate that, if we decide so, we can produce a different society, first, by eliminating bullshit jobs. The policy of Universal Basic Income is a possible means to such end.

On the difference between bullshit jobs and shit jobs

Bullshit jobs involve being paid by someone else either on waged or salaried basis for jobs “that are so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence”. They are jobs of smokes and mirrors. They are white collar jobs, full of perks and status, honour, and prestige. But those who perform them knows they are meaningless. In fact, the job holder must pretend their job is important. So, bullshit jobs always contain a degree of falsity and pretence. “The lives of bullshit workers are based on lies”. Shit jobs are the opposite of bullshit. They are jobs that are needed but are not well paid. Jobs that are of benefit to society. They are blue collar and paid by the hour. Undignified, but meaningful. Typically, they consist in the ‘reproductive jobs’ of looking after people, which involve care, empathy and emotional labour (Graeber 2019, 14).  Bullshit and shit jobs cut the private public divide, in the same way they equally flourish under capitalism and under socialism.

There are five types of bullshit jobs:

Flunky jobs exist only or primarily to make someone else feel or look important. They are the jobs of the servants, clients, sycophants, the entourage of those at the top of the feudal retainers. David writes: “imagine that a crowd of indigent, runaways, orphans, criminals, women in desperate situations and other disparate people gather around your mansion…. The obvious thing to do is to slap a uniform on them and assign them to minor task to justify their existence…. Such roles tend to multiply in economies based on rent extraction” (Graeber 2019, 29). Flunkies are modern versions of servants and maids, which David notes, have disappeared in the north Atlantic world.

Goonies are people whose jobs have an aggressive element: telemarketers, corporate lawyers, lobbyist. Working in advertising, marketing and publicity, goonies are always dissatisfied, even if their jobs tend to earn them six-figure salaries.  

Duct tapers are workers who make up for inefficiencies in the system. For instance: IT workers inputting information into excel spread sheets; programmers making different hardware compatible or female administrative assistants, who end up doing a lot of work for their (male) bosses, and with their affective labour, soothing their egos.  

Box tickers prepare reports and reproduce the bureaucratic apparatus of monitoring, surveillance, and performance assessment of work bureaucracies.

Taskmasters are the managers who formulate the strategic mission, assess business performances, compose grids of career progression, and keep the bullshit system alive.

Humorously parodying the kind of pointless categorizations that populate the bullshit workplace, David’s classification is loose and unground. On a closer inspection, it turns out that most bullshit jobs he mentions are in fact, shit jobs. Take for instance the IT workers who fix and repair programs or make different platforms compatible – the duct tapers. They may be bullshit jobs, but they are central in the reproduction of value under platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2016). The workers for the Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourced platform for so-called “post-human intelligence tasks”, which outsources small and alienating digital work are paid an average of 15 dollars per day, for anything between two and ten hours work, 100 hits per day. Platform capitalism is the productive side of finance, the new site of capitalist value creation and extraction, fully entangled with global industrial production, their digital infrastructures and automation systems. Amazon, Facebook and Google and their shareholders don’t think these jobs are bullshit and won’t let these jobs go without a fight. Or think of the Flunkies such as porters, security guards, maids, freelance care workers.  These ‘shit shit jobs’ are neither blue collar nor white collar but pertain to an unregulated and highly exploitative service economy, which also proliferates with the proliferation of finance.

The confusion seems to stem from the fact that David’s classification focuses on work, rather than on labour, which depoliticises the issue at stake because it discounts the social relation of production, that is, the field of articulations, negotiations and struggles around which some human actions are deemed to acquire more value than others, and underpin the social constructions of skills, tasks, and actions as building-blocks of the whole ritual edifice of bourgeois micro-economics.

Marxism in anthropology has never been too popular, but the attack to productivism and labour value theory in anthropology, from James Ferguson’s book on redistribution, Li Puma and Lee’s on financial circulation, to various analysis on the productivity of the informal economies of slums, has had the bizarre effect of generating a vast market for popular books about work  – whose more recent examples are Jan Lucassen’s (2021) monumental book The Story of Work a New History of Humankind and anthropologist James Suzman’s (2021) blockbuster book Work: A Deep History from Stone Age to the Age of Robots. Like David, Suzman has become a celebrity anthropologist, outspoken about the pointlessness of contemporary work mental and material structures and advocating the 15 hours a week from the perspective of the ‘stone age economics’ of the Ju/Hoansi bushmen of Namibia’s Kalahari desert, which he studied during his PhD in anthropology at Edinburgh university, started after he resigned as senior manager in the diamond mining giant De Beers. Now Suzman runs Antropos ltd, a think-tank that offers ‘anthropological approaches to present-day problem-solving’ at a corporate rate of up to £1,400 per day – half for NGOs (Hunt, 2020).

These culturalist and evolutionary studies of work undervalue the historical materialist aspects of labour, which Marx considers as a real abstraction that is both material and ideological – economic and political. Marxist labour theory of value says that capitalism is a political and economic construction that systematically undervalues and exploits those actions that are attached to a wage relation, which itself is a form of human devalorization. It is not the content of the action that matters. It is the relationships of production that matter, both at the local and global levels, in the entanglement between finance and industry, centres and peripheries, which generate complex entanglements of bullshit, shit, and shit shit jobs.

Besides, David’s argument that the economy of late capitalism is uneconomical, assumes that capitalism, at least at some point, was about economics rather than power and that the economy (or capitalism?) can be fixed, morally and productively, with an efficient work reorganization and that this reorganization consists in sorting out which jobs are more important than others. First, reproductive jobs are more important than productive ones, productive from the point of view capital. But when you look at his classification, nearly all jobs are reproductive, in fact the very problem of productivism, David argues, is that it forgets that the vast majority of the working-class fixes, maintains, looks after – machines, people and objects – rather than heroically fighting on the production line. David’s intuition about the value of maintenance and reproductive labour is a very important one. But, if nearly all human actions are reproductive in large sense, reproductive of the existent world and of existent institutions, how can we distinguish between those which reproduce capitalism such as unpaid housework, and those which reproduce life outside it?  

Image 2: Office work, photo by Andrea Piacquadio.

Instead of looking at how the value of work is socially constructed through the wage relation, David considers the degree of satisfaction afforded by different work, tasks or actions, satisfaction which is directly related to their different affordance of agency and freedom. The emphasis here is on the morality or ethics of freedom rather than the politics of labour, which resonates with Tom Peters’ ideology of freedom management, that is, the idea that work can be abolished or freed, without abolishing capitalist social relations (on this issue see also Ana Cecilia Dinerstein and Harry Pitts, 2021).

In fact, according to David, there is a clear moral divide between bullshit jobs and shit jobs. Shit jobs are morally satisfying and meaningful, whereas bullshit work is immoral, alienating and ultimately dissatisfying because it leaves the bullshitter without agency and creativity and such lack of agency clashes with humans’ natural tendency to find pleasure in seeing one’s action reaching its imagined end. But why is care work so satisfying despite it involving so little agency? Or can a sense of agency emerge from empowering other people’s actions or in the realization that all actions are ultimately equally powerless because deeply relational? An analysis of the social relations surrounding the evaluation of actions, and of the ethical performativity of value, as in Michael Lambek’s (2013) article ‘The Value of Performative Acts’, would have helped here.

Work as protestant ideology or ethics

But it turns out that freedom at work is heavily constrained by the morality of the time.

David is interested in the morality of labour of Northern Europe and North America and in its specific Christian protestant trajectory, and he explicitly leaves out the aristocratic and patriarchal vision of labour held in the Mediterranean and in ancient Greece, whereby physical labour is only for serfs and women. This historically and geographically essentialising classification, which characterises so much Mediterranean anthropology of the 1980s, doesn’t make much sense from the point of view of labour history.

In the feudal economy of Northern Europe, dominated by the Puritan and Protestant ethical framework, paid and waged labour were a form of education and disciplining of the working-class, of training to show good manners, limited to the initial part of one’s life. Its Judeo-Christian vision of humanity, which Sahlins (1996) highlights so well in his ‘The Sadness of Sweetness’, meant that work had to be self-mortifying, sacrificial and redemptive. In such male dominated society, human production is seen as an emulation of the heavenly process of world creation and reproductive labour is considered a mirror, although derivative, of the productive labour of men and God.

Capitalism transformed service into a permanent relation of wage labour but salvaged the ideology of feudalism. In fact, both managerialism and feudalism are forms of abstraction from real production, in which appropriation and distribution of goods, rather than actual production, creates elaborated ranked hierarchy. “Financial capitalism isn’t really capitalism but a form of rent extraction, where the internal logic are different from capitalism… since economic and political imperatives have come to merge… now it resembles managerial feudalism” (Graeber 2019, 181). But were previous forms of capitalism just economical? Is not always profit a form of rent extraction? David criticises the classical assumption shared by both Marxist and bourgeois economists that under feudalism the political and the economical blur because extraction is based on legal principle, whereas in capitalism the economical is abstracted from the political. In fact, he argues, capitalist economics, including work organization, is an entirely political construction. This depiction of Marxism is disingenuous. Marx clearly describes capitalism as a political construction, in which the fictions and abstractions of capital, embodied as much in bourgeois economics as in the material organization of the factory, become real.

More importantly, according to David, under financial capitalism, human life becomes progressively abstracted and surreal, which turns the ethics of Protestantism into a weird sadomasochistic ideology, in which the relation between social benefits and level of compensation is turned upside down; “people should be compensated for horrible jobs because meaningful jobs are already compensating” (Graeber 2019, 213). Productive labour becomes a form of punishment á la Foucault.

David’s Marxism

David’s Weberian and Foucauldian understanding of contemporary capitalism as a weird form of moral punishment and productive madness is a radical change of direction from his previous Marxist analysis of capitalist labour as an inverted form of slavery (Graeber 2006). There, David’s argument of the historical entanglement of capitalism and slavery was part of a broader reflection on structural Marxism, system theory and the political economy approach in anthropology (Sidney Mintz, Eric Wolf and Eric Williams) and engagement with the radical black Marxism of Cedric Robinson. Particularly, David shows that capitalism and slavery share the following traits: both rely on a separation of the place of social (re)production of the labour force, and the place where that labour-power is realized in production – in the case of slavery, this is achieved by transporting laborers bought or stolen from one society into another one; in capitalism, by separating the domestic sphere (the sphere of social production) from the workplace.

The transfer happens by exchanging human powers for money. One effect of that transfer is ‘social death’, in the sense of the devaluation if not annihilation of the community ties and kinship relations and their separation from the workplace. The financial transaction in both cases produces abstract labour, which is pure creative potential and the sheer power of creation. The ideology of freedom which conflicts with how most societies take it for granted that no human is completely free or completely dependent, rather, all have different degrees of rights and obligations. The modern ideal of political liberty, in fact, has historically tended to emerge from societies with extreme forms of chattel slavery.

Such Marxist analysis of the entanglement of capitalism and slavery, tells us much more about contemporary forms of feudal management, the systematic devaluation of reproductive labour and the social construction of unfreedom, than the Weberian approach of Bullshit Jobs.

Reproductive labour

The central theoretical reference in David’s theory of reproductive labour is the feminist scholar Nancy Folbre (2020). For Nancy Folbre, patriarchy is the systematic devaluation of the power of reproducing life by women or alien men such as slaves, which is achieved through three main mechanisms: (1) the creation of property rights and laws that limits the circulation of people and put it under male control; (2) restrictions of rights of women children and sexually non-conforming individuals and (3) under-remuneration of care work.

For Folbre slavery and capitalism are not just moral or cultural systems (associated with patriarchy, aristocracy, caste, or race) or simply work structures (in which factories and plantations mirror each other), but are interrelated political and economic systems in which the wage relation is entangled with and reinforced by conflicting ideological construction of personhood and forms of evaluation of human action. The link between slavery, devaluation of reproductive labour and capitalism is made by Meillassoux (1986) in his anthropology of slavery, which shows how the systematic devaluation of the labour of slaves and the denial of their reproductive powers become a generalised and sustainable economic system only when slavery becomes entangled in merchant capitalism; in the same way in which the systematic devaluation of working-class labour can only be sustainable through the systematic denial of the reproductive labour of women.

Finance

Another Marxist trope in Bullshit Jobs is the link between finance, abstraction, and alienation, whereby the FIRE sectors (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) systematically create abstractions and abstracted organizations which hire ‘complicators’ to increase financial abstractions and the speculation connected to them. Finance creates meaningless ritual and new age gurus, “who paint abstraction as reality, forgetting that there are some things more real than others”. Marx describes capitalism as a form of labour abstraction – CMC to MCM – and finance as a multiplication of such abstract logic. The Marxist philosopher Moishe Postone (1993) considered the abstracted and impersonal kind of work David associates with bullshit labour as the materialization of the commodity form – a real abstraction of capital. But David discusses the proliferation of finance, abstraction and rent extraction as unreasonable and unrealistic deviations from classical capitalism and precisely because unrealistic, to be easily overcome. Even if unrealistic, contemporary forms of rentier capitalism, of the kind described by Christopher Brett (2021) or by Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings (2020) cannot be challenged simply through work re-organizations or wage redistribution, because it is deeply attached to assets inequality and on feudal power relations which capitalism constantly re-produces, via its impersonal machine.   

Solidarity

But the best part of the book are the descriptions of the creative strategies of resistance of this new precarised and dispossessed class of bullshitters consisting of Wikipedia ghost-writers, occupational poets, toilet graffiti artists, deluded rock stars, professional dropouts, and gossipers. It is precisely in the creative agency of these workers, and in David’s empathy towards them, that the book’s call to action emerges. After all, the book is based on interviews with individuals who had read David’s original article and identified with his political project of demystifying the corporate world. That is, the book is based on a sense of solidarity between David and the bullshitters. In this sense, Bullshit Jobs’ greatest potential is as a work of fiction or an ethnography of direct action, which in defiance of the tragic post-workerist sociological narrative, gives voice to the creative withdrawal, artistic desires, and post-capitalist fantasies of platform workers – whose anti-heroic politics resonates with that of the lost people of Madagascar.  

David’s optimism reflected the hopes about the end of capitalism that opened after the economic crisis of 2008 and embodied in the UK by Corbynism with which David had a strong affiliation. At the time, even the gigantic productivist trade union UNITE supported the elimination of bullshit jobs via the Universal Basic Income as a way into what Aaron Bastani (2020) imagined as a ‘fully automated luxury communism’.

This sense of hope was wiped out by the recent global pandemic, which, if anything, widened the gap between overpriced bullshit jobs and undervalued shit jobs. On the one hand, the lawyers, corporate accountants, the platform managers, the internet influencers and gurus. On the other, the Amazon Turkers, the IT engineers who build new Zoomified working environments, or install powerful optical Internet cables in middle class neighbourhood, the gig workers who deliver groceries, parcels, or health services; the nurses, teachers, and carers who continue to be responsible for the reproduction of life. Deadly on humans, the global pandemic didn’t singlehandedly eliminate any useless job or revaluate productive labour. If anything, it introduced the new category of spectral labour, the labour of nurses who are both underpaid and operate daily under deadly working conditions. If a pandemic cannot change capitalism, interstitial changes, operating ‘through the cracks of capitalism’, as John Holloway (2010)  would say, or cultural prefigurations of ‘what could be’, to use a term of Murray Bookchin (1971), won’t do that either.

I have been working on Universal Basic Income project in Brazil for some time, and I must say that the problematic associated with Bullshit Jobs alerted me of the perils of thinking that work can be eliminated with targeted policy measures without the elimination of capitalist social relations. From where we stand now, and looking back at 2013, when the article was written, seems to glance into a different era, one of intellectual hope and political mobilization, so fully embodied in David’s charismatic figure of scholar and activist. His call to action, as hard to follow as it may seem, continues to strongly resonate with me.


Massimiliano Mollona is Associate Professor at the Department of the Arts at Bologna University and Visiting Research Fellow at the Anthropology Department, in Goldsmiths College, London. He specializes on the anthropology of class, labour and political economy, and the anthropology of art. Mollona is currently working on an ethnography of Universal Basic Income (UBI) in Marica’ Brazil, in collaboration with economists from the Federal Fluminense University of Rio de Janeiro.


This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on “Bullshit Jobs”.


References

Adkins Lisa, Cooper Melissa and Martijn Konings. 2020. The Asset Economy. London: Wiley.

Bastani, Aaron, 2020. Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. London: Verso.

Bookchin, Murray. 1971. Post-Scarcity Anarchism. Berkeley, California: The Rampants Press.

Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello. 2005. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso.

Brett, Christopher, 2021. Rentier Capitalism. London: Verso.

Ferguson, James. 2015. To Give a Men a Fish. Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution. Duke University Press.

Dinerstein Ana Cecilia and Harry Pitts. 2021. A World Beyond Work? Labour, Money and the Capitalist State between Crisis and Utopia. Bingley: Emerald Publishing.

Folbre, Nancy. 2020. The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems. An Intersectional Political Economy. London: Verso.

Graeber, David. 2006. Turning Modes of Production inside Out: Or Why Capitalism is a Transformation of Slavery. Critique of Anthropology, 26(1): 61-85.

Graeber, David. 2019. Bullshit Jobs. A Theory. London: Penguin Books.

Gorz, Andre. 1980. Farewell to the working-class. London: Pluto Press.

Holloway, John. 2010. Crack Capitalism. London: Pluto Press.

Hunt, Ellen. 2020. Blue sky thinking: is it time to stop work taking over our lives? The Guardian. Sunday 4, October 2020.

Lambek, Michael, 2013. The Value of Performative Acts. HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Vol 2 (2).

Lee, Benjamin and Edward Li Puma. Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity. Public Culture. 14(1): 191-213.

Lucassen, Jan. 2021. The Story of Work a New History of Humankind. Yale University Press.

Meillassoux, Claude. 1986. The Anthropology of Slavery. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Peters, Tom. 1992. Liberation Management. London: Alfred and Knopf.

Postone, Moishe. 1993. Time, Labor and Social Domination. A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1996. The Sadness of Sweetness: The Native Anthropology of Western Cosmology. Current Anthropology. 37(3): 385-428.

Srnicek, Nick. 2016. Platform Capitalism. Oxford: Polity Press.

Suzman, James, Work: A Deep History from Stone Age to the Age of Robots. London: Penguin Press.


Cite as: Mollona, Massimiliano. 2022. “Why the End of Work Will Not Be the End of Capitalism.” FocaalBlog, 22 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/02/22/massimiliano-mollona-why-the-end-of-work-will-not-be-the-end-of-capitalism/

David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Bullshit Jobs

Chair: Alpa Shah

Discussants: Massimiliano Mollona & Andrew Sanchez

When David Graeber published his article ‘On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs’ in Strike! in 2013, he knew he struck a chord in the public imagination. As soon as the article went up, the Strike! website went down for too much traffic. The article quickly became viral and was translated into at least a dozen languages. Before long, quotes from the piece appeared in the form of guerrilla posters on the London Underground with messages such as: “It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working”. The essay’s main thesis was that work had become an end in itself to sustain the logic of neoliberal capitalism, thereby contradicting the myth of capitalist productivity. In 2018, David decided to turn this brief essay into a fully-fledged book with the intention to flesh out the argument more systematically. In this final instalment of the series, Massimilano Mollona and Andrew Sanchez move beyond the buzz sparked by the essay to sift through the conceptual and empirical claims presented in the book. Weaving personal working experience with anthropological theories of work and value (Sanchez), and considering it from the lens of Weberian and Marxist understandings of capitalism (Mollona), they show where the book succeeds and where, in their view, it is found wanting.  


These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.



Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at LSE, convenes a research theme at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and is author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas.

Massimiliano Mollona is Associate Professor at the Department of the Arts at Bologna University and Visiting Research Fellow at the Anthropology Department, in Goldsmiths College, London. He specializes on the anthropology of class, labour and political economy, and the anthropology of art. Mollona is currently working on an ethnography of Universal Basic Income (UBI) in Marica’ Brazil, in collaboration with economists from the Federal Fluminense University of Rio de Janeiro.

Andrew Sanchez is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He has published on economy, labour, and corruption, including Criminal Capital: Violence, Corruption and Class in Industrial India, Labour Politics in an Age of Precarity co-edited with Sian Lazar, and Indeterminacy: Waste, Value and the Imagination co-edited with Catherine Alexander. 

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August Carbonella & Sharryn Kasmir: Blood and Fire: Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor

Blood and Fire is a volume of the “Dislocations” series published by Berghahn Books. The immense dislocations and suffering caused by neo-liberal globalization, the retreat of the welfare state in the last decades of the twentieth century, and the heightened military imperialism at the turn of the twenty-first century have raised urgent questions about the temporal and spatial dimensions of power. Through stimulating critical perspectives and new and cross-disciplinary frameworks, which reflect recent innovations in the social and human sciences, this series provides a forum for politically engaged, ethnographically informed, and theoretically incisive responses.
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