David Graeber: Corporate Work As A Contrivance

Let me interrupt my money and markets updates for a short post on an article that was just published.   My next money and markets update will be about gold and black gold.  

The topic of contrived work is something I have covered in substantial detail over the years.   I’ve noted many times that upwards of 80% of all corporate work in this nation is contrived.    That less than 20% of people are in capital producing or wealth producing jobs in this nation.   The rest are in capital consuming jobs (Digging holes and then filling them back in or if you prefer a more dystopian characterization, make-work.)   that actually consume society’s capital or wealth.    And because of that we could see a collapse or disappearance of a contrivance of that dynamic called a “career” which is really an ego-created mythology that is a result of the dumbed-down culture of work that corporate capitalism, like communism, requires to survive.   There’s no way not to conform to an ignorant culture of corporate work because work is the method through which wealth is distributed in the world.  Incredibly cruelly and viciously distributed might I add, as all hierarchical and class-based systems are.  

People thousands of years ago worked substantially less than we do today.     We work because that is what our masters want.  Forced corporate work enriches the state.   Not humanity or the human experience.   And, of course, we mindlessly oblige without asking any questions of whatever happened to the 35 hour work week or the advances in science and production methods that were supposed to free up our lives for more meaningful, higher level emotional and spiritual  experiences.    I’m not going to rehash this topic any more but rather point you to two articles by anthropologist David Graeber linked to below.  First let me make one final remark.   The reason why corporate work has not vanished, but rather enslaved us to the longest work week in the world by many measures, is much more sinister than Graeber postulates.   It’s because class and hierarchy (the state) would collapse without forced corporate work.  Corporate capitalism is an economic control system.  I know that probably upsets a lot of brainwashed, career corporate workers who love serving their masters and exploiting the working poor in the process, but it is not about freedom or free markets or democracy.   That is purely pathological bullshit.   So if corporate work was moderated and we only produced what we needed and did away with these make-work jobs,  that means wealth would normalize and redistribute itself naturally to a more egalitarian system.  That compares to the state violence used today to prop up wealth created by forced corporate work.   Which, by the way, is going to happen anyway.   Because a systemic failure of corporate capitalism, communism or any socioeconomic control system would have the same normalizing effect as people being able to work for what they cumulatively need rather than being forced to participate in make-work to please and enrich our masters.  That is coming because of the massive overcapacity in the global capitalist system.  That slack is going to disappear and that means corporations are likely to fall like dominoes or see their footprints shrink dramatically.  Again, all written of time and again on here.  It’s coming.  

The first article is how many British people find their work to be meaningless.   And, the second is Graeber’s remarks about the mind-numbing ignorance of bureaucracy.     I obviously share not only these perspectives but these experiences.   Working in large, bureaucratic corporations is really no different than working in large, bureaucratic government.   Both are systemically incompetent.  The universe has clearly shown us in history that when any ecosystem become dominated by a monoculture or overbearing species, (like globalization, massive corporations and centrally-planned societies) that it causes ecosystem collapse.    That collapse has already happened.   We are just waiting on the smoke to clear.   ie, For the various forms of violence (control) propping up these pigs to give way to the truth.