waking up - freeing ourselves from work

Counting up the ways I used to get erased, or erased myself, at work, I came up with seven – but there’s a lot of overlap. Because really they all boil down to being bossed.

Of course this training starts in childhood, long before we have to sit down to that first interview question. But it should cheer you to recall that submission to external authority is not ‘natural,’ and therefore must be reinstituted and reinforced continually, with each new generation, with each new child. We never stop resisting, if only unconsciously. The hope of this book is to make our resistance conscious, to encourage it along, feed it – and, once linked with a clear plan, cause enough of its spawn to join hands and sing that the next social arrangement can be born before the chaos comes that resource-wars bring.

Chaos, of course, is what the pitiful-power-drunk-few hope will happen – so these counter-efforts on our part are critical, though hopefully in time.

I named my seven-series of erasures: the magic mirror, playing possum, single-phasing, the jog circuit, the dance of death (the black widow), the set-up (being the ‘best’), and bird doggin’ & baby-sittin’ (the curse of the captive audience).

The Magic Mirror:
I used to spend a lot of time wondering about the vampires, the Bushney-roves of the world. I’m sure the same questions cross your mind: how do they sleep at night? – don’t they care about their souls? – surely they have grandchildren? – don’t they want a legacy beyond their astonishing greed? Mark Crispin Miller wrote a whole book (Cruel and Unusual) about the mental health issues of the pitiful-power-drunk-few (podrunks for short). The specific question he was bothered by was: “why are they so angry?” After all, they seem to run the show, so what’s up?

Back in 1928 Virginia Woolf was pondering the very same question, but applied to ‘the professors,’ as she called them, all the men of letters determined to deny women access to the education the rich boys got: “the most transient visitor to this planet, I thought, …could not fail to be aware…that England is under the rule of a patriarchy.” So, what’s up?

Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. That was what he was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price. Life for both sexes – and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement – is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle.…Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown.… (A Room of One’s Own) *

Anyone who’s worked is familiar with this part of the job description. Most bosses are extremely threatened by the appearance of inattention on the part of their slavies.

I recall a boss regurgitating details of a grant that I actually wrote, while I sat there wondering and restive. Suddenly he became angry and, pinning me with a cold stare, said, “are you getting any of this Pam? I can’t tell from your expression.” He then added he’d noticed me glancing at the clock while he spoke.

If we don’t confirm their sense of themselves, who will?

Playing Possum:
By the time I took that job, one of my last paper-pushing ones, I’d already seen the lie and I was just going through the motions, trying to survive.

But faking-it’s no easier than making-it. The mind, it wanders. The boss, he notes. The world intrudes. No matter how hard you try to just ‘lay low,’ ‘keep your head down,’ the world demands more – your complicity, implicit or otherwise.

You may think you can come up with an individual escape plan – save money, buy a few acres, move to Italy, form a commune, whatever – and then…some unwanted bit of news arrives from the front: the polar bears have begun to cannibalize each other; a twenty-three year-old woman has faced down a tractor and died; a pristine river, a rich habitat, has been despoiled; racial hate is roaring across the perfect place you escaped to; the redwood that saved your life has been cut down for a building we don’t need; a bomb is dropped…and suddenly you’re catapulted into the same old pain and rage.

Single-Phasing:
I believe in honoring the ancestors, this being one of our sources of power – meaning not just giving credit where it’s due, but seeking them out and thanking them.

But how honor those about whom we’re never told?

Perhaps by paying attention – which is only possible if we walk slowly enough to see the half-buried gems along our paths, sit quietly enough to hear the whispered songs swimming in our veins.

One gem along my path is Nikola Tesla, a true friend of the working-man and woman. His dream was to free us from toil so that we could join him in the heroic and glorious fun of creating stuff.

An inventor’s endeavor is essentially life saving. Whether he harnesses forces, improves devices, or provides new comforts and conveniences, he is adding to the safety of our existence….The entire globe could be transformed and made a fitter abode for mankind….The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter – for the future…

And once he’d fully conceived, in his mind, the three-phase induction motor he declared, “No more will men be slaves to hard tasks. My motor will set them free, it will do the work of the world!” His revelation came to him in 1882. He went on to design the system of electrical generation and distribution that we take for granted today, and conceived and patented methods for the wireless transmission of energy.

And even though Thomas Edison did everything he possibly could to bury Tesla’s ideas, on which today we so rely, Edison was a household name and Tesla is unknown.

An armature is a cylinder-shaped core of iron wrapped round and round with wire. When electrons flow in the wire and the armature rotates it produces a rotating magnetic field, an alternating voltage. Do this three times and stagger the fields and you have the basics of a three-phase induction motor – it spins and spins and spins effortlessly.
Tesla believed that the forces of nature are the ‘all of it’ * and that we are no less enmeshed in, receptive to, part of, those forces than anything else.

So even if only as metaphor, let’s imagine these three phases of power, working together to keep us humming along. If one of those phases fizzles the motor keeps running, but only just, not as happily and certainly not as efficiently. This sad state of things is called ‘single-phasing,’ and in the artificial world of work it occurs when you find that your full power is not required. In fact, not only is it not required but displaying it will cause you to be viewed with great suspicion, and to be whispered about behind your back.

Studs Terkel’s Working is littered with such cautionary tales.

I’ll run into one administrator and try to institute a change and then I’ll go to someone else and connive to get the change. Gradually your effectiveness wears down. Pretty soon you no longer identify as the bright guy with the ideas. You become the fly in the ointment. You’re criticized by your superiors and your subordinates. (Steve Carmichael)

We tried to get them to upgrade the secretaries. They’re being underpaid for the jobs they’re doing….After that, I was no longer assistant to the regional director. (Laughs). (Lilith Reynolds)

I came to East Kentucky with OEO. I got canned in a year. Their idea was the same a Daley’s. You use the OEO to build an organization to support the right candidates. I didn’t see that as my work. My job was to build an organization of put-down people, who can control the candidates once they’re elected. (Bill Talcott)

I tried to put my ‘all’ into every job too. I noted in my journal from that period:

I got the “dream job” in September and immediately proceeded to put in 60-70 hours a week to ‘make’ it all work. I tried to do it all – to make up for all the gaps in the model by plugging them myself. I designed a curriculum and began conducting it, did community education presentations, got photos, designed a newsletter, designed an evaluation, set up the FileMaker layouts to capture the data, did the staff training, attended all the community meetings, got new ones going, staffed them all! And on, and on! How exciting! The reward? A kick in the teeth.

Were all of us just naive – or just lied to?

A job that presents itself as ‘non-profit’ and “for the public good” naturally stirs the empathic into the competitive, so we may be forgiven for approaching such jobs with the same excitement to make the world a better place that Tesla felt. We front-liners, we shoulder-to-the-plough, heel-to-the-shovel, plain old working folk tend to take the word as true. If you tell us in civics classes that we can hold politicians accountable by voting them in and out, please don’t sneer at us and call us apathetic when the votes get rigged and we haven’t caught up.

We do learn.

And if we could devote our entire day (life) to plotting and planning like the Roves of the world, perhaps we could counter their schemes to subvert democracy faster.

But we’re catching up. Trust me.

But single-phasing is not just about flying full thrusters into public service only to find your wings clipped. It’s also about working in a system that cares not a whit that you play a mean clarinet or have a black-belt or sing like Aretha or write like Baldwin or float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, so long as you can flip and serve that burger in under ten seconds. Maybe Nora Watson (in Working) said it best: “Jobs are not big enough for people.”

We are too big for jobs.

There’s a sense in which we’re all single-phasing here in America, despite Ehrenreich’s claim (in Fear of Falling) that “work, of the special kind that [the middle class] reserves to itself, is the secret hedonism of the middle class…a pleasure that cannot be commodified or marketed, that need not obsolesce or wane with time.” She may be confusing what she herself does for the work of the middle class as a whole. Having worked manual, mental, meaningful, meaningless, marginal, mechanical and measurable, I agree with Bill Talcott: “the middle class is fighting powerlessness too. …The white-collar guy is scared he may be replaced by the computer. The schoolteacher is asked not to teach but to baby-sit. God help you if you teach.”

Power has been captured by a few people. A very small top and a very big bottom. You don’t see much in-between. Who do people on the bottom think are the powerful people? College professors and management types, the local managers of big corporations like General Motors. What kind of power do these guys really have? They have the kind of power Eichmann claimed for himself. They have the power to do bad and not question what they’re told to do. (Bill Talcott in Working)

I’ve worked enough non-profit jobs to know that though they’re glad to see you work yourself to death under the illusion that bureaucracies can change the world for the good, your bossed labor is a far cry from three-phase power: self-directed, self-motivated, moved by the earth and naught else.

The Jog Circuit:
When a motor is wired so that it can only move if someone in control holds down a button, this is called a jog circuit.

Control-freaks viscerally fear a flow – unless you’re flipping burgers or assembling electronic components.

Most recently I saw this listening to the 2008 House Judiciary Committee hearings on torture and the abuse of executive power – the “should-we-begin-thinking-about-maybe-saying-the-I-word?” hearings. At the most gripping moments, like when Vincent Bugliosi, author of The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, got rolling, up go the hands of the Republicans on some “point of order.”

Well this happens in jobs too. If the bosses see you building up steam, expect a memo or a meeting or an emergency of some sort. Whatever it takes to break your flow:

If they would let me loose a little more, I could really do something. We’ve got plenty of statistics to show incredible sex discrimination. …If women knew more about their rights, they’d have an easier time. …There’s no reason why we can’t carry this to the community action agencies. …If we could get into the whole issue of lawsuits, we’d get real changes. My office is trying to stop us. …Some of these jobs will appear meaningful on paper. The idea of the antipoverty program is exciting. But people are stifled by bureaucratic decisions and non-decisions…and an awful lot of my time was taken up with endless meetings. I spent easily twenty or more hours a week in meetings. Very, very nonproductive. …At our office there’s less and less talk about poor people. (Lilith Reynolds in Working)

Once a boss told me, “all the work of this organization originates with me – it all comes through me and is disbursed out to staff from me.” I’ve never been in a job where this was true, but, as with commercials and other propaganda, the point is asserted not because it’s true, but because they want you to believe it’s true.

The lie comes from a boss’ fear that he’s not needed, that the plane might take off without him – or from a boss’ need to please his own masters.
But there’s also the masturbatory thrill of the puppeteer. This compulsion runs deep in class society, this longing to control the labor of others. It can be seen not just in workplaces, but heavily in the home as well: parent over child, wife over husband – and vice versa.

In Susan Faludi’s Stiffed, she probes in one chapter the layoff of McDonnell Douglas workers. The company set up an outplacement center to ease the guys on out the door. Its director described “the wrath of the wife”:

“He was so scared of his wife and what she would do when she found out he was laid off, he actually moved here in his motor home. ‘She’ll do bodily harm to me,’ he told me. He showed me this picture of her and she was tiny. But he said, ‘Rest assured, Mrs. Judd, she’s vicious.’” One woman, upon hearing of her husband’s firing, threatened to toss him in the street. “She said he had to get out unless he found a job,” Judd recalled. The only job he could find was cleaning offices and bathrooms in the middle of the night. He took it. A few weeks later, Judd ran into him at the center and he said, “My wife loves me again. I’m working.”

How easily can we obliterate this pattern as we build the next social arrangement?

I’m as guilty as anyone. I’ve bossed and been bossed. I’ve been conditioned to try to control everything too.

When Randall Robinson, done with American racism, pulled up stakes and moved to St. Kitts, he found this society’s utilitarian world-view had moved with him. I haven’t heard any recent reports on how this problem was resolving itself, but I suspect the earth is working its magic on him – and that it will on us too.

The Dance of Death (the Black Widow):

Journal entry of an office conversation from ten years ago, when Boss B breaks the news to G and P that he’s decided to fire a co-worker D (not present):

G:              “I’m just trying to put myself in her position.”
B:              “But G, can you really imagine yourself in her position?”
G:              “No.”
P:              (Thinking) – “Yeah but G you have some real advantages over D. You have a father who’s just like B, so you know how to stroke the Black Widow just right to keep from being eaten.”

And that is the perfect analogy for B, because he cannibalizes his staff as he mates them, and if you’re careful you can simply allow yourself to be used but not eaten. This is the Dance of Death that most workers force their feet into. It’s not pleasant.

Recently I came across a short piece in a pop-news magazine with the heading, “’Toxic’ bosses: Handle with care.” It offered suggestions for surviving a “bad boss.”

If you contorted yourself just right, it burbled, not only could you survive the experience, you could use it to forge a career ladder.

One way to cope with your boss’ “quirks” is to attempt to turn them to your advantage. If the boss is a micromanager, provide updates until he tells you to stop. If the boss is incompetent, see it as a chance to “gain more responsibility.” After landing my dream job, I realized that I had a “toxic boss,” said an “understandably bashful” contributor in BusinessWeek. Instead of quitting, “I developed a formula.” My strategy includes allotting time every morning to “cater to his needs,” sending quick e-mails throughout the day, and over-responding to his pet peeves. (The Week, September 12, 2008)

I call this “the dance of death” because the price-tag for playing is your soul. These are dangerous games we play every day as a matter of course.

Remember Orwell’s wasp, who was cut in half while he sucked the jam and learned too late what he’d lost?

And what is this jam, exactly? – processed food with an occasional treat, freedom from the use of your bothersome feet?

Marx had the details of this deal down in 1848: “the less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.”

If you think this will ever change while the podrunks rule, think again.

The Set-Up (Being the ‘Best’):
In one of Mark Doty’s three devastating memoirs, * he writes about the moment he realized that who he was wasn’t who his mother wanted. He was performing a song and dance number in his room with a neighbor boy. He is ten years old:

Now I’m in my full stride, my smile wide and glittering in the spot, my fingers spread wide in the air minstrel-style, then flying up to lift my top hat in rhythm. I am amphetamine bright and glittering on the inside, too, possessed by my song. I am entirely a Judy, right down to the prescriptions, in tight black stockings, the tuxedo jacket slicing across her thighs just below the waist, eyes huge with the force pouring out of her gaze now into the music. I begin to wave the long red scarf in the air, making it also dance to my song and the throb of my accompaniment. I toss my cane away and hold the scarf high over my head with both hands. I hold it behind my back and my behind, pull it back and forth in a kind of shimmy. (Firebird)

His mother enters (“What would you say if you found your ten-year-old son performing a drag show?”) and ultimately tells him:

“Son, you’re a boy.”
Of course he knows he’s a boy…the fact that she feels she must tell him this means he has failed…

Was there a moment you knew you had “failed”? While Mark Doty sees this inflicted shame through the lens of homophobia…

I existed in a special zone, no one felt what I did. Held at a distance from others: that was both the price and the reward…Well all right then – if I can’t fit, I’ll be an ozone boy, more rarefied, more peculiar. I’ll breathe the atmosphere of my own elevation… That’s the queer boy’s dynamic, simultaneously debased and elevated.

…he also recognizes that in class society few escape starting out “failed.”

I have been ushered into the world where adults live; I have been warned, have been instructed to conceal my longing. And though I will understand, someday, that without longing there’d be nothing to carry us forward, that without longing we wouldn’t be anyone at all, I can’t see that now. I’m a child, or I was until she said, You’re a boy. I am stunned and silent, caught in a shame that seems to have no place to come to rest. I have been initiated – whether because my mother wanted to punish or to protect me – into an adult world of limit and sorrow.

Of course this society has innumerable ways to “fail” us – stamp a great big “I” for “insufficient” on our foreheads and send us out obsessed with rubbing it off, disavowing it, achieving the right to remove it.

Here, stand still, receive your stamp, because you’re a girl, you’re black, you’re skinny, you’re fat, you’re shy, you’re a clown, you smile, you frown…and so on and so on and scooby dooby dooby.

There’s nothing accidental about any of this. A system that requires “a very small top and a very big bottom” cannot exist if those at the bottom know they are whole, sufficient, entirely perfect beings.

You know that.

Bird-Doggin’ & Baby-Sittin’ – the Curse of the Captive Audience:
One of my favorite ‘games’ when I was a little girl had no name but let’s call it “jungle.”

In this game I would cajole, damn near coerce, the brother one year older than me into pretending to be a lion while I pretended to be a black panther (no political reference intended).

While he roared I would silently stalk, lunge, and then stealthily retreat to plan my next attack.

He was large, loud and clumsy.

I was sleek and devastating.

My brother hated this game. I don’t know how I persuaded him to play it.

After I learned to read I devoured books written from the perspective of wild animals – usually being chased – foxes, wolves, cougars. I identified with the chased, captured and beleaguered.

At night I would sneak out and visit all the dogs with backyards along our common alleyway, talking to them, climbing their fences and jumping into their yards to pet them. I didn’t ask permission. This was my thing. No one ever knew about it.

Throughout time, across millennia, our survival has depended on our power to analyze situations, analyze all the complex, layered information we take in – visible and invisible, tangible and not. It’s been a key source of joy and pride, and in it our interest in the world is rooted.

Yet through this artificial relation called “the job,” it’s rendered absolutely irrelevant.

Hierarchy does this because no matter how keen our powers of analysis, we cannot act – we must be given permission.

We must be told what to do.

This runs against millennia of experience in the world. In exchange we’re given a word: ‘civilized’.

Not a fair trade.

Is it any wonder we dream of a time before hierarchy, a time of freedom and wholeness? Any wonder we love those moments in film, like in Outbreak, when the hero says to his boss, “with all due respect, fuck you, sir.”

When David Gordon and some fellow economists decided to do “some outreach educational work with local union officials and rank-and-file workers…[to engage them] about pressing economic issues…[they] expected conversations [about]…job security and inflation.”

Much to our surprise they were more interested in talking about problems…with their bosses on the job. They complained that their supervisors were always on their case, that bureaucratic harassment was a daily burden. They inveighed against speed-up, hostility, petty aggravations, capricious threats and punishments, and – perhaps most bitterly – crude, arrogant and often gratuitous exercises of power. Their catalogues of complaints were both eloquent and acute. (Fat and Mean)

Just as “submission to external authority” is not “natural,” nor is it “natural” to have a few doing the “thinking” for the majority.

But, instituted before we have a conscious choice about it, molded in us by those we must love, the manual-mental divide is extremely hard to challenge.
And yet…it is every day.

This notion that a few must do the ‘thinking’ for the majority, that ‘brain’ must be divorced from ‘hand’ – is a ‘divorce’ in aspiration only, heavily endorsed by the podrunks, propagandized up the yin-yang, applied in toto in theory, but never fully implementable.

I was truly impressed when I entered the trades how fiercely it’s resisted by tradesmen/women, making them some of the most powerful people on the planet.

I remember as a new electrical apprentice overhearing a journeyman say to someone scrutinizing him, “What’s it to you? What do you care what I’m doing? Take care of your own business.”

Powerful people don’t want to be bird-dogged, and – guess what? – we’re all powerful people.

A friend who’d worked for many years as a GF (general foreman) told me he never would lay a journeyman out with detailed instructions, because there’s always infinite ways to do a thing. He’d just sketch the project broadly – “we’ve got to get these six circuits over to Panel B” – or hand him a print and let him have at it.

And when the engineering on the print is wrong, as it frequently is, construction workers tend to re-engineer it on the spot – they “make it work,” without the credit and certainly without the remuneration.

And of course this is true of all workers on the ground handed the plans of people with far less practical knowledge than they themselves possess.

So why do we put up with it?

We all hate this. Living has become existing – a diminishment of what we are as living things. It makes our skins crawl, our backs tense, our furies flame and our feet itch. We want to get away from it – but there’s nowhere to go…
…Now why do we think this?

Could it be the lies we tell ourselves…or the lies we’re taught?

Wrapped raw with the layers of our constructed ‘reality’ – snug in our suit of razors – we mistake our ‘comfort’ in not moving for inevitability.

At some point (so why not now?), true reality must be faced: we don’t need anyone else to tell us what to do. That a few gather this authority to themselves and jealously guard it is a problem for the next social arrangement – more in planning than in execution.

So, as we begin to plan and we face the manual-mental divide – the separation of conception from execution – several questions relevant to building the new world emerge.

The unnaturalness of this divide is disguised by its ubiquitousness.

Embedded in all social institutions – families, schools, in the relationship between government and its citizens – it feels all-pervasive.

And this all-pervasiveness disguises the fact that only a very, very few actually benefit from it – and they only materially.

As for the rest of us, if we’re allowed a microscopic bit of “power” in the home, or workplace, then we must not be “powerless,” right?

As Marcuse pointed out, if you’re already “free,” then how can you be in need of liberation?

Moreover, its ubiquitousness suggests that there’s no other way.

It suggests that bullyishness is inherent in the human animal – that if we get rid of one set of bullies it will rapidly be replaced by a new set.

And if the sickness inevitably replicates, if all we get for our trouble to free ourselves is the same old shit in different suits, new faces watching us, why bother?

In “The Two Winds” we’ll consider the possibility that we’ve been misled about this whole bully problem, that it’s not true that humans inherently want to control the labor of others.

I sure don’t. Do you?

Another factor inhibiting our ability to get full thrusters underway is the diminishment problem itself – or rather, its’ flip side: “development.”

We’ve been told that we must be less for “civilization” to be more – or even for it to exist at all.

Far be it from us to stand in the way of the greater good for…now who was it exactly we agreed to sacrifice our happiness for? I forget.

It can’t be for our own comfort – we’re suffering from cancer, heart disease, asthma, depression, violence, loneliness and isolation in record numbers.

It can’t be for the planet – it’s in trouble.

It can’t be for our grandchildren – they won’t have a healthy planet to live on.

Wow.

Could it be that all the suffering imposed on people and the planet wasn’t necessary at all?

Something to think about – which we will in the chapter, “Progress.”

And – we’ve got some healing to do. We’re divided across…you know the laundry list as well as I do. Without solidarity – and we’ve seen how work itself divides us – without trust, how you gonna build a mass movement? We’ll consider this problem in the chapter, “Culture.”

Lastly, we’re inhibited by the lack of a plan. This is a controversial issue. Some progressives believe it’s a mistake to have one, believe that having a plan leads to the bully problem. I disagree. So the final chapter is called “The Plan.”

The way out of the trap is through “seeing reality,” as it is, not as we’re told it is. Unless we see reality we’ll be hobbled in our planning, easily subverted and checked.

Consciousness is essential for building a mass movement. And it is, after all, only a mass movement that can unseat ‘Power.’

“The Two Winds,” “Progress,” and “Culture,” provide the theoretical underpinnings of “The Plan.” Though written conversationally, pretty much as I speak, the ideas in them are still relatively compact. If you’re not in the mood for theory, if you already know we’ve been conned and don’t want to look at how deep the brainwashing goes not a minute more, if you already see our future based on freedom, you might want to go directly to “The Plan.”

Continue to "The Two Winds" - Part 1

* I would modify the above ‘men and women’ with the adjectives ‘middle-class Western.’ One of the irritating constants of the ‘letters’ of the West is their presumption of universal applicability to all humankind across all time. I’m gonna try real hard not to slip into that pool of crud here. What follows is about work in class society, given a global world economic system. The advice and advocacies herein apply to that bit of ‘reality.’

* This is also the title of an altogether lovely novel by Jeannette Haien

* The other two are Heaven’s Coast and Dog Years. I was drawn to Mark Doty by one sentence in a review of Dog Years: “Memory seems too slight a word, too evanescent.” It unexpectedly hit me in the gut.

Nascence to End Work

waking up - freeing ourselves from work

Chapter I: Being Bossed

Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work

Being Bossed