[CriticalRegion]

I get the appeal of his arguments but after reading the book, it just doesn't sit right with me. A lot if it reminds me too much of fascist arguments about how all of those city liberals don't do actual labor and the only "real jobs" are farm jobs or something.

[diydsp]

Perhaps they have that in common, but facism pushes out into directions that marxism does not. Esp wrt to class, race, and self-determination.

It helps to ask: how many of the modern fascist leaders are retreating to the farm? I see them developing and deploying tech to inceease their grip on power. I see the "farmsy-folk" as a contingent the facists have persuaded to nip at those in the middle. And the means of the persuasion is, ironically, using the Marxist argunent of alienation.

[twosdai]

This is an exceptionally good point. Truly. Thanks for sharing.

[econ]

Seeing is believing I guess?

I often joke that the company I work for did the same job 100 years ago but they only had manual laborers on hundreds of locations. They made the work schedule, they did recruitment. they filled out the contract, every Friday there was an envelope with your salary in it, always the same amount.

Today we have local managers, regional managers, job agencies, cluster coördinators, quality control people, layers of hr people, doctors, instructors and lots of fancy sounding expensive titles that translate poorly. Each with their own fancy car.

So, I ask them what value they add. Makes them furious. I'm not bitter about it, I'm honest about the joke/hypothetical.

The show is much more expensive and we do the manual (actual) work with fewer people. We work much harder and if someone calls in sick all hell breaks lose among the office folk. Zero redundancy.

Some nepotism aside they all think they do important work. Say, the schedule man makes a schedule for 700 people. He works hard but the results are vastly inferior to 8 people working on one location making their own schedule. If you need a day off or want to trade shifts, you just ask a coworker or two. The office worker begs people not to call him. In the future I'm sure he can also make schedules for the office folk(?)

It is that I remember how things use to work. Otherwise i wouldn't even consider if their jobs are useless.

Sitting down for a few minutes to do some administrative tasks is really nice if you are hurling heavy objects and running from left to right all day. Rest improves productivity so it doesn't really cost time. It makes the work less repetitive and if you screw up organizing things yourself you know who to blame.

Here is a simple concept. The job agencies schedules employees, counts hours and pays salaries. After they are done multiple people at the company have to check everything they do. They are doing everything twice! It's very complicated!

With just 8 people on location any idiot can schedule, count hours and multiply by $. It worked fine for 70ish years.

[incr_me]

I agree. I think Stardew Valley is an exhibition of pastoral fascism disguised as a liberal cozy game. A highly mystifying piece of art. I would give it more leeway if it weren't the fact that its utopian imagination is so limited; you build relationships by gifting the exact items the townspeople desire, production still market oriented, homelessness is understood as a choice, large corporations are violently negated in favor of petty production, etc.

For what it's worth, even ignoring the fact that "uselessness" is an ideologically mediated concept, and so taking his horizon for granted, Graeber's work is empirically incorrect. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067 His was the bullshit job.

[rng-concern]

I think whether you can say it's empirically incorrect depends on if the researchers measured the right thing. Measuring: “Do you think your job is useful?” was over-simplifying, and could miss the phenomenon that Graeber was actually talking about.