What in the hell …

Angela brought up the idea of visceral hatred for bosses, as something I’d said before.

I do have a deep-seated hate for bosses. My partner and I got into a big argument once about a friend who works in management. Our friend once was telling us about difficulties with having to discipline people for coming to work late. I changed the subject. Later, discussing this with my partner, I said that while I do care about my friend and sympathize to some extent with being in a difficult situation, my emotional response is much more than just that. Basically, my gut reaction is simply “you’re a fucking boss!” Ugh. My partner thought this was callous of me, that I didn’t recognize the rock and hard place between which my friend was constrained to act. I made a remark about a parallel difficulty faced by Nazis and prison guards, which went over with predictable lack of useful effect. I claimed it was because my partner has had less bad working experiences, beyond the general badness of having to work. Having been fucked with by many a boss, I do see things as simply a matter of don’t be a boss. Throughout the conversation, my partner kept demanding to know what our friend should have done in that situation. I have no idea, and neither did my partner. To put it in terms of a fairly basic criticism of Kantian morality, the injunction to act in a way such that the maxim of one’s action can be universalized is of limited efficacy when one is faced only with choice which are at best problematically universalizable. (If memory serves, we sat rather uncomfortably in the space of our disagreement for a while before soothing it with ice cream.) The injunction seems primarily to come down to a command not to get oneself into such positions where there aren’t actions available with universalizable maxims, which doesn’t help much when one is already in that situation. And yet, all suspicions of universals aside: Don’t be a boss (of which a fairly basic definition is someone with the power to hire and fire other people).

Part of my own response to bosses is conditioned by fear. I routinely lose sleep over financial worries, partly derived from some former bad work situations, the after-effects of which are only just beginning to disappear. In the US, a boss can fire an employee for any reason whatsoever, or for no reason at all. I am perpetually one paycheck from a humiliating phone call to my parents, two or three paychecks from repossessions and evictions. The boss has a lot of power to fuck up my life, in a totally unaccountable fashion.

Do I really hate the boss, though? Kind of. My stomach does always jump in one-on-one contact with bosses when the boss-ness is underscored. And yet, I don’t hate the person as such. There are some people I can think of, some of them former bosses who willfully and happily brought the hammer down, who I genuinely do wish cancer or other fatal illnesses on, but for the most part I don’t hate the person who is the boss. I hate being bossed.

On the other hand, there is a visceral thrill of standing up to the boss. In the US the law allows a freedom to concerted activity. Of course, the law is shit and many people get run over roughshod by bosses and the law is useless here. But the important point is that concerted activity is the potential for power - for intellectual power in planning and strategizing, emotional power in drawing people out to express their anger and desperation and their need for something better, for work stopping power in carrying out actions, and for another type of emotional power in the relationships that can be built in this setting. When we delivered our petition demanding union recognition my viscera were in knots and my palms were sweating. The ten of us thought we’d be fired on the spot (it took three months instead). At the same time, while it was terrifying it was thrilling too, and there was a lot of power in going up the elevator together. Small contacts - jostling elbows, a pat on the shoulder - carried a big charge. I’m tempted to say it was sublime - an experience of relative danger followed by relative safety.

In my experiences with workplace organizing I’ve found roleplaying can be very valuable to practice some of what goes on in confrontations, something analogous to practicing blocking a punch in self-defence classes, a way to train the body and mind to respond. We did one of these in a campaign where someone was having pay held back illegally after quitting a job. The training doesn’t change the experience, though, it (hopefully) impacts the outcome: it’s still scary to deal with the boss, because one is deliberately facing someone with the power to rewrite social lines at least at a micro level (”I’ll have security walk you out of the building”) in a way that can have a huge impact on one’s life.

At the same time, this facing up also draws (and draws upon a prior process of drawing) other lines, not lines around people but lines between and through people, lines of power not in the sense of in-group/out-group, power to push people out, but power to tug, power in the sense in which loved ones have power over each other: my younger brothers have a visceral power in relation to me, their experiences impact me tremendously such that sometimes I feel forced to act, even if sometimes I can’t actually do anything (not pushed into or out of, but pulled on by a line connecting us: when he was in second grade the older of my two younger brothers had an older kid on the schoolbus throw a pencil in his eye, calling him a camel jockey - his enthusiastic participation in the fervor of the first Gulf War - it didn’t matter that my brother is Mexican, not Arab, brown is brown I guess. I still get a hollow feeling in my stomach and have revenge fantasies when I think about it, and it’s well over a decade ago.) This is a force acting on me at bodily level.

Visceral hate for bosses is acted upon effectively (and fed affectively) by visceral care for comrades (and visceral grief over the slaps comrades take feeds hate for the ones who deliver them, and acting to slap the boss back feeds relationships of care)…