About half of all jobs in capitalist economies are considered pointless and unproductive, i.e., they are socially useless, according to the people who hold them. David Graeber argues that this is by design. In his book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, Graeber posited that the ruling class believes that if ordinary people have both enough free time and material security, it would inevitably lead to a social revolution. Graeber refers to the 1960s in the United States, when the abovementioned condition was met, albeit briefly. During these few years, housing, healthcare and higher education were affordable, workers’ unions were strong, and gains from production and technology actually translated to security for the majority. As a result, people had time on their hands. They used this time to engage in something very dangerous: thinking. According to Graeber, many young people were being relieved of the need to worry about survival, which allowed them to start asking questions and to organise to change the world. This was the ultimate nightmare of the ruling classes. So, they reacted by deliberately creating a world based on work discipline. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes had predicted that by 2030, people would be working 15 hours a week. Graeber explains that the reason we didn’t get anywhere close to the 15-hour workweek predicted by Keynes is that the gains from productivity were diverted into creating administrative hierarchies. Graeber wrote that “Rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector…It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.” Millions of people hold jobs in which they are being paid to do nothing, but for that very reason, they are kept under constant surveillance and control. This explains why people feel busy but feel it is unnecessary. This is neoliberalism, which, to Graeber, was a project of political control, rather than an economic efficiency project, to keep people busy in a world that no longer needed their labour as much as it used to. To Graeber, a population that depends on meaningless work for survival is easier to govern than one with time to reflect. This is because surveillance-heavy, low-autonomy jobs are training grounds for obedience, where work becomes a moral credential without contributing meaningfully to anything. This helps explain why unemployment is somehow stigmatised even when jobs are useless, overwork is celebrated even when it destroys health, and why automation is resisted even when it could reduce toil. In summation, modern capitalism no longer needs most people’s labour, but it still needs their compliance, and that’s what work has become.