scribbled thoughts and messy writing
August 28, 2019
Categories:
books
(Spoilers ahead.)
I read this a while ago but Current Affairs recently reviewed it and now I am too.
The first few chapters get a bit repetitive (he includes many anecdotes of people at their jobs) but the second half of the book delves into economic history and the historical culture surrounding the concept of work which is really interesting.
The later sections of the book are more interesting, where Graeber tackles the history of work and labour and presents some useful definitions for thinking about work. He discusses the meaning of labour – why and when is it necessary? is it necessary? – as well as different categorizations of labour. For example, he makes a distinction between “productive” labour, defined as producing value or profits that can be extracted by capitalists, and “reproductive” labour (such as housework or education) that takes care of workers so that they can do the “real” productive labour.
To think of labor as valuable primarily because it is "productive," and productive labor as typified by the factory worker, effecting that magic transformation by which cars of teabags or pharmaceutical products are "produced" out of factories through the same painful but ultimately mysterious "labor" by which women are seem to produce babies, allows one to make all this disappear. It also makes it maximally easy for the factor owner to insist that no, actually, workers are really no different from the machines they operate.
(p. 237)
He also mentions “caring labour”, both in terms of it being a dominant part of a job as well as the caring aspects of other jobs, and how it is often written out of discussions about economics.
The key to caring labor as a commodity is not that some people care but that others don't; that those paying for "services" (note how the old feudal term is still retained) feel no need to engage in interpretive labor themselves. This is even true of a bricklayer, if that bricklayer is working for someone else. Underlings have to constantly monitor what the boss is thinking; the boss doesn't have to care. That, in turn, is one reason, I believe, why psychological studies regularly find that people of working-class background are more accurate at reading other people's feelings, and more empathetic and caring, than those of middle-class, let alone wealthy, backgrounds. To some degree, the skill at reading others' emotions is just an effect of what working-class work actually consists of: rich people don't need to learn how to do interpretive labor nearly as well because they can hire other people to do it for them.
(p. 237)
Another interesting set of definitions Graeber proposes is “value” and “values”, where value is defined as economic value and values are “priceless” ideals such as artistic beauty or altruism.
I originally picked up the book because I enjoyed Graeber’s article and thought the book continuation would make for light and irreverent reading, but found it interesting and worthwhile.