The bones of the modern global economy might still be labor—albeit off-shored to people willing to do it under ruinous conditions—but the lifeblood of that economy is the massive population of workers demoralized by the uselessness of their day-to-day tasks and incentivised to defend (at least passively) existing economic arrangements: the flunkies and goons, duct-tapers, box-tickers, task-masters, and their wannabes.
BS Jobs
These terms come from anthropologist David Graeber, coming under the umbrella of what he calls B******t Jobs:
We have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector … including the creation of … industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the … expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And … those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or, for that matter, the whole host of ancillary industries (dog washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones. These are what I propose to call “b******t jobs.”
The existence of these BS jobs contradicts the (theory of) how a capitalist labor market should work:
It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen … According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ.
Graeber’s conclusion is that such jobs do, in the final analysis, serve a purpose:
The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger.
The Professional Managerial Class
Principle among these jobs is what we may call the Professional Managerial Class (PMC). Writer and activist Barbara Ehrenreich discussed the term, one that she and her husband John coined, as follows:
There was a real difference between people who worked essentially telling other people what to do … and people who do the work that other people tell them to do. It becomes a difference between manual and mental labor, but it carries with it a [lot of] weight—I see it all the time, the contempt for especially white working-class people among leftists of college backgrounds.
Social Climbers as Social Enforcers
And waiting at the wings is a (probably decreasing) population of young aspirants to PMC status, products of higher education’s overproduction of would-be, high-status job-fillers. For purposes of social control, these frustrated, would-be PMCs are given a scapegoat to explain the scarcity of the positions they covet, so that they do
[n]ot rebel against a structure that renders [their] job expendable [and] in order that the aspirant does not let the brunt of his frustration fall on those whose status and material conditions he desires.
This segment of aspirational youth becomes an important element of conformity-enforcement, because the scapegoat they are told to take their ire out on are those who, for ideological or material reasons, pose a threat to the established order.
The scapegoat is most often that part of society at the overlap between those who retain some economic independence, such as farmers and the self-employed, and those who do not align their vision of ‘the good society’ with contemporary economic pressure, giving their allegiance to some older ideal instead:
Representing older, inherited identities, the scapegoat is seen as a hold-out, restraining progress [and the ideal of individual emancipation]. The scapegoat is the imagined past, the country hick, the redneck, etc.
Such is the material interest motivating ‘virtue-signaling.’
Of course, the would-be PMC only works against his own interests,
In practice, individual emancipation from the past, for example by replacing old cultural homogeneity with multiculturalism, functions to undercut the stability would-be PMCs crave, bringing in cheap immigrant labor and making it an unspoken matter of principle that salaries need not allow young couples to start a family.
The Rebel Classes
But the scapegoating of those outside the BS and PMC labor market is not a matter of mere rhetoric. It also manifests in such policies as might limit private truck ownership or assault on the purchasing-power of farmers.
The Dutch press revealed documents showing that the EU Commission applied backroom pressure on the Dutch government to issue mandatory purchase orders to farmers, to advance the country’s controversial nitrogen policy. According to the documents seen by journalists, senior European Commission official Diederik Samson advised the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture to prioritise forced buyouts of farms to break the backs of protestors in November 2022.
This has led to predictable reactions—from Canadian truckers to Dutch farmers—and, in some cases, to promising victories:
The Netherlands has seen a grassroots backlash against plans to slash the nation’s agricultural industry under the guise of environmentalism, culminating in a major electoral victory for the Dutch farmer’s movement (BBB) this month.
