> Really? I wish you had some time to list some, this is interesting to me, and a huge brush to paint across the entire book.
I can give it a shot just as example.
I grabbed my copy off the shelf and opened up to the middle (page 157 to be specific, but if you want to give me another page number between 1 and 326 I'm happy to do the same thing for that page).
The first thing I see on that page is a quote from Barack Obama and some commentary on it:
> "I don't think in ideological terms. I never have," Obama said, continuing on the health care theme. "Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, 'Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.' That represents one million, two million, three million jobs filled by people working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?"
> I would encourage the reader to reflect on this passage because it might be considered a smoking gun. What is the president saying here? He acknowledges that millions of jobs in medical insurance companies like Kaiser or Blue Cross are unnecessary. He even acknowledges that a socialized health system would be more efficient than the current market-based system, since it would reduce unnecessary paperwork and reduplication of effort by dozens of competing private firms. But he's also saying it would be undesirable for that very reason. One motive, he insists, for maintaining the existing market-based system is precisely its inefficiency, since it is better to maintain those millions of basically useless office jobs than to cast about trying to find something else for the paper pushers to do.
> So here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legislative achievement--and he is insisting that a major factor in the form that legislature [sic] took is the preservation of bullshit jobs.
> To those who accuse me of being a paranoid conspiracy theorist for suggesting that government plays any conscious role in creating and maintaining bullshit jobs, I hereby rest my case. Unless you think Obama was lying about his true motives (in which case, who exactly is the conspiracy theorist?), we must allow that those governing us are, in fact, aware that "market solutions" create inefficiencies, and unnecessary jobs in particular...
Okay, lots to digest there. Let's ignore the grammatical mistake (it should say legislation instead of legislature).
If we follow the citation for that Obama quote we discover that it's not a primary source but rather an article from The Nation: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/mr-obama-goes-wash...
...published June 26, 2006.
Now ignore that The Nation is a leftist publication so the context of that quote is already suspect. Graeber says:
> here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legislative achievement
That quote isn't only taken out of context, it's given a new context that's an outright lie.
Obama was not president in 2006 and in that quote he wasn't "reflecting on his signature legislative achievement".
In fact, the next line in the article he cites starts, "Shifting back to how he sees himself in the Senate..."
This is senator Obama, more than a year before he announced he was running for president, answering a specific question about why there needs to be a provision in healthcare legislation for job training for workers who would be displaced if the US moves to a single payer system.
Given the proper context that quote reads very differently and doesn't at all support David's argument.
And even if the context of the quote was what he fabricates it to be (reminder - it's not), the argument still doesn't make sense to me.
Even if a different system would eliminate those jobs it doesn't mean that in the context of the current system those jobs are "bullshit".
If we allow technology to progress far enough almost every job will change or manifest enough to be markedly different from the jobs we have today. People used to get paid to deliver ice door to door. We invented freezers and now there are fewer ice delivery jobs. It doesn't mean those jobs were "bullshit" when the people were doing them, it just means that technology progressed and made them obsolete ... like it eventually will with every job. Of course a bunch of new jobs were created in the process. And those jobs, along with every job, will change and disappear over a long enough time horizon.
So are you arguing that all jobs are bullshit? Well don't we still need people to do stuff? Hmm well we'll need a system to decide who does what. Some kind of distributed system where we vote with our dollars perhaps...
And there's 3 or 4 other ways to cut down the argument there. And that's just a random half-page of the book. The whole thing is like that.