The Left-Wing Deadbeat with Nurse John

A lot of people can quote the right theory, wear the right shirt, and post the right meme. Then the moment arrives when you have to sit down with a coworker, ask what they need, and move them toward collective action and suddenly they vanish. We take on that tension by reading and reacting to the provocation “The Left-Wing Deadbeat,” using our own union organizing experience to separate what’s real from what’s just frustration dressed up as advice.

We talk about why some organizing stories feel instantly familiar yet still leave out the most important details: timelines, workplace conditions, power mapping, and what the organizer actually did to develop leaders. From disruptive committee members to under-socialized online habits, we keep coming back to a basic organizing truth: you don’t win by judging politics, you win by building relationships, teaching skills, and giving people a path to act. That includes modeling one-on-one conversations, debriefing conflicts, and treating coworkers like human beings instead of line items.

Along the way we get into labor movement debates that shape strategy on the ground: rank and file unionism versus staff-driven approaches, labor aristocracy and “PMC” shorthand, what proletarianization looks like in tech and academia, and why certain alliances like cozying up to police unions can blow back strategically. We also look at militancy, when it helps, when it becomes a burnout machine, and why political education matters even in bread-and-butter fights.

If you care about workplace organizing, union strategy, and building durable worker power, subscribe, share this with a coworker, and leave a review. What kind of “deadbeat” behavior have you seen, and what actually helped turn it around?

Link: https://organizing.work/2020/05/the-leftwing-deadbeat/

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Transcript

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Welcome And Article Setup

C. Derick Varn 0:48

Hello, and welcome to Varnblog. And today I'm here with Nurse John, long time friend of the show, one of the first patron backers, and we're talking about uh an article from organizing work by MK Lee's and Marianne Garneau. I don't know much about MK Lees. In fact, when I went looking for the authors in this piece to kind of give you give context, I know Marianne Ganot, but I'll try to be objective when I describe that. But MK Lee's I I could find some more articles on organizing work. And I suppose this is just one of those actual, really vague enough non-deplumes that we're not gonna find out what this person does, which is fine. Marianne Ganeau was an IWW organizer, she may still be an IWW organizer, I don't know, although I don't see her listing that. She was very active as kind of a semi-professional organizer in the late 18s and the early the early 2020s. But with the caveat is she seems to have quit writing, participating, and doing anything public in labor organizing in about 2023. Um, I literally couldn't find anything from her past that point. Uh, she did this, she did this website that we're gonna be reading this article from uh called organizing work. She was involved in a project that was tangentially involved to project I was in called Ritual 2.0. I was involved with Ritual for a little while. Ritual was a left comm successor to the Red Star. None of these publications ended up mattering, they were all tiny. My one interaction with Marianne was her accusing me of lying about shit that I said happened to labor organizers in Egypt because she didn't know who I was. And I responded to how would an or a labor organizer in New York know what went on in the ground with small-time labor organizations that were informal in a military dictatorship in Egypt. But that was just me. And I guess I bring that up because one thing that that I feel reading this is this article feels very attractive if you've ever done labor work, but then when you read it, the way they talk about labor work, they feel like at best staffers and at worst hobbyists, which is ironic given what the article is about. And I wanted to take it get your take on that, Nurse John.

SPEAKER_00 3:38

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I've like I first came across organizing work about like five or six years ago. And as like someone who does workplace organizing at my workplace and generally in the community around where I work, it was like, I think that uh one of the things that Marianne did by setting this up, it was like a like a blog specifically focused on organizing questions. And I'll like give all credit that that was like that there have been moments where the things that they offer and the perspectives they offer have given people, I think, a touchstone because a lot of uh a lot of what like the actual nuts and bolts of organizing is either locked inside of unions that's

Organizing Work And IWW Training

SPEAKER_00 4:26

kind of like institutional knowledge, or it's kind of like kept in kind of like cloistered off from just like things that you can like teach yourself while you're trying to solve problems at work. And but you know, the more you kind of find out about some of the people behind it, you're like you get less enamored by it. And I think everyone should approach anything about organizing from a critical perspective, informed by your actual experience organizing. And I will say that uh if people are looking for something like this, it's gonna be informed by rank and file in you know organizers, like I really highly recommend people take a look at firewithfire.blog, which is written by a rank and file education organ worker in Minnesota, who I have a lot of respect for their uh their work. Also a former IWW member and trainer.

C. Derick Varn 5:19

Yeah, I I think one thing I should be very clear is is the one thing I do know about uh Marion Garnot is she was an IW the other than what I mentioned is that she was an IWW trainer and organizer. I have never been in the IWW. I notoriously tried to join twice in Salt Lake, and there was no there was not enough of an active chapter to get my local dues, so it took my national dues and never got back to me.

SPEAKER_02 5:42

Um so I I'll just let that bias come out as well.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

And I'm an off, I'm an off and on IWW member depending on how useful it is at any given time. And I highly recommend people who are looking to get into organizing definitely check out getting involved enough so that you can get to an OT 101 and 102. Uh, because those are, I think, some of the best training, like best way for someone who isn't in a union to get the experience, the training experience of how to organize at work.

C. Derick Varn 6:17

Yeah, I I've heard only good things about the IWW, OT102 uh 101 and 102 trainings. And in fact, our worker center, which is not IWW affiliated, but uses a lot of their techniques when we go out and teach people how to do things like salt. Although I'll talk about salting later because I have opinions. Um But I mean this article, I the funny thing about this article is when I read it, I'm like, well, of course I know about shit like this. Like, I've been accused of being one of these people too, even though I'm an active rep, which is pretty hilarious to me, because I'm like, no, I'm literally uh I've been elected as a rep. I've tried to step down and they re-elected me. Oh like so I've been a rep for six years, and I've won three elections, one of which I didn't even run for. So it's it's it's a thing. I'm I'm definitely involved in in uh union organizing. I also do think though, there there is a danger in both over-generalizing advice like this and over-generalizing like rank and file strategies, because I do think like what you do in the nurses union and what I do in the teachers union, and even what other teachers' unions do, because they're so variant how their charters are organized, even in the same national org. So, for example, like they're like think a lot of the Midwestern National Education Association chapters don't let admin into the same union, and many of them will let staff into the same union in Utah. And and that's in the same national organization, so you really do need to learn these things. I will also say that rank and file leftists that you meet online don't often make good organizers, even when they're like professional organizers, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 8:36

And I think one of the things we haven't done yet, we haven't even named the article yet. So the article is the left wing deadbeat, yeah, which is like let's just get that out there because that is like immediately I'm gonna click on that. I want to see what the fuck is being talked about, because it is, I think it's designed to be provocative in an almost a polemic sense. But it is like, I mean, as someone who I was, you know, part of the left far longer than I was active as a union member. And even in my activity as a union member, it took a long time before I stepped into like an organizing role in the sort of role that involved like actually engaging in fights with work, building relationships, and kind of being really intentional about like my engagement with the union and my coworkers

Defining The Left-Wing Deadbeat

SPEAKER_00 9:28

in relation to that, like in relation to the union. And I think the main gist that she kind of starts off, it's like you know, it's like a couple of quotes. He's in DSA. She posted guillotine memes. They wore a general strike shirt to work one day. It's like, first off, like, I don't know what kind of workplace these people are at.

C. Derick Varn 9:47

Yeah, I was gonna say, like, uh posting guillotine memes is one of these things that I've always been like, don't do that under your real name. And I know like it's so common now that no one's gonna take anything of it. But I've also thought of it as like I don't know, it's a kind of signaling that can signal a kind of over-online persona, and and that's ironic from a guy who like makes part of the lady online, admittedly. But but it it is a tell. He's in the DSA. There are some great people in the DSA. I'm currently in the DSA, you're ex-DSA yourself, but I don't know that many rank and file uh uh union members in the DSA who are also really participatory in their union, unless they are specific organizers and salters, and there is one union locally that is the exception to that, and it's the CWA, but the CWA is a very specific kind of union, so which is not a bad thing, it's just a thing.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

Like and I have I have leftist coworkers. Like I have a coworker who I've known her for years, and her her partner was one of the main sparts in Chicago. I have a coworker who several co-workers from the Philippines who went to the same the same school as some of the leadership of the NPA, and have a very like some of them have a very like informed like understanding of what it means to call yourself a leftist and to be part of the left. But I will say that those people oftentimes, like as they point out in the article, they're not the first people stepping up to fight for the coworkers, and and they can be counterproductive in in weird ways. And I've definitely it is always, I think, I think there's something where if you're already kind of like a member of the left and you have like that kind of engagement with your union at work, that it can sting a little bit when you do encounter people like that, and they don't particularly like there's something not very they're not helpful or they refuse to engage or they engage in very counterproductive ways. But I've also seen people with those backgrounds who have kicked off things that are really important, like for coworkers that end up cascading and having effects down the line. That and they are some of them are really good fighters. And I think that there's this kind of reading this article, and maybe we'll get to it more, but I think the biggest thing that I was like, I think it's really important for anyone in any context to not pay attention to the words people say and pay attention to the things that people do, because that that's where the I think that's where the you know the disconnect happens, where it's like you can say all sorts of things, but if you're not willing to take a step in the direction towards collective action, like it doesn't matter what you think or say because it's about what we all do together.

C. Derick Varn 13:06

Right. I mean the the the first anecdote we get was about a scab at a mini mart in the 1990s, and I was already you know at a strike at a mini mart, and I was already like, great, that's a cool story, I'd love to know. And then they're like phantom Noam Chomsky. I'm like, well, that never signified anything to me, one way or the other. It's particularly problematic now, but um but RAP. Yeah, RAP Noam Chomsky's reputation. But I was thinking about this though, and I was like a wobbling in specific northwest, I've been trying to organize the small shops and relates about you know the the the virtue signaling co-worker, and I'll just read the quote. I met him through Rajava Solidarity activist circles. Well, right there, I don't know what that has to do with work before I started working

Anecdotes And What They Miss

C. Derick Varn 13:53

there. He's a leftist professor type in the shop, reads all the philosophy books and listens to Murray Book Chin books on tape. He asked me about organizing once about six months ago, very off the cuff, and we had lunch and had a short conversation about it. I tried to follow up with him regularly for a while and he ignored my text. I finally got him to talk to I finally got to talk to him in person, and he told me that anarcho-synalism is a failed revolutionary practice for like capitalism, that unions had outlived their usefulness as a revolutionary vehicle, and he was planning on opening a small business. Now, I would say many such cases in my life. I have known many, many people who will use ex-revolutionary practices and then open up a small business. I've even known people in the IWW to have been corporate investors. Um which I was kind of like, how I guess you technically don't employ someone, so you do meet the definition of not a boss, but that's a tough one. I can only think of one such case, though. And then the next anecdote we get. There was on adjunct prof at a redactic college that my co-worker and I went to talk to. My coworker was listening to the lecture before the end of class. It was all about feminism and bell hooks and rabbi radical revolutionary ideas. Asterisk. As a Marxist, if you mention Bell Hooks to me, I automatically look askew. But nonetheless, we're not gonna un asterisk. This person was not interested nor supportive of a union in any way. I don't know if you know what bell hooks was a landlord. Maybe that shouldn't be surprising to you. I've not seen so many times in academia. The Marxist professor, the prof who talks about really radical ideas when it comes to putting some of these radical ideas into action, they are nowhere to be seen. And I will say, Marxist professors who don't even support adjunct strikes are one of the bands of my existence, and they are real. But the person this person's describing is not a Marxist. Um they're feminists, and which is fine, and you can be a Marxist and a feminist, but not usually sight and bell hooks, you're not. And I mean, I'd like to know more about what's going on.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

Part of the other thing with a lot of this stuff is that we're not getting any timelines on any of this stuff. And so if you had the the grad workers organizing at University of Chicago started as an IWW campaign in like 2008, and their first like real like strike activity and like real like collective action that was really publicly surfaced was in 2017. And so the idea that you might talk to somebody maybe in 2010, like I don't know when these these things are happening, and maybe they might blow you off because they don't take you very seriously, might have more to do with like the actual material conditions where they're at. And I mean, granted, everything I've ever heard about campus organizing is that it tends to be the humanities are actually really hard to organize for I'm sure a whole variety of reasons that have to do with how internal competition in the structure of the uh of its own labor market for one thing, but yeah, right, and then and people like some of the strongest organizing happens in in the parts of the house in the parts of the university that are more like like literally proletarianized, like and you're watching, and and so it's just like I think that where my my takeaway on this is like our okay, yeah, like this was uh this is clearly happening, and we understand that's a dynamic. That doesn't mean you don't organize those people don't get organized. It just means that you know someone you got disappointed by somebody, and I'm like, and on a certain level, it's like I can be disappointed in my coworker who's a you know a Christian mom who has every reason to fight for you know less stress at work. I can be disappointed in my Trumpy coworker, who, as enthusiastic as he sometimes can be for our union, also will say and do things that turn my other coworkers off. Because, like he's a white guy who's really you know proud of Donald Trump, even in this day, you know, even in 2026. And I think there were like, let's look at the whole if you're organizing at work, it's hard. It's hard. You've gotta you've gotta pitch people on a thing that the our entire society tells you is impossible, which is that you can find common interest with the people that you spend most of your time with and change things, and there's gonna be disappointments in there, and it's like, and I this whole thing to me, it almost like it stings of this is like a sort of disappointment. And it's like I think that the sooner organizers disabuse themselves of this idea that's like, oh, I believe all this shit, and it's like, but like, but you're not doing anything, so what you believe doesn't like what you say you believe, it's a personal moral like commitment rather than an actual like practice. We keep coming back to that, but I don't know much more to say about it.

C. Derick Varn 19:10

I mean, yeah, we can go through the various things that are brought up in here, but I was actually thinking about about this. There are some things that in here that I that I do think may actually be bad advice, but we'll get to that. There's not a lot, but you know, another quote the problem with leftists isn't always a matter of flaking. Sometimes leftists do get involved, but very disruptively. One member at IWW campaign at a restaurant recalls a self-identified anarchist co-worker was the most disruptive committee member. He would scream at co-workers for doing the wrong thing and asked to, and when asked to debrief after one such incident, he would simply quit the union and badmouth them behind their backs. Okay. I I'm gonna just say as a longtime leftist and long time, I'm

Disruptive Activists And Finding Roles

C. Derick Varn 19:57

not longtime union guy. I've been in a union for now eight years, but I was a leftist way before I was a union guy, although I tried to organize unions where it was outright illegal to organize public sector unions and got threatened. So and I was a right winger back then. I add, so there's some truth to some of the stuff being brought up here, but in any organization, a lot of the people who are only on most active are alienated people. That's been true, and every kind of voluntary organization I have ever been in, religious, anything else. And you know when you meet those people that they are likely to flame out if you cannot moderate them. That is not unique to leftists. So I don't so much disagree with this as just going like, well, no shit. Oh and I can tell that a lot of people that must that you are aiming this article at must have never done any kind of social anything if they don't know that. People are gonna flame out. It it just happens. I mean, it happens all the time. And I guess what I find interesting about this is why is no one not taking responsibility? I mean, maybe this person was just so disruptive as a committee member, it was a problem, but why is no one taking responsibility for the fact that the committee could not rein in and find a proper place for this person? Like, this is a kind of personality that exists. John, I know you've run into plenty of them. Like, I I feel like I run into this person in left-wing circles like like, you know, every two and a half, three years, and I'm gonna be like, in four years, you're gonna be a flaming reactionary if we don't, if we don't like find the exact place for you to fit in.

SPEAKER_00 21:55

And I think that's a that's a key thing, is it like this isn't like one of the most striking things, this is gonna make me sound really weird, but it's like you know, Sun Tzu had a whole thing where it's like there's a role for everybody, right? And you if you're if you can't find a place for everybody and you're taking that role of like lead, like in the organizing, like that's on you, right? Maybe the person who's shouting at like their at fellow committee members for screwing up, really their main role should be shouting at the boss and like wind them up and set them on that path, right? In a way that's organized that's gonna keep them from you know, do keep them from getting fucked over. But there's a there is a a role for all the different types of personalities that fit into like into this world. Right. I like I have coworkers who like their their whole thing is they can they you just watch them organize when there's something that they get a bee in their bonnet, they'll go from like nurse to nurse to nurse to nurse. Did you hear what they're doing? Did you hear what they're doing? Did you hear what they're doing? Right. And then like and they just spread the word. And maybe that person isn't making the best decisions all the time. Maybe they're getting people riled up about a thing that like that in a way that is counterproductive. But like the challenge of being a workplace organizer isn't to steer clear of those people or to dismiss them or you know cut them out of organizing. It's to figure out how we can, as a group, take that energy and use it so that we can all come ahead and come out ahead, right? And build power, as opposed to this is like a mentality that's rife inside of my union, and particularly my union, staff, the staffers in my union, is that people who I don't, if you are a union staffer that they you don't find immediately useful to some task that you've been assigned, like you cut them out and you consider them an enemy, right? And I'll tell this to anybody like there's no enemies in my workplace. Like I have future friends. Maybe we have severe disagreements about a lot of things, and maybe our friendship is very much in the future. But at the same time, we do have like I will talk to anyone and listen to them and figure out what it is that their deal is, what motivates them, and figure out a way to integrate that to the extent that it's useful into you know building a fight, right? And so I just like I think that there's this mentality of instrumental uh instrumentalizing people. And this is because these so many of these stories are coming from people who are professional staff organizers, yeah, which is a faction in IWW. And Marianne is one was, at least at one point, part of that faction, a vocal part of that faction of people who are paid to salt, they're paid to organize, they're paid staffers, and all of these problems are coming from the fact that you don't have like most of these people aren't showing up day in, day out for years talking to these people. They're encountering them once or twice, and then they've decided this person isn't helpful, or they've encountered them in one circumstance. You might find a person who is vocally your enemy and disrupting things in one context, and then maybe a year or two down the line, they see the light and they come and they're incredibly helpful and useful, and like they're incredibly helpful and get things done. It's about accepting that people are going to come in at different points, and it seems like a lot of these are the stories of failing on the part of the organizers to figure out what it is that's making these people tick. And you know, there's people you can't reach, right? Right, there's people you try.

C. Derick Varn 25:41

I mean, to be honest with you, tenure track professors are labor aristocrats, and you should know that. Like, and that does not mean they couldn't sometimes be on your side or you should never reach out to them. I'm just saying structurally they benefit from a whole system of labor exploitation. The fact that someone is supplies that a leftist professor did this thing, I'm like, they're a professor. Are they tenured? What's their incentives? Like if a if a if a tenured professor is on your side, it it is often out of moral obligation, which is which is useful. It's great, you know, but it's a different, it's a different kind of skin in the game. And I'm just like, and I'm like, it seems to me, I mean, I I was one of

Labor Aristocracy PMC And Police Unions

C. Derick Varn 26:28

the things I was reading this article article and I was like, who's the audience for this? Because if you've been a if if you've been in a union or you've been in some of these some of these environments for a long time, this should be obvious to you the stuff that's that's true. Now I realize when someone shared this with me that like, well, a lot of the left we deal with, it's not just that they're not in a union, they can't be in a union. They don't work in areas that are unionized. If if they're going in there doing pre-majority union work, which is important, you know, but it's it has a completely different set of dynamics from being in an established union. And I, you know, I am a big supporter of pre-majority union work. I don't want to sound like I'm slagging on it. We are a declining sector of the we're we're declining in uh in our density in the sectors we are historically strong in outside of uh nursing and teaching and the police are are sectors that the entire economic sector is in decline. Like it's not just that the unions are, it's like, well, the car industry for those of you who are listening, I'm sorry that is spitting your ear. The manufacturing, well, you've been automated down forever. One of the things that's very interesting about, say, tech today, which is getting it being hit very hard, it's being proletarianized in front of our eyes, is that they don't have those institutions because they never had them, because they were labor aristocrats, and now that they're being de-aristocratized. And and I use labor aristocrat in the same way old IWW people do. It's not even a moral judgment, is like you have a special relationship to labor because of your sector or because of credentialing or whatever, that makes it hard to scab on you, and thus your incentives are gonna be different.

SPEAKER_00 28:20

I feel like we need a new name for that.

C. Derick Varn 28:23

Yeah, but people say PMC, and that's not true either.

SPEAKER_00 28:27

Yeah. Um we're not gonna we're I don't think we're gonna solve that debate tonight. Like, I'm just like I just want people to understand like anytime I hear people type in a labor aristocrat or read a labor aristocrat, I always cringe a little bit because I'm like, because I have if you have any historical understanding of what role labor aristocrats played and why they received so much ire back in the day, is because it's a very different relationship to what like if you're a credentialed worker or you're a worker who like happens to sit at a particular point of production, because a thing, you know, we're talking about professors and their relation and like tenure professors and how that raises challenges because they're gonna have like a different relationship. I still work with surgeons and anesthesiologists who should be at the very top of that crust, right? And they are, I listen to them and they are complaining because they're they're getting the same downward pressure from capital. And if you have any familiarity with like, you know, the process of proletarianization, that that like pressure from the very top, you know, to smash, like to smash down people at the top, because that's where that's the bottleneck to to creating profit, those people are gonna like wanna like muscle up, right? They want to be able to do that.

C. Derick Varn 29:50

And they're also your most skilled members, unfortunately, or fortunately, a lot of the time. I mean, to be quite honest. Like right.

SPEAKER_00 29:56

And they can also, in some ways, be some of the most militant and historically have done things that are like have led militancy in a certain way. And I think I only push back on that because you'll hear people describe every worker in the United States as a labor aristocrat because they have to be the whole ultra malice thing, yeah. And they use it as an excuse for why they're not able to organize, as opposed to looking at structurally what is it like, what's going on, and in a purely like sort of like Marxist sense, and I say that as not a Marxist, but you know, find Marx valuable in this respect, to be able to actually look at the process that's happening in front of you and look for the opportunities and find and build solidarity because we are all workers, like my co-workers who push mops are just as much workers as me as my coworkers who use a scalpel. And without us, the the process isn't work. And the more of us that are sticking together and can build that solidarity, the better we can all be off in the end.

C. Derick Varn 30:58

Well, this is like that's the whole thing. That's the whole thing. This is one of these things where I have like very, you know, I have ideas that make nobody happy on organizing. For example, I'm a believer in govern in one singular government employees union. And then I'm okay with with the police being in it because we can discipline them and the larger government employees. I do not like the existence of police unions. Not because they could should or shouldn't have them, but I mean, I don't as laborers, I just think if you look at what their incentives are to do, it is to protect the a lot of what police unions do isn't just about getting concessions from the government for police officers. It's also about making sure police officers are investigated, and protecting themselves from the rest of the working class, right?

SPEAKER_00 31:48

To the extent that they're even working class. We can talk with that's a whole other argument.

C. Derick Varn 31:53

That is an argument that I'm not that I actually I think it's a problem for a variety of reasons because I also start thinking, well, I consider them I consider them to be organs uh workers of the state, which makes them in a compromise position that's inherently bad. But I don't that to me that does not mean one way or the other, whether or not they're workers is a whole different question. And one I can't easily answer without also bracketing out whole groups of people who we normally do consider workers, unless you want to do that thing that some Marxists have wanted to do recently, which is to claim that only the manufacturing sector counts as plural and thus they're the only real workers, and that's the only thing we should care about in terms of production. And this has affected many a Marxist linearist, but also I think it's actually probably more dominant in the Jacobin spear by people who are fucking professors. I'm gonna add that.

SPEAKER_00 32:50

Well, here, let me say this, and then we should get back to the article. I will just say that like the thing that separated labor aristocrats from regular from the rest of the working class was that they had the capacity to hire and fire to get a job site. And the thing to me that separates cops from the rest of the working class is the fact that they can use lethal force against other workers and they're accountable not to other workers, they're accountable to the state and to capital. And I've seen that play out in real life, not like not like an abstract moral commitment. This is just literally like they will throw the University of Chicago uh police, largest police force, private police force in the United States, throws out labor organizers. They're like you're trespassing and they'll throw throw you out on top of terrorizing our neighbors. So there's a whole host of strategic reasons why you definitely have to treat cops as like a sp as something different from the rest of work uh the working class. And so I just say that because this is like then we we don't need to get into our own bugbears on that. But yeah, I wanted to say that workers, which is the stupidest debate I ever want to have. Let's get back to the article. So we're we're agree that that the whole thing with the the left-wing, nominally left-wing professor organizing isn't isn't being helpful. And then again, it comes down to like, I don't know what time this frame this is happening. I do know that the tenure track professors at University of Chicago are in the process of trying to organize because they're like facing, like I said, with the the surgeons and anesthesiologists I work with, the attending physicians who are at the very crushed by discipline by by labor discipline.

C. Derick Varn 34:32

I mean, this is the thing about you know, I remember arguing with a lot of Jacobin-inspired social democrats with us. I'm just using Jacobin as a magazine name. I actually don't think are the all the writers for Jacobin believe this and what it means. It's not a sedatorial line, but it but a lot of the PMC complainer types who are also PMC by their own definition. I was like, why are you fighting a proletarianizing area of the workforce that's been proletarianized since the 1970s? And the smarter ones, like Christian Parenti, not a guy who I normally would call smart, but he actually is on this question, would say, Well, we're not really fighting them, but they have patronage from the state, which makes them which makes them act questionably. And I would say in certain areas that is true. Um but when it comes to like doctors or your humanities professors or whatever, I think you're gonna see a lot of them change their opinion as there's new ways to labor discipline them. I I will say this, you know, to get to get to like this next session, which is refusing to talk to co-workers, but I would even argue that my administration, in so much that they are workers and they don't get paid in stock dividends and they are employed. They're definitely labor aristocrats though, even by your definition. Yeah. Um I would I am not opposed to them being in a union. I'm even opposed to them being in my union, I am opposed to them being on my negotiation team. Right. And maybe in my meetings. But but like, I'm not I I I that doesn't mean I don't think they should be organized. And this is something that I think we have to think a lot about. Like, what are we gonna do with these massive amounts of tech workers that are coming into our our our purview because they just got proletarianized in a hard and incredibly quick way. I will also say the other thing that we have to do when we talk about this stuff is we I I I find that a lot of labor organizers, staffers, and even some of the electeds do not want to talk about negative things, which is weird. Uh this is this might not be the culture in your union, John. It isn't mine. It took me forever to get my union to a KME talking about the fact we provide liability insurance because like we don't want them thinking about negative events, we want them thinking about the positive things the union can do for them, like get them discounts. And I was like, No, this is not a discount club, who cares? Like, the positive things we do for them is getting them a better contract, and that means we actually have to do that. And two the other thing is we protect them. And if you don't want me to talk about protecting them from the government, which is really what we do, I'm not protecting them from like corporate bosses, I'm protecting them from the government not following its own rules and laws. I'm protecting them from administration not going by the book. I'm protecting them from a lot of things. This is really the majority of what I do other than advocate for them in the general public. And you don't want me to talk about it. So, one of the things about the refusing to talk to co-workers, I wanted to talk to you about this because I do think this is a genuine problem, particularly for a lot of very online leftists. Yeah, I think it's a general problem for a lot of young people because growing up on social media has ironically led to me being slightly under-socialized. And I think that's a you know, I I and I don't say that as a moral judgment. We didn't like like it wasn't that you chose young people, this listening to me right now, not being out in the world. Um, it is that like we've structured our economy in very alienated and isolated ways, and so it is harder to get people to talk to people because that skill set is often I find a little bit atropied in people today, that it isn't in people just slightly early older who didn't

Why People Avoid Coworker Conversations

C. Derick Varn 38:52

grow up online. But it doesn't mean we won't find it anthropied. I know many boomers who can't talk to people anymore either, and they could 20 years ago, or or when they talk to people, they talk to people about things that are effectively gibberish, right?

SPEAKER_00 39:06

Like boomer Facebook conspiracism is real and it affects people of all sorts of political orientations, and it's just like, what are you even saying at this point, right?

C. Derick Varn 39:18

Yeah, I was listening to Tim Dylan this morning uh doing opposition research and him talking about AI literally trying to build a Sumerian devil and trying to talk to people about that and how your common auntie would think it's gibberish. And I'm like, Because it is like I there's a rational core of what this guy was talking about about like AI being a being a labor discipline mechanism, but like it was coming out as like some Altman's making a deal with the literal devil. I was just like, okay, how do I deal with this? Because it when you talk to people about this stuff, it does sound like gibberish. And there there are certain things that I that I do have trouble talking to my coworkers about. Like luckily, it doesn't come up a ton in in education, but like what because we just don't invest in that much that directly. But when I'm like, you know, we should be very conscious of our Muslim students about how we handle stuff around the around Palestine and be, you know, be very and you know, a lot of my a lot of my coworkers are like good, you know, moderate political Mormons. And they immediately stake their they're signaling virtue by like talking about anti-Semitism. I'm like, that's not nope, nope, nope, that's not what we mean here. Anti-Semitism is bad, but that's not what I'm talking about. You do not need to be lecturing your Palestinian students about how awesome Jews are. I say that as literally the only Jewish person with our I'm not even that Jewish anymore, but literally the only person who's ever like been a member of a Jewish congregation at this job site. So uh and I get that, and I get that can cause fear, but you know, I will say, however, we thought that we were gonna get a lot more pushback about protecting our students and things like ice. Even I have Trump supporters in my job who are actually good on this. It's weird, I don't understand it, but they are, and I don't question it. I'm just like, I'm gonna just take advantage of this cognitive dissonance for what I need to do right now, but but anyway.

SPEAKER_00 41:39

One thing I will say, because this is like a specific scenario where they you know they train people to do one-on-ones, they have like you know, scenarios and things like that, and that's all super important for getting someone to be able to do a one-on-one organizing conversation, which is building a block of organizing. You got to be able to talk to people. Organizing is about building relationships or figuring out how your relationships can help move people towards collective action. As someone who, when I'm not doing workplace organizing and I haven't been super active with it the last year because of reasons, but it's still a thing that I've done plenty of, is tenant organizing. You can only talk someone through how to do a tenant, a one-on-one conversation with their neighbors in a building so much, and you cannot trust that they're going to be capable of having those conversations until they see someone do it themselves and watch it go reasonably well and not create like a meltdown or like you know, the sort of imagined consequences for having like a social interaction where there's like an actual like real concern that needs to be addressed. And and I think that like because so many of these stories I think are coming from union staffers, you find like I I honestly believe it's like if those union staffers haven't sat through and demonstrated a one-on-one conversation with like a coworker in a way that's like structured to show someone how to do it. Like, one of the very first things that we've done to kick off tenant organizing campaigns is we have tenants who have a problem, they come to our local tenant union org, we talk to them about their problem, and then we're like, okay, let's schedule, let's schedule a building canvas, and we'll come and we'll walk you through the first couple of conversations so you can see how it goes. And then you watch people just take off. It's really amazing. And these are people who are the poster children for who these folks are are sounding the alarm on. It's like, you know, the insurrectionary anarchist who wants to like, you know, smash the smash the landlord's uh front window, like you can actually sit and walk them through how to have a real conversation. And once they see you do it, they're like, it's literally, I've seen it's off to the races, it's amazing. And part of the thing is that there's clearly a step missing here. And it comes back to that. It's like you can if if you're trying to get someone to do a thing and they signal willingness to do the thing and they have the ideological like commitment to do the thing, but for some reason they're not doing the thing, there's a disconnect happening where that person still doesn't have the confidence to have that discussion. And that is on you. As like if you're taking lead at organizing at work or if you're some sort of labor union staffer, like your job is to instill conf the confidence to have those discussions, like, and as alienated as everyone is, you can find you should be able to, if you have skill and experience. Experience and the motivation, you can get people to that point. It just takes time and effort. And you actually do have to, again, look at people who you're doing this with not as a checkbox, like you know, a literal like line item on an Excel sheet that you're scratching off if they're not doing something. You need to look at them as a human being. And like I think that a lot of the problems that they're these people are facing are that they're either under some sort of time constraint or some sort of organizational pressure to keep moving and not take the time. And a lot of organizing, it's almost like, you know, the Mike Davis book, you know, Old Gods, New Enigmas, where they talk about it's like it's like tending a garden, right? It's not like this, like mirror, like, you know, shake and bake and it happens. Yeah, you have hot shops and they move fast, but if you're hitting these walls, it's probably you'd be running into these walls regardless of people's ideological priors. It's just they lack that confidence. And I will say that also I think that a lot of people who are of the left have a lot of trauma and experience by saying the things that they believe, and family, friends, community members, bullies telling them, you know, to shut the fuck up and that they're a bunch of pink o commies and like, you know, they don't want to hear nothing from them. And so you gotta work help people work through that. And as a workplace organizer or as a staff organizer, like you're literally paid to do that. Because like you, if you're not instilling that confidence, and that maybe that requires people to see you do it in real life with your coworkers, then you're failing at your job. This is uh this is a document of failures. Like these people are failing to do what they say that they want to do. And I understand like it can be frustrating, but at the same time, like anything important, you have to take time on. You you want to rush shit, you're gonna you're gonna run into things like this.

C. Derick Varn 46:44

Yeah, I was thinking about this the other day because there's like a flag in this section on not talking to co-workers on the DSA. And like you and I, I mean, I'm a little bit more willing to defend the DSA than you, but you know, we're both notorious DSA slaggers ourselves.

SPEAKER_00 47:00

They have plenty, they have plenty to say about us as well, Varn.

C. Derick Varn 47:03

Yeah, they do. I know, even though I'm in them now. Um the DSA members did something that many left to see these days. They skipped over their own workplace and saw out activism that wouldn't involve one-on-ones

One On Ones Need Demonstration

C. Derick Varn 47:13

with confronting the boss. They organized a large fundraiser for a nonprofit called Justice is Global. And I I have to ask, though, I'm gonna go back up here. I'll give the context for this. With nothing left to do but start one-on-ones, all of them dropped off the face of the earth. They stopped organizing. They said, We're scared, we're kind of like our bosses. The staffers pointed out that the company had just been brought out by multinationals, which was already making cuts to benefits. We're like, um, guys, you have to talk to your co-workers, and they just wouldn't. Now, I say that because I have no idea why the DSA members in this group that failed, which is a subset of this group that failed, why they're being blamed for starting a nonprofit called Justice is Global because they didn't do successful one-on-ones. Because I'm not even sure they're trying to address the same problem. Right. And I almost am like, are you are you mad that people are trying to walk into bubblegum at the same time when something went hits up?

SPEAKER_00 48:13

I mean, that that's a notorious thing I've run into with DSA people who also happen to be staffers in some sort of organization where it's like if the thing that they want to have happen isn't the only thing happening, they get like it, it really drives some people like really nuts. And I'll just say this like, yeah, they they they were clearly a capable of organizing. They organized a room full of coworkers to show up and who were interested. And then the next step would be like, okay, you got all these people here. Let's have let's be prepared for like for having those discussions and directing people towards the workplace organizing, right?

C. Derick Varn 48:54

Yeah, and I'm also gonna be honest with you, I don't believe this anecdote.

SPEAKER_00 48:59

Okay, I mean I don't like I take I I am I'm notorious for taking people at their work.

C. Derick Varn 49:06

No, no, I mean I mean I believe that this may have happened, but I don't believe the re the they said we're scared, we're kind of like our bosses, we kind of like our bosses. Like, I could hear we kind of like our bosses, I could hear maybe we're scared. I cannot hear that being the only thing said in a strategic meeting ever. Yeah, and I know this is like, well, they're just glossing, but I'm like, what are they not telling us in this gloss? Like, there's a little hint about something. The staffers pointing out their company had just been bought by a multinational, which was already making cuts to benefits. And I would say, why aren't you power mapping and talking about like where the weaknesses and strengths of the multinational are and assuaging their fears? And and you guys are saying what you said, you said is we just we just say talk to your co-workers, and they and they were like, Well, they just wouldn't. And I'm like, Did you give them talking points? Did you power map? It doesn't sound like it from your own anecdote. That's what I mean. I don't believe this anecdote, there's stuff missing. Um, and it's not because of left ideology, and then you know, I admit, you know, DSAers often are I they're not all, but often are professional activists. In fact, I'm just gonna say when someone calls themselves an organizer and they're not in a specific union in a specific shop, I'm usually like, Are you a professional activist? Because and and there's a place for the professional activist. I'm not even gonna say that it's necessarily bad. I've never been it. I I don't know if John, if you have, but there are plenty of people in my circles though who have been professional activists, but that's kind of a different thing, and the and like if they stop doing something, then they stop doing something. It might have nothing to do about just talking to your co-workers. I I'm just like, there's so much here that I'm like, again, who is this for? And what did you do or not do? I actually can't learn much from this anecdote. Like, this anecdote is actually not super helpful because it's vague, it's clearly leaving some stuff out, and I don't know what the strategic benefit is or would have been. Okay, so I'll read the next part of this. The organizer went at their invitation. It was crazy. There were 20 people there, and almost everyone was from their workplace, and they would have doubled down the committee size if they had just talked to people in that room about a union.

SPEAKER_00 51:38

Sure. Or not, or not. You like you can get 20 people in a room, and one person is a person who's gonna step up in a space.

C. Derick Varn 51:47

Yeah, I was gonna say I've gone and spoken to all kinds of shit and gotten I have to be very careful. I don't want to betray my union and just I don't want to say what even union I'm in, but like I have very high union density at my school. We're among the highest in my district by a lot. Part of that is because uh the nature of my job is a little different. We're not segregated off in classrooms all the time. So I get to talk to people a lot, and a lot of people trust me. Despite all of that, all right, I have probably brought in five people to the union, which is way better than the average person, and you know how my union handles it, they give us they give us monetary incentives for recruitment like we're fucking Amway. Yeah, it's weird. I do not like it. And I've actually said, I'm like, it's the monetary incentives are are not high enough to be motivating, and I find them corrupting. But nonetheless, uh, I don't ask for mine. I actually, when I recruit people, I do not tell them to put my name on the recruitment thing, which probably does not help my popularity with the union because they don't know who what I'm doing. But the reason the reason why I I bring that up is like I've done meetings in the room with 30, 40 people. I go and speak out local community stuff. One of the things with the DSA, and I'm gonna talk to give a little DSA anecdote without a lot of context, is that often the DSA doesn't know what to do. Our labor committee in Salt Lake is on semi-permanent hiatus. It was revived for about a year, it's back on hiatus because the only person there's only four people really attending it, and the only person that could get to run it because everyone's devoting time to a uh Senate campaign, a state senate campaign with a Reichenfall Union member. Guy I actually like if he won, it would be a good thing. I'm gonna be honest though, I think his odds for running are like one in a hundred thousand. So but but but I'm down, I'm not canvassing for him because

DSA Salting And Strategy Gaps

C. Derick Varn 54:10

I don't canvas for Democrats, but I'm down. But our our labor committee couldn't figure out what to do when salting didn't work, and they're like, why isn't salting working? I'm like, well, one, you guys all announce that you're DSA on your fucking like social media and people look you up, and two, who's hiring right now? Like, you mean Salt Lake has a relatively low unemployment, but like for the United States right now, but like even where like it's slow, you're not gonna, you know, you're you're not gonna get people in really easily. And what happened when that was realized is the labor committee went back on hiatus. They're like, Can you try to restart it? And I'm like, I have I'm a rep and I have a 60-hour week job and I do a podcast. I'm really not the guy for that. But in 150 people who are active, I'm not even talking about full, I don't have no idea how many members we have, it's a lot. We can't get five people to a labor committee. So I understand the frustration, but I also do think it's like because people aren't telling people what they can do. If you it's like the only thing you got is salt, I'm like, why aren't why aren't we doing inventories of what's actively going on in the current unions? Like, why doesn't DSA know that? Like, do you even like we need to have representative and more than a teachers' unions and pre-majority nurses' unions? We have it in pre-majority, but not majority nurses' unions. And in in the CW, in the CWA, and a little bit of the of the uh SEIU, which is the Service Employees uh International Union, which is also notoriously kind of eh as a union, but that's what we have. We have no representation in the manufacturing unions, of which Utah actually does have some. We don't have a lot of representation in miners union, we don't have representation. I don't care if we have representation in the cops union, but the firefighters union, we should have rep in. And I was just like, why don't we? You know, like and I got, well, we need to we need to build up political power through elections, and I'm like, okay. You're in Salt Lake, though. Like, like we're in literally, I think, the third reddest state in the country, and you're running as a Democrat. You you really would hear outside of Salt Lake City itself, be better off running as an independent. And there are certain municipal areas where that's easy to do, even like if we had representation in Ogden, Ogden, Ogden municipal elections are nonpartisan. I mean, like it it's not that hard. And they're like, Oh, but we need this relationship, but I'm like, okay. And I I've had this problem with staffers too, because staffers start going, well, you know, I've talked with staffers, like, oh, oh, you know, I want to get in teachers union because you have so much community power to advocate for the workers, which is true, we do. But then I'm like, okay, but what's your goal though? And like, how are you gonna represent us? And and like, well, you know, I'm gonna fight for you in every instance. I'm like, cool, but okay, if you have to triage, what are you gonna favor? Because uh, our things are handled by these things called Uniserve, and our staffers are also also kind of lobbyist, frankly. Yeah, so it it's something that I need to know when I'm talking to people, and this person gave me good answers. I don't want I'm not slagging on them, but it was it's something that you have to think about, and I do find it. I I I mean, if I was to give this article some charity, and and I guess I will right now, I've been saying I don't know who the audience for this is, which I don't, but I do know that like on a scale, if I was to say read a magazine, most read a popular magazine, which ones talk about labor the most, it's gonna be like Jacobin and Descent, right? And and then people know better, they'll say labor notes and the actual labor organs. But you just out talk to the average person on the street, that's probably what they're gonna say. I would say that that is that is like the publishing version of what we're talking about here of someone who talks a good game, but like doesn't really do anything with that game. Like, I I get really mad at Jack Ben's labor boosterism because I've always like you're giving people false conditions, like they don't know what they're actually working in, and that's a problem. Like, like agit prop should be for your enemies, not for the people you want to work with, and stuff like that. And so I find that I find that to be way more problems than just leftists don't want to talk to people, and admittedly, I do think there are plenty of leftists who don't want to talk to people, talked about zoomers. I do think this one actually might have a specific to leftist component, and that leftists are often people who are bullied, well, particularly in their younger life.

SPEAKER_00 59:16

Like you're saying, leftists have do have I mean, like to be fair, right? Leftists tend to be bullied. I think that there's sometimes I I firmly believe that you can think yourself into into corners and like a little too much awareness of what like of like theory can put you into a position where you're like literally gonna do counterproductive things because you're focused on what you've read rather than what's going on around you. So that's totally I think that's totally a thing that I've seen happen. Like, and I think that that's really that's real. I will also say some of the people who I've met in DSA who have the best politics became DSA members after they organized at work, and then through their organizing at work, they started you know exploring like what like like history of unionism and organizing and that sort of thing. And then they became they be they really came into their leftism after their experience as like a workplace organizer, like as a rank and file, I'm a like I'm doing this at my job sort of thing. And so like I think that there's we sometimes we oftentimes are dealing with the trouble of the carts before the horse. And if you look historically, you look at the history of some of America's great, like, you know, Eugene Debs didn't start out as a socialist, he started out, I think, as like a Presbyterian. Right, and and he was like, and he was work, he was engaged in this great labor struggle at work, and that in his experience of that, you know, of those massive strikes that he participated in is what put him in the position that he was in. And so I think that also because so many people are become nominally, I say nominally, members of the left because of their exposure to ideas at school, at work, or not at school, like at college, they kind of have a received idea of what this all means rather than it's coming from their own personal experience. And so I will 100% say that like you are far, you're going to be better for coming to your leftism through the material conditions surrounding you rather than having read a book and deciding that these ideas appeal to your sense of morality or justice. Because all this stuff should effectively be the ideological trappings of all this stuff should be tools, right? To change the world, not like you know, something that just like fire in your belly. You want the fire in your belly, but it's gotta, you know, but I think it's a lot sharper and more directed when it comes from your actual lived experience rather than through just reading. Though I've been known to read a lot.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:10

Yeah, I'm just saying, I'm just fine.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:12

Um we should we're gonna get to we we're gonna get close to the end because you're gonna uh wrap it up. Do we want to talk this last bit of where they're talking about like the militancy where you last expect it?

C. Derick Varn 1:02:24

Yeah, because I I think this is actually kind of good as also as long as as often as you're not expecting the militancy where you least expect it to. Because I will say, yeah, I mean, like one of the best people in my union is is a Trumpy guy, he's also a teamster, which you know, which means he's familiar with unions and is actually very good on helping us do union y stuff. My union doesn't even like to call itself a union. I will also like you know point that out. It's an association. Shut up, we're union. But I will often I will also say that like uh militancy like this is often piecemeal, and I do think you should expect

Militancy From Unexpected People

C. Derick Varn 1:03:11

that. Like people might be militant on a certain thing, and it might even and that might make them great for your union, great in the struggle. They may even become leftist. I don't know that you always see it transferred from domain to domain. I mean, this is even true for me. There, there's certain leftist causes that I think are important that I also don't do that much about, like, because there's an opportunity cost, and I think there's better people who handle the subject than me. But I do find this part to be kind of true. You don't know who your most militant people are going to be. Militants often emerge as ordinary people who just care about issues, not card-carrying leftist, which I agree with. They may this is where you actually get a better, it's a link to something else where you get a better anecdote, but you have to read Martin Glaberman's book or pamphlet. It's not really a book, it's kind of just a long pamphlet, punching out to like get it. But there are there are still ways where I'm like, I don't know, we need to talk about like why ordin like ordinary people who just care about issues might become really good at this, but also you can burn them out if they get militant. And we need to talk about that too, because because another thing that I think about is like when you hear staffers talk about militancy, I'm gonna say something very cynical, but sometimes I'm like, but militants make your job easier, like right, like as a Reich and file, if I have a militant get all super militant and then burn themselves out as a rep, that's a problem for me because I now have a burnout who will probably leave the union, right? Like, and so like I'm always like militancy has to be paired with responsibility. I'm not I'm not I'm not saying the authors would even disagree with me about this, it just seems to be that they're not talking about that. I don't always think militancy is even good. Uh but because you know you need people for the long haul.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:17

Yeah, it's the marathon, not the sprint. And the the thing also is is that when you have those people who are just organi ordinary workers, right? To just want to do solve the problem of like they're fucking with our time cards, right? Or or they're bringing in step agency nurses instead of like instead of giving us OT, or you know, or they increase our class sizes to 80 million.

C. Derick Varn 1:05:43

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:44

Or they're tacking on an extra case right at the end of the shift, and they know they're gonna hold us over. That's these are all very normal things. And I think the thing is is that you when you're talking with people in that role as like the you know, the workplace rank and file organizer, it's really important to pair sound organizing advice and like work towards you know, moving militants towards like you know, at collective action with actual some like with some like grassroots political education. And that doesn't mean necessarily announcing, hey, as a socialist, this is what I think, but you're like, you know, I I'm always saying, you know, it's like there's the law, but the law isn't really for us, right? As working people. And I don't talk to my coworkers who are outside the union like they're somehow not like that we don't have a common interest. I'm always talking about our common interests, that we it's always remarkable how regardless of what job we do, we all have the we do have the same boss in my workplace, largest work, largest employer in Southside of Chicago. It's you know. know tens of thousands of people, we still have very similar complaints because we have the same fucking boss. And I think that if you're not pairing, if you're encountering these people who are the ordinary worker who just wants to deal with like some, you know, you know, bread and butter issue, and you're not adding in like a subtle political education along with that, you're failing them because there'll be a time when they need to make it when they when you need them to do a thing or when everyone needs a thing to happen. And that person all of a sudden might be like, well, I don't talk to them because they're they're from another country. And that's real, right? You'll you'll run into people who all be like, we'll start talking shit about about, well, those workers, they all act a certain way and you know why. And it's like what you're doing is now under you've gone from being a superstar who's really making things happen to someone who's actively making things worse. And I think that there's like this fetishization of like the of the normal worker that happens in labor notes. It happens in it happens in some of these like formations that like kind of it's a workerism. Well if the workers want it, that's what's right, right? But you know if you're not bringing a certain sort of strategic wisdom informed by polit like a political orientation that you know recognizes a kind of universal class interest or tries to find the like expand the class interest to the points where it makes the most sense like you want the water to fill the glass right you will shoot yourself in the fucking foot. You'll end up with people being like well I want to try we should maybe have a strategic you know communication with the with the the police union for like the the the university police one year before George Floyd. And you have to have be able to be capable of having a political discussion about why that that would be strategically a bad idea and the average worker may not see that as a bad idea. They may be like oh yeah that's great. We should talk with them. Maybe they can help us out with this or that sort of thing. And if you don't have a sort of critique political critique of that's of why that might be a problem you can end up shooting yourself in the foot. So I just like yeah I just want to disabuse people. It's like I think there's this idea that you have this like platonic ideal worker who's like they don't come with any preconceived notions but they have all the right relationships and they know all the things to do and they know how to and they and they're always going to do the right thing. That's how you end up with Sean O'Brien right deciding he's like cozy up cozy up to Trump because he thinks that Trump is like you know well Trump talks a big game about you know manufacturing jobs and like you know that I had of course there's going to be a percentage of Teamsters who like our Trump voters because that's just true. But when you start cozying up to people like Trump then you start caught you start hurting yourself in the long run. Just like if you cozy up to Democrats. You know you couldn't cozy up to anybody who's a politician you start painting yourself in those corners.

C. Derick Varn 1:09:56

Right. I mean even Sean Fain I was about to think about that because Sean Fein cozy up to Democrats then he was like did his what was it RossPro was right thing and I was like actually fundamentally Ross Pro wasn't right tariffs didn't do what you think that wasn't what NAFTA was about even that wasn't what undercut the American worker the reversal of tariffs are happened between the 1930s and the 1970s not the 1990s and you know I find you know but then you'll hear people like Bosh Carsten Carr be like we need to run Sean Fain for president of the United States and I'm like you need to shut the fuck up let Sean Fain get this general strike thing off the ground that he's been trying to shop around I would like to see that happen first. A few general strikes yes I was like say I I would even I'm willing to give Sean the benefit of a doubt to be to be fair but no but he's gonna actually pull stuff off I I guess the last thing I want to quickly very quickly address because we have to tie this up but it's like the last thing I think is like maybe what I don't know why Marianne Gurnell just kind of disappeared because I can't find anything her of her of her IBC as for 2023. But I was reading this and I'm like this is a bad omen whatever the explanation for this phenomenon the correlation is too strong to ignore I could talk about many correlations that are spurious that are too strong to ignore um if you're going to head the heed the lesson not only do you need to stop steering towards lefty coworkers which I might agree with you might even swerve to avoid them altogether. And I'm like a lot of this kind of workerism ends up being not just very right wing workerism and often turns on labor itself too. Absolutely now I don't know that Marianne's done that I have no evidence I don't think she has I think we'd hear about it actually but I don't I do think this leads to a lot of people leaving the labor movement eventually because it's like no it there is no like non-ideological thing to deal with we can all talk about the flaws of leftists and many of the flaws of leftists mentioned in the thing are things we've all encountered and are real but also there are other groups with flaws you just don't hang out with them I could talk about the flaws of Mormon organizers too but I don't so and they're specific they're actually a little bit more specific to be quite honest.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:24

I mean on I'm on the south side of Chicago like so many of the people who they would be tagging as like the people to be or like focusing their organizing energy on are looking at what they're doing as one step up the the Democratic party machine. Like it's literally that like I know those people and yeah they're not leftists but they're definitely like they're gonna they see the they see the union as a stepping stone towards some port of like regular working people have all kinds of ambitions and they see and many people see the union as a vehicle for their ambitions one way or the other you know I'd be I'd be wrong to say that I don't have my own ambitions because I like I want the world to be a different place than it is. I've got insane ambitions when you think

Staffer Incentives Workerism And Closing

SPEAKER_00 1:13:11

about it. Yeah all of us but I think that there's you I just I read this and I I recognized like you said superficial truths that like are but there's a lot of things a lot of gaps in what's being described here and I think that it's used as justification frankly by union staffers to because what they're looking for really I in my experience are people who are pliant people who don't have a critique of like how the union operates because they don't literally they literally don't know. And I think that it's just that should be that's the that is to the extent that we have a like something like a vibrant like labor movement in the United States it should exist to and like give workers the for workers to change themselves into the kind of people that can change the world instead of being a fucking puppet to like a a union staffer. And so many of these anecdotes are from staffers in business unions who I'm sure were frustrated that they weren't running it that there were people who didn't want to be puppets for them. And like that doesn't mean that like their responses to that were like that those people didn't have all sorts of other complicated things going on. And I 100% have seen the things that they're talking about. But the idea that you would steer clear of any worker at your workplace is insane. Like and is like it is the worst organizing advice again every worker at my workplace is a if they're if we're not already friends we're future friends. And like I said it just I don't know how far that future is but we'll get there at some point and I will always talk to anybody in good faith about what it takes to change things at my workplace. And I think that if you are an average person work at organizing at work that should always be your that should be like a like cornerstone to your organizing like attitude.

C. Derick Varn 1:15:13

Yeah absolutely agree and on that note like subscribe hit the bell and I think people will be seeing nurse john back on the show because I think we want to do a couple of talks about organizing I'm kind of tired of it just being something that I talk about behind a paywall on on excuse me this wreckage was about said anti foda because even I'm not used to the new name but anyway so you'll see nurse John again and we'll be talking about probably McAlevy and Kimmuti and all the big labor theorists. All right see you around solidarity folks solidarity