reduxreviews

[reduxreviews]

Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

I heard a lot about this book before reading it and I’m glad to finally have had a chance to read it. I think the strongest contribution of the book is discussing the moral and religious culture that broadly instills the idea of work as suffering and necessary suffering that also drives the creation and acceptance of bullshit jobs, as people “need” to work and work should be soul-crushing and stressful and difficult and all-consuming. I think this makes a strong case for why these bullshit jobs are accepted. He also proposes the concept of managerial feudalism where jobs are created for managers to exploit and demonstrate their power over.

The beginning of the book was more conversational and was doing a lot of the leg work to introduce and categorize bullshit jobs. I enjoyed reading all the various testimonials he had collected. The end of the book got more into developing theory and tracing the development of these jobs throughout history. I think I learned the most from him discussing how other cultures “worked” and the economy and time as we understand it to be a rather recent development that wouldn’t make sense to earlier societies.

Overall, I’d recommend it. it’s pretty digestible and makes you think about how much of your job has bullshitified

[reduxreviews]

The spook who sat by the door (1973)

I watched this movie last night and enjoyed it. It was an oppositional take to the one presented in False Internationalism False Nationalism: Contradictions in the Armed Struggle. the movie follows a man who becomes a CIA agent to learn the skills necessary to return to his chicago home neighborhood to start a guerilla army. He transforms one of the local gangs into a disciplined army capable of taking on the police and national guard. He does little to directly engage the broader working class neighborhood in the organization, instead failing to change the minds of his two middle class friends: a social worker and police detective, who attempt to betray him at the end of the movie, a demonstration how the petty borgeious' (i cant spell this word for the life of me) class interests can often side with the powerful rather than the proletariat.

False Internationalism False Nationalism stresses that while the lumpen can be transformed and brought in line with proletariat efforts, it cannot form the primary make-up of a revolutionary movement. they cite the young lords in chicago as an example of how this fails to pan out. this movie puts forward a guerilla movement mostly shaped by one middle class man's leadership of the lumpen, throughout various cities (although only development of one chicago gang is actually shown happening within the movie). the main character is unsure through the end of the movie whether the remainder of the black working class will side with their movement or not but understands their success hinges on it.

Overall, a cool film worth checking out. weird side note: it was apparently (all?) filmed in gary, indiana, which i wasn't expecting