Reporter | Dong Ziqi
Edit | Yellow Moon
People's work patterns have also been affected during the pandemic, with some people having to work at greater risk, some accustomed to staying at home and working remotely, and others at risk of layoffs and pay cuts. As The Nobel laureate economist Christopher Pissarides said at the 2020 World Congress of Scientists, the pandemic will change the way work takes place, and this change will not be friendly to some people — the future dependence on labor will be much less than on capital, because the acceleration of job automation will reduce dependence on manual labor.
If the epidemic has exposed and exacerbated the existing problems, then we also need to ask again about the meaning and value of work in life. What exactly do you do? And what kind of beliefs do you hold? Is such a belief invulnerable? On the one hand, we know that the anthropologist David Graeber once claimed that forty percent of the world's work is bullshit; on the other hand, we can trace back to the origin of Max Weber's so-called "vocational view", and it is interesting to combine the two.
<h3>What is "bullshit work"</h3>
Anthropologist David Graeber, who died in 2020, defines it in his book Bullshit Work, saying that "bullshit work" means that "a person must do this job every day, but he/she thinks the work is meaningless." At the heart of the concept is hypocrisy and deception, including publicity and self-deception, of which self-deception is more important — enough to make the job "bullshit" as long as the worker privately thinks the job is ridiculous and useless.
Graeber also explained that bullshit work is one that has no practical use and can function without the world of work, but contrary to the usual impression, bullshit work is not necessarily equivalent to that of public units, because private enterprises are also bureaucratic and inefficient – if the former Soviet system created redundant blue-collar workers, the capitalist system created more case work and white-collar work out of streamlined management needs. At the same time, bullshit work is not necessarily the occupation that women tend to do, in the current employment environment, women are often engaged in low-paid, high-repetition work, but may be an indispensable occupation in society such as nurses. To further clarify the scope of bullshit work, Graeber gave extreme examples, some of which are like "mafia thugs" because the practitioners have sincere beliefs, no intention of deception, and do not receive a fixed salary, which cannot be called bullshit work.
Graver divides bullshit work into several categories, including flunkies that make his superiors feel important, such as hotel doormen, elevator operators, and some front-desk receptionists who have nothing to do, which he considers to be similar to feudal remnants; taskmasters who make subordinates feel unimportant, who assign and supervise bullshit work; and "goons" who are aggressive and even harmful. This includes telemarketing, advertising, PR and corporate counsel, who need to help educate customers about the demand and then induce people to pay for it. Interestingly, Graeber's sarcasm about PR is extremely strong, saying that he does not know why Oxford needs to hire a public relations department to ensure the status of the "best university", and if PR can make Oxford university status insecure, this can prove the strength of their work, but this is also an impossible task.
In addition to these three types of work, there are "duct tapers" that exist for the system's undeserved errors, where they have to clean up the mess after their superiors and other more important people, and "box tickers" that require others to tick the form and follow the process, even though they know that completing the form will not achieve the unit's stated goals. Of course, these bullshit work types can also exist in mixed forms with each other.
<h3>Why money is more and less is not a good job</h3>
Graeber points out that forty percent of jobs on the market are bullshit jobs. More important than this statistic, he asks people to recognize that jobs that don't have a lot of money and less are the best jobs, and that bullshit jobs that lack a sense of responsibility and conviction wear down people's dignity. People need to find meaning (end) in their work, and the lack of meaning can overwhelm people. He quotes a passage from Dostoevsky's Handbook on the Labor Situation of Hard Laborers to explain what freedom at work is and what is not. Dostoevsky wrote that he testified to the fact that even for death row inmates there was a distinction between forced labor and free labor; that the hard laborers were mostly skilled craftsmen who would sell their products to the locals for a small amount of money—though this was forbidden in principle, but which could sustain them in prison and give them a sense of self-domination and moral autonomy, whereas coercive labor was devastating:
"I thought, if anyone wants to completely crush and destroy a person ... Just let him do absolute, completely meaningless and irrational work... If he had to pour water back and forth between two containers, or mash sand, or carry a pile of dirt back and forth between two places over and over again—I believe that in a few days a prisoner would hang himself, or commit a thousand crimes, preferring to die rather than endure such shame, shame, and torture. ”
What Graeber is trying to argue is that feeling the purpose of work and doing it is the greatest freedom, and the work of "touching the fish", "no physical performance" and "pretending to be busy" is in fact the greatest lack of dignity and freedom. This is quite different from the previous assumptions of human nature based on utilitarianism, that as rational people, human nature instinctively pursues the maximization of profits, so doing nothing and earning is the ideal job. In his view, human beings are born to exert influence on the world, and from infancy they will show joy in influencing the things around them, Graeber cited the German psychologist Karl Groos's 1901 discovery that "human beings are happy to see themselves as things" to prove his point. On the flip side, losing the ability to influence things creates trauma of failed influence. In his words, "A human being unable to have meaningful impact on the world ceases to exist", so doing bullshit work, especially supervised and forced bullshit work, is unpleasant.
An interesting example from "Bullshit Work" is that a student from a blue-collar worker family is accustomed to seeing his parents directly produce the fruits of their labor, such as producing and repairing objects, so he feels confused after finishing college and doing white-collar work. The demand for honest labor, to see the fruits of labor, rather than being involved in self-deceptive, forced empty labor, is at the heart of Graeber's discussion.
We should not regard Graeber's opposition to bullshit work as his private aversion to certain types of work. In The Land of Desire, a book that discusses the rise of consumerist culture in the United States in the 19th century, William Lynch, a professor emeritus and historian at Columbia University, reviews how PR and brokerage jobs have reshaped American lives (which, in Graeber's pen, would presumably be classified as the "thug" type of bullshit work) and points out the "pseudo" nature of these jobs. For example, The most important figure in the 1920s, Burnes, was once evaluated as the maker of "pseudo-events", and his successful PR cases included the creation of media events to bundle velvet and sexy charm with the delicacy of Paris and New York.
The economist Verblanc, famous for his Theory of Leisure Classes, also objected to the work of brokers for reasons somewhat similar to Those of Graeber. According to Veblen, agents, including investment bankers, real estate agents, and advertisers, were not engaged in productive labor, but only made money by buying and selling the desires of others, shifting economic activity from making useful goods to making money and making profits, who knew nothing about craftsmanship but knew the complexities of profits, turnover, and aspirations. As for financial means and sales techniques, it is also an art of deception, because this art induces customers to have non-existent desires and then make money by selling these desires.
<h3>The source of the "vocational view"</h3>
Graeber discusses contemporary work and its hypocrisy, advocating that people should do what they can do, and this sincere attitude is reminiscent of max Weber's "conception of vocation" in Protestant Ethics and Capitalism: people regard work as a vocation and dedicate their lives to it. Weber writes that the individual's sense of responsibility for his own work and his sense of the content of professional activity are the most representative features of the social ethics of capitalist culture, which has gained dominance in economic life and educated the economic agents it needs—entrepreneurs and workers.
At any time in history there have been bold speculators and adventurers, as well as financiers who have held huge sums of money, but none of them are the economic subjects of capitalism. The so-called economic agents are those who have grown up in a cold and ruthless living environment who are both meticulous and daring," who have the qualities of moderation, honesty, reliability, sensitivity, and shrewdness, and devote themselves wholeheartedly to their careers. Permanent work for their careers is a necessity for their lives and the only motivation for their lives.
The problem worth pondering lies in the emergence of a lifestyle in which "people live for the cause, not for the cause to exist". In the pre-capitalist era, economic labor was not aimed at earning more money, and working to make money would be considered "gold-worshiping" or even despicable and irrational; in the capitalist era, this became a guiding principle and provided an ethical basis for the life of the new entrepreneur. Weber emphasized that the so-called capitalist change does not come from the continuous investment of money, but from the preparation of the capitalist spirit.
"Wealth is amassed in large quantities, but not to lend money to earn interest, but to be constantly reinvested in business, and the leisurely and comfortable attitude of the past has been replaced by a strict and pragmatic attitude. Those who followed in made their fortunes because they were thrifty and did not want to spend, but only wanted to make a profit; those who still maintained their old way of life had to cut back on food and clothing. ”
Weber traced this notion back to religious traditions. The religious concept associated with "calling" is a god-entrusted mission, while the word occupation is closely associated with the Reformation. The modern origin of the word occupation is a translation of the Bible, in which Luther first used the word "occupation" in the modern sense. Weber pointed out that Luther's "vocation" regarded the fulfillment of secular duties as the highest content of moral practice, but because it did not advocate business activities, it had limited influence on the "profession" in the modern sense.
If we turn to Calvinism and other Puritan sects, we can get more inspiration. In a nutshell, Calvinist doctrine believes that what is happening in the world, if there is any meaning, is that it is only a means of manifesting the glory of God, and that only a small percentage of people will be chosen for eternal life. Weber commented on this, "Such a tragic and impersonal doctrine is bound to have serious consequences for those who believe in it, especially an unprecedented sense of loneliness in each person's heart." The point is that Calvinists propose that people can prove themselves to be God's chosen people through secular professional labor, thereby attaining "soul salvation." All things in the world exist because of God, so the professional tasks of this world are also given by God, and the fulfillment of these tasks has the nature of God rather than man, "that is, a purpose that serves the rational construction of the social order around us." Thus the secular profession becomes the most appropriate means of dispelling religious unrest, and labour becomes an effective means of resisting all temptations. In Weber's view, fixed occupations have the significance of abstinence, and also provide an ethical basis for the modern professional division of labor, and professional labor has further promoted the spread of the capitalist spirit of life among the population.
Moreover, the tireless and persistent systematic professional work will be judged by religion as the most reliable and vivid test of the regenerator and his sincere faith. This evaluation must have played an incomparably powerful lever for the diffusion of what we call the capitalist 'spirit' conception of life. ”
<h3>"Work scam"</h3>
It is difficult to say that there is no relationship between David Graeber's advocacy of work based on the idea of honest labor and true faith, and on the other hand, the "conception of vocation" that Max Weber traced back to the doctrine of impersonality. The attitude of work advocated by Graeber is more like an encouragement to honestly pursue vocations that are in line with individual nature, and the bullshit work he opposes is a critique of the introspection of labor as an end in itself, the goal of making money, and especially the people who work as completely rational people, which is one of the important influences of calvinism. Weber writes that Calvinists live in unabated tensions, unable to escape or rely on other forces, and need to elevate the individual from a state of nature to a state of grace in every moment and every action, so that people's lives become completely rationalized, practice is no longer unplanned and unsystematic, and a feasible rational scheme is formed, and the businessman with a strong will as steel in the capitalist era is the contemporary version of the Calvinist saints.
Encouraging people to pursue their ambitions is not difficult to understand, and the latter point is even more worth thinking about. What is the problem with getting involved in an economy and treating labor and making money as an end in itself? At the end of the 1970s, Chen Yingzhen created the "Washington Building" series of novels, including "Night Truck", "A Day for Office Workers", "Cloud" and other articles, featuring office workers from multinational companies as the protagonists, telling the story of what happened in the "Washington Building" in Taipei. In this series of novels, Chen Yingzhen put forward the slogan of "going to work, it is a big scam".
Novelist Chen Yingzhen's insight into work is similar to that of sociologists and anthropologists, and also points out the tragedies and joys of individual work outside theory. The protagonist of the "Washington Building" series of stories has the idea of honestly waiting for a promotion, but the reality does not happen as he planned: one wants to be a manager to the point of being a magic manager as the supreme goal of life, and the other who has a smooth promotion and sees that he is going to jump into the independent office, suddenly blocked in the middle of the way, and threatens his boss to resign in anger.
Just as calvinists cannot escape tension and must be on the path to redemption, in an age when everyone has to go to work, life outside the corporate economy is almost gone, and when emotion at work becomes the only source of personal meaning, the love of work becomes the cause of his/her exhaustion. The protagonist of Chen Yingzhen's novel wants to leave his work environment and company, but whether he stays at home, takes the bus, or chats with friends on the phone, he finds that his social role has disappeared, and he has nowhere to go without the network of the company. He suddenly felt as if he had been abandoned by the whole world. It occurred to him that this whole world seemed to have long been densely organized into a huge, powerful machine that he could not understand, and thus rotated with it incessantly and without pretense. After saying his resignation, he felt that he had long been in "a huge invisible net of heavy life, driving everyone to work and leave work, and it was difficult to move."
Combining Chen's novels with Graeber and Weber, they seem to point to an important question: when the employment environment is no longer what people want, and the concept of occupation (or variant belief that "you should love your job") is everywhere, will people in it be obliterated by work – and even if it is a bullshit job, it is difficult for people to move, let alone escape?