Bullshit Jobs and Moral Ambition
I have read Bullshit Jobs by Graeber before, so I wasn’t surprised to find out that lots of high-paid professionals with fancy job titles turn out to be a complete waste of space in society that serves the people. Unfortunately, we are not living in a society that serves the people. Instead, under the current capitalist system, these jobs either generate profits for the ruling class, complicit in the oppression of the workers, or actively obstruct the proletariat revolution.
What’s interesting about these bullshit jobs to me is that they are unique to imperialist countries like Canada and the US. In the global South, the revolutionary force has historically come from peasants, farmers, and industrial workers. However, in Canada, most of the factories, industrial sectors, and farmland have been moved abroad to colonies or turned into privatized entities.
In consequence, what’s left are a large amount of proletarized people concentrated in urban cities. Some work in small shops or the service industry, such as servers or baristas with minimum wages, while some hold bullshit jobs in corporations and are compensated generously compared to former occupations.
The salaried professionals, even tho according to the Marxist definition, are the proletariat. They don’t own the means of production and work for a wage. But are they the proletariat? They enjoy a degree of material comfort and proximity to the ruling class, often benefiting indirectly from surplus value extracted from the Global South. In practice, they fit the definition of the petit bourgeoisie.
This group is heavily fragmented. They could be liberals with progressive elements, yet uphold the status quo; they could be conservatives who want to deport immigrants; or they are communists who want a revolution. I always have complicated feelings about this group. Historically speaking, they had played a leading role in the revolution. But at the same time, they could have failed to do proper mass line investigation and be subordinate to what the mass wanted.
The Canadian context adds another layer. It is a settler-colony, where questions of land, sovereignty, and production cannot be separated from Indigenous concepts of ownership. Any revolutionary movement here would look very different from one in the Philippines or other anti-imperialist struggles for national liberation.
As an international student, I’m still on my way to understanding the Canadian society, and so David Graeber's book gave me a glimpse of it. These reflections are quite different from my background as a Vietnamese of Lebanese heritage. The struggle in Vietnam, as well as the struggle in Lebanon and the Arab world, is not the same with the one happening now in Canada.
This connects to my reading of Rutger Bregman’s Moral Ambition. I’ve struggled for a long time with the question of why I don’t feel happy, even tho I have all the privileges and opportunities to be more than happy. I mean, I do feel happy, but it rarely stays for long. Over the past year, I’ve found purpose through organizing: joining the Palestinian solidarity movement and engaging with labor struggles. I’ve been out there doing the real deeds, not just a Marxist armchair or online activist. But things are so brutal and gruesome that I sometimes don’t know how to wake up every day and keep going. I burn out faster than Thomas Clarkson, at only a year into organizing. But to be fair, he had fewer problems in 1794.
Worse, the burnout doesn’t always come from political defeats—it often stems from interpersonal tensions within organizing spaces. Navigating conflict, caring for comrades, and holding people accountable without fracturing relationships is a constant challenge. But even through exhaustion, organizing grounds me. I can see myself committing to this struggle for the long ride—a liberated world for all.