Modern Times & Hard Times

In Western democracies, heavy labour has been continually on the decline, factories have been closing, heavy industry outsourced. So isn’t Dickens’ criticism in Hard Times of the industrial northern city Coketown (based on Preston in Lancashire) simply from another irrelevant age?: “...inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow.” Boring long-gone world of factory workers! Or just an historical curiosity, lucky we’ve escaped from that. Not entirely, perhaps. What might this still mean to us? 

Although fewer people are caught in the repetitive mechanisation of heavy industry, the mechanisation of work has continued apace. It is commonplace to see a workday task as repetitive and disconnected from its final outcome in the process of production. So we are left in a vacuum working at a fragment, which has no real meaning to us, and can feel useless and dispossessed. Like in a production line we screw on the bolts and don’t see the thing that rolls out at the end. Perhaps what rolls out is useless anyway. Yet we need creative outcomes. Such mechanical tasks can just as easily turn us into the “the piston of the steam-engine," in the Coketown factories, "[which] worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness".

 

Bullshit Jobs (2018, Allen Lane) by David Graeber, professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics

In this book, which includes serious reflections on our working world and is the result of years of research and interviews, Graeber comes up with some disturbing facts, confirmed by the respected polling agency YouGov. Very many people, up to 40 percent in Britain and the Netherlands, and surely elsewhere, believe their job to be useless, if not harmful. More than a third of people believed that their job did not “make a meaningful contribtion to the world.” This is what Graeber calls, rather irreverently, a Bull**** Job. They believe that if it were to disappear, no-one would notice and the world would be no worse off for it. It might even be a better place. This largely unspoken malaise sits beneath the surface of millions of people's lives, however they, we as a society, might wish to hide it. So Dickens' denunciation of alienation finds a modern echo. Surely, the quietly rebellious “acolytes” and “junior messengers” in the Circumlocution Office thought nothing less...

Here are some of Graeber’s observations. We can wonder what many of us are being educated for.

From the section “On the misery of not being a cause”:

“...much of our sense of being a self, a being discrete from its surrounding environment, comes from the joyful realisation that we can have predictable effects on that environment. This is true for infants and remains true throughout life. To take away that joy entirely is to squash a human like a bug.”

“...the integrity of the human psyche, even human physical integrity (insofar as these two can ever be entirely distinguished), is caught up in relations with others, and the sense of one’s capacity to affect the world...”.

“It’s hard to imagine anything more soul destroying (than...) being forced to commit acts of abitrary bureaucratic cruelty against one’s will. To become the face of the machine that one despises.”