Bullshit Jobs, Fuck Work, & The Legacy of David Graeber with James Livingston & Corey McCall


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Is is possible to imagine a world without work?

Or, at least, a world in which work is not romanticized, is not treated as defining element of social and individual achievement?

James Livingston predicts that we need to prepare for a postwork world.

And David Graeber has challenged us to imagine alternatives to organization by bureaucracy, credit, and corporations.

This episode features Livingston talking to Matt Seybold and Corey McCall about Graeber’s posthumous book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, as well as the Great Resignation, the Great Recession, the Great Risk Shift, and much more.

James Livingston is Professor of History at Rutgers University and founding editor of PoliticsSlashLetters.org. He started out as an economic historian writing about banking reform in the Progressive Era. His first book, which is still in print thanks to the financial crises created by supply-side economics since 1983, is Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890-1913 (Cornell UP, 1986). He is also author of Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940 (UNC Press, 1994), Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History (Routledge, 2001), The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), and Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul (Basic Books, 2011), as well as numerous shorter works for mainstream periodicals, academic journals, and blogs. Most relevant to this episode are No More Work: Why Full Employment Is A Bad Idea (UNC Press, 2016) and “Fuck Work” (Aeon, 2016), as well as other supplementary PostWork and AntiWork writing (see bibliography below).

Corey McCall was, until recently, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Elmira College, where he taught for fifteen years. He currently serves as a staff paralegal at Legal Assistance of Western New York and an instructor for the Cornell Prison Education Program. He has also been a Visiting Scholar at Penn State’s Humanities Institute.His research ranges across Africana, American, and European philosophical traditions. He is co-editor (with Philip McReynolds) of Decolonizing American Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2021), (with Nathan Ross) Benjamin, Adorno, and the Experience of Literature (Routledge, 2018), and (with Tom Nurmi) Melville Among The Philosophers (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). [Twitter: @CoreyMcCall]


Episode Bibliography:

U.S. Personal Savings Rate History, Last Updated 2.25.2022

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James Livingston, “Fuck Work” (boundary2 online, 3.27.2017)

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