• jack [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      It is necessary to the maximization of profit. Capitalists don’t employ all those marketers, salesmen, accountants, HR people, etc. for fun and charity. They do it because capitalism requires massive amounts of socially useless labor to get the maximum sales volume and market dominance.

      • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]@hexbear.net
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        17 hours ago

        Is a certain quantity of this socially useless labor mathematically vital to the survival of capital, or is the proliferation of this labor a sort of unchecked outgrowth that’s an unforeseen outcome?

        graeber “The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political.”

          • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]@hexbear.net
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            12 hours ago

            It’s literally straight out of the article that coined the term “Bullshit Jobs”, a point that’s made several times

            It’s not at all clear to me how capitalists are directly compelled to do what they do by macroeconomic forces alone, in such a way that it is not possible to imagine them acting otherwise. That is a far-reaching claim that demands the burden of proof.