Socialism is the Best Medicine

Socialism is the Best Medicine

Machismo at Work?

September 29, 2007

Comments

The man was nearly deaf. “He won’t wear hearing protection!” exclaimed his exasperated wife. I turned to the man and asked if this was true. He nodded and confessed that none of the guys at work wore hearing protection.

Feminists would describe this behavior as workplace machismo or male toughness. Marxists would describe it as false consciousness, where workers fail to recognize their class interests, in this case, to protect their health on the job.

I suspected something else, so I replied, “I think I understand. If you value your hearing, then you are valuing yourself, and that would create conflict in a job where you are not valued.” His eyes widened in recognition. Then he looked down at the floor and nodded. His wife asked me what I was talking about, so I explained.

The more employers divide and devalue their employees, the less they have to pay them, and the more profit they can make. In self-defense, workers seek recognition of their contribution in the form of higher wages and benefits and improved working conditions. This can only be achieved when workers pull together.

In 1937, General Motors was the biggest corporation in the world. Genora (Johnson) Dollinger describes the confidence of workers who forced GM to accept their union:

“Every time something came up that couldn’t be settled or the workers got a tough foreman who told them, “Go to hell,” they’d shut down the line. The men were so cocky, they’d say to the foremen, “You don’t like it?” They’d push the button and shut down the line.”

To prevent such rebellion, the capitalist class try to strip unions of their power. In her book Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States, Sharon Smith explains how conservative union officials joined with government to drive socialists and other militants out of the unions.

By the 1950s, American unions had been transformed from fighting organizations controlled by workers to bureaucratic organizations run by middle-class bureaucrats. But the bosses wanted more. They wanted complete control of the shop floor.

Degrading workers

In Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, Harry Braverman describes how bosses robbed workers of their power by imposing an industrial system called “scientific management” or Taylorism after its inventor, Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856 – 1915).

Taylor developed three methods for transferring control over the labor process from workers to managers: separating mental and manual work; deskilling the labor process; and micro-managing every step of the work. In combination, these methods reduce the skilled worker to a cog in a machine, interchangeable with any other cog. As one writer of the time observed,

“It is not, truly speaking the labor that is divided; but the men: divided into mere segments of men – broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail.”

Taylor’s methods are the norm today. Fast-food restaurants are structured like assembly lines. Hospitals function like factories where separate departments tend to different parts of the body, in assembly-line fashion. Classroom courses are scripted to the point of describing which hand gestures to make while teaching.

Devalued workers are treated as expendable. An estimated 55,000 Americans die every year from occupational injury and illness, far more than died on 9/11. Despite this shocking level of industrial slaughter, politicians do not denounce employers as “terrorists,” and they do not order Homeland Security to patrol the workplace.

Ninety percent of all work sites in America (covering 40 percent of the nation’s workforce) are not inspected regularly for health and safety violations. When violations are found, the penalties are too small to force real change.

The State virtually gives employers a license to kill workers. In 1970, Congress declared that causing the death of a worker by deliberately violating safety laws is a misdemeanor (not a felony) with a maximum sentence of six months in jail. This is half the maximum for harassing a wild donkey on federal land.

Workers stripped of skill, dignity and social worth suffer low morale, sickness, and frequent absenteeism, all of which lower productivity. To boost productivity, experts in medicine, psychology and human relations serve as the maintenance crew for the human machinery. These professionals are not employed to remedy the assault on the worker. Their job is to manage the worker’s reactions to that assault. The worker becomes the problem, not the way work is organized. That is how a middle-aged worker with hearing loss ends up at the doctor’s office feeling embarrassed about not using hearing protection.

False consciousness?

Is this worker suffering from “false consciousness”? He knows he has a conflict. He understands the danger of excessive noise and wants to protect himself. However, he also recognizes (even when he cannot put it into words) that if he and his co-workers valued themselves, it would be more difficult to tolerate a job in which they are not valued.

Given the employer’s disregard for their hearing, these workers have two choices. They can unite and demand less noise on the job and more effective hearing protections. Or they can “go along” by dissociating from their need to protect themselves. The first option would create conflict with the boss. The second option creates conflict with themselves and each other. The workplace is structured to promote the path of least resistance, which is to “go along to get along.”

When challenging the social order seems impossible, machismo serves as a form of self-defence. Machismo helps male workers bear their degradation by making it seem that they choose to risk their health on the job, as a confirmation of their manly toughness.

By viewing the problem as masculine strutting, we fail to recognize the worker’s actual oppression. By viewing the problem only as false consciousness, we disregard the ways that workers defend themselves when they can see no class-based alternative.

Workers’ lives are stressful, and society tells them that the cause of this stress is not the people who wield power over them, but other workers. So, when they see no class solution, workers may turn against themselves as well as against each other.

Socialists strive to help workers uncover the social source of their misery and their collective power to end it. The term “false consciousness” is used to explain why workers persist in supporting a system that oppresses them. (Feminists also use the term “false consciousness” to explain why women support a system that oppresses them.)

The concept of “false consciousness” resembles Freud’s concept of psychological resistance. When Freud’s patients refused to accept his interpretation of their problems, he called this “resistance,” a psychological defense against confronting painful realities. The assumption is that the therapist is right and the patient is wrong.

In reality, therapists frequently fail to appreciate the larger social context that compels people to behave in ways that seem self-defeating, but are paradoxically self-preserving in the absence of other choices.

Consider people who stay with abusive partners despite their therapists’ recommendations to leave. Freud would view the deadlock between therapist and patient as resistance, where the patient is resisting the therapist. However, the therapist may not appreciate the person’s lack of options for supporting themselves and the real possibility that their mate may kill them if they leave.

Just as the concept of resistance creates conflict between therapist and patient, the concept of false consciousness can create conflict between socialists and non-socialist workers. Who decides whose consciousness is “true” and whose is “false”? Socialists may not appreciate the extent to which capitalism is structured to keep most people feeling powerless most of the time, regardless of what they know in their heads.

The body tells the truth

The self-defense methods that workers use to ‘get by’ are not entirely successful. They preserve a semblance of dignity, yet fail to protect against the ravages of exploitation. What the mind refuses to acknowledge, the body protests by generating pain and other disabling symptoms (like hearing loss). As Michael Schneider writes in Neurosis and Civilization,

“As long as the working class does not rebel against these new and intensified forms of exploitation, heart, stomach and circulatory diseases of individual workers will rebel for them. Even though the worker may still ‘go along,’ his circulation, in any event, will not. Even if he says, ‘actually I feel alright,’ his stomach ulcer will prove the contrary.”

Machismo, racism, sexism, homophobia, dissociation, sickness and other forms of self-defense both mask and reveal the reality of worker oppression.

Workers do not choose to suffer. They want to be judged even less. Socialists can align with workers by appreciating the complex methods they use to defend themselves. This alliance is essential if workers are to fight their oppression as a class.

Braverman concludes that, until workers fight back as a class they will

“remain servants of capital instead of freely associated producers who control their own labor and their own destinies,” and they will “work every day to build for themselves more ‘modern,’ more ‘scientific,’ and more dehumanized prisons of labor.”

4 Comments

4 Comments

  1. September 30/07

    Good article.

    If I may add, since I have some personal experience of that condition, the feeling of not being valued compounds with a feeling of powerlessness that leads to a longing for death, “jokingly” expressed as for example “one has to die from something.” This is particularly striking among the males in the workplace.

    Life is a struggle and a fight, isn’t it ?

    Reply
  2. September 30/07

    Thank-you.

    I’m female, and I work for a retail chain, HBC (Zeller’s) in Canada. In the past 3 months I have worked there, 2 of my fellow employees have been put on anti-depressants, one has developed a bleeding ulcer and the rest just plod along like dairy cattle. The lifer’s as I refer to them (10+ years) are the most miserable lot of women (and 3 men) I’ve ever met.

    We are forced to push instant credit applications for store credit cards or Master Cards down the throats of every customer who crosses our paths and have a set number per day which we must sign up. If you fail to do so, you are called into the office to discuss the matter with your supervisor and manager, and as we are not so subtly reminded constantly, it could mean your job.

    We are paid barely above minimum wage. Last year, an employee who’s no longer with the company attempted to encourage unionization. She was shunned by the rest of the employees.

    Conditioned sheep, the lot of us, and too afraid to do anything about it, for fear of losing our lousy, thankless, horrible jobs. By the way, most of us are single mothers struggling to make ends meet from paycheck to paycheck.

    Your article doesn’t make me feel any better about my job, but it at least puts how I do feel into perspective.

    Reply
  3. October 5/07

    Fiona’s workplace differs from mine in that we make good money for our industry. We also have good benefits and substantial dividends on investments we have in the company. You wouldn’t think we have anything to complain about; unless you were on the inside and were privy to the spheres of managerial influence that keep us in our place.

    I don’t doubt that Fiona’s workplace is much more stressful than mine due to the disparity of incomes. However, the corruption of the principles that are supposed to govern the company and the treatment of workers creates a deprivation of spirit that haunts our workplace too.

    Workers cannot aspire to their highest selves. Management does not want us thinking about better ways to do things. Management does not want us to point out when other workers are being treated unfairly.

    We keep our well-paid mouths shut when other worker’s lives are thrown into turmoil and they lose their jobs because they wouldn’t keep their heads down and their mouths shut.

    The company’s literature touts its vision-statement of a democratic workplace, but the company’s policies, which are supposed to address any failing in the purported democratic workplace, all end in the sphere of managerial influence.

    Environmentally-concerned citizens’ groups have sprung up with amazing diversity; people who recognize a common need to address environmental issues are getting together to decide what they can do in their community. People and groups with common goals are connecting through the internet, and posting links to each other.

    I think workers can use this model. The deprivation of spirit that Paul, Fiona, and I are experiencing can be addressed by us. I’m game for any worker that wants to connect and think about the issues and what we can do. You can contact me at: pbyynevfoyhr@ubgznvy.pbz

    I went to a climate-action-group meeting in my community last night. They are doing really positive things. And they are doing it all by themselves.

    Reply
  4. September 30/2007

    Good article.

    If I may add, since I have some personal experience of that condition, the feeling of not being valued compounds with a feeling of powerlessness that leads to a longing for death, “jokingly” expressed as for example “one has got to die from something, anyway”. This is particularly striking among males in the workplace.

    Life is a struggle and a fight, isn’t it ?

    Reply

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Posts

To Win Social Justice, We Must Win the Class War

To Win Social Justice, We Must Win the Class War

Book Review: Class Struggle Unionism is based on the understanding that workers create all social wealth, and a system that allows a few to obtain billions in riches while the producers of wealth live in misery is an illegitimate system. Once we accept that reality and act as a class, victory will be ours.

read more