Bullshit Jobs and the Contradiction of Capitalism

Classical and especially neoclassical economic theories are built on the assumption that, under competitive market conditions, economic actors will allocate resources more efficiently. Yet today, particularly in the service and financial sectors, millions of jobs have emerged that appear meaningless, generate no social benefit, and are often regarded as unnecessary even by those who perform them. By analyzing the mechanisms through which these jobs arise in terms of corporate feudalism, financialization, and state policies aimed at preventing social crises, it is possible to draw several important conclusions about the role of artificial intelligence in the contemporary employment crisis.

The Productivity Illusion

In his 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technological progress and automation would enable people to work only fifteen hours per week by the end of the twentieth century. Keynes's prediction regarding productivity growth proved largely correct. However, his expectation that these technological gains would dramatically reduce working hours did not materialize. Productivity increased in agriculture, manufacturing, and industry, and the physical need for human labor declined significantly.

What Keynes failed to foresee was that the newly liberated time would not be used to enhance human well-being and leisure. Instead, the system would fill it with entirely new bureaucratic and hollow forms of employment.

Today, a substantial portion of the modern workforce is employed in jobs that even the workers themselves struggle to explain. David Graeber conceptualized this phenomenon as "bullshit jobs."

Conceptual Framework and the Fivefold Job Typology

Graeber defines a bullshit job as a form of employment that is so completely unnecessary, pointless, or even harmful that the employee themselves cannot fully justify its existence, yet feels obliged to pretend otherwise because of the conditions of employment. The critical distinction here is between "shit jobs" and "bullshit jobs." Garbage collection, caregiving, or mining are difficult, poorly paid, and exhausting occupations. However, their social value is beyond dispute. In contrast, some positions can be questioned even by their own occupants in terms of their functional contribution.

Graeber groups these meaningless jobs into five basic categories:

• Flunkies: Positions created entirely to make someone else, usually a senior executive, feel important, powerful, and influential. Teams of assistants with little actual workload, or representative positions created solely for visibility and status, fall into this category.

• Goons: These consist of aggressive or defensive positions that produce no genuine social value and exist only because competitors have similar roles. Expanded corporate legal departments and public relations structures designed merely to obstruct rivals or manage perceptions belong to this group.

• Duct Tapers: Employees in this category are tasked with applying temporary fixes rather than solving structural and permanent problems within a system. A data-entry worker who must manually correct errors every day because of poorly designed software is an example.

• Box Tickers: These represent formal bureaucratic functions that allow an organization to appear as though it is doing something that it neither truly does nor genuinely values. Performance analysts in large corporations, those who prepare mandatory corporate surveys that nobody reads, and some compliance officers belong in this category.

• Taskmasters: These include middle managers and micromanagement specialists whose role consists primarily of assigning work to people who could function perfectly well on their own, or inventing entirely new and meaningless projects to keep subordinates occupied.

The Structural Paradox of Capitalism and the Mechanisms of Production

Classical economic theory argues that profit-seeking firms operating in free markets will eliminate unnecessary costs. Since companies are not charitable organizations, the existence of these meaningless jobs appears to contradict capitalism's claim to rationality. Three primary dynamics help explain this contradiction:

• Corporate Feudalism and Internal Bureaucracy: Within large organizations, power and status are often measured not by the value one creates but by the number of subordinates one manages. A department manager continuously demands new staff in order to preserve their budget, power, and prestige within the organization. Even if top management remains focused on profits, middle-level bureaucracy creates an artificial employment bubble to sustain its own existence. This is essentially a modern adaptation of feudal lords surrounding themselves with servants purely for display and prestige.

• Financialization and the Economy of Appearances: In many advanced economies today, company valuations are increasingly shaped by financial expectations, brand value, and projections of future growth. Particularly in venture-capital-driven sectors, firms feel compelled to signal constant growth potential and scalability in order to satisfy investors. A company that could operate efficiently with very few employees may create numerous meaningless positions in human resources, marketing, or brand strategy simply to project the image of a vast global enterprise.

• Social Control and the Politics of Security: From the perspective of states and dominant social groups, mass unemployment represents an unmanageable social crisis and a potential threat. If the free time created by automation were genuinely made available to people, large numbers of economically insecure individuals with abundant free time might begin questioning the existing political and economic order. In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell offered a powerful allegory of how perpetual activity, information control, and distraction mechanisms can contribute to the sustainability of political power.

At certain times, governments implement policies that support high levels of employment in order to preserve economic and social stability. The primary objective of such policies is not necessarily direct social control. However, because of the political and social instability that high unemployment can generate, preserving employment often becomes a critical priority for governments.

Cognitive Violence and Worker Alienation

Karl Marx wrote about the alienation of industrial workers from the products they created and from the production process itself. Yet workers of his era at least knew they were producing a car, a shoe, or some other tangible object. For the employee trapped in a bullshit job, alienation takes on a different dimension and becomes a form of psychological and cognitive violence.

Subsequent researchers studying labor processes argued that modern capitalism increasingly fragments work itself and organizes it around systems of control and supervision.

Human beings naturally wish to leave a mark on the world and create meaningful effects. Even if a person receives a high salary, knowing that their work is entirely meaningless can be psychologically devastating. One reason behind burnout, loss of motivation, and the phenomenon of "quiet quitting" may be this structural sense of meaninglessness. When employees realize that they are merely actors in a performance designed to sustain the system, they become alienated both from their labor and from themselves.

Techno-Feudalism and AI

At the present stage of development, artificial intelligence and large language models possess the potential to eliminate many of the middle-management bureaucratic, reporting, data-consolidation, and box-ticking functions that are commonly classified as bullshit jobs.

However, unless property relations change, the AI revolution may not lead humanity into the age of freedom that Keynes envisioned. As companies eliminate these meaningless jobs in order to reduce costs, the resulting mass of unemployed people may face a new wave of dispossession.

Some researchers describe this emerging order as techno-feudalism. According to this perspective, economic power increasingly derives not only from ownership of capital but also from control over digital infrastructure, data networks, and computational capacity.

A narrow technological elite that owns the hardware and cloud-based large models may condemn the rest of society to subscription-based dependency and a precarious form of digital serfdom.

If gains in technological productivity are not translated into broader income growth and increased leisure time for society as a whole, the relationship between productivity growth and social welfare may continue to weaken.

The path out of this vicious cycle lies not in technology itself but in the political economy of distribution. Rather than trapping people in meaningless work through the creation of artificial jobs, policy proposals such as universal basic income (UBI), radical reductions in working hours, and the socialization of technological infrastructure through open-source or public ownership models are increasingly becoming subjects of serious debate.

Whether technology will substitute for human labor is a critically important question. Throughout history, technological transformations have repeatedly generated such substitution effects. This time, however, the scale and scope of the impact are far broader and potentially more disruptive than in previous eras. Another critical issue concerns how the resulting productivity gains will be distributed. If these gains become concentrated solely in the hands of capital owners, technological progress may become not a vehicle of liberation but a source of new forms of dependency.