Over at the Intercept, a privileged, cisgendered, straight, white person-who-does-not-menstruate named Ryan Grim has penned a fascist screed against the progressive working class that has to be read to be believed. Grim’s core complaint is that “internal strife” has led the American “progressive advocacy space” to a position in which it has “more or less, effectively ceased to function” — a development that, in Grim’s view, is attributable to “meltdowns” from self-indulgent staff members who have been “focusing only on themselves,” rather than on the broader systemic injustices that they are being paid to address. Throughout his piece, Grim repeatedly centers Western imperialist conceits such as “effectiveness,” while ignoring the lived experience of the marginalized people he has elected to attack. In an irony that has clearly been lost on the author, Grim’s piece ends up demonstrating exactly why the debilitating internal revolts that he disdains have become so just and so necessary.
Educated readers will recoil in disgust at Grim’s deliberate and repeated use of the word “function” — a hateful, politically loaded term, which carries with it more than three centuries of privileged, white supremacist, heteronormative, patriarchal assumptions, and which continues to inflict genuine harm on the folx whose truths Grim is attempting to erase. Over and over again, Grim hurls this word at his victims — whom he blames for their own pain. The free speech of minorities, Grim suggests, can no longer be indulged “by a progressive movement that wants organizations to be able to function.” To bolster this claim, he quotes a member of America’s fragile management class, who says that “organizations naturally have rank and authority that is respected” and insists that, if it is to fulfill its purpose, his own outfit “has to function.”
And there we have it: To be “effective,” an organization “has to function.” Has to. Here we see the authoritarian logic of globalized capitalism, which demands “efficiency” and “functioning” and “results” and “impact,” at the expense of love and respect and safety and community and discourse. The opposite of “functioning,” Grim writes, is being “paralyzed,” which, in addition to representing a cramped, neo-Confederate approach to evaluating success, shows you the unexplored ableist assumptions that underpin America’s revanchist economic framework. In a particularly notable passage, one of Grim’s interviewees complains that for the “last nine months, I was spending 90 to 95 percent of my time on internal strife. Whereas [before] that would have been 25-30 percent tops.” Well, let me tell you something, paledudebro: That’s your job. It’s not on your bone-weary, underpaid, traumatized, semi-hermeneutized employees to process your emotional labor for you. They’re exhausted. They’re broken. They’re suffering from a deconstructed, non-exigent, commodified economy that has chewed them up and spat them out. The least you can do is help heal them — and maybe throw a few dollars into their Reparations Venmo while you’re at it.
The most openly violent part of Grim’s essay is his conscious platforming of a manager who explains that, when he is making hiring decisions, he now asks himself “how likely is this person to blow up my organization from the inside?” This rhetoric — which compares Labor to international terrorism — is classic metacognitive pathologizing, the clear aim of which is the otherization and problematization of people who have a non-standard approach to work. Sadly, it is typical of the genre. Among the other culturally disenfranchising words that Grim and his anti-democratic friends use to describe those of us who are just trying to interrogate their work sphere are: “complaints,” “zealous,” “schisms,” “tension,” “raging,” “wrenching,” “debilitating,” “turmoil,” “abuse,” “strife,” “shaken,” “shocking,” “anger,” “infighting,” and “bullshit.” It can be no accident that the philosopher and fascism expert, Jason Stanley, recently identified exactly these words — in exactly this order — as prerequisites to the impending imposition of white Christian nationalism, and confirmed that the only way to avoid such an outcome is for me and my friends to get a raise.