/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.23093705]

>>62% of jobs are white collar
How do people not realize that a majority of us being essentially organizers for real actual workers doesn't make sense? It's like having 3 generals for every two soldiers.

[Anonymous No.23093714]

i'm sure the argument is much more sophisticated than that.

[Anonymous No.23093732]

That's why we need to bring in more migrant workers. That's the only way that every white man can be an officer and not a pawn.

[Anonymous No.23093733]

You could have 100 people moving salt piles from one end of town to another every day.
Or you could have 30 people being informed by 70 people where and how to move material to actually get productive work done.

[Anonymous No.23093942]

>>23093733

[Anonymous No.23093963]

>>23093714
i think you mean "nuanced"

[Anonymous No.23093975]

>>23093705
All of society is a pyramid scheme to keep itself going. The Redditor pot smokers were right.

[Anonymous No.23094007]

>>23093705
What's most rational for the system as a whole isn't what's rational for individual agents in the system. Hiring an extra five secretaries makes you look like a better manager, even if you're wasting the companies money

[Anonymous No.23094057]

>>23093705
With the amount of excess produced from industrialization, there honestly is little need for that many blue-collar jobs, especially when it's cheaper to import than to produce domestically.

[Anonymous No.23094203]

>>23093705
So we have reached a point where some jobs exist not because society needs them, but because the people who do the job need them?

[Anonymous No.23094271]

>>23093705
The reality is they do realize it and they don't care. Most people live only to maximize the pleasure in their short pathetic lives. If that means living a worthless life of treading water they will take that deal.

[Anonymous No.23094286]

>>23093705
We need a UBI. We are currently in a transition period and as of today, the majority of workers are entirely superfluous. But because people need jobs, companies just invent them to look good on investor portfolio spread sheets. Literally millions of people go to work everyday and are locked into 40 hour per week time wasting sentences and contribute nothing, it's strictly just to waste time. Imagine the amount of entrepreneurs and artists that could be actually fulfilling people's needs and desires with just a little guaranteed permanent income. Instead, we all have these ongoing
prison sentences.

[Anonymous No.23094311]

>>23094203
No, even bullshit jobs exist to allow for the non-productive circulation of capital. Marx dealt with non-productive labour's role in the circulation of capital. It is almost as if people don't collectively introspect on their own labour by radical attacks on the employing class.

[Anonymous No.23094389]

>>23094286
UBI? Ben Shapiro told me that's communist. I think I'd rather watch my coworkers slack off and chat by the ol' watering hole, watch them optimize how to complete tasks as inoptimally as possible so that nothing more is ever asked or expected of them, and watch them invent new forms of stupid. All while my boss is pressuring ME for more output while turning a blind eye to the useless workers as a result of their ass suckling. I couldn't have it better any other way!

[Anonymous No.23094393]

>>23094286
Here is a great video on why UBI is a bad idea from a Marxian analysis.


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QGBQwZsp3T0&pp=ygUSUGF1bCBjb2Nrc2hvdHQgdWJp

[Anonymous No.23094454]

I work an absolute bullshit job and I just get drunk daily wondering when they're going to fire me for being useless but apparently all the numbers keep going up and people like me.

[Anonymous No.23094527]

>>23094286
i personally agree on ubi but it has nothing to do with this subject really.

the bullshit jobs is a result of inefficiency being incentivized by white collar industries being priced on their image. basically more people in suits = higher price for the extremely cheap to produce product.

[Anonymous No.23094530]

Try harding like this is a white collar faggot move

[Anonymous No.23094599]

>>23094527
>the bullshit jobs is a result of inefficiency being incentivized by white collar industries
Are all white collar industries complicit in this?

[Anonymous No.23094606]

>>23093705
>me making 300k a year while you're seething that its a "bullshit" job
Yeah the world really needs more writers and 4chan neets

[Anonymous No.23094608]

>>23094286
>We need a UBI

Sorry bro best I can do is a series of wars

[Anonymous No.23094621]

>>23094393
Less than two minutes into the video and it already seems retarded. If a person has enough money to live on, then it doesn't matter if employers offer 1 penny per hour, the prospective worker can turn it down or take it under no duress of economic concerns. Hell, people can just straight up volunteer since their economic needs are not a pressing factor. "Unpleasant" work would then need a premium to convince people to take them. A negative income tax frees the worker and gives the worker control over his labor, to sell it or keep it for himself.

[Anonymous No.23094630]

>>23094608
>"Invest in the well being of our citizens? But what about the billions earmarked for Israel and Ukraine???"
It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there are growing trees already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards...

[Anonymous No.23094826]

>>23094621
The biggest issue mentioned in the video was the required increase in tax rates in order to pay UBI to everyone in the first place.

[Anonymous No.23095594]

I worked as a welder/pipe mechanic for 2 years and now I'm a supervisor.
It's hard to overstate how much more value I added as a mechanic than as a supervisor.
It's ridiculous. But I'm happy since I'm sparing my body now

[Anonymous No.23095601]

>>23093732
But, there's no jobs for them besides fast food and roofing. If they take any other job, it's to displace an existing worker for a lower wage.

[Anonymous No.23095615]

>>23093942
Gunna get even worse as midlevels (NPs and PAs are getting independent practice across the country).

[Anonymous No.23095930]

>>23094826
You don't need taxation to distribute fiat currency. What you probably mean to say is "how do we manage inflation with such a program?". The answer is we already have this problem, it's just that the money being printed is given to failing businesses which have been deemed "too big to fail", thus, instead of the citizenry gaining economically and then having to deal with the monetary inflation, the wealthy get to vastly grow their wealth and then it's the whole population that must deal with inflation!

[Anonymous No.23095980]

>>23093705
It all comes from artificially low interest rates distorting the market. With higher interest rates you could never afford this.

[Anonymous No.23096732]

>>23094286
I would really, really like a UBI but I am concerned that we need a system that maximizes development for the sake of our survival against China and other countries. Utopias only last until their uncivilized neighbors invade them.

[Anonymous No.23096796]

>>23095980
but interest rates are currently at a restrictive level?

[Anonymous No.23096904]

>>23096796
Real inflation (not government propaganda numbers meant to lead public sentiment) is higher than the fed funds rate. Therefore, the current fiscal policy is not restrictive, it's just less loose. That's not to say current policy won't have negative consequences.

[Anonymous No.23097037]

The last thread had a really buttmad glowie in it.

[Anonymous No.23097193]

This book is just midwit slop. He comes up with easily testable hypotheses and then just uses fucking twitter polls and other garbage tier data to justify his conclusion that most jobs, including software developers, are useless (since why pay someone to fix bugs when you can just have no bugs XDD).
I don't doubt that there are quite a few people who feel like their jobs are useless, don't get me wrong. We've had a phrase for that for centuries and it's called alienation. But of course the redditors need le edgy swear word book to feel superior to secretaries while not understanding the simple concept of offloading less productive, time consuming work to an underling.

[Anonymous No.23097266]

>>23095980
"we can probably conclude that at least half of all work done in our society could be eliminated without making any real difference" Page 26
Interest rates certainly play a role in expansion and layoffs, but to claim that over 50% of the workforce could be laid off without any real difference, yet somehow managers who would gladly put 0.5 ply toilet paper in the stalls if it existed, haven't considered the (lack of) meaningful output from their workforce, is the sort of logic I would expect from a highschooler -- not an LSE professor.
The argument he makes to back this is that management feels more useful by having more people under their control or whatever.
However in the batshit world of his that this would hold true, automation and offshoring must not exist, since they prove the existence of a strong incentive to evaluate the importance of each job opening, barring cases of incompetence.

[Anonymous No.23097325]

Also, just to give a concrete example of how bullshit (insert pencil crossbow) his claims are:
Graeber states his theory has ‘been overwhelmingly confirmed by statistical research’. This statistical research consists of a YouGov poll of UK workers (and a dutch poll which I won't focus on here but it's an equally shaky situation).
The YouGov survey found that 37% of UK workers say their job does not make a meaningful contribution to the world. He then inflates this number to be over 50% by adding the "do not know" category and implying that since people consider emails and administrative tasks to be useless, and since these "useless feeling" tasks may take up half of a workers time, this surely means that even 50% of non-BS jobs are actually bullshit.

However Mr Shitforbrains forgot to consider that simply saying your job "does not make a meaningful contribution to the world" (as per the YouGov poll question) is not the same as saying one’s job is completely pointless. And it only considers the workers feeling towards their job, not objective measure of usefulness, such as one of many KPIs within management theories.

In fact, even the YouGov survey which he relies on contradicts his theory entirely, as the number who feel their job does not contribute to the world is higher among lowest grade, semi-skilled and skilled manual workers than they are among supervisory, clerical, managerial, administrative and professional workers.
Thus, even this threads core premise that 60% of jobs being blue collar implies some sort of uselessness, is made moot by the very study which Graeber cites as a central piece of evidence.

[Anonymous No.23097339]

>>23093733
your existence is superfluous

[Anonymous No.23097349]

>>23094454
>I work an absolute bullshit job
>and I just get drunk daily wondering when they're going to fire me for being useless
which?

[Anonymous No.23097849]

>>23097193
>>23097266
>>23097325
Anyone who has spent time working in an office knows that you could axe at least half the workers there. I don't care about your seething reddit wall of text. Your job is bullshit.

[Anonymous No.23097859]

>>23093733
>>23093733
...Or you could have 95 people being informed by 5 people where and how to move material to actually get productive work done.

[Anonymous No.23097876]

>>23095594
Supervisor/manager positions are important but too many of them either got promoted from a job they were much better at, or are completely clueless about the jobs of the people they're supposed to manage in addition to having no idea how be an effective manager. I think in general all of those types of positions should be replaced by secretaries, to handle the same responsibilities but without the implication of being superior to the people who actually do the job.

[Anonymous No.23097884]

>>23096732
Corruption is already sinking the USA. "Maximize development"? Nancy Pelosi is beating Warren Buffet in the stock market and you want to talk "Maximize development"? Not to mention the endless giveaways to other countries to fight useless wars which have zero benefit. China has already surpassed the USA in economic output, because China actually manufactures things, the USA is a servant economy (see pic), and as such has been losing economic power for the last 50+ years.

[Anonymous No.23097891]

bullshit jobs are caused by the fact that "society" is something we expect to come and work together. ultimately it is due to the lack of competition

[Anonymous No.23098192]

Actually, its rather the fact that we can no longer trust the various data analysis due to the fact that they are a signal by wich economies operate and therefore there are many economical and political reasons to keep them falsified.
And you cant make good policy based on falseness.

[Anonymous No.23098233]

>>23097849
That sounds like a superiority complex and not the thoughts of someone who's actually had to manage an office

[Anonymous No.23098448]

>>23098233
Coping make worker

[Anonymous No.23098662]

>>23097849
Sure theoretically, until the remaining half feels overworked and understaffed because it turns out having people doing the oh-so useless tasks like writing emails and checking for regulatory compliance actually play an important role, and allow blowhards like you who think you're the backbone of your shitty midwestern paperclip company to do the "useful" work without being bogged down by minutae.

[Anonymous No.23098892]

>How do people not realize that a majority of us being essentially organizers for real actual workers doesn't make sense?
I supposed it will make more sense to you when more of the actual workers are replaced with machines
>It's like having 3 generals for every two soldiers.
It's like having the humans be the generals while the drones do as much soldiering as possible

[Anonymous No.23098919]

>>23094286
UBI would only be sustainable in a much smaller world, i.e. fewer people. Having a UBI coupled with an infinite-growth ideology just doesn't bode well. Nevermind the issue of mass-reliance on govt. doling out livelihood.

[Anonymous No.23099188]

>>23097884
Looks like service jobs are the real UBI.

[Anonymous No.23099212]

>>23094454
This but with weed instead of alcohol.
I recently got promoted into night shift and haven't had a sleep schedule this orderly since early childhood.

[Anonymous No.23099472]

>>23095930
rec a book on this subject

[Anonymous No.23099495]

>>23094286
Even if there was UBI I wouldn't take it. It would just give me more of a reason not to respect this pathetic corrupt society that calls itself the pinnacle of human history.

[Anonymous No.23099516]

Anyone who isn't a blue collar worker can't really be considered a productive member of society. Most of them should be sent to gulag, the high IQ ones do administratory work in blue collar enterprises. Society would immediately improve.

[Anonymous No.23099579]

>>23099495
You would be dumb not to take it if you pay taxes. It was your money before they took it.

[Anonymous No.23099722]

>>23099579
This, they'd just take his money and give to it to consumers. He's retarded.

[Anonymous No.23099746]

>>23099579
I would stop working if society became so pathetic and as a result I wouldn't be paying taxes. It's also not your money even if you 'earned' it. It formally belongs to the bank and your 'pay' goes to the bank as well so they can gamble with it.
Either way relying on money is pleb cattle mentality.
>>23099722
And I don't care.

[Anonymous No.23099752]

>>23099579
>>23099722

People who argue like you two are usually very low IQ.

[Anonymous No.23099756]

>>23099746
You're a teenager forming your ridiculous opinions based on ad hoc guesses about how the world works. You have never held a job.

[Anonymous No.23099764]

>>23099746
>>23099752
Obvious samefagging, barely even tried.

[Anonymous No.23099773]

>>23099756
What I said is simply the truth, not a guess. Your boss gets rax cuts for employing you. Your bank gets money to gamble with by your boss putting your money there. The central bank owns the paperlets you get to use to buy useless garbage with to sweeten your pathetic cattle life.
The earlier I can liberate myself from this and stop with both working for someone else and relying on money, the better.
And don't get me started with how arrogantly entrepreneurs behave towards their workers.

[Anonymous No.23099956]

>>23097849
The people seething are the 80% that barely do any work. Imagine having to write an extra few emails lmao

[Anonymous No.23099984]

Same reason only 1/3rd of the antebellum south was enslaved: if slaves outnumber whites, they'll rise up and take revenge on them, as is what happened in Saint-Domingue when the combined white and mixed-race population found itself outnumbered 10-1.

Contrary to what a lot of people think, society indeed is a pyramid, but it's an inverted one. This isn't an unstable way to run society; it's how the vast majority of societies have been arranged since the dawn of sedentary civilization.

In all societies, those at the top form just enough alliances and economic connections to maintain a majority that’ll always defend the system. Strictly speaking, although the ruling class (aristocrats in pre-modernity, bourgeoise today) alone are outnumbered by the rest of the population (commoners/all non-bourgeoise,) when combined with their allies (the petite bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy,) the ruling class is the majority. The reason the ruling class is almost never overthrown is because their allies aren’t counted amongst their number, giving the false impression that this top-heavy system is actually far closer to what you’d expect a normal pyramid to look like.

In truth, the proletariat may do all the work and may be the only group actually needed in society, like slaves, they’re nothing more than a sizable (although still doomed) minority. In times where their numbers are being thinned-out by the appetites of the majority above them squeezing them out of existence, you’ll see a steady stream of downwardly mobile members of the labor aristocracy, such as what we’re seeing now in the first world. Again, this downward movement still doesn’t restructure the pyramid into a proper state, since those laboring to produce surplus will increasingly find themselves unable to reproduce, while those owning the surplus are able to increase in number, pushing their weakest allies amongst the labor aristocracy down into the proletariat to replace those who’ve been churned out of existence. In time, laborers and the impoverished will always find themselves unable to afford continuing their genetic lineages after a few generations, while the ruling class will always expand, always continuing the endless redistribution of surplus by having indefinite (but always temporary) waves of downward mobilization into the enslaved class.

Essentially, it’s the ruling class which always pushes the proletariat out of existence, and replaces the perished with the most distant, least needed members of their own number. Although those at the top always stay at the top, their weaker allies are always going downward.

[Anonymous No.23099997]

I can't even get any job. I wish I was rural. It must be so cozy and easy to get a job

[Anonymous No.23100023]

>>23095594
>>23097876
>>23093705
One issue is that it is almost impossible to go from manager to worker despite being very easy to go from worker to management. My dad works in industry, about 20 years ago he got moved to management and he hates it, has hated it, for about 15 years, he's awful at office shit and cannot move up into higher management because he has worker qualifications/experience and not a uni degree or the right connections. He would have loved to have gone back to having a van and fixing shit on site while adding so much more value to the company even on a reduced schedule for his age, but in both prestige and pay it would be a demotion and so the company wont/cant offer it and he wouldnt/cannot ask for it. Now he does about 3 hours of work a week and the other 35 being a frustrated busybody.

[Anonymous No.23100029]

>>23099516
This point of view is acceptable only if you consider that society must technologically regress to the stone age

[Anonymous No.23100047]

>>23100023
There are some very technical jobs in which you can chose to never go management and still have a great career and gain lots of money, while doing technical stuff your whole life, that’s especially true in fields like software engineering or cybersecurity

[Anonymous No.23100063]

I haven't learned a complex job, but once I have a farm and the freedom to live on my estate without relying on other 'people' I might use my free time to research the melting of metals inside a secret chamber and pass the trade on to my son once he reaches 15 years of age.

[Anonymous No.23100070]

>bruh what do CEOs even do?
stupid
organizing is more real than labor. organizing has implicit value; anything well-organized is better than something unorganized. putting labor into a task is meaningless unless there's an organizational structure around it.

[Anonymous No.23100088]

>>23100063
It's not a trade thats just a hobby

[Anonymous No.23100091]

>>23099984
i.e. "Settlers" was correct, the white majority throughout US history has always been amongst the bourgeoisie alliance; America's true proletariat has always been its non-white population. However, the ruling class is now worried that they've shifted too many of their white allies downward, and know they can't count on their protection if they no longer exist.

This leads us to the current debate over immigration, where Democrats have staked-out the position that the lost proletariat needs to be replaced by non-white migrants, so that the highly-educated, high-skilled, white labor aristocracy isn’t shocked into rebellion by so rapid a reduction in quality of life. Meanwhile, Republicans want to keep these people out, since they feel America's current proletariat and labor aristocracy are still far too large and need to be whittled down more before they inevitably soften their migration stance in a few decades. Republicans are less worried about a rebellious proletariat than they are the sinking of the labor aristocracy happening too slowly; an angry proletariat is always defeated, but an enraged labor aristocracy and petite bourgeoisie is large and powerful enough to overthrow the bourgeoisie and exterminate them.

The bourgeoisie can survive off a small proletariat and replenish its number soon enough. It cannot survive if all its allies are gone and have joined the proletariat in rebellion.

[Anonymous No.23100125]

>>23100023
>and he wouldnt/cannot ask for it
I highly doubt the "cannot" part, he made a choice. I can understand that it's a difficult conversation to have, but it's still just embarrassing that he would rather be miserable for 15 years than swallow his pride for one moment.

[Anonymous No.23100134]

>>23100091
If /pol/-tards were serious about saving the white race and could actually think, they'd support a high, steady stream of non-white immigrants into the country, so that they'll be enslaved instead of members of the white, ruling-class majority. Obviously, their numbers can't become too large since they need to remain a minority that's too weak to rebel, but they need to be large enough for the surplus to continue being generated, so that the bourgeoisie don't deem it necessary for more white people to be pushed down into the enslaved class.

[Anonymous No.23100199]

>>23100091
Most Western societies of nowadays don't have a rigid aristocracy anymore. You are a part of the aristocracy because you say so. There's no social obligation for anyone to listen to someone else. Inside his house everyone is king. This is important to understand the next part of my explanation. Even if there's white people who are not associated to the formal upper class, there's no reason to believe that they are so because they have been excluded by the former. They might as well just not commit to current society, and form a parallel one that follows it's own rules.
>>23100134
Then would happen what already has happened. After a few generations the underclass is no longer a bunch of individuals who admit them being low class to reasonable explanations like their parents being born in a foreign country. They would start forming an anonymous mass and one day call injustice. The non-white underclass would usurp the white upper class, and America would turn into a shithole.

[Anonymous No.23100399]

>>23099188
It's not UBI since you are forced to serve before you get the income. It's literal serfdom (since wages are so low that you can never buy property on modern day wages)

[Anonymous No.23100536]

>>23100399
Serfs work the land and keep a portion of their labor to survive. They literally worked. 80 percent of office workers do basically nothing but move papers. They don't actually work, there is no labor. It's not serfdom, it's farce.

[Anonymous No.23100639]

let me guess, that "62% of jobs are white collar" is as far as empirical support goes in this book?

[Anonymous No.23100717]

>>23100125
I bet you are still in high school/college.

[Anonymous No.23100756]

>>23100717
This is such weird cope.

[Anonymous No.23100824]

>>23100756
not cope. its obvious to anyone who is old enough to have a family or a mortgage.

[Anonymous No.23100835]

>>23100824
Uh, no it's not.

[Anonymous No.23100844]

>>23100824
Its really not. Just spend less money and dont wrap yourself up in bullshit. He was able to live before with his family on his old job but now suddenly cant? Come on.

[Anonymous No.23100873]

>>23100844
This. Even if his employer actually got weird and refused to budge (and we'll never know if they would have since he didn't try, but it is highly unlikely since would violate the near-universal "path of least resistance" approach that employers have on stuff like this), he could just find a different company and come up with a good bullshit line about why he's leaving.
>>23100824
I'm sorry but your dad is actually pretty fucking spineless. It's not rare or anything, lots of people are like this and spend their lives reacting to random-ass notions and weakly-founded fear, but he's one of them.

[Anonymous No.23100886]

Wow this thread pushed some buttons LMAO

[Anonymous No.23101009]

>>23093733
Or you could have 70 well-paid people endlessly arguing over where to put the sand piles, just to run out of budget and scrap the whole thing.

[Anonymous No.23101022]

>>23093705
>How do people not realize that a majority of us being essentially organizers for real actual workers doesn't make sense? I
Optimisation makes perfect sense. People working to optimise logistics is often more valuable than the mere physical labour of the logistics.
The question is not whether optimisation is valuable, the question is the degree to which it is needed.

Most of it nowadays, I agree, is useless. Half of that useless stuff (Tax attorneys, financial managers etc.) are entirely predicated on idiocy
in governance. That is, many modern jobs exist only to clean up the mess and navigate the confusion that governments cause.

Of the remaining half, perhaps less than half, we find more useful jobs. Warehouse managers, plant operators (non-labourer skilled fields) etc. all improve society in meaningful ways without doing real labour.
Mere labour is often the least efficient and least productive way to spend time.

[Anonymous No.23101195]

>>23093732
>every white man
Every white woman. The men outside the coasts are mostly jobless.

[Anonymous No.23101199]

>>23093975
The parents leach off the kids. And babies are sacrificed.