{"id":1942,"date":"2020-10-05T14:52:42","date_gmt":"2020-10-05T13:52:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/writersrebel.com\/?p=1942"},"modified":"2020-10-08T09:03:25","modified_gmt":"2020-10-08T08:03:25","slug":"read-david-graeber","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writersrebel.com\/read-david-graeber\/","title":{"rendered":"Read: We Celebrate the Life of David Graeber<\/span>David Graeber<\/span>"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

During the recent Rebellion we lost an inspirational friend and ally, David Graeber. This Sunday, 11 October 2020, sees an Intergalactic Memorial Carnival take place in over 100 (and counting) locations around the world \u2013 and everyone from XR is invited.<\/b><\/p>\n

Rebels in London can head to Portobello Road, and there are events planned up and down the country. If you can\u2019t find one near you, host your own. There\u2019s more info here: https:\/\/davidgraeber.industries<\/a><\/p>\n

As the website says: \u201cFrom street corners to theater stages, live video feeds to squatted cemeteries, the 11th of October could enter history as the biggest memorial for an anarchist since Louis Michel’s 1905 funeral in Paris when 120,000 people chased the head of the police away from the funeral procession.\u201d<\/p>\n

We are ALL invited to be part of history, in celebration of a man whose mind will undoubtedly change it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

David Graeber gave this speech for Writers Rebel on Trafalgar Square, outside Waterstone’s Bookshop, on 11<\/b>th<\/b> October 2019.\u00a0<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n

[APPLAUSE] Thank you so much. When they said \u2018reading\u2019 I thought \u2013 oh! you know, I\u2019ve done so many readings but I\u2019ve never actually <\/span>read<\/b> something at one of those readings? So I thought well \u2013 I\u2019ve never read the Bullshit Jobs<\/em> book \u2013 maybe I should just do that \u2013 read some of it.\u00a0 And then people said \u2013 well, try to emphasise its relationship to ecology \u2013 which I thought was kind of obvious!\u00a0 But I thought \u2013 maybe what I will do is read some paragraphs of it and then talk about the larger implications of it.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When I wrote this article a few years ago, I was thinking about work.\u00a0 Why are we all working so hard? This is supposed to be the science-fiction future and we are all supposed to be working fifteen to twenty hours maximum.\u00a0 And instead we just keep working more and more and work invades every aspect of our lives.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I thought \u2013 technology, which could have been used to eliminate work, has instead been used to make us work all the time.\u00a0 How did that happen? <\/span>Why<\/em> did it happen? I\u2019ll read\u00a0 \u2013 <\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018Rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours, to free the world\u2019s population, to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions and ideas, we\u2019ve seen the ballooning, not even so much of the service sector, but 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 not even reflecting all the people whose jobs provide administrative, technical or security support for those industries.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, just think about it \u2013 all those people who are just working all day to provide somebody with a tax dodge by translating for him some forms from France into some forms from Germany.\u00a0 Somebody\u2019s got to clean those buildings they\u2019re in, somebody\u2019s got to provide heat, somebody\u2019s got to do security and pest control and so forth and so on \u2013 fix the machines when they break. And then there\u2019s all the people who have jobs that only exist because everybody\u2019s working so hard. There\u2019s a whole category of jobs like dog washers, and things like that, that nobody would need, but everybody\u2019s working so hard at all the other useless jobs, that you have to create new, useless jobs to support their uselessness.\u00a0 So there\u2019s whole ancillary industries like dog washers, all-night pizza delivery, that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working.\u00a0 It\u2019s as if there were people out there making up pointless jobs just to keep us off the streets: just to keep us all working.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things. Through some strange alchemy that no one can quite explain, the number of salary paper pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers of the past, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working fifteen, twelve, ten, nine, eight since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their Facebook profiles or downloading TV box sets.\u2019<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And I write \u2013<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018Once, while constantly contemplating the growth of administrative responsibilities and British academic departments, I came upon a possible vision of Hell.\u00a0 Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don\u2019t like and are not especially good at. Say they\u2019re hired because they\u2019re excellent cabinet makers, and then they discover they\u2019re expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish.\u00a0 Neither does the task really need to be done. At least, there\u2019s only a limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed<\/span> with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets and not doing their fair share of the fish frying responsibilities that, before long, there\u2019s endless piles of useless, badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and that\u2019s all anybody really does.\u2019\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think this is a pretty accurate description of the moral dynamics of our own economy.\u00a0 We\u2019re all so obsessed by the idea that somebody else might be getting off without working, that\u00a0 we basically make up useless jobs just to keep each other working and then we sit around being angry and resentful of each other and thinking \u2013 Oh! that guy, he\u2019s got a real job.\u00a0 This is why people hate auto workers or people who teach.\u00a0 Why do they hate teachers? They educate kids?!\u00a0 Well that\u2019s why they hate teachers.\u00a0 You get a real job; you want a vacation too?\u00a0 Well, that\u2019s not fair!\u00a0 So they mobilize resentment based on the fact that all these people have to show up and work and do nothing all day and kind of hate everybody as a result.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The kind of resentment this creates is the bizarre dynamic that holds our society together.\u00a0 And I think that the ecological implications of this are obvious but I think they need to be underlined. According to surveys, 37% of people in this country said their job made no meaningful contribution to society. If it didn\u2019t exist, it would either make no difference whatsoever or maybe the world would be slightly better.\u00a0 And this is people\u2019s assessment of their <\/span>own <\/em>jobs!\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Now I assume they\u2019re probably right.\u00a0 If you\u2019re going to be wrong, you\u2019re going to probably over-estimate the importance of your job, you\u2019re not going to under-estimate?\u00a0 So okay, if 37-40% of people are just doing nothing all day, think of all the buildings!\u00a0 How many buildings do people have to make just so people sit there and pretend to work?\u00a0 And I actually started looking into to it and that\u2019s probably the single most important contributor to carbon emissions and energy usage and hence climate change. This completely useless infrastructure construction. It\u2019s happening all over the world.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And the more I talk to people \u2013 you talk to people from New Zealand, you talk to people from South Africa \u2013 wherever you go, they\u2019re putting up skyscrapers. They\u2019re putting up office blocks and they\u2019re putting up office blocks just for the sake of putting them up. They have some strange, financialized sort of mechanism that actually rewards you for ripping down old stuff and putting up new stuff whether it\u2019s needed or not\u00a0 and then they try to figure out what to do with it so they have to just make up bullshit jobs just to fill the buildings. And this is happening everywhere. These buildings are destroying the planet.\u00a0 And it\u2019s all to do with the people behind it \u2013 behind the construction industry are exactly the people behind climate denial, rape and monopolism.\u00a0 It is not a coincidence that Donald Trump is a construction guy.\u00a0 So, I would say that the two things destroying our planet most of all are the combination, the insidious synergy, between bullshit jobs and batshit construction!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I think this needs to be explored.\u00a0 I would say, if we get rid of the bullshit jobs, if we get rid of batshit construction, I\u2019d say, thirdly planned obsolescence: this is my proposal.\u00a0 You know, everything is made to break in three years, which is another form of bullshit jobs, that\u2019s just keeping people busy remaking things which could have been made perfectly well to begin with.\u00a0 So get rid of that.\u00a0 Let\u2019s say \u2013 all computers come with a twenty-year replacement warranty.\u00a0 You think they can\u2019t make a computer that\u2019ll last 20 years? Of course they can.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So if you get rid of the bullshit jobs, you get rid of the batshit construction, you get rid of things that are made to break \u2013 we\u2019re half way there already.\u00a0 That\u2019s my proposal. Thank you.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

With many thanks to Michele Witting for the transcription<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

David Graeber<\/strong> sadly died on September\u00a02nd 2020. He was an American\u00a0anthropologist,\u00a0anarchist activist and author, known for his books Debt: The first 5000 years <\/i>(2011), The Utopia of Rules <\/i>(2015) and Bullshit Jobs <\/i>(2018). He was a professor of anthropology at the LSE.<\/p>\n

As an assistant and later associate professor of anthropology at\u00a0Yale University from 1998 to 2007,\u00a0his activism included protests \u00a0at the 2002 World Economic Forum\u00a0in New York City. Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and is sometimes credited with having coined the\u00a0slogan\u00a0“We are the 99%”.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Act Now: Attend the memorial this Sunday<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  During the recent Rebellion we lost an inspirational friend and ally, David Graeber. This Sunday, 11 October 2020, sees an Intergalactic Memorial Carnival take place in over 100 (and counting) locations around the world \u2013 and everyone from XR is invited. Rebels in London can head to Portobello Road, and there are events planned […]<\/p>\n

Read More… from Read: We Celebrate the Life of David Graeber<\/span>David Graeber<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1943,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[264,262,263],"yoast_head":"\nRead: We Celebrate the Life of David Graeber - Writers Rebel<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/writersrebel.com\/read-david-graeber\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Read: We Celebrate the Life of David Graeber - Writers Rebel\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"  During the recent Rebellion we lost an inspirational friend and ally, David Graeber. 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