/social/ - Socialism

I'm probably preaching to the choir here: it's easy to imagine how many of those jobs would just vanish if our work was motivated by direct wants and needs rather than abstract money. If someone rich can just offer people a salary to be an anti-social lobbyist, union-buster, marketer or corporate lawyer, that's taking human effort away from actual work that needs to be done to fix this broken world.
When you start to add up all the bullshit jobs in the world, when you see just how huge the scope of its wasted manpower is, it's horrifying.

I read this article about bullshit jobs and some of them are just absurd.
https://davidgraeber.org/articles/i-had-to-guard-an-empty-room/ (also published by The Guardian)

Someone I know recently found that their landlord company had no-one in their office when they went to complain. Maybe this is one of the reasons behind a 'my job is to occupy space' story, where a local physical office building exists purely for legal or reputational reasons rather than functional reasons.

The sabotage thread (>>511) has me thinking: how immune to sabotage is a bullshit job?
Obviously it depends on the job: someone guarding an empty room obviously has a different impact to a union-buster when they neglect their job. But what potential does the non-work job have to sabotage? I find the example in >>592 of the Lynx user interesting – they've found a way to do things in a job where their time would otherwise be completely wasted. Perhaps this can create a limited form of a professional revolutionary at the expense of the bourgeoisie, if we can discover, document and exploit certain bullshit jobs which allow the supposed worker to secretly perform some revolutionary activities on-the-clock, rather than simply working a day job and performing revolutionary activity in their remaining spare time.

>>601
People can sabotage others, so when a job is bullshit it may still be able to influence other jobs. Even just incurring a cost and allowing property to be damaged could be on the table.

>>601
The mere fact that you are being paid for something, bullshit or not, suggests the boss wants it done and sabotage would affect them. But on the other hand, failing to guard an empty room probably doesn't do much to fight the bourgeoisie, at least in any way more than giving you more free time to do something useful.

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>>601
I think a better question is, how can goons like union-busters be turned?
Before someone says they inherently can't, look to extreme examples like federal agents getting turned (e.g. DIA's Ana Montes) or state armed forces refusing orders (e.g. soldiers in October Revolution).

>>601
You gotta think outside the box a little. A bullshit job may not involve doing anything relevant in the job itself, but it might provide access to sabotage other things that do matter. Even better perhaps, because the less related to your job the sabotage is, the harder it is to connect the sabotage back to you.

>>657
> how can goons like union-busters be turned?
As your video implies, offer them something better. Simple bribes are less ideal than something more consistent like benefits of collective bargaining. The issue with this is that you don't want to invite reactionary elements into your union or other organization. You can attract people to turn pre-emptively by making the role of a worker more appealing than the role of a strikebreaker or scab. In the more immediate context, where they're already on the strikebreaker side, the stick might be more effective than the carrot - especially if you can target the members of the group (perhaps a shitty boss?) who the others dislike and would endear them to you.