On Land and Labor
And how the financialization of land further accounts for the increase in bullshit jobs
We're past the autumnal equinox now, and in the prime of the fall harvest season; it seems a good time to think a little about the connections between labor and land. With a little maneuvering over the next few newsletters, I expect this to help us circle back and finish the train of thought we began but left incomplete earlier in the summer, about occupations as a form of liberatory practice.
Land and the kinds of labor we do are closely linked, though in societies long-distanced from subsistence forms of living or from agricultural cycles, this may not feel tremendously obvious anymore. But with ample access to land that is itself allowed to labor according to its own tendencies — that is, allowed to live and to grow things that land as it is can grow, and not prevented by paving it over or contaminating it or fencing it in every which way — humans may also find themselves able to labor more according to their own tendencies. To harvest and garden and hunt as need and season require, and in the meantime, to do the labor that is that of simply being human in community: relating, creating, making family and community, telling stories and myth, and just taking the time to be an animal body like all the other animals.
If you’ve read the work of the anthropologist David Graeber, be it the unexpectedly popular Dawn of Everything or the earlier Bullshit Jobs, this line of thinking probably sounds familiar, as will the notion that most humans these days have their ability to do such essential labor radically restricted and are shunted instead into the eponymous “bullshit jobs.”
I’ve not read the latter book, but it’s based on an earlier essay, where he defines “bullshit jobs” as jobs that don’t really need to be done, from telemarketing to many forms of administration, and just about any job that isn’t obviously producing something or caring for someone. Neither a cook nor a nurse is a bullshit job; a person who is truly aiding both cook and nurse in having what they need to work is also not a bullshit job, so a manager might not be a bullshit job, but the hospital insurer’s position almost certainly is.
What he’s trying to get at is an answer to the question of why we all work so much, when there were such grand hopes that by this day and age, we’d hardly have to work at all. He references economist John Maynard Keynes’ belief that by the end of the 20th century, we’d all be working only 15 hours a week.
If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3–4 hour days.
Graeber doesn’t mention land in that essay, though it gets a little more play in Dawn of Everything. But it’s also hidden in there if we look for it, in the mention of finance capital aiming to exploit productive workers. Financialization takes that which might have been available without money and requires that money be used to access it. Under present systems, if one is not born inheriting large sums of money, one must likely work for it. And the more things necessary for daily life now require money, the more one must work—employed work, not just those necessary labors of acquiring and making things most basically needed for life. So as access to the products of land and land itself cost more and more, so must one work more—or earn more via investments, thereby bucking the burden of extra exploitative labor onto someone else. The hyper-finacialization of land is especially demanding, and tears more and more away from time that might be used to something other than the pursuit of making money. To put it another way, the more banks seek to turn your rental lease or mortgage into a highly profitable investment product, the more your life must become about the pursuit of money.
I’ve had a long fascination with this question that Graeber asks, about how employment (and such mind-numbing employment at that) came to dominate most of our time. Though it’s also been matched with an interest in the changing speeds at which we must not work, not just the overall duration. For we’re not just working more; most of us are working more quickly, in addition to more hours. And that’s across fields and classes: academics are being required to churn out more books, squeeze in more administrative tasks, and teach more classes for the same position; workers at restaurants are not only possibly working longer hours while short-staffed but responding to online messages at the same time and wearing a headset to also answer questions from fellow staff members the moment they come up. No one’s just at a meeting anymore; they’re also on half a dozen ‘productivity’ and communication platforms.
In an earlier essay, I described how this kind of sped-up labor enabled by computers offers a “promise of a fantasy mobility” while in the end physically immobilizes us. We are stuck in the no-place of our screen, rather than being able to be present, and move attentively through, the places where we actually live. This is another method by which we see the relationship between labor and land: the kind of labor we do can increase or decrease the level of presence and quality of relationship we have with the lands where we live.
For a long time I had what felt like a simple enough solution to this conundrum; simply put, it was to want less so as to work less. I was heavily influenced by various forms of voluntary simplicity, both of religious and activist varieties, and especially where the two met—the Dorothy Days of the world—but also sources like the book Your Money or Your Life, the opening chapters of which goes to great lengths to demonstrate the costs, both personal and environmental, of most forms of modern employment.1
But again, the hyper-financialization of land makes this less a feasible solution. The average cost of housing where I presently live has nearly doubled in the last decade. Rents in the city where I grew up are triple what they were in my childhood. One can’t say the same about wages. We all know this; they’re the common facts of the day. We can’t, it seems—especially for those of us more tied to hourly forms of labor—reduce the exploitation of our labor without finding a way to reduce “the power of finance capital” over the most basic of all our needs, which is a space on the earth itself.
The need to use so much of our time doing work dictated by someone else—both bullshit work and more genuinely productive forms—also often prevents us from learning much about the actual labor needed to sustain ourselves without money. We’ve become accustomed to having all our needs met by whatever flow of cash we have access to. Another way to say that might be: we don’t know how to take care of ourselves when contemporary supply chains fail. Foraging books and gardening guides may be a popular sell but most people don’t get beyond a few mushrooms and tomatoes—a pretty limited diet.
The right to labor on land for the sake of subsistence has been a persistent fight for centuries now. One might say it is the quintessential anti-colonial battle. Yet most folks I know today would dismiss the notion that this is a valuable thing for which to fight. Higher wages, sure. The right to grow your own beans, or to walk many miles and forage? Hardly. And much current social critique treats these two pieces of life—labor and land—as largely separate. This is one of the failures of much Marxist and related thought, which, while sometimes positing specific events in the relationship between labor and land, such as key moments of primitive accumulation (which we discussed a little around the last equinox), saw those events as predominately existing in the past and not meriting attention in the present moment. One should remember that it came as a surprise to many of the theorists originally working immediately after Marx that the major revolutions came in societies filled with peasants rather than factory workers.
What if the ability to labor slowly and routinely with the more-than-human world—not separate from it or against it—is one of the greatest freedoms? And how many of us these days really get to taste that?
In our next newsletter I want to share an essay I wrote about ten years ago now, one that I revisit regularly to clarify my own thoughts on what kind of work is worthwhile and what sort of work truly helps bring the change in the world I hope to see. Following that, I want to share the story of some activist artists who began to realize the limited role that land had been playing in their work, who abandoned jobs on the academic arts track for participation in what has become a truly legendary occupation and land seizure. I’ve also got some long-overdue interviews with other writers on labor and land that I’ve been meaning to share.
All that’s coming soon! We’ve been on a light publishing schedule due to my own personal transitions—not just a new apartment and town but also, yes, some new waged labor outside my work here at Unsettling—but we hope to readjust to provide you all with more reading now that the sometimes inclement weather keeps us all indoors more often.
Thanks for reading.
Until next time,
Meg
Your Money or Your Life is one of the precursors of the FIRE movement (Financial Independence Retire Early), though many of those folks have dropped the ecological and community concern in their vision of life, often choosing to reach financial independence via investments in extractive industries. Others are increasing costs of living for others more generally by acquiring extra property and using it solely as an investment vehicle.