Yeah there’s a reason I’ve turned down promotions to work in an office. I couldn’t hack it. I probably will stay working in the shop indefinitely. I work with both technicians and engineers, in the shop and the office. I actually like most of the office staff, but I can get a sense of the cattiness if I hang around too long lol. But the techs are my fellas, it’s very fun to dick around all day while workin and just riff about whatever. Plus sitting in an office chair all day sounds miserable to me, I need to be moving around and using tools and being hands on.

Maybe look into the trades? I have one of the cushier jobs in manufacturing but a lot of them can be hard on the body, digging ditches all day and things. But being outside is nice (sometimes lol)

If the capitalists and managers you deal with don’t use their “human capital” for directly getting more surplus value, it’s always about dividing up surplus value that was stolen elsewhere.

A manager (class traitor) who commands more laborers can lay claim to a larger portion of stolen surplus value and so has an incentive to keep work ineffective by keeping lots of workers in their department/division to do meaningless tasks.

David Graebers “bullshit jobs”, that someone else suggested, isn’t wrong about this, but I feel like he’s coming out of this corner of US anarchism that ignores and avoids Marx and “rediscovers” Marxist results in slightly less coherent ways with different terminology, no dialectics and no view of the totality.

Marx already gives examples in capital 1 how the surplus value is divided among the ruling class:

• industrial capitalists get the part called profit,
• landlords get the part called rent,
• finance capitalists get the part called interest.

In capital 3, he further explains how the surplus value is divided among different sectors based on the organic composition of capital.

The point is that all of this doesn’t change the underlying analysis at all. All the laws, like the tendency of the rate of profit to fall still follow, no matter how the thieves divide the surplus value after it is stolen. Middle managers getting a larger part of the pie by creating bullshit jobs is just another example.

It’s good to know all this to maybe strategize where we might drive a wedge between our enemies, but I just don’t like that some anarchists frame it like this makes Marx irrelevant, I mean the main contradiction, the one about socialized labor vs private accumulation, is literally about how capitalism is inefficient and stands in the way of organizing shared labor in a way that benefits all.

And management is not alone in this either: Industrial capital causes overproduction, landlords are massively inefficient, a pure parasitic drain on society, finance capital exacerbates the periodic crisis immensely. Capitalism still keeps them around because in it’s short-sightedness, it’s unable to be efficient. It’s constantly cannibalizing the conditions of it’s own reproduction. We don’t need to be surprised by one more way this inefficiency manifests.

To be more explicit, the reason, that is, the short term incentives for keeping around the long term detrimental parasites are the crisis tendencies of capital: Keeping landlords means there’s a safe way to park capital in a crisis and still earn rent. Finance capital means it’s possible to lay claim on future surplus value in the form of interest, if the present is in a profitability crisis. Keeping well paid and inefficient middle manager class traitors around safeguards against crisis caused labor unrest, which is then disciplined by said managers (and solidarity is broken efficiently beforehand, as you described).

I think, that wraps it up, but there’s a whole different angle to respond to your post, which is about alienation and alienated management creating alienating working conditions, but I have to catch some sleep so I can get back to my own alienating bullshit job tomorrow ;)

(It’s not all bullshit, but it definitely is mostly bullshit this week)

Good luck comrade! At least understanding why it’s all bullshit might keep us grounded. Libs would be angry, confused and likely blaming themselves and/or minorities. We just have our anger to deal with and it’s already directed at the right people.

pretty good book about this subject, other comment says about the same

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

The way I see it:

Working for PMC is to become a true “welfare queen”.

Amerikkka produces a reserve army of labor (half of them are mouth breathers that don’t even deserve their diplomas, but that’s another rant).

Creating that reserve army of labor reduces the chances of any unionization efforts to come to fruition, why make a fuss if you and your coworkers can all be replaced with the snap of a finger?

Now you have kids not only thankful to have a job, they’re giddy with excitement that they can work for LockheedNorthropRaytheon LLC.

They’d rather pay you enough to be satisfied, and on top of it now you can tell yourself that you earned it, and you’re now wondering why some people have it worse if it was so easy for you to make it.

I know it’s terrible to draw comparisons, but it does remind me of how colonialism worked. Introduce some form of supremacy between two groups, feed one group the scraps of your exploitation while you’re robbing them both. They’ll gladly help you keep the other one down as long as they feel superior to the other.

This doesnt happen here everyone is out to fuck you for some fake approval for fake things.

The particular type of bullshit job you find yourself in is specifically for creating the climbers of middle management. Its the lobster bucket that the next higher tier of management gets to dip into for the purpose of filling lower level management positions or to “promote” into a new section/project leaders that didn’t exist before.

The upsetting reality is that you and I are doing this stupid little dance to make rich people feel important, that’s about it. The bourgeoisie are little babies who aren’t satisfied if they can’t see a bunch of people toiling away in their name. They’re playing a video game and we’re the NPCs. we need to be seen so they can feel superior.

I can’t bring myself to buy into the shit, but I’ve not long figured out that all shitty bosses want is to be made to feel like a super important super smart big boy.

Graeber claimed they served 5 functions (borrowed from Wikipedia):

Graeber states that more than half of societal work is pointless, both large parts of some jobs and five types of entirely pointless jobs:

1. Flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, store greeters;
2. Goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, or to prevent other goons from doing so, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists;
3. Duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers with lost luggage;
4. Box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers, academic administration;
5. Taskmasters, who create extra work for those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals.

You could say its for control but control of what? Controlling workers who produce nothing? Keep the burgeoning class of PMC wankers appeased?

I’d say probably that. Every court needs a jester. Plus, the PMC wankers don’t necessarily realize that they’re unproductive, too. They’re in that position because they’re good at mindlessly replicating hierarchy. You’re there to help prop up consumer demand with your income, enhance the social status of people above you because they look better when their teams and budgets are bigger, and be a whipping boy when convenient.

Think also about the “useless retainers” that swarmed around feudal rulers at the end of feudalism. When feudalism began in Europe, it was a bunch of barbarians rushing in from the steppe to destroy the Roman Empire. By the time feudalism was really starting to fall apart a thousand years later, it involved child rulers being surrounded by conniving priests, advisors, relatives, jesters, etc., all of whom nonetheless had better gigs than the peasants toiling in the fields (and who were obviously the real source of feudal wealth).

This is just how modes of production end. The ends of feudalism, capitalism, and slavery all look kind of similar in some ways. People are going to argue with me for saying this, but ur communism might have even ended in the same way in the Fertile Crescent with the invention of agriculture. People were out there building shit (like Gobekli Tepe and other megalithic sites) as hunter-gatherers before agriculture really existed. We don’t know much about those societies because they existed before writing did, but maybe their “rulers” also had swarms of useless backstabbing retainers. Their presence is a form of desperation. The system is falling apart, but the ruling class can’t understand why or doesn’t want to, so the answer is just to get more advisors who are never going to tell them the truth: that it’s over. A lot of speculation here on my part so let’s go

I actually haven’t even experienced the pleasant misery of a bullshit job in awhile, even though on some level all jobs under capitalism are bullshit and without a profit motive, almost everything could be automated.

More employees means big bossman is more special. Hire more employees!

Here’s my hunch, as someone who is unfortunately lumpenproletariat.

Jobs are sadly becoming more and more a privilege. So a lot of the BS jobs you see is porky helping out a friend or family member, who in turn is helping out a friend or family member. Hence why nepotism is so important these days. The real economy is gone.

This is just a hunch, I haven’t read the book.

Remember that the people at the top don’t have a perfect view of the organization. Nobody can really see up or down more than a level or two unless they go out of their way to do so,* and most people don’t have a personal incentive to pursue that kind of visibility. I think there’s a strong chance that your job exists because at some point creating it benefited someone above you, by helping to expand or hold on to their influence within the organization. It doesn’t matter if you don’t actually produce anything, the important part is that they were able to convince their superiors to give them a budget for this department, and the more budget they have the more important they seem, and also the more of it they can get away with siphoning for their personal projects.

You might say, but doesn’t the balance sheet show we lose money? It seems like an obvious cut. But there’s someone whose job it is to justify your department’s existence, and they have a strong incentive to keep doing that because if they fail they’ll lose their job too, so the people who make those kinds of decisions are being told this is a necessary expense. Someday one of them, perhaps due to receiving some incentive for finding cuts, may show up and start asking hard questions about what it is you do here, but until then the farce will continue.

*I mean obviously they can look at the org chart and the budget, but unless they’re fairly close to your operations they don’t know that you spend most of your time having meetings about whether to have more meetings; they’re going to assume you do something related to the department’s nominal purpose.

When you have kids you learn to deal with it.

I feel like sometimes it’s compliance, sometimes its corporate oversight, other times its a job that actually benefits the organisation but you’re so alienated from your labour and there’s such a detachment from what you do and the value you create that you don’t see it.