Peacock Capitalism
Selfish workers wanting life too reducing boss opportunities to peacock and undermining their capacity to ensure work contributes mainly to our suffering.
It is 6.37pm Sunday and I am sitting beneath the kiwi vine, which is laden with fruit. The cicadas are singing (is that what we call that racket?) and it is a cool 23.4 degrees C - though it feels, the bureau of meteorology kindly tells me, like 16.7. The dusk is yet to feel dusky, so the chickens are chasing invisible insects, bedtime still a distant necessity. From the community garden I can hear distant hippy drumming, marking the end of the weekend featuring the mountains Edible Garden trail.
Image: Community Garden, with labyrinth.
Dozens of people sauntered through our garden yesterday, their eyes kindly passing over the weedy bits (those are the bits for which I’m responsible) and marvelling, as only garden types can, at the abundant kiwi fruit, the corn ready to eat, the astonishingly delicious blueberries and the miracle of fruiting eggplants in a climate for which they were never intended. How far along must the winter veggies be at this point, several people asked. How do you make the soil adequately acid for the blueberries? Why haven’t the sulfur crested cockatoos eaten your corn? (A: the ways of white cockatoos are mysterious, but we can all agree they are dickheads).
One person asked to meet Tilly specifically, having read Altin’s essay about her (see link below). And many who hadn’t heard of Tilly’s fame also wanted to talk about the chickens, as much as the plants.
A surprising amount of discussion focused on our building projects. The outdoor kitchen was the hub of the operation, where I was making strawberry jam. I served home made jam on local sourdough bread with a big pot of peppermint tea: each time I ran in to collect more boiling water I called for some random stranger to stir my jam. Volunteers were plentiful.
Image: Kiwi fruit with cluttered outdoor kitchen after jam making and kombucha + tea
The outdoor bath was a particular joy, with many couples engaged in friendly squabbles. Would you really bathe outside, one would ask the other. Oh yes, they would declare, eyes shiny with the fervour of a new religious convert. May I photograph your bath, they asked. Sure! How do you get the water hot? A hose from the laundry window.
Image: tomatoes
Even the chicken shed, the project that took me a whole of time on long service leave (which I largely spent sitting next to waterfalls) and a few years of weekends and while I finished Virtue Capitalists, made from scrounged corrugated and leftover old fence palings over narrow fox, rat and quoll proof wire, was subject to much discussion.
Later in the day I brought out my kombucha – a rhubarb ‘rose-nay’ and an elderberry piNOT noir – both receiving enthusiastic reviews. Rightly, if I say so myself.
A day spent glorying in the small stuff - talking about our garden, and talking with other in our garden, about theirs.
F*cking capitalism one home grown vegetable at a time – and taking a weekend to celebrate it.
Some of this food-producing effort is enabled by the reduced travel time associated with working from home, a change in work that has been under attack this week, mostly by bosses. And, weirdly enough, Adam Tooze.
Peacock Capitalism - WFH v RTO
This week a bunch of bosses have been crying about the terrible selfishness of workers wanting to Work from Home (WFH) instead of the obvious need for them to Return to the Office (RTO).
WFH is a thing for Australian Public Service (full disclosure, my new part time gig is there) in the new agreement apparently, though I only know about that because of the whining of other bosses who don’t want their office-working staff to make similar demands.
To most of us, rejecting WFH makes no sense, even by boss logic. This is John Birmingham:
Honestly, if Willox [peacock author of anti-WFH rhetoric] were any good at his job, he’d be leading the cheer squad for Work From Home. Just look at all that extra surplus value small and medium business owners could be stealing from their employees.
Adam Spence’s Corporate Peacock Theory is persuasive:
The concept of Corporate Peacocking - like male peacocks displaying vibrant plumage to attract mates, managers can showcase their status and contributions better when working onsite. Activities like swishing their feathers at all-hands company meetings or buying post-work drinks.
By bringing workers back to the office, managers can better signal their dominance in the corporate pecking order.
Elsewhere, he’d pointed out that time in the office is often wasted - WFH doesn’t undermine productivity, on the contrary. This conforms to my experience too. When things were very busy in my academic job I dreaded the days in the office. So. Many. Interruptions. I’d end up working way later than my body could really cope with, just to make up the time used making a ‘vibrant campus’ with activities that were not part of my job and were never going to be rewarded by anyone (not that doing exactly what they want really, really well was any guarantee, see my pinned post).
Andy Spence also pointed to evidence that return to work imperatives suggests such bad management that it functions as a prophet of doom(ed profit):
Stanford Professor Nick Bloom argues that when a firm announces a 5-day RTO mandate it signals trouble ahead. He goes as far as stating that investors should sell their stock, and workers should update their CV/resumes.
This is the lot of poor old Gen X managers, sez Nigel Bowen. Under Boomer thumbs for their whole working life, when finally when it is Gen X’s turn to belittle and surveil staff members, Covid hits. Just like every other fucking thing that happens to us poor GenXers, boomers get all the good stuff – in this case, managerial authority – and all we get is some pretty unwarranted nostalgia for that Reality Bites movie.
How can managers preen, bully or feel powerful when theirs is just another face on Teams?
I have a solution for peacocks needing to preen online. I saw it back when the world was collapsing at my former university and bosses were required to ‘consult’ but didn’t actually want to talk to anyone. All you need to do is turn off everybody else’s cameras, disable chat and have the bosses just talk to one another about how good it was to ‘see’ everyone (who they couldn’t see), how much they wanted to ‘hear’ feedback (though no one else could speak) and how terribly hard this whole job loss thing was for them, even though their jobs, of course, were not at stake. Good for the old preening, that disabling staff thing, which you can really only do if people are not physically in the room. It would be awkward to similarly muzzle them and also not look at them if they all RTO. You could call WFH in this situation win-win, though probably that’s not what your invisible staff would say if you turned on their microphones.
I’m not saying that our levels of productivity are unimportant, not at all. For my part, I like my work time to produce…well, work. Sure, this might be part of my work ethic addiction. But even in the highly exploitative chicken processing factory where anthropologist Steve Strifler worked (though not from home), the desire for the work to be effective was often more important even than making the pretty awful work conditions easier or better. I kinda reckon we all want our work to do something, and not just be wasted time in exchange for bucks.
Nevertheless, surely it misses the opportunity that WFH presents, just to focus on what it means for the rate of exploitation, productivity and sociality. What about what WFH enables, for some people at least, for life?
Not important, according to Adam Tooze on this week’s Ones and Tooze podcast. Think of the cleaners, baristas and dry-cleaners!
Baristas (especially…managers must be having trouble getting a coffee?) and cleaners are suddenly earning deep sympathy from bosses (and I am not including Adam Tooze in this ofc) who are typically prepared to outsource and exploit them. Managerial crocodile tears for such workers, the ones they’ve been squeezing via outsourcing for decades. This, bosses seem to reason, might get people to RTO out of sheer labour solidarity.
Tooze, however, suggests that our WFH and the commercial property $crisis it is producing in inner cities, could constitute an economic death spiral.
Death. Spiral. OMG, we better RTO ASAP. Right? Read the Headline! Selfish, selfish workers wantonly produce a DEATH SPIRAL by doing their work, but not in the office. Insert AI-produced artwork entitled urban death spiral. Illustrate the piece with peacock bosses (and, weirdly enough, Adam Tooze) wagging their peacock fingers, little tears in their inadequately caffeinated peacock eyes.
I mean maybe it is the beginning of the end of the urban concentration that has dominated modernity and acted as a metaphor and manifestation of capitalist logics since the nineteenth century. I gotta say, reducing inner urban agglomeration doesn’t sound all that terrible (though of course it is for developers of big commercial buildings), at least from a food forests in backyards perspective. But maybe that’s because I don’t drink that much coffee. And I like to support my local cafes and dry cleaners, anyway.
I get that change is painful, even for the peacocks of peacock capitalism, desperately looking for someone to travel hours from their affordable housing to make them a decent coffee in the CBD. But what if the Barista worked at a cafe closer to the home they can afford? Less travel time might mean a death spiral for the CBD and maybe for the developers of big commercial buildings (add more peacock tears, boo hoo) but could well be good for workers, the environment and local communities.
Image: Miraculous eggplants
Less travel time makes it easier to pick up kids, to get to the gym, to get a healthy dinner on, monitor excessive levels of chicken freedom (pick up Tilly and put her back into her bit of the garden) and grow food. The work gets done and the eggs are collected. Hey look, win-win!
Of course, not every moment of work can done this way, and some work can’t be done that way at all. And it isn’t everyone’s preference, nor in all ways good.
But for those for whom it works, including me, it means more space for life, while also doing the work. Restoring socially available free time, and freedom, one homegrown vegetable at a time.
F*cking Capitalism.
History of Capitalism Reading Group has begun
Six of us gathered convivially by zoom on Thursday afternoon, thus launching the History of Capitalism Reading group. We talked a little about the reading, but in the end decided we would carry this reading forward to next month. Instead, for this first meeting, we talked about our various scholarly interests, sharing ideas and suggestions, as well as making some decisions about how the group will work. Here they are:
We will meet the last Thursday of the month, 5.30-6.30pm Sydney time (currently AEDT but AEST in due course)
In general, Hannah will choose the reading, keeping it short and manageable for busy folk. I - or someone else, if they want a turn to suggest a reading - will introduce the reading and prompt discussion.
We will leave space for discussion about works currently in progress, but we won’t turn it into a writing group. Offers to read and comment on one another’s writing may well emerge organically.
But everyone was keen on an opportunity to read and think together about things that we might not otherwise come across.
The Reading Group is open to paid subscribers, because I can’t do that much work for free. However, graduate students and early career folk, or others who would like to join but feel unable to subscribe please get in touch and I will add you, no interrogation of your finances required.
Busy week…
This Wednesday lunchtime 1pm AEDT (that’s tomorrow by the time I post this)) I will speak at the Royal Australian Historical Society, online. You can book your tickets here.
On Thursday I am heading to Hobart for the Australian Society of Gynaecological Oncologists. This is not my normal crowd, but we believe that Virtue Capitalists helps explain some things they are experiencing in their profession. I’m looking forward to talking to them about my research and hearing the ways it does (or doesn’t) resonate. If you’re a gynae cancer doctor, or live in Hobart…yell out so I can say hi.
Around nine years after we first presented our paper ‘Seeking a New Materialism in Australian History’, on Wednesday 3 April, around 5.30pm at the State Library of NSW Sophie Loy Wilson and I will talk at History Now! about the History of Capitalism, chaired by Mike Beggs. Details here.
Check out this Review of Virtue Capitalists in The Conversation.
Is this emptying of CBD offices to grow vegetables about Degrowth?
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