Batshit Jobs

Discussion

Nick Dyer-Whiteford:

"The idea of batshit jobs is that there are some jobs that involve profound contradiction: They make workers participate in the destruction of the conditions of life in order to make a living. The most obvious examples of such work happens in fossil industries, but also aviation, car manufacture, industrial agriculture, the military. Corporate management, finance, and advertising and many other sectors organised around facilitating and enabling ecologically destructive processes of production, extraction and wastage also merit the description. The term plays off David Graeber’s notion of “bullshit jobs”: work that workers themselves characterise as pointless, meaningless, or socially harmful. Low-level service work, corporate paper-pushing, and ballooning layers of PR and HR staff inventing tasks for themselves and others are some examples. Whereas bullshit jobs create little of value, batshit jobs are necessary for the production of most of the commodities we currently consume as well as for capitalism itself, making its abolition a much more radical and complex proposal.

While workers often don’t reflect on the insanity of destroying the conditions of life to pay their bills, it’s a form of madness on a structural level, hence the riff on the American slang expression “batshit crazy”. Indeed, many workers would go mad if they truly faced the contradiction, leading to various strategies of repression or overeager affirmation of the pride they take in their work, think Cara Daggett’s analysis of petro-masculinity. But more and more workers end up refusing to work in batshit industries. Take this 2021 report in Oil & Gas IQ, a global platform for workers in the fossil fuel industries:

“Nearly half of oil and gas professionals have said that they expect to leave the industry in the next 5 years, according to a new survey out earlier this week. […] Over three quarters (82%) of recruiters have had at least 10% of their open positions unfilled for over three months. Drilling & Well delivery (14%), and Geoscience (12%) are the most difficult roles to fill.”

Unlike the reluctance of workers to take shit and bullshit jobs under “the Great Resignation”, work in oil and gas tends to be very well paid and professionally satisfying. If more and more workers are refusing work in the industry, the number of workers who are demanding the transformation of their industries, or sabotaging them from within, must also be growing if still small. In any case, batshit jobs aren't just a rich problematic for social psychology and psychoanalysis, but also for eco-social agitation and organizing.

In a class analytical perspective, the notion of batshit jobs points to the fact that class isn’t just a matter of the organization of production (technical composition), of social reproduction (social composition), and of subjectivity and political organisation (political composition), but also of how the class is inserted into more-than-human relations, what we may call ecological composition. Because all production, reproduction, and all political orientations and aims are differentially inserted into the web of life, whether they have the luxury to ignore this insertion, or carry on the often abject and hyper-exploited labour of sustaining human life at the “metabolic frontline” of capitalist society. To really understand what is at stake here, we need to move from abstract diagrams (like the question of “human-nature metabolism”, as if the human species makes up a sort of super-organism) to concrete analyses of how different kinds of human activity affect non-human activities and flows. How do humans organized in specific social relations harm or sustain, mobilize or abandon, co-depend on or break ecological relations between different species, material flows and climatic processes?"

(https://projectpppr.org/populisms/degrowth-communism-part-iii)