top
East Bay
East Bay
Indybay
Indybay
Indybay
Regions
Indybay Regions North Coast Central Valley North Bay East Bay South Bay San Francisco Peninsula Santa Cruz IMC - Independent Media Center for the Monterey Bay Area North Coast Central Valley North Bay East Bay South Bay San Francisco Peninsula Santa Cruz IMC - Independent Media Center for the Monterey Bay Area California United States International Americas Haiti Iraq Palestine Afghanistan
Topics
Newswire
Features
From the Open-Publishing Calendar
From the Open-Publishing Newswire
Indybay Feature

Fighting the Boss in Our Head

by Carl
An article concerning the intersections of patriarchy and working-class organizing, from a working-class cisgender male organizers' perspective.
Fighting the Boss In Our Heads and Hearts
By Carl

If there’s one thing I know for certain, it’s that I’ve hated every boss I’ve ever had. Whether it was the benevolent farm owner who fronted as my “friend” while cutting my hours and threatening to replace me when I complained, or the store manager at the coffee shop who promised me health care only to be forced by their higher-ups to cut back on employee benefits. My blood boils when I think of the bullshit that myself and millions of other workers put up with on a daily basis just to survive and pay our bills. It doesn’t matter that the boss is just a small piece in a much grander social system. We hate them nonetheless.

One great thing about being a radical organizer is that you get to spend most of your time with other people who also hate bosses and, occasionally, are organizing people to fight back against them. There’s nothing quite like seeing the look on the face of an employer when you barge into their office with 30 workers demanding a wage increase; or show up to their home at 7am with drums and horns. These moments are what attracted me to a group like the Solidarity Network. Originally founded in Seattle, the Solidarity Networks are based on a simple premise: if your boss or landlord is messing with you, we’ll make their lives hell. Not only is this fun and in line with radical politics; it also works. In just a handful of years, Solidarity Networks have successfully reclaimed unpaid wages, recovered stolen rental deposits, and won crucial repairs for tenants, among other victories all around the world.

The purpose of writing this piece, however, was to start to come to terms with a different kind of boss that is plaguing our movements and our communities. This is a boss we often overlook in search of more “strategic targets,” one that is evasive, cuts across class lines, and has the capacity to infiltrate our organizing efforts no matter how cautious we are. If we are truly committed to a world without bosses, it would seem worth our time to take a step back and look at how this boss has been able to invade our most cherished spaces and start to think creatively about how to defeat him. We can call this the “Campaign to Defeat The Boss Inside Our Heads and Hearts.” This boss is called patriarchy, and sometimes it has a way of making me a boss too. And as always, we have to fight to win.

In order to explain what I mean by all of this, I’ll be mostly referring to my own experience as someone who has oftentimes acted like a boss, even as I’m trying to fight other bosses; as someone who wants to re-center working-class life in our struggle but often finds himself romanticizing the worker movements of a bygone era (pretty much all of which were plagued by some form of patriarchy, like in a major way); and as someone who wants to keep in mind the long-term visions of a society without domination or hierarchy, but finds it difficult to balance this with the day-to-day realities of strategic organizing. What I’m saying is: this stuff is hard. One aspect of patriarchy is the false insistence to go it on our own. So in confronting this boss, the only way to succeed (as in any campaign) is together. As an older male mentor once told me: “Just because I’m a man, doesn’t mean I have to act like ‘the man.’”



How does patriarchy act as a boss in our movements?

A.) The normalization of aggressive behavior and authoritarianism

When I reflect on past experiences, I see the ways in which I accumulated and concentrated authority in political groups through a variety of tactics. One thing I noticed myself doing was asserting certain group processes that prioritized a very specific mode of discussion, debate and making of proposals, based in aggression and contrariness. Because of my particular development as a radical, which largely centered around reading and celebrating the histories of radical men with fantastic beards, I’ve often approached political discussion in abstract terms, in a way that doesn’t always value our comrades as human beings or as friends (or even as comrades) but rather places a much larger value on pushing forth proposals and hundred-year old political lines. This characteristic has the tendency to silence others, usually by creating an atmosphere where it’s hard to speak up (micro-aggressions, anyone?). If people don’t feel like participating or don’t know what to say, we can blame them: “They just don’t care about the issues as much as I do. Hmph!” Maybe this sounds familiar to you, or maybe it doesn’t. Either way, it was unhelpful for the groups I was a part of in the past.

Another way that I found myself controlling discussions was by misinterpreting alternative modes of communicating (which I didn’t understand) as being “open-ended” or not “targeted.” Our very very important revolutionary theory from the 1800’s has little to say about feelings (i.e. what is actually going on in peoples bodies). In the majority of radical organizing spaces I’ve been in, I’ve witnessed similar dynamics at play. Some group of people want to discuss how they’re feeling about their relationship to the group, and other (usually louder) voices proclaim that there is simply no time for stuff like that, or express visible frustration and impatience, which can be a passive-aggressive way of coercing the group. I can say I’ve taken this stance many times in my organizing life. Deeming the discussion of feelings as “bourgeois,” I wouldn’t always seek space for the inevitable plurality of experience and modes of operating that exist in a random group of people.. I would write this off by appealing to pragmatism: “Well, I’d love to talk about how we’re feeling, but we have to plan this action right now!” This sense of urgency ignorers the more important dynamics in the room, namely that other people are having thoughts and/or feelings that ought to be discussed.

This is a form of social control that seeks to re-enforce authority. It derives from the forced implementation of a particular way of communicating ideas. There is a push for our groups to focus solely on “rational discussion” and to “only talk in terms of proposals.” Are you making or amending a proposal? Are we voting on the proposal? Sure, it’s important to have structured conversation and not just let people derail meetings and agenda items. But sometimes our claims of pragmatism ignore our actual revolutionary, pre-figurative goals. And if there’s no time at the meeting to discuss these things, then it is our responsibility to build friendships outside of the meetings and take on some of the emotional work, pulling people in instead of forcing them out. With most political groups I’ve been in, the routine is to show up to the meeting, or workshop, discuss the serious business, and then go home, while anything that is “off-topic” or not on the agenda is quickly dismissed due to lack of time. This is all backwards. Listening to our comrades, understanding where they’re coming from, and allowing space for people to share their whole selves will do a lot more to build long-term movements than rapidly passing some proposal about what language goes in an article on our website that no one reads.

What happens when one of our comrades feels disrespected or not listened to? In small-group settings (such as in the Solidarity Networks), this typically results in talented and valuable organizers leaving the organization (usually with some amount of bitterness which certainly doesn’t help the reputation of the group). In larger uprising moments such as Occupy, the tendency of men to speak over everyone else, control discussions, and disregard the feelings of others can lead to huge rifts in the movement and the departure of dozens, or perhaps hundreds of participants. How does this strengthen the working class? One major take-away that I got from learning how to organize other workers was that the majority of my job as an organizer was to listen to people, understand precisely where they’re coming from and what they care about, and then move them towards action and reflection. This builds trust and confidence with the people we’re organizing. We ought to be able to translate these skills into our interactions with our own comrades. As organizers we need to be flexible, and able to shift our thinking and strategy to fit the moment, and depending on who we’re working with. By interrupting others, clinging stubbornly to our specific political lines, and driving people away from our groups, not only are we perpetuating a patriarchal organizing culture (which runs contrary to our stated values), it’s just terrible organizing and shitty behavior, plain and simple.

B.) Fear of repression

Bosses rely on authority and a threat of repression in order to maintain order and a strict sense of obedience in the workplace. They can control us through their access to our wages and their ability to reprimand or fire us, take away our benefits, or lower our pay. No surprises here. And while these conditions don’t necessarily exist in an all-volunteer organization, the basic dynamics do tend to crop up. Here’s how:

As I mentioned previously, I was politicized largely around the writings of lots of male revolutionaries. Hell, my nickname in middle school was “Karl Marx,” (apparently the only other “Carl” people had heard of). Becoming more involved in the radical scene in my late teen years brought me into contact with lots of other activists who had apparently been politicized in a similar way. Through these encounters I learned how one is “supposed to talk” in political circles. I was overwhelmed by the history and knowledge of the left, so I dedicated a large amount of time to reading and learning about the various factions and splits and ideologies and tendencies (I’m putting myself to sleep just typing these things), and more importantly, developing my ability to argue political points. This seemed like an important skill to develop, though it didn’t earn me a lot of friends per se.

Only after looking back on this process years later do I see how deeply steeped in patriarchal culture these practices were. I learned that it was no accident that so many “radical spaces” were populated almost entirely by white men. I would ask myself, be-fuddled: “why are people silent after I speak?” “Why does it seem like ‘no one else has any ideas?’” “Why are people leaving our group?” and also “Why am I always the one invited to speak at events or public actions?” And for the longest time I had no concrete answers for these questions. I just thought I was the coolest, the most down, or maybe just the most intelligent. Ugh. And this is not to say that everyone besides white men is uninterested in political theories and histories, but rather, as I’ve started to argue, that it is the way in which we go about discussing these ideas with others and our tendency to shut down conversation, centering ourselves in political discussions instead of creating collaborative spaces where people can share a variety of perspectives.

In reality, what was happening was that I was creating a hostile environment through the intimidating use of a specific kind of knowledge and way of speaking that, in a patriarchal capitalist society, is deemed superior and/or “normal.” This all but guaranteed that I would be the one asked to speak or write a thing, when needed. I believed that organizing should be centered in developing the best political argument, bringing an idea to a meeting or public event and convincing everyone I’m right. Those who did not have the same experience or interest in crafting elaborate proposals and arguing them in a group of mostly strangers (and mostly men) would be afraid to speak up for fear of sounding dumb or being told they’re wrong. Or at the very least they would be bored and disengaged. This is how big decisions would get made about the political direction of a group, without any real informed discussion or inclusion of other ideas. I remember writing elaborate political platforms that I would then explain to my group and ask for their approval. Often people would passively agree to it, and then later I would act shocked when they weren’t familiar with the platform! This was not consensus or democracy, but rather coercion and manipulation. That’s right, I was a “mansplainer” before we even had a term for it.


Furthermore, I would often have a defensive response when dealing with objections to my proposals or my behavior, which when coupled with the authority I carried with me, only contributed to this coercive culture. For example, I might come to the group with a well-crafted proposal, but other people (maybe a majority of the group) disagreed with it, or were skeptical or unsure. I might get upset because clearly I was right and other people just weren’t seeing things clearly. So what are the tactics I could use to push through what I wanted? 1.) I could be rude to people, either overtly (through condescension or insults, like how a boss calls you “stupid” if you make a mistake) or covertly through micro-aggressions or excluding them from social scenes (you know, like how a boss can demote or fire you if you complain); more commonly I could threaten to leave the group (you know, like how a company threatens to leave town when its workers try to organize); or perhaps the favorite method of the left currently, I could go online and write epic diatribes about how backwards the left is (you know, like I’m doing right now!).

Lacking a mass working-class base or the skills and experience to build such a base (through no fault of our own), such activity gets interpreted as “organizing.” Hours are spent debating the fine points of some statement, or trying to prove a point to some person over email. More often our time gets wasted dealing with the inevitable fallout between organizers who feel insulted or hurt or not listened to. This model of organizing is patriarchal, and it’s also how bosses act. Furthermore, it drives away tons of amazing people, who either drop out of politics altogether, or join an organization that may treat them, I dunno, like human beings (even if the organizations’ politics aren’t totally on point). In my experience, the vast majority of folks who have left the groups I’ve been a part of have done so not because they’re not dedicated or talented or smart, but because they don’t feel welcomed or listened to.

While I think it is necessary for myself and other radical men to take our patriarchal behavior into account from the standpoint of our own values, it is also necessary if we are to build and maintain strong movements and organizations, if we are to be actually doing good organizing.


C.) The exploitation of others’ labor

Not only did I grow up with examples of men showing emotions or doing any real support work for others, the activist culture I was reared in did not model this either. The women in the group were generally the ones to step up and do the groundwork (cooking food, facilitating, inviting everyone to the meeting, consoling people who felt stressed or sad, etc.), while the men would usually just show up and talk.

For the longest time I didn’t understand how much work really went in to keeping the organization together. I didn’t realize that behind the scenes of the meetings and online discussions, there was a whole flurry of activity going on: folks mediating conflicts, listening to frustrations; crafting discussions or workshops on internal dynamics and oppression; forming caucuses for oppressed groups within the organization who didn’t feel appreciated, etc. These activities (and many more) comprise part of what often gets called “emotional work.” And who would do this work, traditionally?

As a young activist, I was pretty convinced that all we had to do to overthrow capitalism was organize as many protests and events and direct actions as possible and then, poof! No more capitalism! Well, as it turns out, it’s hard to overthrow capitalism when you’re acting like a boss. I always felt more comfortable doing the political squabbling and bull-horning work (which is ultimately pretty useless…just like the work of a boss), while others were stepping up to keep all the gears moving in our organization. This was exploitation, straight up.

Just as our unpaid labor as workers under capitalism allows the ruling class an ever-increasing amount of leisure time to enjoy/waste as they please, the unrecognized/un-validated labor of our comrades in the struggle (generally not men) allows us increased time to network with other activists and be seen, go to events and shmooze, develop relationships with the right people, write and publish epic essays and manifestos that gain us credibility and recognition in the movement, thereby implicitly increasing our authority over others in movement spaces, thereby making it even less likely that we will be expected to do often undermined “emotional work” and thus gain even more time to write more shit and make appearances at activist functions and thus gain more credibility. We can call this the accumulation of leftist social capital via patriarchy.

To be clear, these are not just individual dynamics; there are social forces at play in the left and more broadly that reinforce this. For example, again during Occupy, I spent a good deal of time (probably not enough) at the space where all the meals were made, cooking, chopping, cleaning up, etc. At one point an older male activist came to me and said: “Why are you here doing this work? We need you at the camp organizing people!” Another time, a different older male activist literally tried to drag me out of a working group meeting (which was organized and facilitated by my then-partner) so that I could go to one of their secret “leadership meetings.” I politely declined (ok, not so politely actually). But there were many times previous to that where I didn’t decline, where I chose to do the more exciting or prestigious thing instead of being solid towards my comrades, or where I agreed to speak at some function even though I had already spoke at 10 other functions that year. This helped to build a lot of things, namely my own reputation, but did not in the end build any sort of movement.

In my experience with organizing that emphasizes campaigns and victories (such as the Solidarity Network, and other union work), we can often dismiss “emotional work” as distracting from the ultimate goals of the group. This is done for “pragmatic” purposes. “I just want to win!” is a common refrain, implying that there is a distinction between our short-term campaign goals and our longer-term revolutionary visions (or, rather, that the longer-term visions aren’t all that important). However, if patriarchy is a boss (and a hugely important one, as I’ve tried to argue) then we also need to defeat that, or else our “class struggle” is hollow and meaningless. Dismissing the absolutely necessary work of keeping the organization together is not winning. Letting others do this work while you do the “real organizing” is not winning. If the principle goal of our organizing is ending exploitation and domination of other humans, this behavior = losing. Like, 1000% losing. And although this dynamic seems to have changed somewhat (at least in some spaces in the Bay Area…I can’t speak for elsewhere), I know that I, and probably most organizers, could definitely make some improvements towards doing more support work, listening, building accountable relationships, offering care and love to our comrades, not to mention supporting others in the movement in developing these skills.

Just to be clear, up to this point I have said that patriarchy exists in our organizations through exploitation of labor, authoritarianism and fear of repression. You know, like pretty much all the reasons we organize against bosses.

Tactics to Defeat the Boss Inside Our Head

On the bright side, our movements and the people within it are creative and smart as hell! And, as we’ve seen throughout history, we have the capacity to change our minds and actions. This boss who dwells inside of us is by no means omnipotent. He was created by capitalist patriarchy and he will be defeated only through sustained and direct confrontation. Just as standing up to your boss feels scary, because we’ve spent years living in his shadow and being afraid, standing up to the boss in our head can seem terrifying or hopeless. We don’t feel capable of changing after so long. We might feel guilty for past behavior. Some of us have spent years trying to be better, trying to organize against this boss inside of us, only to catch ourselves slipping up and seeing that boss come out again and again. It can be de-moralizing. But, as the famous strike slogan goes: “One day longer, one day stronger!”

So what do we do? First off: there is no prescription, there is only experimentation. There are probably tons of ideas out there that y’all have put into practice effectively (and I’d love to hear about them!). But just as with organizing, the only way we will know if a given tactic or strategy is effective is by putting it into practice and evaluating it, then improving it. Below are a few suggestions to get the ball rolling.

*Listen, dude.
We can start by listening, obviously. Next time we go to a meeting, let’s try not making any proposals. Let’s try fully understanding what other people are saying. If we don’t understand, how about we ask a question or two? And let’s think long and hard before we answer. It’s unfortunate we still have to say this, but let’s try to remember that oft-repeated phrase “step up, step back.” If we are talking way too much, or driving the conversation and noticing that other people are frustrated with that, let’s move back, take a breath, and listen. This also goes for our personal conversations. If you are talking with a comrade (or anyone), especially someone other than a cisgender man, try to notice how much you’re talking versus how much you’re listening/asking questions.

*It’s ok to be wrong, dude.
We can show more willingness to collaborate with others. We can demonstrate humility. After all, we’re probably not always right. And even if we are, it’s not that important, especially if the constant need to be right on every topic is driving away other organizers. Is that how our revolution is going to succeed? By us being right all by ourselves? Probs not.

*BFFSD (Best Friends For the Struggle, Dude)
We can build meaningful relationships with people outside of organizing. This can seem scary, especially if the person is not from the same background as us or doesn’t automatically seem that political. But we can learn how to talk to each other, learn how to support other emotionally, as humans, not just as “co-workers.” If the only time we see each other is at some boring meeting once a week, guess what? We probably won’t like each other very much, and we won’t know where we are all at emotionally and physically. We won’t empathize with anybody, which makes it easier to assert domination through the dynamics already outlined in this piece. Needless to say, it’s important to build these relationships with more than just the men in the group, lest we just continue to replicate the boys’ club mentality that can sometimes permeate leftist subcultures. Let’s make an effort to hang out with and get to know our comrades, and let them know that we really have their backs.

*Hug it out, dude.
As men we can learn to be more vulnerable with each other, talk about how we’re feeling and what we need. We can talk about our relationships, our frustrations, our visions, and we can develop closeness and intimacy with each other. This takes a big burden off of others and spreads out the crucial “emotional work” more evenly.

*Dude, where’s my praxis?
Despite the emphasis in this article on our individual behavior in movement spaces, don’t get me wrong: our ultimate task is to work in solidarity against the institutions that lift up patriarchy. While the work of self-improvement and becoming better male feminist organizers is crucial, we can’t forget to actually show up, and put our ideas into practice. This looks different depending on where you’re living, but there are powerful struggles against patriarchy basically everywhere that we need to plug in to and support. Building class solidarity means showing up for all class struggles, and this certainly includes showing up for fights against gender oppression and violence.

*Seriously
While this article does not delve into the issue of sexual assault (mostly because I wanted to highlight some of the more subtle/unrecognized forms of patriarchy in organizing), it is essential that men in the movement take a more active role in combating intimate violence, which sadly still plagues our society and our radical scenes. Some good resources for starting this work are listed at the bottom of this article, along with other suggested readings.

*Dudes Doin’ Dishes
We can (and should) volunteer to do child-care, or cook food for events, or take on other “support roles.” This might mean stepping back from being at the most exciting parts of an action or meeting, or working on writing epic essays (I know, I’m not modeling this very well right now). If you live in the Bay Area, one good way to plug in to this is to volunteer with the Bay Area Childcare Collective, https://bayareachildcarecollective.wordpress.com/
A quick note here: this is not to say that “men need to do more women’s work.” Good organizing means that we are all taking on a variety of tasks, splitting them up evenly (according to our desires of course…some people may prefer taking care of children to being in a long meeting. I know I do…), and getting a chance to practice a plurality of skills. Men stepping up to do more support work is an attempt to balance the labor more justly, not reinforce gender binaries that determine what kind of labor you are “designed for” based on your gender.

*Dudes undoing our dudeness
Lastly, we can start informal groups to support each other’s growth as feminist men, both emotionally and politically. Expecting women to take on our emotional load is exploitation of labor and not something anyone (least of all, radical labor organizers) should ever do. Thus, it is our responsibility to take of each other’s shit, and our own. I know, this may seem to contradict the thing I just said about men not just hanging out with each other and creating “boys clubs.” Let me try to be clear: these groups of men can and should be formed in the context of organizing with lots of other kinds of people and should not be separatist, or from sort of liberal ally-ship model where we reduce ourselves to one abstract identity. It is inevitable in the course of building mass movements that many of the men we come into contact with (rank-and-file workers, for example) will exhibit much of the same behavior that we’ve discussed in this piece. We need to hone our abilities and our fluency to confront patriarchy as it manifests in the struggle with poor and working class people. However, creating groups of relatively privileged men who exclusively work with each other completely defeats the purpose of mass struggle and liberation. Within our movements it is perfectly acceptable and often necessary for study/support groups to form to deal with some of the shit blocking us from advancing our revolutionary agenda, especially if/when these groups are requested by our comrades who feel disrespected/silenced.

Conclusion

We cannot defeat the boss by becoming him. That much is clear. However, it is anything but inevitable that we should become bosses in our process of organizing. What is inevitable is that the road to a new world will be bumpy, and we will likely stumble a thousand times before we get there. I want to say that we shouldn’t be afraid to mess up, but the truth is, it is scary. This is why we organize collectively, and not as individuals. We know that, as workers, the only way to take on the bosses is as a united class. It is no different when we take on the boss of patriarchy. We cannot do it alone. Patriarchy, like capitalism, is an unnatural system that perpetuates violence, fortifies hierarchies, and obstructs us in our journey towards a liberated world. When we talk about “class struggle,” this means struggle with ALL oppressed classes, and therefore we must center the fight against patriarchy (fighting the boss inside our heads and our hearts) if our words are to mean anything at all.












Acknowledgments

It feels pretty weird to put out this particular writing with my name on it, even though I attempted to base the majority of it on my lived experience. However, a hefty chunk of the thinking that went into this was not done in isolation, but rather in innumerable conversations with friends, comrades, and my amazing partner. I’m not trying to be falsely modest when I say that the better parts of analysis in this piece came from these other folks in my life (not to mention the countless folks on the front lines of the struggle against patriarchy) and they deserve much more credit than I do (not that the purpose of writing a political essay is to get cred…or at least it shouldn’t be). And even though much of what’s in here was drawn from my own experiences, the only reason I was able to write a piece like this is because many people, of many genders, have taught me, pushed me, and helped me think through all my bullshit over the years, and up until today. I am hugely indebted to my radical community, and I hope that I can pay this debt with continued growth as a male feminist and class-warrior.



Suggested Readings.


Why Misogynists Make Great Informants: https://inciteblog.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/why-misogynists-make-great-informants-how-gender-violence-on-the-left-enables-state-violence-in-radical-movements/


“Support,” a zine showing ways to prevent sexual violence and support survivors, and more. http://www.phillyspissed.net/node/18


“The Revolution Starts at Home,” confronting intimate violence in activist communities. Here’s a PDF. http://lgbt.wisc.edu/documents/Revolution-starts-at-home.pdf


Info on the Challenging Male Supremacy Project. http://zapagringo.blogspot.com/2010/06/challenging-male-supremacy-project.html


Against Patriarchy, Tools for Men to Further Feminist Revolution. By Chris Crass. http://thefeministwire.com/2013/06/against-patriarchy-tools-for-men-to-further-feminist-revolution/


Sex, Race, and Class, by Selma James. https://libcom.org/library/sex-race-class-james-selma


Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy, by Andrea Smith. http://laylacassim.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/andrea-smith.pdf

Caliban and the Witch, by Silvia Federici.
Add Your Comments
Listed below are the latest comments about this post.
These comments are submitted anonymously by website visitors.
TITLE
AUTHOR
DATE
theno
Mon, Jun 8, 2015 1:43PM
We are 100% volunteer and depend on your participation to sustain our efforts!

Donate

$110.00 donated
in the past month

Get Involved

If you'd like to help with maintaining or developing the website, contact us.

Publish

Publish your stories and upcoming events on Indybay.

IMC Network