BULLSHIT JOBS – a book presentation, Blaž Kosovel and Ajda Pistotnik

(Billshit Jobs: A Theory) David Graeber 2024; 442 strani

Participants: the author of the accompanying study Blaž Kosovel, the discussion will be moderated by Ajda Pistotnik, political scientist, head of the Policy Lab think-tank and former researcher on the economics of debt.

A book launch of Bullshit Jobs, a book by anarchist anthropologist David Graeber. The author of the translation and the title is Aleksandra Rekar.

The two speakers will present the relationship between well-paid meaningless jobs and underpaid or even unpaid caring and creative jobs, and will try to answer the question why meaningless jobs are multiplying, while the salaries of those employees who create and produce many useful things are staying the same or even decreasing.

American anthropologist and political activist David Graeber (1961–2020) wrote a short essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” for Strike! magazine in 2013, and its publication sparked an unexpected response. “If the hypothesis of any essay was ever confirmed by the reaction it received, this is such a case,” Graeber recalls in his book. The article caused quite an explosion. Readers responded en masse with their testimonies about such jobs, and Graeber later used these testimonies as anthropological field data, analyzing and placing them in a historical and social context. This led to the creation of his 2018 book “Bullshit Jobs: A Theory,” whose central thesis is that modern society has an increasing number of jobs that are mainly self-serving, and that people employed in these jobs are well aware that they are not doing anything particularly useful (and are therefore unhappy). Graeber concludes that society as a whole would likely benefit if such jobs did not exist at all. Since these pointless jobs are not economically justifiable either, it is evident that their function is political, he argues. It is less likely that people employed in some regularly and well-paid bullshit job will become politically active…

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Blaž Kosovel (1981) is a researcher, cultural worker, tour guide, self-employed in culture, editor of the magazine Razpotja, and project leader of Ab Initio – Urban Utopia (as part of EPK 2025), aimed at creating a digital archive of Nova Gorica and presenting other European new towns. His research focuses on intellectual and social history as well as cultural and urban geography. His doctoral dissertation was expanded into a scientific monograph titled “Why the USA Has No Ministry of Culture – From Agriculture to Cultural Industry, from the City of Rome to American Civilization” (Založba ZRC SAZU, 2022), where he describes, among other things, the central role of corporations and management in shaping modern USA. As a Fulbright scholar, he was a researcher at the City University of New York in 2013.

Sajeta 2024