Bullshit Jobs
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  • Published: 3 May 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241267363
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

Bullshit Jobs

A Theory

Formats & editions
Paperback
19 Feb 2019
EBook
3 May 2018
Audiobook
15 May 2018
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Huge swathes of people spend their days performing tasks they secretly believe are not really necessary. This book shows why, and what we can do about it.

Back in 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes prophesied that by the century's end, technology would see us all working fifteen-hour weeks. But instead, something curious happened. Today, average working hours have not decreased, but increased. And now, across the developed world, three-quarters of all jobs are in services or admin, jobs that don't seem to add anything to society: bullshit jobs. In Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber explores how this phenomenon - one more associated with the 20th-century Soviet Union, but which capitalism was supposed to eliminate - has happened. In doing so, he looks at how we value work, and how, rather than being productive, work has become an end in itself; the way such work maintains the current broken system of finance capital; and, finally, how we can get out of it.
  • Published: 3 May 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241267363
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320
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About the author

David Graeber

David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, and was a contributor to Harper's Magazine, The Guardian, and The Baffler. An iconic thinker and renowned activist, his early efforts helped to make Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement. He died on 2 September 2020.

portrait photo of David Graeber

Also by David Graeber

The Dawn of Everything
Debt
Debt
Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
The Utopia of Rules
The Democracy Project
See all

Praise for Bullshit Jobs

Praise for The Democracy Project: 'Clear, pungent and right ... a compact and incisive account of why capitalism has run with such a smash into the buffers'

Times Higher Education

Graeber's talent is to take big concepts and unpack them, forcing us to examine their implications for society ... the book is a cool drink of water after so much dry, academic writing on the "revolutions" of 2011'

New Statesman

Captures the joys and fears of a movement

Observer

The most influential radical political thinker of the moment

New Yorker