David Graeber explains why capitalism creates pointless jobs. Instead of using technology to increase our leisure time, he explains that it "has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more:"
In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes 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. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
Graeber is more than happy to pick up the slack:
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world's population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the "service" sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.These are what I propose to call "bullshit jobs."
It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.
That's quite contrary to the efficient-market hypothesis, isn't it? Graeber continues by noting that "The answer clearly isn't economic: it's moral and political:"
The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the '60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.
It's also clearly not an accidental situation, as he points out by writing that "If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it's hard to see how they could have done a better job:"
Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the - universally reviled - unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) - and particularly its financial avatars - but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days.