Columbia’s Sociology Department Faculty: Will subvert university suspension of students over pro-Palestine protests, will allow students to attend class, take exams, receive grades, and receive credit
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I hope these protests continue to spread with the same departmental support. There is already massive tension between department faculty and admins at many universities and a huge wave of grad student unionisation in response to terrible working conditions facing both them and non-tenured professors. If they can build solidarity strikes with the anti-Zionist students, the scope of the unrest can expand. Any attack on them by police means a response from UAW since that's who they're with.
There is already massive tension between department faculty and admins at many universities
It reminds me of one of Graeber's Bullshit Jobs/Utopia of Rules points that many of our actually useful public institutions (within the realm of education, healthcare, etc.) have become bloated with class middlemen - a vertically swelling stack of bureaucratic administrators that manage the tension between owners and labourers with increasingly technical systems of means testing and whatever else. These people have a distinct class position from actual educators, so even though professors can be all over the place ideologically depending on their department, it's really not a huge surprise to me that the sociology folks are on the right side of history here.
I really enjoyed Bullshit Jobs
Unfortunately it's basically the most triggering thing in the world to speak about because people immediately go WHAT MY JOB ISNT BULLSHIT YOU'RE BULLSHIT STFU
Like bro. No one said that. In fact Graeber's definition explicitly says if workers in the job consider it to not be bullshit then it isn't. People really really really lose their shit, in my experience, when you discuss the idea of bullshit jobs and suggest that many, maybe most?, jobs in industrialized nations like the US and the EU are either bullshit, could have hugely reduced hours of working, etc. They start crying on about "but we need plumbers!" Yeah, nooooooo shiiiiiiiit dumbasses (reliving stupid conversations I've had in my head now). No one would accuse plumbers of being bullshit. And no one is accusing you! ITS A SOCIETAL LEVEL FUCKING PROBLEM NOT A YOU OR JUST ME PROBLEM HOLY FUCK
This discussion was with a person, actually people, multiple people, who are legitimately on the left. They just kept thinking i was saying abolish work. I had to eventually save my brain cells by saying "ok, just read the book. It's short. Then we can discuss it more." And never heard anything else about it 🤦♂️ legitimately one of the most frustrating conversations I've ever had (multiple conversations with different people).
If your job involves moving physical objects it probably doesn’t count as a bullshit job
Aspects of it could potentially. Honestly depends. Also what is being moving? If it's just commodities produced solely because capitalism demands constant consumption then, well, that's sort of inherently bullshit. Like a derivative of a bullshit economic system.
I worked a few jobs where I moved stuff (incidentally I also did a job that often coordinates with plumbers- HVAC and some electrical work).
I worked at UPS for a couple years when I was in college many years ago. I was scheduled to work 4 hour days usually, but we'd all dick around and maybe actually be work working for like 3 hours of that absolute max. Probably more like 2 hours most days. The rest we spent taking half hour long "10 minute breaks" and things of that sort. Go sit on the shitter just to sit. Build a castle of boxes to lay down inside while your work buddy kinda watches for the supervisor. Normal stuff for teens/early 20s.
The entire point of all this is sort of "we all accept in some way that every job, even necessary ones for society (like those jobs I personally did), are either fully bullshit or contain elements of bullshit within them. Or, even if the job is seen as fully necessary (HVAC, electrical, plumbing, things like that) there are still bullshit aspects to it or an unnecessary amount of work hours put in just for the sake of keeping standard hours."
I can speak for HVAC and electrical. The amount of time I spent napping in my van, reading, sitting and eating an extra long lunch, talking shit with coworkers or employees at places I went, is incredibly high. It ranged of course from like half of my day doing basically nothing of real value to somedays, very rarely, spending the whole day doing work. I guess the question sort of at the heart here is why is it that a person is made to "work" that 40 hours (in my case, but many must work more) when they could work 30, 20, whatever. Maybe some weeks you do have to do 40 hours and the next week is practically dead. Yet you must be there all the same.
If we eliminated all the wasted time, what would people do? Graeber hypothesized that part of why society, capitalists being the dictators of it, continues this standard is because it removes excess leisure time during which people would begin to form political organizations that would ultimately end capitalism all together. So they build (not like as a conscious project. It just sort of happens) this division among people in the form of not just owners vs labor but middle management and more middle management and managers of the managers and a manager for those managers and all of them get paid progressively higher (despite producing zero value in many cases) and have more to lose. The perfect group of people with zero class consciousness and zero desire to develop any even if they become aware of it.
And I haven't even touched on third world vs first world... nor do I plan to since my comment has already veered horribly off course, as usual.
Anyway, this is like 201 level Bullshit Jobs discussion after someone manages to stop screaming at me that their job isn't bullshit.
One thing Graeber brings up is that there's a lot of less bullshit work that is service of bullshit jobs. If we could drastically reduce working hours and shut down a lot of the useless administration, tech, and finance work, how much commercial janitorial work could we free up?