Meaningless labor in the concept of David Graeber

Abstract

David Graeber (1961–2020) is a former professor at the London School of Economics, sociologist, and social anthropologist, prominent thinker of modernity; in the decades ahead, his views and social ideas will be highly demanded in social and humanistic knowledge. Assessment is given to his social theory of labor, which Graeber dedicated multiple books and articles, viewing labor as a futile phenomenon for the society and individual. He notes that meaningless labor in just a set of actions subordinated to some social force. The analysis of his ideas reveals several important vectors of modern social mentality: 1) in reconsideration of the role of labor in life of a person and society, the social frame of references (from the perspective of total sociality) is brought to the forefront, while the economic and political vectors of the assessment of labor assessment are shifted to the background; 2) meaningless labor becomes the social norm and generates the new system of values, for example, bureaucracy, administration, office, etc.; 3) gradually and with strong consolidation in society, labor becomes part of the active symbolic struggle (for example, for power) and symbolic exchange, which entails inequality between people and social commonalities. The article substantiates the heuristic nature of application of the concept of meaningless labor in characterizing the central ideas pf David Graeber, taking into account the fact that labor is viewed as an “imitation” of social value. This thesis is fundamental in comprehension of Graeber’s theory, as all his works contain a refrain on the need to reconsider the key social values (labor, money, finance, taxes, resources, and other), the nature of which is determined by both economic and sociocultural relations.