Graeber – Lesson 3: Bullshit jobs and why so much work under capitalism is meaningless by design
Kia ora,
Last lesson we saw how debt is not a natural law but a political and moral construction. This lesson we turn to work itself — and Graeber’s argument that under capitalism, enormous amounts of human labour are not just exploited, but completely pointless.
The book is Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), and it is one of the most widely shared and debated works of radical social criticism of the past decade.
What is a bullshit job?
Graeber’s definition is precise: a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence — and yet feels obliged to pretend otherwise.
Note what this definition is not. It is not a description of bad jobs, hard jobs, or low-status jobs. Graeber is clear that many jobs that are socially essential — rubbish collectors, care workers, nurses, teachers — are underpaid and undervalued. His argument is about a different category entirely: jobs that produce nothing of social value, and whose practitioners know it.
Graeber identified several types of bullshit jobs:
Flunkies — people whose role exists to make someone else look or feel important
Goons — people employed aggressively on behalf of employers in ways that harm others (certain lobbyists, PR consultants, corporate lawyers)
Duct tapers — people whose job is to fix problems that should not exist
Box tickers — people whose role exists to allow organisations to claim they are doing something they are not really doing
Taskmasters — people whose role is to assign work to others who do not need it
Why does this happen?
This is Graeber’s most provocative claim: we tolerate and even produce bullshit jobs not because capitalism is efficient, but because capitalism requires that people work. Work has become a moral value in itself, entirely separate from whether it produces anything useful.
In this sense, Graeber turns the standard economic story on its head. Economics teaches us that markets are efficient allocators of resources. If a job exists, the logic goes, it must be producing value — otherwise why would someone pay for it?
Graeber’s answer: because powerful people benefit from others being kept busy and feeling dependent. Because full employment is politically necessary. Because we have built an entire moral framework — a theology of labour — that says idle hands are dangerous and a job, any job, is better than no job.
The spiritual damage of pointless work
Perhaps the most important part of Graeber’s argument is psychological. He collected testimonies from people in bullshit jobs and found a consistent pattern: people doing pointless work suffer. Not just boredom. Deep, corrosive misery — the particular torment of being paid to pretend that what you are doing matters when you know it does not.
Graeber calls this a form of spiritual violence. Work is one of the primary ways humans find meaning, purpose, and connection. When that work is hollow, something essential is damaged.
Meanwhile, the people whose work is genuinely meaningful — who teach children, care for the elderly, grow food, maintain infrastructure — are systematically underpaid. The less bullshit a job contains, Graeber argues, the less it tends to pay. The more bullshit, the more it pays.
Bullshit jobs in Aotearoa
New Zealand is not immune. Our public and private sectors have grown extensive layers of compliance, communications, strategy, and coordination roles — many of them recognised by the people doing them as not producing much that is real.
There is a particular irony in the expansion of managerial and administrative roles in the public sector during decades of austerity. Frontline teachers, nurses, and social workers were cut. Middle management layers grew. The people doing the actual work — teaching, healing, supporting — were stretched. The people monitoring, reporting, and administering multiplied.
This is not simply waste. Graeber argues it is structural. It reflects who has power, and who gets to define what counts as productive.
The political stakes
If Graeber is right, then the standard debate about work — how to create more jobs, how to grow the economy, how to reduce unemployment — misses the point entirely. The question should not be how to create more work. It should be: what kind of work, for what purpose, decided by whom?
This connects to movements for a Universal Basic Income, a four-day week, and for genuinely democratic workplaces. If work as such is not inherently good, then we are free to ask what would actually make lives worth living — and to organise politically to get there.
Questions for you
Honestly: have you ever done a bullshit job? What did it feel like?
Why do you think we treat employment as a moral value, even when the work produces nothing useful?
What work do you think is genuinely valuable and genuinely undervalued in Aotearoa right now?
Reply or comment. These are not abstract questions.
Next up: Lesson 4 – The Utopia of Rules: why bureaucracy didn’t end with the welfare state, and why the left needs to take it seriously.
In solidarity,
The Kiwi Dialect