What in the hell …

I’ve been working with someone recently who wants to organize their workplace. It makes me so tense. I’m not taken with the Derrida/Levinas infinite debt to the other kind of thing, except with regard to this, in which case it really does feel right, at a minimum it seems to have the proper aesthetic for that empty feeling in the pit of my stomach working on this stuff.

This person is really gung-ho, excited by the news they’ve heard about our union and organizing that’s been done in the industry. But they have rather business union type instincts, because that’s the predominant model at hand in the rare cases when workplace organizing comes up. And that model is fucked. The bosses helped write the laws that undergird it because they prefer its results (”we’ll provide labor peace” is how the CIO billed themselves to bosses in presenting the contract model) across the board, and at this point the bosses have also broken their side of the deal that gave that model the efficacy it used to have. Hence the splits in the AFL, a panic set of captains fight about the best route back to the glory days while the ship sinks beneath them. They don’t mind, they have fat fucking paychecks. But I digress.

This fellow worker takes feedback very well, so I needn’t worry so much. Of course, needing not to doesn’t stop a habit. Part of my nervousness is simple desire to avoid a conflict with a comrade. But more than that, it’s a fear of fucking up. I mean, I fuck up all the time, but fucking up when someone else’s job is on the line, and their co-workers…? Ugh. Terrifying. I try to be as honest as I can, and give my best advice, and make many calls to other people I know.

It’s not even like things are jumping yet. The campaign’s still in the first stage. There’s a lot of enthusiasm, in this fellow worker and others who are supporting the campaign. I keep trying to respond to that with caution but without being discouraging.

I keep saying “if we’re doing this right, we should be frustrated by impatience, not feeling like things are moving too fast.” One metaphor I like to use is that of climbing a mountain (not that I would know) - the point is to put one foot in front of the other, have the end goal in mind and the immediate steps mapped out. The gratifying moments are when one looks down and sees how high up one’s climbed by plugging away. Exciting moments are to be avoided if at all possible - unforeseen events like avalanches. We can’t rule these out - hence the term ‘unforeseen’ - but we can take steps to minimize their occurrence. Gather information first - first contacts, then agitational/relationship building information. Then start to pop the question. Wait to tell the boss until the absolute last moment. But we’re not in control of that all the time.

And we burn out if we’re not careful. At the meeting tonight the room was full of excitement and interest - we’ll do this, we’ll do that, we should try this, who will take this assignment? - and it’s great, it’s invigorating. It’s also probably overly optimistic in its tenor (though I do believe that optimism should be the emotion that characterizes the way in which we orient ourselves toward the future). We’re looking at a 2 to 5 year commitment, and it will likely be a year at a minimum before we see any results that will impress anyone aside from people with the strictest of organizers’ criteria for judgement. It will take a long time, we need to make sure that we will know how to accommodate ourselves for a time. Slow fuses, slow burn. But it’s exhausting.

All this waiting takes time. It takes fucking forever. In the past six weeks I’ve been to six meetings, two of which lasted for a whole weekend each, and I believe two conference calls. I have to throttle down, this is not a pace I can sustain, especially with the needs of the rest of my life. (No desire here to be a professional revolutionary or the superhero that the business unions require their professional staff to be.) But … what about the infinite debt? How to throttle down in the face of that? Any act left undone is a tremendous loss, and all of this is too important to not be done in the best possible way, and I can always get a little less sleep, do a little less work, we can’t afford mistakes - Of course, thinking this way is the chief mistake. Another is monopolizing the experiences so there’s not a shared accumulation but a single accumulation of ability and an accompanying hierarchizing of organization, disguised as a meritocracy. The infinite debt means that even not throttling down doesn’t fulfill the debt. So there’s no unfallen state. Cooling off a bit is do-able. I’ve done it before. If I want to be able to do it again later, I have to do it again now. The infinite debt requires it.

On the other hand, I also feel a deep-seated impatience. I don’t want things to take as long as I know they will. I want things to start to move right fucking now. I want my fellow workers’ optimistic assessments to be right - we’ll lock it up in no time - but I can’t really believe that. What we can trust is what we build, full stop. But building take so long, and every second that the world continues the way it’s going is several lifetimes worth of horror and violence and banality. It has to change. I’m convinced it will. Doing so requires being able to keep the heat of impatience yoked to a patiently crafted engine of planning and organization, with enough of each to keep the machine moving without (me) going cold or burning up.

In the meantime, let’s set a date for when the contact list will be complete, plan for starting the roleplays on the one-on-one conversations, keep collecting the industry information, follow up with the potential salts, and hey we should hang out outside of all this stuff and just talk about music or something, don’t forget to brainstorm about the salt training and about the industry strategy, I’ll call you next week to check in and you call me if anything comes up you have my number, oh we still have to schedule our next committee meeting, prepare our reportbacks, call those other folks for advice, check out that article for the possible study group, try to sleep more and eat better, keep going to the gym, figure out what to let slide, take hot baths, drink beer, and don’t neglect other relationships. I’m tired. Much work to be done. There always will be. Look how much progress we’ve made already. Keep on keepin’ on but make sure and keep being able to keep on keepin’ on. Little by little.