*rolls eyes*
When he talks about power from below, he's talking about how, as a for instance, we manufacture our own consent. take an example from work. i'm supposed to be a big ol' radical, right? i should be questioning all kinds of things about the way management uses techniques to get more work out of us. and of course, I do, though i can't do a whole lot about it. i can do stuff at the individual level -- like look the other way when people screw off as a form of resistance or cover for people screwing off or, or, or.
but one of the things i notice that happens, is that most people's approach to the pressure is to cocoon themselves, batten down the hatches and refuse to be helpful. if another team needs help and you have free time, you don't volunteer. when your internal customers want things or need help, instead of helping them, they try to push the work off on someone else.
they aren't cooperative.
but there is a core of people for whom this is difficult -- due to many factors (socialization in childhood, kinds of work experience, etc. etc. these folks feel that they're there to work and help others, to do a good job, to make sure our users have good products, to make things work better, fix when broken, pitch in and help when others have a lot of tasking, etc. they feel a sense of solidarity, iow.
but we, this latter group, are tools, yes? we inadvertantly end up judging our co-workers as lazy, bad attitudes, shirkers -- and we get frustrated. now, i have the tools to understand what's going on -- yet even i get exasperated at people who, when you stop by for help with a problem, are more intereted in tetris (or whatever). i get irritated by th e complainers. i have contempt for the project manager who is always trying to find some other team to take care of a bug. jeez. if she'd just assign the bug for fixing, it'd take 5 hours to fix. meanwhile, it's been 2 days of labor time back and forth emailing and meeting about who's responsible for fixing the freakin' bug.
and of course our customers, the people for whom we create software products and web sites, think the pm sloughing off work is a real shirker.
that process of judgment -- judging and finding morally wanting our co-workers who aren't doing the full load -- is a form of power.
the people shirking are exercising power -- they are ensuring the flow of power throughthe tangle of capillaries of power that snake through the system.
which is why if we only focused on management -- the owners of the company -- we'd never see how power is really operating or, rather, see another way through which power is operating.
but all is not lost! what do we see in the judgmental company tools who work hard and judge their fellow shirkers harshly? we see solidarity in action. we see people for whom the alienated labor process isn't so alienated. they do understand that they create things for others to use and enjoy and that they have a responsibility to do a good job -- to realize their humanity through their labor. and that solidarity, while it has that other edge -- the edge through which we are tools for "the man" -- it also has another edge, the power of solidarity. we are or at least could be, engaged in practices that, when cultivated, will be an important foundation to a socialist society.
carrol likes to talk about how those practices will be forged in struggle. we don't know what human being is like be/c human being changes with shifts in material factors -- division of labor (man: i'm rusty on the marxist lingo)
that's true, but where I depart from carrol is that i think that, in the here and now, we are forging practices that will contribute toward that socialist future.
Here's how i put it at the blog in comments, once. i didn't bother to correct for typos. i'm just blowing time b/c we're leaving for hospital in a few. from all the crawling around on my knees cleaning and such, i managed to get a severely infected knee and ignored it -- like an ass.
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But there is a problem with that. One of the things I remember noticing when I read research and did resarch on the workplace is that you can look at the way that, for instance, workers end up doing what Michael Burawoy calls "Manufacturing Consent" to their own exploitation and oppression. For various reasons, workers end up seeming to resist management and, at the same time, that resistance turns out not to be resistance at all, but a way of binding them every more tightly to the system of exploitation.
Waitresses do this. Mgmt asks them to be stingy on portions, pats of butter, rolls, soda, etc. Waitresses rebel or resist this corporate demand and sneak extra food to their patrons. They see it as a way of fucking the boss who is usually someone who was a waitress only 4-5 months earlier and even resturant GMs aren't long from the days when they slung hash, flipped burgers on the line or were dishwashers.
But this act of resistance just makes them attach themselves to their customers. It doesn't really get them to see how they're exploited. Instead, they work even harder for customers, go out of their way and so forth. This will even happen when tips aren't involved. (Ehrenreich uncovers this, as sociologists studying restaurants did as well, in Nickle and Dimed)
Oh, take the way that cafeteria workers will refuse to call in sick. Even if they get paid sick days. They do this so they won't fuck over their co-workers, who will have to work shorthanded if someone calls in sick. This working class cultural ethos binds them ever tighter to the forces of production: they're good tools for the man, even as they are expressing a kind of solidarity with their brethren on the shop floor.
blah blah. my point. When you look at these issues, you can lamaent them and see nothing but bad things going on in terms of workers binding themselves so tightly to the capitalist mode of production. There's no escape, it seems.
But you can also look at it another way: when workers care about each other, they are cultivating and nourishing an ethos that would be important under a socialist mode of production. If under socialism, people don't work simply to live or people don't work because they are forced to, then what motivates? Well, part of what would motivate was feeling part of a group effort, solidarity with fellow workers. Even solidarity with the consumers of your product the people who need whatever it is you make, the people who get joy, pleasure, sustenance, shelter, etc.
but what is going on in middle class workplaces? resistance doesn't take the form of solidarity. resitance to exploitation takes the form of competitive individualism. what is that nourishing and cultivating for the possiblity of a future outside of a capitalist mode of production? is this helping us develop a mindset for a socialist workplace? probably not.
well. just babbling. this has been bugging me for a couple of months and I haven't worked out all my thoughts on it. but there it is. maybe babbling it 'out loud' with help me articulate it better on another round of editing and rethinking.
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)