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a publié une critique de Bullshit Jobs par David Graeber

David Graeber: Bullshit Jobs (Hardcover, 2018, Simon Schuster) 4 étoiles

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is a 2018 book by anthropologist David Graeber that argues the …

A very interesting book about work

4 étoiles

It took me some time to enter into the Bullshit jobs book. At first, it appears as some leftist light essay. The book started when David Graeber wrote a first opinion piece about the fact that a significant percentage of the population is doing work that is useless to society and they know it. This first essay made a lot of noise, and some media made some polls : in UK, more than 35% of people say that they are doing a useless bullshit job. Based on these numbers and lot of testimonies, David Graeber wrote this book to elaborate on this concept. The first chapters appears as quite light : some definitions, some testimonies, some categories of bullshit job. Overall, I wasn't convinced : radically leftist but also pretty light theoretically, not real analysis of what is happening, no stats, everything described in a pretty broad context. But I powered through it and found myself suddenly into pretty intense and deep writing about what is work, what is the value we put into work, how capitalism forced an evolution about these concepts, and all this starting from the question of how do we globally accepts that some works are totally useless. I am not used to read that kind of broad essays, but I really enjoyed this anthropological thinking about work and may read some more David Graebber.