it’s helpful concept. dialectical materialism aims to do analysis by looking at how the real world affects our ideas and how our ideas affect the real world (the dialogue or dialectic between the two). On a society-wide level, Marxists identify a “base” (material conditions - how production is organized, who lives where, etc) and a “superstructure” (corollary ideas). We think that the base primarily influences the superstructure, not the other way around (“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”). For instance, in capitalism we have ideas like “meritocracy”, and these take hold as popular ways to understand the material conditions of economic disparity. Often the superstructure lingers after the material conditions have changed. For instance racism originally came into prominence to justify the chattel slave trade of Africans. Now chattel slavery is gone, but those racist ideas persist and affect the base, which changes the ideas, etc. Another example is how religion changed as capitalism developed: as the church lost power over society, Christianity developed the idea of a personal relationship with God instead of one mediated through the church. (And then there’s the Anglican split which is more explicit.)

so discrimination against ND people like you’ve experienced is real, and it’s easier for an individual to get ahead if they look NT/white/male/etc, BUT the structural existence of that discrimination is a result of economic conditions. it’s not that someone sat down and said let’s organize society so the jobs have payscales according to the identities of the workers. It’s that society is laid out in a way that works for capitalists, and the ideology of what’s “normal” springs up to defend/explain/enforce the existing order. The many changes in American non-black racism to fit changing economic conditions provide great examples, e.g. How the Irish Became White.

The Bullshit Jobs explanation is that the bullshit jobs are those which are most valuable to Capital, not the jobs that are socially valuable.

Yeah it does. Which specific jobs are you talking about? I think Graeber is good, but “email jobs” is no more descriptive than “counter jobs” or something. Lots of different counters you can sit behind, lots of different emails you can send. We do ourselves a disservice by trying to analyze “the laptop class” or whatever without examples.

I was going to spell this out in initial comment but decided in favor of brevity. By “the amount of surplus labor capitalists are able to extract from labor power in that type of job”, I mean that efficient extraction of labor power in some roles can force capitalists to steal less surplus in other roles. For instance, if programmers are paid $200k to save finance firms $1m a year in operational improvements, nonprofits may have to pay their programmers $90k even if they’re getting nowhere near $500k of surplus labor out of the deal, because otherwise the programmers can go work for finance firms and make $200k. Lawyer jobs that close billion-dollar mergers or wiggle out of EPA fines make it more expensive to hire a criminal defense attorney. When labor is commoditized, you get something similar to the minimal socially necessary amount of labor that values commodities. So I expect that many high-paid “bullshit jobs” are staffed by labor that could be extracted more efficiently in other roles.

e: on second thought, second paragraph may be bourgeois labor market theory rephrased into LTV. But I think it’s obvious that salaries are part of economic base, and social hierarchy is superstructure, not the other way around.