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Currently reading
Apr. 5th, 2019 07:59 pmUgh, this has been a Week. Separate from this, but in retrospect it really can't have helped, the theme of my reading this week appears to be 'f*ck capitalism.'
I’m almost finished with David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, which is a fascinating read but also..... incredibly depressing. Particularly, as a very-soon-to-be recent grad, looking for my first Real Job™, reading this book sort of felt like watching Titanic while on a cruise ship.
Graeber developed this book out of the response to a 2013 article he wrote, which went viral and attracted a lot of personal testimonies from people who saw their own experiences in Graeber's theory of "bullshit jobs." This article, published around the time his book came out last year, is a better quick-read summary of his argument. It's definitely an interesting read, especially when he delved into labor history and the development of social norms around employment in his examination of how we got to this point, but I haven't finished the book yet, so I don’t know if he concludes with any suggestions on how to shift away from this phenomenon besides, like, 'overthrow capitalism.' (Edit 4/7: Although he quibbles over the actual value of "policy recommendations" given that he's an anarchist and believes we shouldn't have policies at all, he does advocate for a Universal Basic Income in order to "detach livelihood from work.")
I also started Sarah Smarsh's memoir Heartland, which coincides weirdly well. Graeber touches on the increased undervaluing of actually productive labor, and waves awkwardly in the general direction of a discussion of "the white working class" and class resentment, but it's not his strongest point. On the other hand, Smarsh — "a fifth-generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side and the product of generations of teenage mothers on her maternal side," as the blurb tells us — weaves a discussion of the broader political and economic factors of rural poverty in the U.S. into the story of her own family.
I'm only a couple chapters in, but so far I give it two really enthusiastic thumbs up. The only way I can describe it is "really eye-opening," because I've never been closer to a wheat field than the outside of a car window in my life, but it's not, like, shocking poverty porn or anything. Smarsh writes with love of the place and the people she came from, even as she's frustrated by the cyclical poverty that's trapped her family for generations and how they've suffered because of it. She also deals really thoughtfully with the idea of white privilege, and how it intersected with her family's severe class disadvantages.
I’m almost finished with David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, which is a fascinating read but also..... incredibly depressing. Particularly, as a very-soon-to-be recent grad, looking for my first Real Job™, reading this book sort of felt like watching Titanic while on a cruise ship.
Graeber developed this book out of the response to a 2013 article he wrote, which went viral and attracted a lot of personal testimonies from people who saw their own experiences in Graeber's theory of "bullshit jobs." This article, published around the time his book came out last year, is a better quick-read summary of his argument. It's definitely an interesting read, especially when he delved into labor history and the development of social norms around employment in his examination of how we got to this point, but I haven't finished the book yet, so I don’t know if he concludes with any suggestions on how to shift away from this phenomenon besides, like, 'overthrow capitalism.' (Edit 4/7: Although he quibbles over the actual value of "policy recommendations" given that he's an anarchist and believes we shouldn't have policies at all, he does advocate for a Universal Basic Income in order to "detach livelihood from work.")
I also started Sarah Smarsh's memoir Heartland, which coincides weirdly well. Graeber touches on the increased undervaluing of actually productive labor, and waves awkwardly in the general direction of a discussion of "the white working class" and class resentment, but it's not his strongest point. On the other hand, Smarsh — "a fifth-generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side and the product of generations of teenage mothers on her maternal side," as the blurb tells us — weaves a discussion of the broader political and economic factors of rural poverty in the U.S. into the story of her own family.
I'm only a couple chapters in, but so far I give it two really enthusiastic thumbs up. The only way I can describe it is "really eye-opening," because I've never been closer to a wheat field than the outside of a car window in my life, but it's not, like, shocking poverty porn or anything. Smarsh writes with love of the place and the people she came from, even as she's frustrated by the cyclical poverty that's trapped her family for generations and how they've suffered because of it. She also deals really thoughtfully with the idea of white privilege, and how it intersected with her family's severe class disadvantages.
