In a book published shortly after the 9/11 attacks, in the midst of the fear and anxiety generated by those attacks, FEAR: THE HISTORY OF A POLITICAL IDEA, Political scientist Corey Robin, who is on faculty at Brooklyn College, reviews and critically examines what four thinkers (Hobbes, Montesquieu, Tocqueville and Arendt) had to say about the place of fear and anxiety in politics and governance. Each of the thinkers mentioned as well as many others write about fear in a way that characterizes fear as something that comes from beyond the political elite - the state of nature for Hobbes, the loneliness and disconnection of individuals for Tocqueville and Arendt (at least in her earlier works.) In that imagining, authorities, governments and managers promote themselves as the ones who abate fear and keep us safe and prosperous. But that imagining of the place of fear often obscures the ways that fear is very used by those in power to control, to create compliance and conformity - that is, fear and anxiety as intentional instruments of repression (for example, the fear of communism in the past and the fear of terrorism in the present here in US have been used to justify the infringing and erasure of rights.)
The major part of the book is spent looking at how fear and anxiety have been wielded by government (red scares, the PATRIOT act, etc, in the US, but also concentration camps in Nazi occupied Europe and the gulags of the Soviet Union) as he moves to the book’s conclusion, the author points out - and, of course, he’s not the first or only one to point this out - that as much as we in the United States celebrate the principles of democracy and citizens’ rights to principles such as the freedom of speech, association, privacy, and so on as spelled out or implied by the Constitution, those principles apply only to our dealings with the state; they do not apply to the workplace. We may say we live in a democracy, but most adults spend the majority of their waking hours at work in the context of autocratically structured hierarchies in which we are not free to speak our minds, associate with whom we wish and are constantly open to violations of privacy. Not only can your boss read your emails and monitor your phone calls, but can dictate how frequently you use the rest room, can search your bags and car if it’s parked on company property. In many states, you may be fired because of your political affiliations, or for political statements made in non-work hours. Fear and anxiety are used with intent, as supposedly effective management techniques - not necessarily to increase production but to increase the manager’s control of the workplace. Fear and the promotion of fear (of lay-offs, loss of hours and therefore of health coverage, arbitrary punishment) has become such a regular feature of the American workplace that Americans expect that they should live to in fear. And so, as we become inured to fear in the workplace where we spend most of our hours, we accept fear in the public sphere and accept the repression that follows. If we want to do more than simply give lip service to the principles that we say we stand for - liberty, justice, equality, democracy - then we cannot allow fear to be the foundation upon which we manage and govern.
For decades, as the power of the labor movement grew, fear and intimidation of workers in the workplace decreased and a respect for democratic government also grew in strength. Today and since the 1930s, the corporate power structure and conservatives in government are dismantling labor’s ability to organize. Union membership is very low today, and with every decrease in membership, there is an uptick in the use of fear, anxiety and intimidation by managers.
To that, I say...educate, agitate, organize. Join a union!
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