David Graeber: So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary

Radical heritage David Graeber. Photograph: Frantzesco Kangaris for the Guardian

A few years ago David Graebers mother had a series of strokes. Social workers advised him that, in order to pay for the home care she needed, he should apply for Medicaid, the US government health insurance programme for people on low incomes. So he did, only to be sucked into a vortex of form filling and humiliation familiar to anyone whos ever been embroiled in bureaucratic procedures.

At one point, the application was held up because someone at the Department of Motor Vehicles had put down his given name as Daid; at another, because someone at Verizon had spelled his surname Grueber. Graeber made matters worse by printing his name on the line clearly marked signature on one of the forms. Steeped in Kafka, Catch-22 and David Foster Wallaces The Pale King, Graeber was alive to all the hellish ironies of the situation but that didnt make it any easier to bear. We spend so much of our time filling in forms, he says. The average American waits six months of her life waiting for the lights to change. If so, how many years of our life do we spend doing paperwork?

The matter became academic, because Graebers mother died before she got Medicaid. But the form-filling ordeal stayed with him. Having spent much of my life leading a fairly bohemian existence, comparatively insulated from this sort of thing, I found myself asking: is this what ordinary life, for most people, is really like? writes the 53-year-old professor of anthropology in his new book The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Running around feeling like an idiot all day? Being somehow put in a position where one actually does end up acting like an idiot?

I like to think Im actually a smart person. Most people seem to agree with that, Graeber says, in a restaurant near his London School of Economics office. OK, I was emotionally distraught, but I was doing things that were really dumb. How did I not notice that the signature was on the wrong line? Theres something about being in that bureaucratic situation that encourages you to behave foolishly.

But Graebers book doesnt just present human idiocy in its bureaucratic form. Its main purpose is to free us from a rightwing misconception about bureaucracy. Ever since Ronald Reagan said: The most terrifying words in the English language are: Im from the government and Im here to help, it has been commonplace to assume that bureaucracy means government. Wrong, Graeber argues. If you go to the Mac store and somebody says: Im sorry, its obvious that what needs to happen here is you need a new screen, but youre still going to have to wait a week to speak to the expert, you dont say Oh damn bureaucrats, even though thats what it is classic bureaucratic procedure. Weve been propagandised into believing that bureaucracy means civil servants. Capitalism isnt supposed to create meaningless positions. The last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they dont really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.

Graebers argument is similar to one he made in a 2013 article called On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, in which he argued that, in 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the end of the century technology would have advanced sufficiently that in countries such as the UK and the US wed be on 15-hour weeks. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didnt happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

Which jobs are bullshit? A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble. But its not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. He concedes that some might argue that his own work is meaningless. There can be no objective measure of social value, he says emolliently.

In The Utopia of Rules, Graeber goes further in his analysis of what went wrong. Technological advance was supposed to result in us teleporting to new planets, wasnt it? He lists some of the other predicted technological wonders hes disappointed dont exist: flying cars, suspended animation, immortality drugs, androids, colonies on Mars. Speaking as someone who was eight years old at the time of the Apollo moon landing, I have clear memories of calculating that I would be 39 years of age in the magic year 2000, and wondering what the world around me would be like. Did I honestly expect I would be living in a world of such wonders? Of course. Do I feel cheated now? Absolutely.

But what happened between the Apollo moon landing and now? Graebers theory is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was mounting fear about a society of hippie proles with too much time on their hands. The ruling class had a freak out about robots replacing all the workers. There was a general feeling that My God, if its bad now with the hippies, imagine what itll be like if the entire working class becomes unemployed. You never know how conscious it was but decisions were made about research priorities. Consider, he suggests, medicine and the life sciences since the late 1960s. Cancer? No, thats still here. Instead, the most dramatic breakthroughs have been with drugs such as Ritalin, Zoloft and Prozac all of which, Graeber writes, are tailor-made, one might say, so that these new professional demands dont drive us completely, dysfunctionally, crazy.

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David Graeber: So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary