- Joined company as lead software developer
- Saw oppression dynamics vs office workers:
- class: capitalists vs professional-managerial class vs workers
- gender: all-male bosses sat at corners of main room, surrounding mostly women employees with sniper-like lines of sight at their computer screens.
- race/ethnicity:
- cleaning staff: poor migrant Mideast women who spoke neither English nor the local language
- office workers: middle-class (or higher) migrants from countries with high unemployment, who spoke English but not the local language
- Listened to lunchroom complaints
- Moved from complaints ("What did I do wrong?" or "Boss-man's irrational!") to consciousness-raising (the institution's just functioning normally.) Discussed bosses' negotiation 101 tactics, like goodcop/badcop
- During company meeting, the women employees (who led the fight) handed management a slightly edited copy of Shanley Kane's "Values Towards Ethical and Radical Management" — as our new interpersonal values
- This improved things noticeably, but bosses singled out 1 coworker as "the ringleader" & she had to tread lightly
- So 3 of us formed a little coven to fight the oppressions by increasing our bargaining power.
Health benefits: in David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" (end of chapter 4), I explain that organizing was far healthier than my normal work. However, when we met our goals, I was stuck with only my bullshit job. I rapidly burned out. So I discovered a way to slip through the cracks to work from home, setting my own hours. Only much later did I discover free activist counseling.
Vital principle: have people's backs. Watch for burnout levels. (But of course, not condescendingly valorize oppressed groups. There's gonna be the occasional pathological liar, harasser, men more loyal to patriarchy than class… So watch yellow & red flags.)
My privilege: My institutional power was simple to wield — during a team meeting, talking up our lowest-paid coworkers' work resulted in a 33% raise. I felt like a political tank. (Often, I wished use of a second body, skulking around the workplace and providing cover; so one day I held up my wrists like a marionette & offered use of my own body. But that was considered a bit weird. :)
Unionizing & firing: Much later, the company merged with a much larger company and unionized (to be precise, a "Works Council"). I had a small part in this. My dev team was fired before the union took effect. (The reasons were a bit complicated. In any case, I was happy with the severance.) After I was fired, I switched to UBI organizer. Plans I wrote.
Criticism: I organized office-worker business school grads — oddly satisfied once they got promotions & nice jobs. Didn't much help our bathroom-cleaning coworkers, as far as I know.
"The anarchist world is not a five-year plan, but rather a mess of contingencies. A mess in which everyone makes mistakes, things happen haphazardly, and where people surprise you. It is also necessarily a mess whose effects are necessarily hard to measure. Precisely because anarchists do not seek to affect/effect state power or create formal and permanent organizations, they are inherently “illegible” (see Scott 2005) to the instruments normally used by the state and its “arborescent” institutions (including the academy) to measure, rank, and track people and their activity. In the end it is hard to tell whether or not anarchist projects have 'succeeded'".
— Erica Lagalisse, "'Good politics': property, intersectionality, and the making of the anarchist self"
To attack boss-men's oppression, we analyzed the mechanism that workers felt was the strongest lynchpin:
- Employees mostly came from poorer countries.
- Not speaking the local language made it harder to find a local job.
- For a couple people on visas, boss-man engaged in wage theft to lower the wage below the visa's requirements.
This savaged their bargaining power. To strengthen bargaining power, we initiated projects like:
- hire tutor for the local language
- teaching tech & project management
- getting other jobs
Three of us bonded into a little circle, generating & implementing all sorts of ideas. Our decision loop was vaguely like:
- We'd identify a goal, or oppression to attack
- Come up with a bunch of ideas
- Consider their advantages, and figure out what could go wrong (to de-risk them)
- See synergies & contradictions between ideas (maybe modifying them to amplify synergies and avoid contradictions)
- Select & try some
- Watch & evaluate outcome
- Go to step #1
For the local language tutoring project (described next), we settled into oddly quick & efficient biweekly meetings, run by consensus.
Lessons: conflict, self-management
About 5 of us organized hiring a language tutor. We hit each phase in "forming–storming–norming–performing". First, we organized a class. Then got really pissed at each other. Then some dropped out, while the motivated remainder (my 3-person coven) figured out how to work effectively.
Knowing that "storming" is natural made it less personal. Even during "performing," we hit a couple mini-cycles of "forming–storming–norming–performing." We calmly hiked them like hills, compared to the mountains behind us.
Our professional tutor (my family friend) was used to dominating classes she taught, driving students through boring material. During my coven's consensus meetings, we resolved to make clear we're highly motivated and wanted to customize the classes to our interests. Her role was to expertly support us. So the most likeable of us kindly expressed this in our next class, and from then on things worked pretty damn smoothly.
Lessons: confidence, whole-worker-organizing, cheating
One salesperson wanted to simply leave—the daily humiliations were too great. So we looked for a better job elsewhere. Supported her emotionally through the shame of rejection. (She knew as a salesperson that sifting through 98% failures is a common overhead in finding the 2% sales. She just had to apply this knowledge to selling herself on the job market.)
We stalked hiring managers, learning their predispositions. I helped her on those inane job interview tests—cheating. (People succeed not primarily as individuals, but on the strength of everyone in their support network.)
She had an abusive boyfriend. As a side-effect of a job application (which asked her to analyze Tinder), she found her new boyfriend—now her husband.
After months of searching, we discovered and won her dream-job. (I tried hard to detect yellow flags in her boss, but couldn't find anything. Same with her new boyfriend.)
Her personality quickly changed. Before, she was desperate to please. Now, she has casual firmness in her voice. Doesn't freak out when things go astray, but simply fixes them.
Lessons: learning, demystifying
Excerpt from an unpublished essay I wrote. What midwife-teaching felt like.
Lessons: invisibility, demystifying
I had one non-developer coworker secretly facilitate the dev team's meetings, appointing her as project manager. One junior dev particularly enjoyed using jargon to make his mediocre thoughts sound intimidating to non-programmers — I wanted to undermine that.
At first, she feared someone would ask, "What are you doing here!?" Classic impostor syndrome. But after a couple weeks, she saw behind the jargon.
Her boss was a foot away from our room, separated by a thin wall. Mysteriously, he showed no sign of hearing her, nor wondered why she disappeared 15 minutes every morning. I called it "invisibility": operating so counter to conventional social logics that he couldn't sense us a foot away. (Felt like the childhood fantasy of walking invisibly through a room by staying in people's blindspots.)
She moderated our "retrospective" meetings where we reflected on the last weeks. She was struck by my coddled dev team's haplessness. They constantly complained that they weren't given clear priorities; seethed about King Joffrey; wanted "the men with the money" to make everything clear.
When she was sick, I asked another coworker to replace her. Striking contrast in their styles:
- coworker 1: Afraid to look clueless, so pretended she understood. Bosses normally rewarded this, but this is bad for learning.
- coworker 2: Openly curious & asked questions that revealed her ignorance. Bosses normally punished this (humiliation, less freedoms), but the developers in the room were thrilled to explain.
I later used this "invisibility" technique to escape the office & work from home.
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Erica Lagalisse: her book "'Good politics'" — extremely useful case-studies & analysis of anarchist organizing. Random pages discuss illuminati, anarchists, jealousy, intersectionality, hermetic magic..! What else could be more engrossing?
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Michael Albert: Unclear whether his Participatory Economics itself would "work" — but its tools are top-notch. Examples:
- Leadership promotion: sharing skills & confidence to be leaders
- Professional-managerial class: I frankly think if someone doesn't sometimes use a 3 class analysis, they'll often goof up & try to lump workers together with their viscerally hated class enemies
- Balanced job complexes: helped me sense power imbalances, so I could correct them
- Theory-theory: leftists talk about theory. So WTF is theory?
- Self-improvement: you could just... make your own economic system. Let's experiment with different utopias!
- Basic strategy: "Short term, we raise social costs until elites implement our demands or end policies we oppose. Longer term, we accumulate support and develop movement infrastructure and alternative institutions, while working toward transforming society's defining relations."
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Starhawk: consensus tools
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Shanley: Wrote brilliant radical-management essays that are now hidden lore; she tore them from the internet. I stored them on multiple drives.
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Getting to Yes: Bargaining power is a vital concept. This is a slim important book.
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Women's Way of Knowing: Non-patriarchal teaching. (The last couple chapters.)
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HPMoR: Right-wing 'libertarian' Harry Potter fanfic designed to teach relentless resourcefulness. It's hyper-individual, but can be adapted for a more effective & healthier collective context. “Of course there are ways you could have won. There always are, in every lost battle. The world around us redunds with opportunities, explodes with opportunities, which nearly all folk ignore because it would require them to violate a habit of thought.”