marxism

I do mostly agree with you. I can see how Graeber focuses on a more privileged portion of the labour force. You gotta be careful with labeling white collar workers as "labor aristocracy", as most are in a pretty precarious state already. The actual bosses and owners have no qualms about fucking off to drink or play golf during the day, and they don't need to deal with any of the bullshit.

So I teach upper Secondary, which is thankfully not a bullshit job. But the levels of bullshit has visibly increased in the last twenty years. I spend less of time in teaching, planning, and marking, and more on documents and fucking meetings.

but when I think of a strata that have it so bad that their particular form of oppression deserves its own book, I think of sex workers or prison laborers or undocumented migrant workers, not white-collar workers who have a sense of ennui because they stare at Excel spreadsheets all day.

I definitely agree with this, btw. I think the reason this resonates with people from the West, is um, we're often in this group. The economies of the West have become so fucked, that most real work is done overseas.